Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday IdealsCope, Henry Frederick
Religion
Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday Ideals
Cope, Henry Frederick
Conduct of life
We may be satisfied with myths as to the ordering of the first family,
and we may leave to the play of fancy the specifications of an ideal
heaven; but when we begin to order our own families and adjust our
social and civic affairs we are compelled to wait for principles based
on facts, for truth. Religion thus becomes a science.
Much eloquence was spilled over the conflict between religion and
science. It was only a conflict between the old religion and its new
form, between the gray dawn and the growing day. Our fathers were not
wilfully false, holding on to darkness when the light came; but they so
long had held sacred the pictures seen in twilight they were loath to
give them up for those of the full day's printing.
The most damaging infidelity is the lack of faith in truth, the fear
that it might not be safe to allow all the facts to be known. He who
in the name of religion seeks to prevent our seeing and accepting the
full facts is religion's greatest foe. Only the full truth can set us
fully free, intellectually, spiritually, morally.
Why should we fear the light of investigation on the things of
religion? There is more sacredness in simple truth than in secrecy.
It were better to be lost forever seeking truth than saved by
sophistry. How foolish to attempt to adjust our lives by laws built
out of speculation, to attempt to steer by a compass when there is no
pole of truth?
In to-day's changing tides of thought, when the old faiths seem
slipping away, when we wonder why we have lost the simple faith of our
own youth or our father's, looking for some firm ground for our feet,
we do well to set them down on nothing but facts, to discriminate among
the sands of time and the alluvial deposits of tradition till we find
the rock of truth.
But facing the facts we find everywhere one writ large, over all one
great principle of unchanging law, one great purpose moving through all
nature and all history, and what we once only dared to hope and dream,
that back of all there throbs infinite love and there rules infinite
wisdom, now is attested by the impressive array of the witnesses of
science.
Truth always is safe. The holiest error must be born of hell. We can
make no mistake in refusing to go beyond truth, and we will find that
she leads to the ordering of life according to eternal laws, to the
doing of duties and finding of sweet joys as old as the hills and as
unchanging; she will lead in the paths of rightness.
Some day our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to
read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend
the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the
harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion;
shall know things as they are and be what we should be.
THE REAL FOUNDATION
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account