The Dilemma of the Modern Christian; How Much Can Be Accepted of Modern Christianity? (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911. Excerpt: ... One word needs to be added. Even the Christians who cannot honestly pray to the exalted Christ cannot fairly be charged with leaving Christ out of their prayers. They pray as he taught us; they pray to God as he revealed Him; they pray in his name; and they will even say "for his sake," whatever that may mean in the circumstances. Christian prayer in a Christian land, offered by Christians, is impossible without Christ. THE CASE OF THE MODERN MAN This, then, is the situation. What has the typical modern to say to it? We suspect the reader will not have to go very far to find him. That this modern is a person of religious propensities will not be questioned, for he is human. To begin with, he feels no desire to make special thanksgiving to a Jesus who lived--as he hears--1900 years ago. "Religion," says he, " is a personal relation to God, and has nothing to do with events and systems and personalities of other days. Jesus is a definite, historical fact, the most important, because the most insistent datum of history. But my religion has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with data of history. And if historical science should ever prove that Jesus never existed (which it will not) I should still cling to faith beyond the forms of faith." He would resent as a gross libel the attempt to dispose of him by attaching to him the name of any one theologian and leveling him to the ground with an ism. What he feels is symptomatic of today, not just of one particular school. He sympathizes with the modern spirit as applied to religion. Therefore he will have turned his back on the whole transcendental business of theology--a transcendent God simply transcends his mind and his active interests. It will always be passing strange to him that man should have had so litt...