Can you think at all and not pronounce heartily
that to labour in knowledge is to build up Jerusalem,
and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem
and her builders?
_Blake._
For the Christian a man is a being capable of receiving and assimilating
life as no other creature can, and as the biologist has no biological
reason to believe. The Christian declares that he has reason, good and
ample. He _knows_ whom he believes. This is a matter of living religious
experience to which generations after generations have borne witness.
There is a ladder of spiritual reality, he says, up which men are
climbing and upon which some have reached great heights. The biologist's
ladder, despite its many steps and its length along the ages, is too
short for him. Or rather (so he will tell you when he understands what
the biologist means) his own ladder is a legitimate and even a natural
extension of that, as of all others of the sort that men have anywhere
set up.
Is this advance of man, then, an affair of a single departmental
business—the religious business? Or, let us ask, can there be kinds of
knowledge that are not really knowledge of God? Is it reasonable to
regard biological knowledge, or chemical or physical, as knowledge of
some alien reality not embraced in God? The supposition is monstrous. If
God is, then all truth attained by man is truth of him. If I learn that
the world advances from the ether to my brain I shall have learnt
something about God. So the Christian should maintain, if he is true to
his Christian principles. The advance of man towards communion with God
in knowledge is not a mere affair of some one department of knowledge
called religious, although it is now for the most part carried on
departmentally. Although men separate off for their practical
convenience the study of plants from the study of animals, and a
specialist may separate off the egg of the newt and study nothing else,
and even think, at least seriously, of nothing else; although we may not
only speak of religion, or knowledge, or philosophy as separate one from
another but act as though they were, yet if the Christian and the
philosopher and the scientific man are right in holding that there is a
unity in the multiplicity of things, a 'uniformity of nature,' an
'Absolute,' or 'One God,' then religion and science and philosophy are
only separated, if separate at all, by an artifice or a convention. You
cannot really _separate_ knowing, in a man's activity, from his feeling
and acting, nor his feeling from acting and knowing, nor his acting from
knowing and feeling, nor his activity from himself; although you can
_distinguish_ each from the others. They are different, but their
difference is embraced within a oneness. So it is with religion and
science and philosophy. They are all results of man's activity in
relation to a reality of innumerable aspects and unfathomable depth; and
they may all be means by which he ascends the ladder of his experience
of God.
Therefore the Christian does his own sacramental and incarnational
principles a grave injustice if and when he tries to turn away from
science and philosophy. Not only this—he cannot really do it. When he
succeeds in turning away from that which he believes to be all there is
of science and philosophy, he does not cut out from his creed and his
theology the science and philosophy incorporated in them—a science and a
philosophy which undoubtedly need correction that they may move and grow
with the movement and the growth of experience. It is only the science
and philosophy grown to new ripeness and new truth since the day when
the great bulk of his Christian tradition was laid down in written words
to be transmitted to him, that as a matter of fact he is rejecting. And
he is able to reject these just and only because he has already in this
tradition such science and philosophy as serves to make for him some
sort of a _Weltanschauung_, a world-picture, you may say. It is useless
to protest that a man can be religious without having a world-picture;
he cannot even be a man without one. And the only question for him is
whether it shall or shall not be as wide in its extent and as good as he
can make it, whether he shall or shall not include within it all the
knowledge and vision of God he might include.
Plainly—that is, plainly to the Christian—if the scientific man or the
philosopher does not include in his view of the world what the Christian
knows and sees, he is the loser. His picture is not all it might be. But
the same, _mutatis mutandis_, is true of the Christian. For all is God's
and of God. And if we never before discovered this, we see it when we
discover the point where science and religion meet, where the scientific
knowledge of the world passes into the sacramental, and the scientific
knowledge of man, as part of the world, passes into the incarnational;
each to be crowned there, each to be interpreted and fulfilled.
To this discovery there is only one theoretic obstacle which is
insuperable. It is the acceptance of mechanism as a root-principle in
either science or religion. I say nothing of philosophy, because there
is now-a-days no mechanistic philosophy (that is, no materialistic
philosophy) that need be feared. But in science and in religion
mechanism is still a danger, and the acceptance of it as the fundamental
principle of working and construction in a world-picture is an obstacle
that cannot be passed. There is nothing to be done except to overturn
it.
In regard to science much (as we have seen) has already been done; more
is being done. How is it in regard to religion? What about mechanism
there?
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