56/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

In seeking to impose forms of belief or action upon others, we are violating the spirit of Christianity, which insures absolute freedom of choice to every individual. In past ages multitudes were imprisoned or tortured for refusing to accept dogmas which have long since been discarded by all intelligent people; and while today, in civilized communities, such drastic measures are not resorted to as a means of suppressing heresy,

there are still evidences of the same spirit at work in milder ways, seeking to restrain or define the scope of men’s liberty to think and act for themselves. Every attempt to perpetuate forms and creeds is opposed to the Spirit of truth. Were all formulas of the past annihilated, the creative Spirit would speedily provide new ones adapted to existing needs.

The free, unconventional. Christian type of life is like the wind that “bloweth where it listeth.” It is radically opposed to conventionality. The hostility of the Pharisees toward Jesus was largely due to the fact that he set at naught their traditional customs and beliefs, and taught men to do likewise. Yet he did not deliberately and intentionally aim to overthrow them, in an iconoclastic spirit; he “came not to destroy but to fulfil.”

Yet when the free Spirit which actuated his life demanded new forms of expression, it incidentally and unavoidably accomplished the downfall of old ones that impeded its progress. Time-honored ceremonies and traditions which had been sacredly guarded and cherished for centuries by the Jews, were necessarily swept away by the truth he revealed. As he did not seek to destroy old forms, neither did he attempt to establish new ones. “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

The issue was not: old vs. new forms; but Spirit vs. fixed forms of belief of every description. The free life of the Spirit cannot be subordinated to rigid forms. Either the one or the other must be paramount; both cannot retain the supremacy. But no sooner were the disciples thrown on their own resources than reverence for doctrines and observances, so characteristic of the Hebrew race, began to be shown in a revival of certain old forms and the substitution of new ones in place of others.

Paul was regarded with suspicion by the brethren at Jerusalem, on account of his liberal views, and we find him at one time engaged in a controversy with them over the matter of observing rituals commanded by the Jewish code, which he held had been abolished by Jesus. The metamorphosis of Paul’s own doctrinal views, as may be seen from a comparison of his earlier and later epistles, was very marked.