322
The Fundamentals but there is a Kingdom of persons whose law of gravitation is ove. There is not a physical law of the transformation of energy pervading the spiritual cosmos, but there is the law of the transfiguration of character, according to which “we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are transfigured into the same image from glory unto glory.” J CHRIST THE KEY Christ is the only key to this experience. Mr. James seeking to discredit a certain kind of reasoning from design,’ says if you throw a handful of beans on a table you can, by manipulating the beans, make any sort of figure your own design may wish to produce, and so with arguments from de sign in nature, he says. But he fails to state that the re verse is true. You can manipulate the beans so as to destroy a figure or design already present. Christ is the figure seen in religious experience, in Christian history, in the creeds of Christendom, in the Bible. You cannot get rid of that figure except by manipulating the beans with a destructive purpose. CHRISTIAN PRAGMATISM III. In the third place Christian experience transfers the whole problem of Christian evidences to the sphere of practical life. In this phase of it, Christianity has a point of contact with the new philosophy of Pragmatism. The pragmatic philosophy says the ultimate question for every man is, “What shall I do to be saved?”, and that the ultimate task of philoso phy is not to solve the insoluble riddle of the universe but to save men from pessimism. Now Pessimism, says the prag matist, is just one of the two possible modes of reacting upon or interpreting the total experience of life. The optimist sees ground for hope, the pessimist does not. The boy who was asked while fishing how many fish he had caught, exempli-
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker