Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
We are encouraged to consider, further, this name and its meaning for us
and above all in us. In us, we justly say, life is really different from
what it is in the plant. We are 'persons'; plants are not. Life in us is
personal, in the plant it is less than personal. But it is life, all the
same and all through, from the impersonal to us, different though we
assuredly are from the impersonal. And we can hardly escape asking
ourselves whether, as they are now, men are of the highest order of real
difference among the different orders embraced in the potency of life.
Can life do no more and better, seeing that it has done so much? Is it,
in itself, no more and better? The Christian answers these questions
without one moment of hesitation. He says that 'the Holy Ghost,' the
divine Spirit and Lord, is the 'Giver of Life'; and that there is an
order of life in which this Lord and Giver is brought into personal
relations with us, communicating with and communicated to us; so that by
this communication we are raised beyond the state of children of earth
and of the merely earthly life, to the high place of Sons of God, who
know their Father and are at one with each other and with him.
If there is a thorough-going evolutionist anywhere it is the Christian.
And it is his sacramental doctrine that gives consistency and
persistence to his evolutionary convictions, if and when they are
consistent and persistent. At times they are neither. At times the
Christian, like the rest of us, fails to see the grandeur and
universality of his own deepest principles. And then he belies them in
word and deed; and his picture of the world of men and things is false
to them and to himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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