Still less, however, does the Gospel presuppose any definite knowledge of nature, or stand in any connexion with such knowledge; not even in a negative sense can this contention be maintained. It is religion and the moral element that are concerned. The Gospel puts the living God before us. Here, too, the confession of Him in belief in Him and in the fulfilment of His will is the sole thing to’ be confessed; this is what Jesus Christ meant. So far as the knowledge is concerned—and it is vast—which may be based upon this belief, it always varies with the measure of a man’s inner development and subjective intelligence. But to possess the Lord of heaven and earth as a Father is an experience to which nothing else approaches; and it is an experience which the poorest soul can have, and to the reality of which he can bear testimony.
An experience—it is only the religion which a man has himself experienced that is to be confessed; every other creed or confession is in Jesus’ view hypocritical and fatal. If there is no broad “theory of religion” to be found in the Gospel, still less is there any direction that a man is to begin by accepting and confessing any ready-made theory. Faith and creed are to proceed and grow up out of the all-important act of turning from the world and to God, and creed is to be nothing but faith reduced to practice. “All men have not faith,” says the apostle Paul, but all men ought to be veracious and be on their guard in religion against lip-service and light-hearted assent to creeds. “A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not; but afterward he repented and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, Sir; and went not.”
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