But now, there are abundant symptoms that the tempers and minds of men are greatly changed. Men’s minds are more open than before to the need of some spiritual bond to keep society together; and the character and spiritual claims of Christ, and the marvellous results that have followed from His life and death, are beginning (I think) to be recognized with more spontaneousness and with less of superstitious formalism. On the other hand, the vast regularity of Nature has so come home to our hearts that some believe in it as if it had a divine sanctity; the thought of praying that the sun or moon may stand still shocks us as a profanity; and boys and girls, as they stand opposite to some picture setting forth a Bible miracle, look puzzled and perplexed, or, if they are a little older, say with a sententious smile that “the age of miracles is past.” In a word, that very element of inexplicable wonder which once strengthened the faith, now weakens it, by furnishing weapons to its assailants, and by inducing rash believers to take up and defend against sceptics a position that is indefensible.
In any case, it is the duty of each generation of Christians to put aside, as far as it can, the illusions of the previous generation and to rise higher to the fuller knowledge of Christ; for the outworn and undiscarded illusions of one generation become the hypocrisies of the next. The illusions of the permanence of the Mosaic Law, of the speedy Consummation, of Transubstantiation, of the Infallible Church, of the Infallible Book, have all been in due course put away. A candid and modest Christian ought surely to argue that, where so many illusions have already been discarded—and all without injury to the worship of Christ—some may remain to be discarded still, and equally without injury to the Eternal Truth.
What if miraculous Christianity is to natural Christianity as the Ptolemaic astronomy is to the Newtonian? Both of these astronomical systems were of practical utility; both could predict eclipses; both revealed God as a God of order. But the former imputed to the unmoving sun the terrestrial motion which the latter correctly imputed to the earth; the former explained by a number of arbitrary, non-natural, and quasi-miraculous suppositions—spheres, and spirals, and epicycles, and the like—phenomena which the latter more simply explained by one celestial curve traced out in accordance with one fixed law. I believe that in religion also we have made a similar mistake and are being prepared for a similar correction. We have imputed to Christ some actions which have sprung from the promptings of our own imaginations—imaging forth what _our_ ideal Deliverer would have done—and which have represented, not His motions, but the motions of our own hearts. By what we have euphemistically denominated “latent laws,” that is to say by hypotheses as arbitrary and baseless as the old epicycles, unsupported by sufficient evidence and inconsistent with all that we see and hear and feel around us in God’s world, we have endeavoured to explain a Redemption which no more needs such explanations than forgiveness needs them—a Redemption which is as natural (that is to say, as much in accordance with the laws of physical nature and the ordinary processes of human nature) as that Law of Love, or Spiritual gravitation, which may be illustrated in the microcosm of every human household. Now we are to learn the new truth: and as the God of Newton is greater (is He not?) than the God of Ptolemy, so let us not doubt that the God revealed in spiritual Christianity will be greater than the God revealed in material and miraculous Christianity. The new heavens will not cease to declare the glory of God; the new firmament will not fail to tell of His handiwork.