We no longer feel under the necessity of reconciling human
mistakes with divine infallibility. Professor Goldwin Smith has told us
recently that these old theories of the Bible were a millstone about
the neck of Christendom, and that they must be gotten rid of if
Christianity was to live. This is all that doubt and investigation have
done to the Bible. They have cleared away the things that no sane and
earnest and devout mind wishes to keep; and they have restored to us in
all their dignity and beauty and sweetness and power the real human
Bible, the Bible which poured out of the heart of the olden time, and
which is in all its truth and sweetness, so far as they go, a
revelation of the divinest things in human thought and human dream.
Preachers tell us every little while that those who ask questions have
taken away our Lord, and they know not where he has been laid. What has
this spirit done concerning Jesus? Has it taken him away from us?
Rather, as the result of all this question and criticism, at last we
have found him, found him who has been hidden away for ages, found the
man, divine son of God, son of man, brother, friend, inspirer,
companion, helper. It has done for Jesus the grandest service of which
we can conceive.
And now one more point. People used to suppose they knew all about the
next world. They knew where heaven was and where hell was, and who were
to be the inhabitants of either place, and why. Doubt and question have
been at work here, and now we do not know where heaven is; and we do
not know where hell is, except that it is within the heart of those
that are not in accord with the divine life.
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