Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 84:333 (Jan 1927)
Article: Religion: Echo Or Answer
Author: John E. Kuizenga

BSac 84:333 (Jan 1927) p. 9

Religion: Echo Or Answer

John E. Kuizenga

Religion has the inveterate habit of refusing to be a corpse at the very time when those who pose as competent have pronounced it dead. That there is to-day such a self-summoned coroner’s jury re-affirming the old verdict is evident to every one who is familiar with many pronouncements of much that passes for authoritative science, philosophy, or psychology. As a conspicuous example, on the other hand, of the many who deny the verdict, we have Philip Cabot of Boston calmly asserting that he has found God, and that as a consequence he has entered upon a new life.1

There are several facts about Mr. Cabot which are fortunate. He is from Boston, which means that he is within the charmed circle of accepted culture. He is a Harvard graduate, which means that his education cannot be challenged. He is a man who has been successful in big business, which means that in addition to the hearing which his personal qualities might give him, he speaks also with the power that comes in a land where money talks. By his own circles, we are told, Mr. Cabot was accepted as a successful man in the days before he became a prophet of religion.

Admitting that he did not find God before he was fifty, Mr. Cabot looks upon the years of his life preceding that time as years of total failure. He was a pagan, describable in the language of the apostle, “a man of this world, having his portion in this life, whose God was his belly.” He had tried out to the full the impossible effort to live by what he now calls “sawdust and stimulants”,—the materialistic aspects of life, and such rather hectic diver-

BSac 84:333 (Jan 1927) p. 10

sion as money can buy to relieve the strain of big business. There came for him a time of failing health, when he lost his grip, when neither medicine nor the various forms of mental healing and suggestion could give him what he needed. He found God at the very time when, as he himself testifies, the only good life held for him was the prospect that his life at any rate would soon be ended.

“It seemed that in worship, or prayer, and in my Bible, the solution of the riddle of my universe had been revealed to me; for I was living in a new world of peace, beauty and gladness, such as I had never conceived. That condition has continued except that I have returned to the world of men, taken up my again daily chores with the keenest interest and with a sureness of touch and an absence of worry and excitement to which all my associates can testify, and my health has continued to improve in a remarkable way.”2

In his...