Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation,: 10th Edition, 1890
Religion
Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation,: 10th Edition, 1890
Christianity; Incarnation
Our purpose was 'to succour a distressed faith' by endeavouring to
bring the Christian Creed into its right relation to the modern growth
of knowledge, scientific, historical, critical; and to the modern
problems of politics and ethics[3]. We were writing as for Christians,
but as for Christians perplexed by new knowledge which they are
required to assimilate and new problems with which they are required
to deal. What is needed to help men in such perplexity is not
compromise, for compromise generally means tampering with principle,
but readjustment, or fresh correlation, of the things of faith and the
things of knowledge. In detail this will, no doubt, involve
concessions, and that on both sides, because both sides have been
liable to make mistakes[4]; but in the main what is to be looked for
is a reconciliation which shall at once set the scientific and
critical movement, so far as it is simply scientific and critical,
free from the peril of irreligion, and the religious movement free
from the imputation of hostility to new knowledge--as free as any
movement can be, which is intensely concerned to nourish and develop
what is permanent and unchanging in human life. Such a reconciliation
has more than once been effected in the past, though never without a
preliminary period of antagonism[5]; our confidence that it will be
effected anew in the future lies partly in the fact that we see it
already taking place in some minds which seem to us to represent the
best life and thought of our time both scientific and religious. One
such at least[6] we knew and have lost, though only from present
intercourse, in Aubrey Moore. Nobody could know him and think of him
as 'compromising' either his faith or his science. He lived primarily
and with deepest interest in his religious life and theological study,
but he lived also with intense reality in the life of science. And the
debt we owe to him, over and above the debt under which his personal
character lays us for ever, is that of having let us see how the two
lives of faith and of science can melt into one. He felt indeed and
wrestled with the difficulties of adjustment. He had not, as it seemed
to us, nearly finished his work in this respect. But he had done
enough for our encouragement: enough to help us to believe that the
best minds of the future are to be neither religious minds defying
scientific advance, nor scientific minds denying religion, but minds
in which religion interprets and is interpreted by science, in which
faith and enquiry subsist together and reinforce one another. The
reason why he should have been so soon taken from us and from the
Church on earth--taken when 'our need was the sorest'--lies in the
impenetrable mysteries of God. 'Si dolemus ablatum, non tamen
obliviscimur quod datus fuit, et gratias agimus quod habere illum
meruimus.... Pusillus corde eram et confortabat me; piger et
negligens, et excitabat me[7].'
II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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