“FREEDOM OF THOUGHT.”
FREEDOM of thought is claimed by those who profess faith in Scripture, but seek emancipation from creeds or formulated statements of inspired truth. This revolt against creeds and systems of doctrines assumes the guise of respecting only that which is divine. They will not be trammelled by confessions drawn up by men—they claim a right to drink directly from the fountain of Scripture. They would pass men that they may reach God. “Divine revelation,” not human dogma, is their cry. This is specious. But it is not the glitter of genuine gold that makes it so. This protest against confessions, instead of being a genuine utterance of respect for the divine as compared with the human, springs, not infrequently, from the very opposite feeling. So long as doctrines are left lying on the pages of Scripture they do not interfere with our trains of thought, our phases of feeling, and our lines of action. It is when they are formulated in distinct propositions that they come into close contact with us.
It is what is Divine in the human statement of truth that is obnoxious. It is the demand for faith in the truth of God that is resented, and the precision and authority with which that is required. I can wander through a wood, and though trees surround me they do not stop my progress. I can move as I please by passing round them. But a few branches taken thence can form an enclosure which I feel to be a prison. Even so, while no definite propositions are deduced from Scripture and used as tests of our belief, we can have for our minds the dangerous liberty of unrestraint. A profession of regard for the Bible as a whole, and of its being one’s only creed, may consist with using no part of it as a rule either of faith or practice. And is there honesty in this professed zeal for Scripture at the expense of confessions? If there is such deference to Scripture as is professed, why is there such an aversion to systematise its revelations? The truth is, that men like to leave the truths of Scripture embedded where they are, lest they might be used as a test wherewith to try their beliefs. They wish to be allowed to think as they please. Confessions are to them most troublesome things; not because they interpose between them and Scripture, but because they show when they depart from it; for they present in a distinct, definite, articulate form the truths of Scripture before them. This movement against confessions just arises from men’s aversion to think according to the mind of God. It is the old atheistic revolt in its first upheavings, though the covering surface has not yet been broken.
And not only among inquirers after truth do we find this impatience of system, but also in the accredited religious community, and even in the case of some who claim to be the leaders of thought within the Church. Men there are, indeed, of truth and of might in the various Churches—men who will “buy the truth and sell it not.” But there are, nevertheless, indications of waning loyalty to the Word of God—a yielding to the haste and unsteadfastness of the times, a straining after novelty and excitement, an impatience of system, a dreamy expectancy of some bright futurity, and the flippancy of self-conceit. In short, all the symptoms of the plague by which the age is smitten, appear, to a careful diagnosis, in a section of the Church itself. There is already a drifting from old moorings merely for the gratification of some fancied progress. A perilous adventure voyage in search of religious novelties in faith and worship has begun, which cannot be regarded without alarm. The jubilations which attend the first conscious movement seawards are already heard, and a scornful laugh is already flung at the slow ones who still lie at anchor. It may be impossible to forecast the issue of this dalliant licentiousness of thought within the Church in these days. If the expectations of some who claim to be par excellence the thinkers of the Church shall be justified by the result, a disastrous future is before us. The Church current which these direct is but an offshot from the age-stream beyond it, moving now in a parallel direction, and which, if it spread and dominate within the Church, shall bear away at length, in the channel of the parent-flood—as a drift of fragments with which unbelief shall make sport—our abandoned testimony for the truth of God!