Dr. Eliot Offers a New Religion

1914

Future Church Will Rob Death of Terror

Spurns Biblical Stories and Rejects Miracles as Impossible

Boston, Mass., Jan. 5. — A new interpretation of the Divine Being has been advanced by President Emeritus Charles W. Eliot of Harvard in a continuation of his predictions on the religion of the future.

Dr Eliot would bar the word "God" and substitute "Our Father." Nothing so radical as his ideas on the appellation of the Divine Being has been advanced for many years. This statement has been published by the American Unitarian association. This twentieth century Christianity of Dr. Eliot does not believe in the Garden of Eden. The serpent tempting Eve and then tempting Adam he turns over to the rubbish heap. He says God did not make man out of the dust of the ground; God did not turn stonemason and give into the hands of Moses the ten commandments; neither did the sun stand still for Joshua; neither did Jonah go through his thrilling experience in the closed quarters of the whale.

These and other stories Dr. Eliot would designate pleasant reading, but not for belief. There will be nothing like dogmas or creed in this twentieth century religion. No miracle will be found in it.

"Men of science," Dr. Eliot says, "have no faith in magic or miracle."

Dr. Eliot's religion will stop speculation in theology. It puts a damper on future schools of theology, like that which has been the outgrowth of the nineteenth century in Germany. The church of the future will have more reverence for the personality of Jesus, will prefer liberty to authority, will rob death of its terror.

"No thinking person now accepts as anything but primitive myths of fanciful poetry the story of the Garden of Eden," Dr. Eliot says, "or the portrait of God in the second chapter of Genesis as a being who worked man out of the dust of the ground, as a child fashions an image of snow or clay.

"The creator is for modern men a sleepless, active energy, and will, which yesterday, today and forever actuates all things as the human spirit actuates its own body, so small, and yet so inconceivably complex.

"By savage man the gods were recognized chiefly in the irresistible catastrophes of nature — in the lightning, the earthquake, the flood, and the drought, the volcano, and the mighty wind.

"Twentieth century people recognize God chiefly in the wonderful energies of sound, light and electricity; in the vital processes or plants and animals, in human loves and aspirations, and in the evolution of human society."