THE DEAD HAND IN THE CHURCH.

BY REV. CLARENCE LATHBURY.

C

ENTURIES ago our English ancestors awakened to

the startling fact that a vast portion of the national territory had fallen into dead hands and was administered according to statutes framed by dead brains. In short, the inhabitants of the unseen universe were slowly but surely getting their grip on the kingdom, and it was only a matter of time when the living would be ruled by the dead. The silent and inexorable company of the disembodied, to whom no protest might be made, whom no pity could move, were getting the reins of government. To avert the approaching calamity its extension was prohibited by the stat ute of mortmain.

In the State of New York a backward step has been taken. Protestant institutions were free to follow the predilections of their own consciences, instead of the consciences of their great-great-grandfathers. But in 1875 a law was enacted permitting a church or educational institution to be incorporated and set going for all time under the guaranteee of the state that so long as a half-dozen persons desired though a thousand others dissented the property might be held to the original purpose.

This is worse than Romanism. The Roman Church is subject to a living pope influenced by the sentiment of his era, but the Protestant bodies are ruled by a set of dead popes whose voices and decrees are heard only in their writ ings. Having passed on to clearer vision, and supposedly outgrown their crude views and judgments, they are doomed to control posterity and tie it to a desiccated past. Presumably moving along lines of spiritual evolution they would be horrified at their oppression, crystallized and perpetuated, lying like an incubus on willing vassals. There is the possibility of establishing institutions in this "land of the free and home of the brave" and imposing upon them popes

and autocrats worse than Leo XIII or Abdul Hamid. The hand still and cold is stretched forth from the grave, and is mightier than a thousand hands of the living. It is obstructing the path of human development. The disintegrated brains of Augustine and the early Fathers, of Luther, of Calvin, of Wesley, of Channing, of Ballou, the makers of artificial and inane creeds who flourished in the Dark Ages of the planet, hold posterity back from the shining gates of present revelation, and their skeleton fingers fasten it to the decrepit body of a dying creed.

This is especially evident in the field of theology. Our denominational seminaries lie helplessly under the benumbing influence of the dead hand, automatically chanting the litanies and rehearsing the creeds of ancient times. They are moored in the quiet inlets of the stream of thought flowing to the infinite sea. Physical science keeps pace with the spheres, but theology gropes in charnel houses and, like the antiquarian, busies itself with the débris of structures that have served their generation. Science stands erect with clear eye and open face, but the dead finger of a dead past is pointed at theology, and theology slinks away tremblingly, not daring to meet the ghost and bid it down.

Why should this generation become the puppet of any that has preceded it? It was not for the Fathers to bind the future to ordinances that would be inevitably outgrown. The man of the stagecoach times cannot plan for the swiftly coming epoch of steam and electricity. The most altruistic and prophetic of the Fathers could not have outlined the beatific disclosures of these remarkable days. They have sought to perpetuate theories that are now as extinct as the dodo. The authors of them would be as amused at them as The legislation of the dead hand is inflicting absurdities on the venerable present. Free thought and untramelled research are forbidden because they endanger such legislation. The planet should be governed by living hands and intellects, by men and women with eyes and ears wide open to the messages of this decade. The old theologies are as foreign to us as are the old astronomies or physiologies. Truth must be interpreted by each generation and adapted to its

we are.

requirements. The manna must be gathered fresh every morning; it will not keep overnight. New sunlight, direct from the sky, is needed for the new day. Hoarded water becomes stagnant and deadly; it must continually fall from the clouds and filter through the hills, replenishing our springs. The atmosphere of the Middle Ages-the air that Calvin, or Luther, or Elizabeth breathed-will not do for us. We must live in the present if we are to live

at all.

The bathos of the dead hand in science, sociology, and industrial progress is more pronounced because less customary. What a theme for the cartoonist! The professor of physical geography representing the earth to be flat because the Fathers so represented it! The astronomer teaching that the stars circle about the earth because the old astronomers did so! The physiologist denying the modern theory of the circulation of the blood because it is not found in traditional physiology! The chemist searching for the elixir of life, the traveller for the fountain of youth, the mariner for the fabled Atlantis or Sea of Darkness, because the Fathers thus groped in the gloom of an ignorance harmonious with those young days of discovery! The anthropologist endeavoring to set civilization to the pure and simple era of the childhood of the race! The theologian urging us back to the apostolic crudities! "Let us turn back the pages of nineteen centuries, become babes again—and rest in the blessed state of callow innocence." It is the old cry that would undo the struggles, and tears, and attainments since creation. It is the song of the sluggard, the liturgy of the church of the heavenly rest.

