RELIGIOUS reform has usually found its beginning in a protest against a hard and fast dogmatism which, though it may or may not be repressive, has become unendurable to liberal and progressive thought. It has been a strike for larger freedom, for hospitality to new and better ideas. Such a reaction always heralds a new day, and yet when it becomes extreme it may beget a mental condition which is quite as dangerous as that which incited the protest. To illustrate: in a recent address which unsparingly condemned the domination of religious creeds, a distinguished educator is reported to have pronounced against anything and everything which speaks for "finality in religion." "Outside of what is called religion," said he, "there is no place where absolute truth is fixed, and there is an irresistible trend toward the belief that truth cannot tie fixed. In the region of philosophy and metaphysics there is an immanent flux. . . . Why should the theologian say that he has reached a fixed point in his research?"
It is possible that the speaker may not have so intended, but these words carry the intimation that we do not and cannot have any absolute knowledge of spiritual things, and that all so-called knowledge is but a conviction which the wise will hold tentatively. Such an attitude of thought is not uncommon. It readily lends itself to religious skepticism and closely approximates the dictum of Gassendi (1592), when he said, "There is no such thing as knowledge; we can only affirm what appears, not what is ... knowledge is not meant for man, only opinion." This idea is altogether at variance with the Christian Science teaching that the only true faith is a scientific faith, and its fruitage is seen in the fact that to-day unnumbered thousands who do not think deeply enough to declare that they are agnostics, offer this argument in extenuation of their indifference to spiritual things. Religion, say they, is all a matter of conflicting opinions anyhow, and so long as I pay my debts and play a fair game I am willing to take my chances! When undemonstrated concepts of truth are cast into the form of a creed, unreserved loyalty to which is made the brand of a religious body, the lovers of spiritual progress have great occasion to weep; at the same time, nothing proves more deadening to spiritual aspiration than a prevailing skepticism as to the possibility of actually knowing or proving anything about God and the spiritual man.
There is an ecclesiastical dogmatism which maintains that the revelation of divine truth is a consummated fact, that nothing further can be added to it through the illumination of human consciousness. It resists the thought of a continuous unfoldment of truth in keeping with the spiritualization of human sense, and the criticism of such a "finality" is no less needful than legitimate. A discrimination must be made, however, between stereotyped and unprogressive human opinion and that scientific dogmatism (if this phrase may be allowed) which is the egoism of an illumined sense, the assertive perception of a truth that has been proved to be true beyond all question and peradventure, a sense which, from a basis of the demonstrably known, has a clear and inspiring foresight, an intuitive expectation of the as yet unknown. Though he frankly concede the relative modesty of present achievement, the mathematician or astronomer has acquired, through demonstration, a knowledge which is so positive, definite, and provable as to be no longer questioned or questionable; therefore, however vast and complicated the further problems presented, he unhesitatingly addresses himself to their solution, as soon as the necessary data can be secured. He is sure that they are subject to that law and order of which he has a degree of definite knowledge.
