Universalist Preacher Takes up the Origin of Religion

Cedar Rapids, IA, 1897

OF ITS ORIGIN

Rev. Pratt's Splendid Sermon at Universalist Church.

Takes up the Origin of Religion and Pleases a Large Audience of Former Parishioners and Old Friends by His Strong Philosophy — The Evening Service.

The services at the Universalist church yesterday morning were exceptionally interesting, the parishioners and old friends of Rev. Pratt assembling in large numbers of hear their former pastor. The church was beautifully and tastefully decorated with flowers and the greeting accorded the speaker was cordial and sincere. Rev. Pratt spoke extemporaneously for forty minutes, holding his audience attentively. The following is a brief synopsis of the address:

REV. PRATT'S SERMON.

"Where Did Religion Come From?" was the question considered by Mr. Pratt. Paul's words, "The spirit beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God," was used as a text. There is a system of interpretation which limits the application of the text to those who are members of the visible church on earth; those who have accepted, "using the language common in the religious world," Christ and his salvation. They only have the witness of the spirit.

The same rule of interpretation is applied to that magnificent outburst of Paul wherein he speaks of the enduring nature of the Divine Love.

"For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

This it is said applies only to those who are members of the visible church. Nor can any others claim the promise or assurance "We know that if the earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved we have a building of God, an house not made with hands eternal in the heavens."

Did Paul mean to thus limit the divine love and that dearest of all hopes, the hope of immortality? One can hardly think it, when it is remembered that Paul was the apostle who gave to Christianity its universalistic trend, saving it from degenerating into a narrow Judaism which would surely have been its fate, had Peter's influence and spirit molded it and given to it a final form.

If the apostle did thus limit the divine love and the immortal hone we cannot follow him for we know that all men are children of a common father, and heirs of a glorious immortality.

Strike the religious history of the world where you will and you will find evidence of the religious sentiment.

The crude form and right of savage tribes, the temples now in ruins in the civilizations that greet us at the dawn of history, the mystic's dream, the Quakers' silent devotion, the worship and practical benevolence of the nineteenth century all declare that religion is an imperishable sentiment, and that man has ever had a dim realization of the relation he sustained to the eternal power that makes for righteousness.

Facts unmistakable unite to affirm that man has ever been a child of God and believing as we do that the aegis of his protective love is over all worlds it is the language of faith to declare that man will be forever a child of God and the object of his mercy.

Where did this universal religious sentiment come from? An answer quite commonly given the question would be something like this: "Religion is in the world." Religion is in the world because the church is in the world. Religion is in the world because there is a sacrificing priesthood ordained of heaven and the critics of Lyman Abbott would declare that religion is in the world because God has given us a revelation and confirmed it by such wonderful marvels as the swallowing of Jonah by the whale. We are told that we must believe that or we cannot believe the Old Testament. If we cannot accept the Old Testament we cannot accept the New. If we do not believe the New Testament we do not believe in Christ and if we cannot believe in Him we cannot believe in anything.

Upon the acceptance of Jonah's experience as literal history, Christ's law of love ultimately rests and religion stands on the divine foundations.

Foolishness can go no further. Lyman Abbott's critics seem to need some kindergarten lessons in common sense. Religion is not in the world because of the Bible, the church, or the priesthood. Say rather that these are in the world because man is a religious being and they are the outward expression of his religious nature and life.

Where did religion come from? Max Muller and his school would answer, "It was born in the nature myths so common in the childhood of the world." Man gave to nature's forces a personality, the nature myth became the hero myth, and in a later development was given a moral significance. Thus religion was born.

Where did religion come from? It was born, says Darwin and Lubbock, in superstition. It came with ancestor worship out of the belief of early tribes in ghosts and spirits. In this field you search will be rewarded if you seek to find where religion originated.

These theories are all inadequate. Religion is in the world because man is a child of God. It is the development of his spiritual nature.

Growth and change then are its law and method. Like all life, philosophy, and science it comes under the sway of the law of evolution. There is a fiction current in some organizations of Christendom that the church possesses a fixed theology. The only way to have a fixed theology is to deprive man of the power of thought. The century that makes the assertion of a fixed theology furnishes the refutation of the claim. Consider it only on the dogmatic side.

What a softening down of religious dogmas there has been in the past one hundred years. What has become of the good old doctrine of election? Oliver Wendell Holmes says that when he was a boy it was preached in New England that only one in two thousand were to be saved, and that a serious dispute arose in the town of Medford, which had at that time about 2,000 inhabitants, as to whether the deacon or the minister stood the best chance of receiving at last the favor of heaven.

The Calvinists seem to realize now that to ask men to enter upon the Christian life and be loyal to high ideals, when it is ordained from all eternity as a decree of high heaven that they shall go the other way, is as Father Taylor once said, "A good deal like inviting the gravestones home to dinner; it is impossible for them to come." Realizing this, Calvinism has quietly taken a position on Arminian or Methodist ground, and declares that "whosoever will may come." The change which has come over the spirit and dream of theology is evidenced by the changed nature of the hymns in modern worship. What lurid hymns our fathers sung:

"My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead;
What horrors seize the guilty soul
Upon the dying bed."

Or again:

"And are we sinners yet alive;
And do we yet rebel?
'Tis wondrous, 'Tis amazing grace,
That we are out of hell."

In the place of these lurid hymns of the olden time we sing:

"Yes for me, for me, he careth,
With a Father's tender care;
Yes with me, with me, he shareth,
Every burden, every fear."

Mr. Pratt then traced at length the development of religion through Animism, Polytheism, Monotheism, Cosmic Theism, to the final thought of the fatherhood of God, and asked the question whether it would pass away.

Evolution to him but established more firmly the fact of the imperishable nature of religion. Religion had nothing to fear from it, but it sounded the death knell of the old Latin theology.

It abolished the line that had been drawn between the natural and the supernatural, so that in this beautiful world we now had a vision of the "fullness of the Godhead bodily." The universe was not dirt. All matter was resolvable into force and will, and force and will are spiritual.

The final words were unity and love. "And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love." He closed with relating an incident in the life of Gounod, the composer, which illustrated the noble unselfishness of the man, an unselfishness and kindness that made him even more worthy of admiration than his art. This love illustrated in his life and in all who mediate the divine love to humanity is the grandest, greatest thing in this world or any world. It is the power that holds society together and if all were obedient to its law, our earth would become more beautiful than that mythological Eden with which it is affirmed that man began his terrestrial journey. Love is the golden ladder by which man ascends the heavenly heights.

—The Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, May 24, 1897, p. 5.