The Relations Between Religion and Science: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884Temple, Frederick
Religion
The Relations Between Religion and Science: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884
Temple, Frederick
Religion and science
aside by some higher duty which makes that pain the means to a higher
moral end. And if we are set by our consciences to seek for some rule
of universal application for this purpose, it becomes perpetually
clearer that nothing can excuse cruel punishments inflicted on criminals
or enemies, or hard-hearted indifference to the poor and the weak. Our
own nature cries out for kindness in our pain, and that very cry from
within compels our consciences to listen to the cry from without. And
the denunciations of cruelty and oppression we recognise as we hear them
to be the voice of God.
But however true it be that this progress corresponds exactly throughout
with the necessary working of the great moral principles implanted in
the spiritual faculty, it nevertheless remains true also that all this
teaching in its successive stages is given by men who did not profess to
be working out a philosophical system, but who claimed to bring a
message from God, to speak by His authority, and in many cases to be
trusted with special powers in proof of possessing that authority.
Looking back over it afterwards we can see that the teaching in its
successive stages was a development, but it always took the form of a
revelation. And its life was due to that fact. As far as it is possible
to judge, that union between Morality and Religion, between duty and
faith, without which both religion and morality soon wither out of human
consciences, can only be secured--has only been secured--by presenting
spiritual truth in this form of a Revelation.
When we pass to the New Testament, all that has previously been taught
in the Old, in so far as it is related to the new teaching at all, is
related as the bud to the flower. The development, if it be indeed a
development, is so great, so sudden, so strange, that it seems difficult
to recognise that it is a development at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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