Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
Studying at its best the Christian view of the world of life—and it is
not worth any man's while to study it at less—we find that Jesus Christ
stands there always as greatest among prophets, though 'more than a
prophet.' He is in the line of the prophets but at their head; he is
their culmination and their fulfilment. He knew himself to be a prophet,
and to have the lot of one who 'is not without honour save in his own
country.' He lived and taught, and he and his teaching were received,
after the manner of the prophets that had gone before. Like Isaiah and
Jeremiah he spoke the language of drama and poetry, and gave body in
parable and pictorial visions to his message. Like them he spoke and
preached always with passion and as being conscious of a very wall of
opposing forces. For him as for them the exaltation of religious
machinery above religious life, and all self-satisfaction through mere
forms and ceremonies, meant an onset of spiritual death. To use these
things as a shelter within which a man might follow his self-seeking
bent, whether of greed or of fear, was the worst (but one) of sins.
'Hypocrites,' that is, 'play-actors', 'generation of vipers,' he said of
the professionally religious of his time. That there was for him one sin
greater than such play-acting is of his own supreme greatness. No other
prophet recognized and denounced as he did the sin that cannot be
forgiven; for no other prophet had as he had the full personally
realized revelation of an indwelling God whom man, consciously, might
cast out. This, with his marvellous balance of judgement in regard to
the letter or the machine and the spirit—the organ and the life that
shapes and uses it—is a marked element in his _differentia_ among
prophets. And we, who are friends to them all in so far as they protest
against depreciation of spirit and life, and against men who make of the
products of life from which life has departed obstacles to the urgency
of the present, have to consider whether we can go with him as far as he
goes, or whether this element of difference between him and the rest is
in any way to weaken our alliance with him. He is not only one among his
fellows; he is also unquestionably different from them. Is there
anything about this difference that should make us who are friends of
the prophets quarrel with the Christian who accepts and welcomes it?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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