This enthroning the Fathers and handing them the sceptre of the present is simply puerile. We are the ancients. The world was never so old and wise as now. The modern man gathers up the erudition and experiences of all cycles of history, and supplements them with those of the present. He is therefore the conclusion and embodiment of all discovery and wisdom since the dawn of time. Why then should he go to the Fathers? It is more fitting that they should come to him. Science takes this only reasonable position. The

university that should attempt to reiterate the past would die out and become an amusing memory.

The dead hand in theology is even more ridiculous, for it enters a domain higher and grander. If it is intolerable in the science of the rocks, the stars, and the verdure, how is it in theology-the science of God? It is worse, for it throttles the moral life, arresting moral growth. It stupefies the God-given intellect and turns it into a thinking machine manipulated by persons who have lain in their graves, it may be, for millenniums. It is a kind of animated Ouija or Planchette moved by spirits of long ago who are forbidden to return with intuitions gained since the terrestrial record closed. Why not restate theology in modern terminology, as well as biology, zoology, philology, psychology, or any of the other ologies? Why take a photograph of an ancient portrait that could never have been exact, when the living truth may be thrown up by a modern camera? Why ask what ancient theology said that the Bible said that Christ or Moses said that God said, when God is here in greater power and clearer vision than ever before? Why procure our sunlight by the roundabout process of the moon reflected from a mirror, when the dear old orb is shining in the heaven of to-day? Why take a report of a report of a report, when we may listen to God for ourselves?

Note the blessed freedom vouchsafed by one of our theological seminaries (Lane Seminary at Cincinnati) to her students. The Presbytery of Cincinnati utters itself thus nobly:

We advocate a full and free critical study of the scriptures for the purpose of vindicating the true nature of the scriptures as held by our church.

This is Romanism simple and pure, with a dead pope in the pontifical chair. It places the Bible back where it was when it lay in the hands of the priests or was chained to the pillars of English cathedrals. The Bible may be studied fully and generously-provided an agreement shall be made that such study shall lead to conclusions arrived at by the Fathers of the church. Fancy Harvard Medical School saying to its students: "Take your microscope and search freely, provided you will agree to contradict Pasteur's theory

of microbes!" or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology delivering itself in this wise: "Study electricity frankly and exhaustively, but be sure to reject any revelations that might substantiate the modern delusion of the X-rays, or the heretical claims of Edison in relation to the phonograph!" or our liberal universities saying to those who come to study: "Be thorough and broad in your pursuit of social science, provided you resolutely hold to the traditional theories of the origin of man, and sustain the old and blessed doctrine of indiscriminate philanthropy!" "Study astronomy in all freedom, but avoid Copernicus's impossible conclusions as to the structure of the solar system!"

Injunctions such as these practically say: "You may not study at all." To study in order to reach a conclusion already reached, under instructions to ignore any new light that might affect those conclusions adversely, is not to study genuinely. It is to close out liberty and light, and to end where we began. It is an absurd waste of time. It is to be forever turning about in an ecclesiastical half-bushel. No wonder there is so much talk about the decadence of the pulpit. How could it be otherwise when the novice is thus handicapped and drugged? No man of independence and force will submit to any such thing, and the church thus bars out that which would give her life and length of years. Let us note a few things the dead hand is doing for the church.

It forbids the frank study of the scriptures. In the days of Christ the Bible was in the hands of the scribes; in Luther's time the priests held the keys of interpretation; to-day the individual sects maintain traditional teachings which the adherent is given to understand he must find in the Bible. Untrammelled liberty of investigation is denied. The clergyman or theological student must be a sacred phonograph through whom the church utters itself. Like the Chinese, he bows at the shrines of his ancestors, reiterates their sentiments, and the dead hand becomes a shaping influence, the ruin of living ideals, the suppression of the hopes of the future.

It induces hypocrisy. A creed as ambiguous and doublefaced as a political platform is represented as written by the