MANNER OF CREATION

Gisborne Times, Volume LXV, Issue 10311, 21 January 1927, Page 6

MANNER OF CREATION

THE ULTIMATE TRUTH. DEAN INGE’S PHILOSOPHY. Dean Inge, giving the second annual Fison lecture at Guy’s Hospital Medical School, took Science and Ultimate Truth as his subject. In lus conclusions Dean Inge said: ‘‘Of the motives of the Creation and the manner of the Creation we know nothing whatever. AVe cannot penetrate the mind of' the 1 Absolute, and I think we must frankly confess that, while the return journey to God, the path of salvation, is known to us, the downward journey, the path of Creation, is unknown to us. “This has even been made a reproach against the school of philosophy 'to which I belong. AVe feel we are "told to account for the world. Well, the world is a solid fact which we have to accept, not to account for. “I do not know the reason why we' should he admitted behind the scenes while our business is on the stage. If I have to picture myself how the world may be related to its Creator, I should say that, though the enormous nature of the Supreme Being is unknown to us, He has revealed Himself under the three attributes of goodness, truth and beauty. “These eternal and intimate values are not in active thoughts. They necessarily produce an eternal world —n sphere of spaceless and timeless existence in which we live, bins is the heaven of the Christian. “There are some, I know, who picture to themselves religion as retreating from one position to another before the victorious advance' of science, and now preparing to die in its last ditch. That- is not at all my opinion. Organised religion is certainly not retreating. But why? I do not think that scientific discoveries have so much to do with it as is often supposed. “I should say that religion has in the past tried to coerce the irreligious by garish promises and terrifying threats—both promises and threats offered in grossly materialistic language. AYhen these promises and threats lost their cogency, religion secularised itself st-ill further, and announced that its object was to promote a comfortable organisation of society. These irreligious appeals have failed, so the irreligious no longer care for t-lie menaces or promises of the Church, and they have no respect for the priest in politics. “But the religious appeal is in no way weakened. Now, as always, the soul of man lives by admiration, hope and love; and that these are fused in homage to the Unseen hut Everpresent Being, the ‘Value of Values,’ as a medical thinker called Him, who exists unchanged behind the flux of phenomena, .and appropriate reaction, worship, is set up, and the inhuman spirit sets forth again ‘on its adventure, brave and new.’ less hampered than formerly by the fragments of obsolete science and philosophy which a new knowledge has helped us to discover.’