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A
SUDDEN CHANGE
Professor
James, in his lectures at
"I
shall leave cynical materialism entirely out of our discussion as not
calling for treatment before this present audience, and I shall ignore
old-fashioned dualistic theism for the same reason" (page
30).
ITS
SIGNIFICANCE
Let
the reader not fail to grasp the significance of the statement. For hundreds
of years the instruction imparted to the youths of
But
now, we are told (and it is true), that within a single generation the framework
of our educational systems has been so changed that the language
which expressed the abiding convictions of our ancestors sounds as
strange in the atmosphere of our great universities as the language of a "different
race of men," uttering the formulas of some "outlandish savage religion."
Whether the change is for the better or for the worse is not, for the
moment, in question. What we wish to impress upon our readers’ minds
at this point is simply the fact that a tremendous change has taken place,
with amazing suddenness, and in regard to matters that are of vital importance
to the whole world, and particularly to the English-speaking people.
EFFECT
UPON PLASTIC MINDS
The
effect upon the plastic minds of undergraduates of such words as those last
quoted can easily be imagined. They artfully convey the suggestion that these
young men are, in respect of their philosophical notions, vastly superior
to the men of light and learning of past generations, and that it is by
the repudiation of Christianity and its "lively oracles" that they
furnish convincing
proof of their intellectual superiority. There are few minds among
men of the age here addressed, or of any age except they be firmly grounded
and established in the truth — which could resist
the insidious influence
of such an appeal to the innate vanity of men.
Such
being then the influences to which the students at our universities are now
exposed, is there not urgent need of impressing upon Christian parents (there
are yet a few remaining) the warning of our text, and exhorting them to
beware lest their children be despoiled through philosophy and empty deceit?
A
GREAT PERIL
What
does this sudden and stupendous change portend? Is not the very existence
of Christianized civilization (i.e., the social system which has been
reared under the influence and protection of Christianity) imperiled by it?
Beyond all doubt it is. Nor is our reasonable apprehension in this regard in
any wise allayed by Professor James’
statements that the principal factors of this change are "scientific
evolutionism" and "the rising tide of social democratic
ideals." Great is the mischief already accomplished by these
mighty agencies of evil, and we are as yet but at the beginning of their
destructive career.
One
more word Professor James speaks on this point: "An external
creator and his institutions may still be verbally confessed
at Church in formulas that linger by their mere inertia, but
the life is out of them" (page 34).
And
with this agree the words of the risen Christ to the church in its
"Thou
hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen
the things that remain that are ready to die" Revelation
3:1,2.
BUDDHA
OR CHRIST?
It
is now in order to inspect briefly that system of philosophy which, in its several
forms, has crowded out of our universities the doctrine of Christ (and
which has incidentally made Him a liar). We have already stated that this
reigning system, now holding almost undisputed sway in "Christian" England
and
The
philosophers of today have, therefore, nothing to offer to us that our ancestors
did not understand as well as they, and that they were not as free to
choose as we are. Did our ancestors then prefer the worse thing to the better
when they chose, and founded great universities to preserve, the doctrines
taught by Jesus Christ and His Apostles, rather than (as they might
have done) the doctrines associated with the name of Buddha? Our present-day
teachers of philosophy appear to say so. But if there remains any
judgment at all in the twentieth-century man, he will remember, before lightly
acquiescing in the removal of the ancient foundations, that whatever there
may be of superiority in the social order of Christianized England and America
over that of pantheistic India is due to the choice which our forefathers
made when they accepted the teaching of the Gospel of Christ, and
to the fact that every subsequent generation until the present has ratified
and adhered firmly to that choice.
WHAT
BENEFIT?
What
benefit, then, can any sane man expect as the result of this sudden and
wholesale repudiation of teachings which are vital to Christianity, and the
acceptance in their stead of the ancient doctrines of heathendom?
