Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 88:351 (Jul 1931)
Article: The Religion Of Humanism
Author: John Elliott Wishart

BSac 88:351 (July 1931) p. 268

The Religion Of Humanism

John E. Wishart

About the word Humanism a fierce battle is now being fought. One issue at stake is, it appears, to determine who has the exclusive right to it as a party name. Charges and counter-charges are made by literary combatants, each side marshalled under a banner inscribed with this magic term. Those, if any, who lament the passing of the ages of controversy, may well take heart as they read some of our recent magazines. In this war quarter is neither asked nor given. The debaters do not hurl such opprobrious epithets at one another, as Luther and Eck were wont to fulminate, but the spirit is almost as bitter. C’est la guerre and it is a outrance. There is at least quite emphatic indication that those whose slogan is Humanism are not all of one mind. And with some of them the Christian thinker need have no quarrel.

The word has been appropriated by Professor Schiller as the designation of his philosophical system, and to dispute his right to do so would be to strive about words to no profit. More important from the point of view of this paper is the group that may be called literary humanists, who are probably best entitled to the name as being followers of the Greek tradition in a manner not unlike that of the enthusiasts for the classics in the Renaissance. Their devotion to “that glory that was Greece and that splendor that was Rome” brings upon them the condemnation of many ultra-modern educators, but it may be that in this matter they are wiser than their critics. The goal towards which they would have us press is the ideal of the perfection of man, “an harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature” (Matthew Arnold). But they insist very reasonably that this goal has not been reached, that self-expression is not good unless the self that is expressed is good, that there is need of

BSac 88:351 (July 1931) p. 269

criticism, and that there are standards by which we must judge ourselves. There is a considerable literature on the subject, and many of the writers of the school, especially its leaders, Dr. Irving Babbitt and Dr. Paul Elmer Moore, are brilliant men of letters.

It seems obvious enough that the kind of Humanism which is advocated by this group of writers, as for instance in the recent volume, “Humanism and America,” and in The Bookman, which has become their organ, need not be hostile to Theism or to Christianity and in fact is usually not so. There is not the slightest reason why one who is devoted to this higher culture should not also believe in a God of love and in Jesus Christ as the supreme manifestation of God. The ultimate goal for the religious man will be higher than self-culture, but the...