August 1924
THE K I N G ' S BU S I NE S S
483
Unbelief Founds No Schools At this point, it might be worth while to inquire how ■many colleges and universities organized infidelity has established in this country and is now carrying on. Do you know of any? I do not. Of course, sometimes an infidel or a radical Biblical critic will find his way into our Christian colleges, and will try to undermine the Christian principles on which it is founded even while he is eating the bread the church furnishes and enjoying its emolu ments. But organized unbelief has founded no schools of advanced learning. Have the “ ignorant” and “ gullible” people of the Christian church established any colleges in this country? You know they have and by the hundred. Their educational institutions dot our land from ocean to ocean and from lakes to gulf as daisies spangle a Kansas prairie in the spring time. And these colleges give a full- orbed culture in the liberal arts, and list in their curricula all the various branches of science, literature, history, lan guage, philosophy, psychology, and all the rest. Who is it that are likely to be well informed and educated®the people who have built colleges or those who have built none? It can be proved that Christian faith is not superstition and credulity. One proof is this: Christian faith is begot ten in the soul by the Holy Spirit. No man can exercise justifying faith in the Lord Jesus unless he is enabled to do so by the Spirit of God. “No man can say that Jesus is Lord, save by the Holy Ghost.” So says St. John. And Paul puts the matter plainly: “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.” It is not probable that the Divine Spirit would beget blind gullibility in the soul of any man. Such an idea is preposterous. The Bible Warns Against Credulity Moreover, the Bible itself warns people not to be too ready to believe everybody who brings forward a proposi tion. Christ said, “ Take heed how ye hear,” and, “ Take heed what ye hear.” Does not that require discrimination? Our Lord also warned His disciples in this way: “Beware of false prophets; for they come to you in sheep’s clothing; but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Does that indicate that Christ’s disciples are to be credulous? Note what Paul says: “Prove all things; hold fast to that which Is good.” Discriminating! Next is St. John, who admonishes us: “ Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.” No! the Bible itself challenges men to be discerning, and not be victimized by schemers and pretenders. The patent fact is, people who allege that Christian believ ers are stricken with blind credulity simply “ give them selves away.” They prove by their own mouths that they have never had the experience of Christian faith, and hence are incompetent to pronounce judgment upon it. Some times men expose their inadequacy by too much talk. So it is with those who call Christian faith blind gullibility. Then we should remember that many finely educated men and women are true believers in Christ and the Bible. In the college to which I belong we have between fifty and sixty professors and instructors, many af them bearing scholastic degrees from the best universities of this and other countries; and yet every one of them is a confessing Christian. You can never convince me that all these and many other finely educated people the world over are stricken with superstition and credulity. Why is Faith Pleasing to God? “ But without faith it is impossible to please God,” says the writer of the Hebrew letter. Let us ask the reason.
Why is faith pleasing to our Father in heaven? Does it really make any difference to Him whether we have faith or not? Suppose we think seriously about it for a moment. Why is faith pleasing to God? I reply: Because He is our heavenly Father, and He likes to be trusted. How does that thought impress you? God likes to be trusted. He cannot help being grieved when we do not have confidence in Him. It pains Him to be regarded as a falsifier. Do not we want to be trusted? Does it not grieve us when people question our honesty? And the more upright we are, the more sensitive we are about being suspected of duplicity. Our heavenly Father in this respect is certainly like us, for we have been made in His image. Is it not delightful to think of giving joy to our Father in heaven? Well, you can please Him best by trusting Him and doing His will. More than that, does it make no differ ence to God as to what is the condition of our hearts? When His all-scrutinizing eye looks down into our souls, the crucial question is, Is He pleased or displeased? He certainly knows all about our psychology. “He that formed the eye, shall He not see? And He that formed the ear, shall He not hear?” So He that created the mind, shall He not know the mind and feel an interest in its status? When He sees that our hearts are full of trust toward Him, does it not seem reasonable to believe that He is pleased with such a state of the soul? On the other hand, it must grieve Him when He finds arrogance and distrust; finds that we will not believe in Him. in His goodness, in His Son whom He loved with an everlasting love and sent down into this sin-cursed and sorrow-stricken world to redeem and save it. Let us remember'that God is the ultimate and original Psychologist, and knows the moral and spiritual status of the soul. If some of our modern psychologists had the fear of God in their hearts, they would not write works— and even college text books^—that omit and elimi nate all thoughts of a divine Creator. The psycho-analysts would not attribute our pure and holy Christian experience to libido, which means sexual passion. I give another reason why faith is pleasing to God: He does not want us to be narrow and one-sided in the develop ment of our psychical powers. The rationalists almost wor ship reason; at least, they make it the form of judgment, and greatly exaggerate its value and power. Of course, Christians also believe in the use of reason, because it a God-given faculty, and the Holy Scriptures enjoin upon us to be “ able to give an answer to every one that asketh a reason for the hope that is in us.” But man possesses other mental powers besides the logical powers. He also has the faith faculty, which is a part of the mind’s innate and orig inal constitution. Therefore we cannot please God unless we use and unfold all our divinely bestowed faculties. In all life, faith or confidence is necessary. The little child trusts its parents long before it learns to reason. The student must trust his teacher. Without mutual confidence the commerce of the world could not be carried on. You never would get aboard a train either by day or by night if you did not trust all the men along the line, and the engi neer and fireman in their cab. In the matter of science most people must trust to the technical experiments and researches of the experts. I do not mean that we must trust their speculations, but we must take their facts to a very large extent on faith. Similarly God ■wants us to use and culture the faith faculty in our relation to Him. He wants an all-round psychical and spiritual culture; hence he says to us, “Use your reason in the right way, but cultivate faith too, (Continued on page 532)
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