Christianity, No Fable 91 I am aware that at the present moment there are those who declare that Christianity is played out, that it has served its day, that it has lost its hold on men’s minds and will require to give place to some other panacea for the ills of life. But for the most part that is the cry of those who have not them selves tried Christianity and hardly understand what it means. And in any case no effective substitute for Christianity has ever been put forward by its opponents or critics. Nor has any attempt to modify or improve Christianity as a system of religious doctrine ever been successful. Perhaps one of the most strenuous efforts in this direction has been that of so- called liberal (alias rationalistic) theology which seeks to divest Christianity of all its supernatural elements, and in particular of its divine-human Jesus by reducing Him to the dimensions of an ordinary man—in which case it is obvious, the whole superstructure of Christianity would fall to the ground. Yet a contributor to the Hibbart Journal (Jan. 1910) who himself does not accept orthodox Christianity writes of “The Collapse of Liberal Christianity,” and frankly confesses that “the simple Jesus of Liberal Christianity cannot be found,” which amounts to an admission that the picture of Jesus in the Gospels as a Divine Man, a supernatural Christ, is no fiction but a sublime truth. 3. A detailed examination of the Christian Scheme shows that means better fitted to secure its ends could not have been devised. a. It will not be denied that part of the aim of Chris tianity is to restore mankind in general and individuals in particular to the favor and fellowship of God, out of which they have been cast by sin. Whether the Bible is right in its explanation of the origin of sin need not now be argued. Common observation as well as individual conscience testi fies to the fact of sin; and the disastrous condition of the race induced by sin Christianity proposes to remedy—not by telling men that sin is only a figment of the imagination
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