The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
Now what is the scriptural idea of man? Man interests us especially
in three aspects. He is a corporeal being; he is an intellectual
being; he is a moral being, with feelings, will, and personality.
Man's body. Plato considered the body as a source of evil and a
hindrance to all higher life. And Plato was by no means alone in
this. The Bible takes a very different view. Neglect of the body is
always rebuked. The only place, so far as I can find, where the body
is called vile is where it is compared with the glorious body into
which it is to be transformed. "Your bodies," writes Paul to the
Corinthians, "are members of Christ," "temples of the Holy Ghost."
But the Bible teaches that the body is to be the servant, not the
ruler, of the spirit. "I keep under my body, and bring it into
subjection," continues Paul. Here again science is strictly in
accord with scripture.
Man is an intellectual being. I need not quote the praises of
knowledge in the Old Testament. They must be fresh in your mind. But
the practical Peter writes, "giving all diligence add to your faith
virtue; and to virtue knowledge." And Paul prays that the love of
the Ephesians may "abound more and more in knowledge and in all
judgment." But the important knowledge is the knowledge of God, and
of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master. And similarly science
emphasizes that the chief end of all knowledge is that we should
know the environment to which we are to conform. Knowledge is useful
to strengthen and clarify the mind, that it may see and conform to
truth and God: and if it fails to become a means to conformity, it
has failed of the chief, and practically the only, end for which it
was intended. We are to come "in the unity of the faith and of the
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of
the stature of the fulness of Christ." But knowledge which only
puffs up and distracts the mind from the great aims and ends which
it should serve is rebuked with equal emphasis by the Bible and by
science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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