Religion: Pagan's Return

Such religion as there can be in modern life, every Individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself ... I am a pagan . . . the Christian believer lives in a world governed and watched over by God . . . On the other hand, the pagan lives in this world like an orphan.

So wrote the distinguished Chinese scholar-philosopher Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living, his bestseller of 21 years ago. Today, suave, slight Dr. Lin. 63, is an orphan no longer. Last Sunday he sat in the congregation of his new church—Manhattan's Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church—and listened attentively to the sermon of its Scottish-born pastor, the Rev. David Read. Afterward, puffing a pipe in the sun-filled living room of his modern apartment on Manhattan's East Side, the onetime pagan explained his new position.

"When I wrote that chapter about being a pagan, I had the attitude of an 18th century rationalist: humanity was sufficient unto itself. Now I have come to the realization that humanity is never sufficient unto itself. Man needs something greater outside himself, a sense of unity with God, the knowledge that he is part of a greater whole.

"In the last 20 years I have spiritually progressed. I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior now. The thing that won me to him more than anything else was the way he spoke of God out of actual personal knowledge—not in terms of speculation or theology. My father was a Presbyterian minister, and I studied for the ministry until the dogmas got me down. I still have not much use for the theologians. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not a complicated thing.

"And God isn't anybody's private property, either. Nothing makes me more disgusted than the egotism of people who think they can use God—to make it stop raining on the day of the picnic, or spare their lives in a disaster. My family and I were in a train wreck a while ago in France. I had taken two of my children into the dining car ahead for some ice cream, and we were served unusually quickly—which meant that just before the wreck we had left the car, in which a great many people were killed. Some of my Christian friends talked about it as though we had been especially preserved. What egotism, to assume that God loves you more than the people who were killed!

"No, I am not an 'orphan' any more. In joining the church I have the assurance that God's in his heaven and the world's all right, that's true. But a churchgoer who looks on going to church as a kind of private home-insurance is beneath contempt. God doesn't need our prayers; he won't do us favors for them. Christianity is a power—and a living force to help us live to the full here and now. It is affirmation of life."