51/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
7.
CHRISTIANITY.
As the light of this nineteenth century is reflected back over the historical narrative of the New Testament, the fragmentary incidents there recorded grow luminous with a suggestiveness which enables us now to restore, in its original perfection, the Christian philosophy of life,
after it has reposed for centuries beneath the surface debris of traditional interpretations; just as the paleontologist is able to reproduce the complete likeness of some extinct species, by the aid of a few scattered fossil impressions.
It was impossible for men to be conscious of the real purport of the life of Jesus, until modern research and insight had first brushed aside the cobwebs of ignorance, materialism and religious bigotry that had long been allowed to envelop the simple story of the four Gospels.
For nearly two thousand years the religious system known as Christianity, has been undergoing a series of metamorphoses, and assuming ever-changing garbs of beliefs, ceremonies and ethical standards.
There are in existence today scores of sects claiming to base their creeds on the authority of the Bible. The term sect means cut off or separated. Sects stand for particular phases of truth, rather than for the Truth itself, which is eternal, not subject to interpretations. Every sect interprets the Biblical record in its own manner, and is convinced that the Bible embodies its peculiar doctrinal views.
It regards their acceptance as necessary to the welfare of humanity; therefore it seeks to perpetuate its individual existence and to extend its influence. Various interpreters of equal intelligence discover very different meanings in those writings.
And so the independent truth-seeker is confronted at the outset with a somewhat anomalous state of affairs, due to the existence of numerous sects, or “isms,” representing a wide range of beliefs, and claiming each for itself the only exclusively correct interpretation of the Scriptures, resting on the clearest evidence.