The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candourPhelips, Vivian
Religion
The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candour
Phelips, Vivian
Rationalism
of the Church of England, in which they express a desire to receive
authoritative encouragement to face critical problems with entire
candour. [182]
AN INSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM.
The gravity of the situation and the divergence of the new from the old
teaching are summed up by the Church Times in the following pertinent
remarks:--"It is impossible for Christians to affect nonchalance as to
the result of the controversy between anthropologists like Lubbock,
Lyell, Huxley, Haeckel, and Fiske, who assert the human race to have
continuously (with whatever relapses) progressed out of brutish and
squalid barbarism, and those who, like the late Duke of Argyll, Lang,
Tylor, Hartmann, [183] Renouf, and most missionaries, maintain that
savagery is a declension from higher things, and that 'man's natural
state is civilisation'--not, of course, the civilisation of Paris and
London, of trousers and half-penny papers, nor yet Rousseau's anarchic
golden age, but creation in God's image after His likeness. It is said
that we need believe no more about our first parents than that they
were innocent--i.e., had not yet made trial of good and evil; that the
'former Adam,' even after he had ceased to be a pithecoid hanging
by his tail from boughs, and long after his mollusc [184] stage of
existence, was still as primus homo, a demi-witted creature, burrowing
in holes, gnawing roots, grunting, grimacing, snarling, shuddering; not
even a noble savage, but bestial and grovelling. As moral consciousness
slowly woke in him, he misused his powers; but such a 'fall' was really
an advance. Such is the latest version of Paradise lost--of that great
disinheritance, that moral and spiritual catastrophe, which, St. Paul
avers, was the entrance of death into the world by one man, and which,
he seems to say, dragged down the lower creation when the son of God,
'paragon of animals, noble in reason, infinite in faculty,' fell in
Eden. We do not urge that the two teachings cannot be reconciled;
but it is clear that the immense difficulty is not to be dismissed
by saying that the Bible is a mosaic, not Mosaic, or that it does
not profess to instruct us in anthropology." [185]
There is a downrightness and lucidity about this criticism of advanced
theology which one cannot but admire, although one may not be able to
share its optimism as to the chance of the two teachings ever becoming
reconciled. How can they? Consider the unsatisfactory nature of the
following speculations by means of which the clerical evolutionist
hopes to surmount the stumbling-block of the Fall.
THE BISHOP OF WORCESTER'S THEORY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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