But one thing is
true of either process in the Christian doctrine of conversion. It is
not merely an achievement, although it is that; it is also a rescue.
It cannot come about without faith, the "will to believe"; neither can
it come about by that alone. Conversion is something we do; it is also
something else, working within us, if we will let it, helping us to
do; hence it is something done for us.
Now, this experience of conversion is passing out of Christian
life and preaching under humanistic influence. We are accepting
the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue. Hence we blur the
distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian. Education
supplants salvation. We bring the boys and girls into the church
because they are safer there than outside it; and on the whole it is
a good thing to do and really they belong there anyway. The church
member is a man of the world, softened by Christian feeling. He is
a kindly and amiable citizen and an honorable man; he has not been
saved. But he knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is right
you will do it. Intelligence needs no support from grace. It is
strange that the church does not see that with this relinquishment
of her insistence upon something that religion can do for a man that
nothing else can attempt, she has thereby given up her real excuse for
being, and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone.
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