Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 56:223 (Jul 1899)
Article: The Abiding Realities Of Religion
Author: John Henry Barrows

BSac 56:223 (July 1899) p. 543

The Abiding Realities Of Religion1

Pres. John Henry Barrows

WE live in a swiftly changing world. New visions daily come before the eyes, new elements enter into life, new thoughts and convictions occupy the mind. Ours is a world where in every sphere much that is old passes away. As Lowell sang in his great Harvard Commemoration Ode,

“What ever ‘scaped Oblivion’s subtle wrong,
Save a few clarion names, or golden threads of song?
Before my musing eye
The mighty ones of old sweep by,
Disvoicéd now and insubstantial things,
As noisy once as we; poor ghosts of kings,
Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust,
And many races, nameless long ago,
To darkness driven by that imperious gust
Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow.
O visionary world, condition strange,
Where naught abiding is but only Change,
Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift and range!”

The stars do “shift and range,” for the universe is expressed in terms of motion. Life itself means mutation and growth, and thus the thoughts of men are widened. A recent notable article by a teacher in our Seminary calls attention to the lessening area of human confidence now covered by the historic systems of belief.

BSac 56:223 (July 1899) p. 544

In homely phrase all of us may rightly say, ‘It is better to know fewer things than to know so many things that are not true,’ or only partially true. There is nothing unique about our experience. The Apostle Paul, whose life and convictions had met a sudden and miraculous transformation in his early manhood, and who even found himself called by a new name, realized to the full the transitory, and even visionary, character of much of human existence, the incompleteness of his childish thought of God and man, and even the fragmentariness of his own knowledge as an inspired preacher of Christianity. But he was also conscious of certain abiding realities in religion, which no progress could possibly render antiquated. There are persistent elements, eternal laws, continuing, though still living, forces in the world of the spirit; and the greatest of these he describes in a prose poem to which we can find no parallel in ancient or modern literature.

It is of these abiding things that I wish to speak. But I am not to give an exposition of Faith, Hope, and Love as qualities of character divorced from what is central to all Christian preaching, namely, Jesus Christ. I hardly need say that we look on him as the author and perfecter of faith, as well as the chief object of it. We look on him as the inspirer of hope and the everlasting fountain of love. The supreme ...