But have we accepted it as the only
authoritative rule of practice? Have we ever tried to live one day of
our life so that it should resemble one of the days of the Son of Man?
Knowing what He thought and did, and how He felt, have we ever tried to
think and act and feel as He did--and if we have not, what wonder that
our religion, being wholly theoretical, appears to us tainted with
unreality, a thin-spun web of barren, fragile idealism which leaves us
querulous and discontented?
Such a sense of discontent should be for us, as it really is, the
signal of some deep mistake in our conception of religion. It should
at least cause us alarm, for what can be more alarming than that we
should be haunted with a sense of unreality in religion, yet still
profess religion for reasons which leave the heart indifferent and
barely serve to satisfy the intellect? And what can produce a keener
torture in a sincere mind than this eternal suspicion of unreality in a
religion whose conventional authority is acknowledged and accepted?
I am convinced that these feelings are general among great multitudes
of the more thoughtful and intelligent adherents of Christianity.
Religion rests with them upon a certain intellectual acquiescence, or
upon the equipoise of rational probabilities, or on the compromise of
intellectual hesitations.
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