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
exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the
Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world.
The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed
supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message.
This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for
such a direct communication from God to man. Men seem to need it so much
that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long
if they do accept it. All who thus claim supernatural authority must, of
course, justify their claim. They must justify their message to the
human conscience. What they teach must be an advance towards, and
finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law. And if they profess to
have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power
is really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that
their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature of
man, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely successful.
It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once
revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural
power was needed to procure that access in the first instance. We
believe because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up our
children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have
sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if we
had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the
spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without
any external evidence at all. But the first receivers of the message, to
whom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and we
actually know did happen, to whom it was hard to reconcile that
revelation with previous teaching, how sure were they to need some
other and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernatural
in the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, can
never stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for the
first reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and to
all it is a help to find that reasonable ground can be shown for holding
that such evidence was originally given.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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