Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
There is a good deal in our experience that may be read with advantage
as commentary on this challenge of religion. There are men (we have
known them) who grow smaller before our eyes. We say that they are
wrapped up in themselves. There are others who as plainly grow larger.
Their interests expand; they take in more of the concerns of other men
and, as we put it, make them their own. These, obviously, far from being
wrapped up in themselves, are for ever breaking down barriers and
passing beyond them. If we do not see them for some time we find them
happily different. They are caring about ideas and aims and persons they
were not interested in before; they have been learning; they have, in
one word, grown. And those others will have shrunk. A man grows by the
spiritual food on which he feeds. And if such a statement sounds remote
from ordinary experience (which it is not), let us say that the more he
really has the more he really is.
Now religion acknowledges this and interprets it. In the eyes of a
religious man such growth means a growth in God. And he points out that
it happens only where a man has sought for its own sake, not for his,
what he has won. He says that the way of life is a way of
disinterestedness in regard to self and interestedness in all else. And,
as usual, he sends us to the Gospel for the fundamental principle
underlying what experience shows. 'Whosoever will save his life shall
lose it.' That is the kernel of the matter. Because love is the secret
of growth in spiritual life, whether intellectual, moral or aesthetic,
greed shall not procure its fruits. In the nature of things it cannot.
That is why growth in 'spirit and life' seems so paradoxical. When I
want food to eat I may be as greedy as I please. This will not prevent
me from having it. When I want food of the spirit greed will only take
me out of my true path and I shall find husks that the swine eat and
Dead Sea fruit.
I cannot even discover truth or beauty or holiness, much less win them
to myself, if I do not seek them for their own sake. I cannot see what
another man is, and I cannot make him at one with me in a real
fellowship, unless I care about him (as we say) because he is what he
is, and so make his interests mine. If I use any human being as a mere
instrument to serve my purpose I lose that human being, though I may
keep the instrument. Men and women, like goodness and truth and
beauty—and God—cannot be made mine unless I give myself to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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