Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
schematic diagrams of the scientific man and gives reasons for the faith
of the religious man, who goes further still.
Here in the Christian Sacrament, where the Christian says that the
fullest justice is done to bread and wine in lifting them up to be a
means of communion between God and man, science and philosophy, religion
and art, may meet together.
For nearly two thousand years Christians have seen in 'this bread' of
theirs matter impenetrated by spirit, and raised by it into another and
a higher order. They have held to a doctrine of both in which neither
was despised, or thought of as deceiving or unreal. Materialistic
thought and theory, abstract spiritualism, all theories or doctrines
that cut the world of experience in two with a rationalizing hatchet,
have been powerless to loosen their hold. Matter informed and
transformed by spirit; spirit pre-eminent over and including
matter—these have been cardinal and inevitable implications in the
sacramental worship of Christians. Cardinal and inevitable, too, is, in
consequence, their view of the world as an affair of order superposed on
order in a nature capable of being raised to the height of that which
they call the supernatural, an earth that may become a new earth, a city
of men that should rise to the noble state of a City of God.
* * * * *
We look back on the chemist's colloid that becomes, as protoplasm, no
longer common colloid but one from which a world of living creatures has
arisen. We see again a wonderful life informing and transforming matter,
pre-eminent over it yet dependent on and manifesting through it. We see
the chlorophyll of the plant raising chemical elements to a new order of
being, and life in its onward march from order to order of manifesting
consciousness, attaining at last man, creative in his spiritual freedom
and dominance. We see that a Christian might point to man himself as the
summing up of outward and visible signs and an inward and spiritual
grace which science has made known, as reasonably as he may take bread
as the central symbol of his worship. And he may tell us, or we may tell
him, that these things are one—that there is everywhere 'continuity of
process with the emergence of real differences' in a world that is
'sacramental' from its lowest to its highest order, from the speck of
jelly to man. He and we both may see it as a world of outward and
visible signs, each manifesting what the Christian names 'an inward and
spiritual grace,' and we name—how do we name it? So far, only _life_,
mysterious and mysteriously potent, communicating and communicated life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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