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
Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the Moral Law out of anything
but itself. Attempts have been made, and many more will no doubt be
made, to trace the origin of the spiritual faculty to a development of
the other faculties. And it is to be expected that great success will
ultimately attend the endeavours to show the growth of all the
subordinate powers of the soul. That our emotions, that our impulses,
that our affections should have had a history, and that their present
working should be the result of that history, has nothing in it
improbable. There can be no question that we inherit these things very
largely, and that they are also very largely due to special
peculiarities of constitution in each individual. That large part of us
which is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own will
and our own free action, it is perfectly reasonable to find subject to
laws of Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the lower
animals. They, too, can love; can be angry or pleased; can put affection
above appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can be
patient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing; can take delight in
society: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of
civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's faithful servants and
companions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions
and affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in the
arts of life well comparable to our own. If the bare animal nature is
thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural
forces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should be
found to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, we
are animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we may
expect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature is
capable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of such
evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. This
nature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of that
spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our
whole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done with
this instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, and
may be still further formed for the future. It is good to study the
evolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty
itself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. The
essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this
development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such
universality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises to
the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abraham
to say, 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' The very word
right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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