Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: Essays — John Shaqi
Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Agnosticism; Miracles; Religion and science
Got in my way? Why, my good "voice," they were driven in my way. I had
happened to make a statement, than which, so far as I have ever been
able to see, nothing can be more modest or inoffensive; to wit, that I
am convinced of my own utter ignorance about a great number of things,
respecting which the great majority of my neighbours (not only those
of adult years, but children repeating their catechisms) affirm
themselves to possess full information. I ask any candid and impartial
judge, Is that attacking anybody or anything?
Yet, if I had made the most wanton and arrogant onslaught on the
honest convictions of other people, I could not have been more hardly
dealt with. The pentecostal charism, I believe, exhausted itself
amongst the earliest disciples. Yet any one who has had to attend, as
I have done, to copious objurgations, strewn with such appellations as
"infidel" and "coward," must be a hardened sceptic indeed if he doubts
the existence of a "gift of tongues" in the Churches of our time;
unless, indeed, it should occur to him that some of these outpourings
may have taken place after "the third hour of the day." I am far from
thinking that it is worth while to give much attention to these
inevitable incidents of all controversies, in which one party has
acquired the mental peculiarities which are generated by the habit of
much talking, with immunity from criticism. But as a rule, they are
the sauce of dishes of misrepresentations and inaccuracies which it
may be a duty, nay, even an innocent pleasure, to expose. In the
particular case of which I am thinking, I felt, as Strauss says, "able
and called upon" to undertake the business: and it is no
responsibility of mine, if I found the Gospels, with their miraculous
stories, of which the Gadarene is a typical example, blocking my way,
as heretofore, the Pentateuch had done.
I was challenged to question the authority for the theory of "the
spiritual world," and the practical consequences deducible from human
relations to it, contained in these documents.
In my judgment, the actuality of this spiritual world--the value of
the evidence for its objective existence and its influence upon the
course of things--are matters, which lie as much within the province
of science, as any other question about the existence and powers of
the varied forms of living and conscious activity.
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