The New Protestant Criticism of Christianity [pp. 88-101]

96 The NeW Protestant Criticism of Christianity.
other miracles, the efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul.
Dean Stanley should be proud of
his pupil.
John James Tayler, the head of
the Unitarian College of Manchester, and a Unitarian clergyman, is
also a great stickler for the superiority of morals and "gush" over
dogma and duty. Here is a volume of his sermons on Christian
Faith and Duty, all brimming over
with expressions of admiration
for the character of Jesus and
for the beautiful words which he
spoke, but insisting at the same
time that it is sentiment and emotion which characterize the Christian, and not faith wedded to
good works. It is not belief in
any dogma that is necessary, but
"That principle of trust, of confiding
sympatlzy with higher mind, of reliance oa
spiritual tendencies at first dimly apprehended, but ever felt to be something
real, exhaustless, and infinite, which is
the essential element of all religious feeling, of all true faith."
One need not trouble one's self
about the authenticity of any book
in the Bible, nor care whether this
one is a forgery or that one wholly
uninspired. All he need do is to
be "sympathetic," and, if he finds
anything he likes, accept it and
make poetry about it. What one
does not like may be rejected in
the same free-and-easy method.
Mr. Tayler says:
"It would surely be a true reverence
to surrender our souls with child-like
simplicity to the influence of those
grander and deeper truths which form
the inner life of the Bible-those inspirations of holiness and heroism and
love and heavenly trust which prove
themselves divine by their kindling effect on our higher nature-and dropping, as of no import to us, without any
attempt to weave them into a theological theory, the human elements which
unavoidably adhere to every historical
manifestation, to press on in the work
of our daily life towards that spiritual
ideal of our humanity which Scripture
sublimely images to us in a kingdom of
God."
This is the soft and easy way
of blinking unpleasant and stern
truths, and is the key to a fool's
paradise. One's "higher nature,"
perhaps, might be shocked by finding it laid down that to marry a divorced woman was to commit adultery; but if he were taught that this
was only "a dogma," and was due
to "the human elements which unavoid'ably adhere," etc., he could
content himself with "the grander
and deeper truths," and go on his
sinful way with a light heart.
George Dawson, M.A., has often
been compared to William Cobbett,
and, in truth, he was not unlike
him. He lived in Birmingham,
but his fame as a pithy pamphleteer, a skilful advocate, an able
debater, and a popular preacher
was more than provincial. His
conventicle was a queer placea Cave of Adullum wherein were
gathered all manner of discontented souls. For a while he was a
Baptist, but he took leave of that
sect in a sermon from the text,
"Thank God, I baptized none of
you!" What he afterwards becameit would be difficult to say,
further than that he was certainly
a Dawsonian. He was always
right, whoever else was wrong.
In the volume of Sermons on
Disputed Points and Spacial Occasions are collected his best discourses, and in one of them he
thus exalts the advantage of often
changing one's "views" on theology-on such trifling points, for example, as the Divinity of Christ
or the eternal punishment for unrepented sin:
"Why should my change of views af