Surely
there never was a generation of men so unwise, so blinded by its own
conceit, as this foolish generation, in thus casting away the guidance of
that Book which has put England and America at the head of the nations,
and which has been the source of everything that is commendable in
so-called "civilized society," and in accepting in its place the
brutalizing and
degrading doctrines of pantheism.
In
whatever our eyes can rest upon with satisfaction in our past history or our
present institutions, our art, literature, ethics, standards of family life and
national life, etc., etc., we see the evidences of the influence of those teachings
which have now been discarded by the wise men of our day as "puerile"
in comparison with those of heathen philosophy. How long will it be
before the righteous judgment of God overtakes the peoples who have thus
turned with contempt from the source of all their greatness?
The
warning, therefore, should be sounded out, not only to the young men and
women who are likely to be the dire? victims of the "higher
education"
of the day, but to every dweller in civilized lands, to
Beware lest any man make a prey of them through philosophy and vain
deceit. For the matter we are considering vitally affects the interests of
every civilized community.
NATIONAL
RESPONSIBILITY
From
the Bible and from secular history we learn that God deals not only with
individuals on the ground of privilege and responsibility, but with nations
also. Because of the extraordinary privileges granted to the Israelites,
a heavier responsibility rested upon them than upon other nations,
and they were visited for their unfaithfulness with corresponding severity.
And now we are living in that long stretch of centuries known as "the
times of the Gentiles," during which the natural branches of the olive tree
(Israel) are broken off, and the branches of the wild olive tree are grafted
into their place; that is to say, the period wherein the Gentiles are occupying
temporarily Israel’s place of special
privilege and responsibility. The diminishing of them has become the riches of
the Gentiles Romans 11:11-25.
In
dealing with a nation God looks to its rulers or leaders as responsible for its
actions. The justice of this is specially evident in countries where the people
choose their own rulers and governors. In our day the people are all-powerful.
Rulers are chosen for the express purpose of executing the popular
will. Likewise also the time has come when the people not only elect
their rulers, but also heap to themselves teachers, because they will not
endure sound doctrine 2 Timothy 4:3,4. We may be sure, then, that
the persons we find in the professional chairs of our colleges are there by
the mandate of the people, who have turned away their ears from the truth
and give heed to fables which please their itching ears.
By
the very constitution of a democratic social order the teachers must teach
what the people like to hear, or else give place to those who will. God
will surely judge the privileged nations for this. The change has been great
and sudden. The judgment will be swift and severe. Until our day, whatever
may have been the moral state of the masses of people of England
and America, governments were established on the foundations of Christian
doctrine; kings and other rulers were sworn to defend the faith; the
Bible was taught in the schools; and no one was regarded as fit for a position
of public responsibility who was not a professed follower of Jesus Christ.
As for the teachers in our schools and colleges, not one could have been
found who did not hold and teach as the unchanging truth of God the doctrines
of Bible Christianity.
A
GREAT APOSTASY
Recognizing
these facts, which all must admit to be facts, however much they
may differ as to the significance of them, it follows that we are living under
the dark shadow of the greatest national apostasy that has ever taken place.
During all the history of mankind there has never been such a wholesale
turning away from the Source of national blessings, in order to take
up with the gods of the heathen.
SOLEMN
NONSENSE
We
have already stated that the regnant philosophy, i.e., pantheism, is expounded
in our universities in two forms, known respectively as "monism"
and "pluralism." Professor James, although a vigorous critic of monism,
admits that the latter has almost complete possession of the field, and
that his own cult of "pluralism" has very few adherents. These two species
of pantheism are, however, alike in the essential matter that "both identify
human substance with divine substance." From a Christian standpoint,
therefore, it is not very important to distinguish between them.
