The Lost Light

PROLOGUE Coming forth in a day when theology has long been discredited - even in its own ecclesiastical household - and religion itself is threatened with obliteration by rampant forces hostile to it, this book aims to rehabilitate theology and to stabilize true religion. It must be said at the very outset and with blunt insistence that it is for religion and not in any way against it. It is written to establish religion again as the cornerstone of human culture, when civilization has largely turned away from it to seek elsewhere the guiding light. It is designed to redeem Divine Theology from her outcast condition and place her again beside Philosophy and Science on the throne in the kingdom of man's mind. It needs sharply to be asseverated that the book is for religion because many will pronounce it the most forthright attack on ecclesiastical doctrinism yet presented. It can hardly be denied that it sweeps away almost the entire body of common acceptance of biblical and theological meaning. But it makes no war on anything in religion save the idiocies and falsities that have crept into the general conception of orthodox belief. Finding the chief enemies of true religion were those within her own gates, the book has had to address itself to the ungenerous task of repudiating the whole untenable structure of accredited interpretation in order to erect on the ground the lovely temple of ancient truth. If theology is to be rescued from its forlorn state of intellectual disrepute into which not its enemies but its friends have precipitated it through an unconscionable perversion of its original significance to gross repulsiveness, the errors and distortions perpetrated upon it by those of its own household must be ruthlessly dismantled. Hence to many the book will seem like a devastating assault on the very citadel of common religious preachment. In the face of all this it must be maintained that the work is written to support and defend religion against all its foes and that it is constructive and not destructive of true religious values at every turn. It was no light or (Page 1) frivolous gesture to affront a settled and rooted growth of beliefs and doctrinal statements that have been cherished for centuries around the hearthstone of Christian culture and become hallowed by age-long acceptance and the strong loves and loyalties inbred in sensitive childhood. But it was seen to be a drastic operation quite necessary to save the organism of religion itself from further decay and menacing death. Excrescences of misconception and superstition had to be heroically cut out of the body of theology and the calcareous incrustations of ignorant interpretation dissolved and carried away by the acid stream of living truth flowing forth, after centuries of suppression, from the mighty scriptures of the past.