St.
Paul was not quite at home on Mars Hill; it was hard to make those who
were always hearing and seeing some new thing understand; the shame
and humility of the cross were an unnecessary foolishness to them. So
they have always been. The humanist cannot take seriously this sense
of a transcendent reality. When Cicero, to escape the vengeance of
Clodius, withdrew from Rome, he passed over into Greece and dwelt for
a while in Thessalonica. One day he saw Mount Olympus, the lofty and
eternal home of the deities of ancient Greece. "But I," said the bland
eclectic philosopher, "saw nothing but snow and ice."
How inadequate, then, as a substitute for religion, is even the
noblest humanism. True and fine as far as it goes, it does not go far
enough for us. It takes too little account of the divided life. It
appears not to understand it. On the whole it refuses to acknowledge
that it really exists, or, if it does, it is convinced of man's
unaided ability to efface it. It isn't something inevitable. Hence the
pride which is an essential quality of the humanistic attitude.
But the religious man knows that it does exist and that while he is
not wholly responsible for it, yet he is essentially so and that,
alas, in spite of that fact, he alone cannot bridge it. So he cries,
"Wretched man that I am, what shall I do to be saved?" Here is the
feeling of uneasiness, the sense of something being wrong about us
as we naturally stand, of which James speaks.
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