The
principal difference is that monism (or "absolutism") "thinks
that said substance
becomes fully divine only in the form of totality, and is not its real
self in any form but the all-form"; whereas pluralism maintains "that
there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance
of reality may never get totally collected ......and that a distributive
form of reality, the each-form, is logically as acceptable, and
empirically as probable, as the all-form" (page 34). "For
monism the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive fact,
outside of which there is nothing;" "And when the monism is idealistic,
this all-enveloping fact is represented as an absolute mind that
makes the partial facts by thinking them, just as we make objects
in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in a story by imagining
them."
"The
world and the all-thinker thus co-penetrate and soak each other
up without residuum." "The absolute makes us by thinking us."
"The absolute and the world are one fact." "This is the full pantheistic
scheme, the immanence of God in His creation, a conception sublime
from its tremendous unity." On the other hand, pluralism says that "reality
may exist in a distributive form in the shape not of an all, but
of a set of eaches." "There is this in favor of the eaches, that they
are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear
to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately
to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously"
(page 129).
I
have transcribed the foregoing specimens of this solemn nonsense in order
that the reader may be informed of the choice which our great universities
now set before the thousands of eager and receptive minds that throng
them in quest of knowledge. The rulers of these educational institutions
virtually say to their students, You must accept a pantheistic conception
of the universe, but you may choose between a monistic universe
and a pluralistic universe between a universe which consists of a single
ponderous "All," or one comprising an indefinite number of miscellaneous
"Eaches."
CONFLICTING
SCHOOLS
Whichever
of these "weak and beggarly" conceptions our young student adopts,
he must be prepared to hear it assailed by the adherents of the rival school
and criticized as highly irrational and absurd; and for this his course in
philosophy prepares him. Thus the advocates of monism declare that pluralism
is "infected and undermined by self-contradiction." On the other hand,
Professor James maintains that the "absolute" of the monist
"involves features
of irrationality peculiar to itself." He points out that, upon the theory
of absolute idealism, the all-knower must know, and be always distinctly
conscious relation of every object in the whole universe, but also all
that the object is not as that a "table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros,
not a
logarithm, not a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling,
not a thousand centuries old," etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. "Furthermore,
if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have
already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The rubbish
in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the more
desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity,
plethora, and superfoetation of useless information" (page 128). And
how about things that are criminal, vicious, and impure? These are of necessity
just as much the thought-forms of the absolute as their opposites.
A
PHILOSOPHER’S VERDICT
Again,
after mentioning certain difficulties of the idealist theory, Professor James
speaks disparagingly of "the oddity of inventing as a remedy for
the inconveniences
resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual
object called
an ‘absolute,’
into which you pack the self-same contradictions unreduced" (page
271).
Once
more we quote: "When
I read transcendentalist literature .....I get nothing but a sort
of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground, and
resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall with
an empty manger. It is but a turning over the same threadbare categories,
bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers
and solutions, with never a new fact or new horizon coming
into sight" (page 265).
This
is what a philosopher of the front ranks says of the ruling philosophy of
the day, whose speculations are being impressed upon the minds of our brightest
college students. One comment may be permitted, namely, that if a
foolish absolute did not Create men by thinking them, certainly foolish men
have created an absolute by thinking it; and it is difficult to conceive how
they could have employed their minds more foolishly.
AN
IMPOSSIBLE TASK
This
is the situation brought about, now that Christianity has been politely bowed
out of our schools and seminaries in order to make room for the irrational
philosophy of Hinduism! Very pertinent in this connection are the
words of the prophet:
"The
wise men are ashamed; they are dismayed and taken. Lo, they have
rejected the Word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them?" Jeremiah
8:9.
For the occupation in which our philosophers are engaged is the impossible task of trying to establish an explanation of the visible universe after having rejected the true account thereof received from its Creator. The god of the ruling philosophy is one who is not permitted to speak or make himself known in any way. Philosophy must needs put these restraints upon him for its own protection; for, should he break through them, the occupation of the philosopher would be gone. So he must remain in impenetrable obscurity, speaking no word, and making no intelligible sign or motion, in order that philosophers may continue their congenial business of making bad guesses at what he is like.
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