Acts 17:27 That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: I. GOD MADE MAN TO SEEK HIM. 1. Man is by nature religious. No one ever discovered light or invented hearing; man saw because he had eyes and heard because he had ears. And religion is as natural as either, because as native and essential. Hence man gets into religion as into other natural things, spontaneously. But to get out of it he has to reason himself into a strange position. No man is an atheist by nature, only by art; and an art that has to offer to nature ceaseless resistance. The atheist does not escape from God, only finds an ideal substitute for Him. 2. Religion being thus native to man, its being is as old as his, and — 3. As universal. In his multitudinous faiths he has been blindly fulfilling the Divine decree to seek God. From this point of view the religions of the world have a most touching import; they show men belated, stumbling darkly on, impelled by his Divine homesickness. The religions of man are like voices which say "Come over and help us." 4. The nature that demands religion responds to it. We know how bad the world has been with its religions, but what would it have been without them? In spite of their falsities they have helped man to live his little life to the measure of his capacity. It and it alone has been able to lift man up to the mountain peak of the Spirit. But if religion is the point where man touches the highest, then it is that which finds, vivifies and directs the best that is in him. It is only as the nature which has come from God returns to Him that it thinks the wisest, does the noblest and becomes the best. II. RELIGION IS NOT ONLY NATURAL AND NECESSARY TO MAN, BUT ALSO TO PEOPLES. When a people has the noblest conception of God its spirit is in its sublimest and most heroic mood. An English ambassador sat at the table of Frederick the Great, with infidel wits who were making sport of religion. Suddenly the talk changed to war. Said the long-silent ambassador, "England would by the help of God stand by Prussia." "Ah!" said Frederick, "I did not know you had an ally of that name." "So please your Majesty," was the swift retort, "He is the only ally to whom we do not send subsidies." There stood the truth confessed. England's best ally is God. A sceptical age is never a great or golden age; nor an infidel people a noble or creative people. For deed, politics, letters, art, religion is a necessity. In seeking for peoples who know not God, our philosophers have to go to cannibals. III. SINCE RELIGION IS SO NECESSARY, THE HIGHER AND PURER THE RELIGION, THE GREATER WILL BE ITS POWER FOR GOOD. History unfolds a wonderful tale. In India a few thousand Englishmen hold empire over more than two hundred millions of men. Wealth and culture came to the Hindoos ages before they came to us, yet how with that long start do they and we now respectively stand? Why has the Hindoo declined in power as he grew in multitude, while the late-born Saxon has "widened with the process of the suns"? Because the faith of the one grew like an iron band round his spirit full of consecrated falsities, while to the other came a strong yet gentle faith which breathed into him a purer spirit and nobler aims. So while the Hindoo feels as if held in the dread bonds of fate, the Saxon knows himself a son of God, a brother of man, sent to make earth happier and holier. IV. BY WHAT RELIGION CAN MAN BEST FIND GOD AND REALISE THE END OF HIS BEING. Religions may be divided into two classes. 1. Artificial or fictitious religions — those of the individual imagination or reason; "ideal substitutes for religion." To this class belong — (1) The Religion of Nature, that product of the eighteenth century, which, however, was neither a religion nor a thing of nature. It was simply a speculative system so named that it might better offend Christianity. It never was professed anywhere — save by its makers, who were not in a state of nature, but were cultured with the culture of the Christian centuries. This attempt to give us Christianity without Christ failed utterly. (2) The attempt of Strauss to build on our modern physicism a faith in which the universe became the only God. But man can only love the good and trust the right, and as these are the attributes of a person, Strauss failed. (3) The Comtist apotheosis of man. But worship implies reverence. The thinker in his study, heir of a splendid inheritance, may well feel how magnificent are the gifts of humanity; but what has humanity done for the convict or the miserable victim of lust? The religion that man needs is not one that can delight the enlightened only, but one that can save the lost. 2. Real religions — those of history and fact. These may be divided into — (1) The national religions of the past. All round us lie the ruins of the ancient faiths of Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome. They are all dead, to revive no more: supplanted by the universal and unifying faith of Christ. (2) Turning from the dead past to the living present we have — (a) Confucianism: but its prudential wisdom is without the enthusiasm of humanity. Look at it as realised in the people so quick-witted, yet so stationary, and then imagine what it would be were the world an immense Chinese Empire. (b) Brahminism — the most awful tyranny of custom and caste, to which morality is unknown, and which can deify the basest as easily as the best. Brahminism universalised could only mean man depraved, and sent wearily to wander through time in search of eternal oblivion and peace. (c) Buddhism, numerically the mightiest religion in the world: but in spite of its admirable ethics, a religion without God or hope, radically selfish, and as impotent as selfish. (d) Islam, whose religion does not purify the home and therefore cannot regenerate the race. (e) Judaism, which was great only as a prophetic religion, and whose life for the past eighteen centuries has been but a reminiscence. 3. From these imperfect faiths let us turn to that which has created the civilisation and noblest moral qualities of the Western world. Study it — (1) As regards its ideal contents. Take its conception — (a) Of God. Such a God as that of Christianity, an eternal Father and Sovereign, infinite personalised love and righteousness, has boundless promise of good and hope for man. (b) Of man. The Christian doctrines of man's origin, nature, privilege and destiny are elevating and ennobling as no others are. (2) As regards its actual achievements. Look around; you confront a civilisation that in its high, generous, and humane elements was created by Christianity; that has, to all its ignoble and pernicious elements, in Christianity a merciless foe. It has changed the sinner into a saint, freed the slave, built the hospital and created in every generation a noble army of teachers, reformers, philanthropists. Conclusion: The religion of Christ is the one religion that man needs; it has come from God that it may bring to God. Here lies the secret of its preeminence. Others have risen out of man's search for God; this out of God's search for man. (Principal Fairbairn.) Parallel Verses KJV: That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: |
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