"BEATIFIC VISION A FACT”

Evening Star, Issue 21722, 17 May 1934, Page 1

"BEATIFIC VISION A FACT”

' DEAN INGE AKB SCIENTISTS ■1 ' \ ’ ■ Bt-an .-luge, 'in a paper coutly before the British Institute of Philosophy at University College, Gower street, on “ Science, Philosophy, and Religion,” declared; “ The beatific vision can be seen by few and described by none. Nevertheless, it is a fact.” Sir .Tames Jeans, continued Dean Inge, thought that the sun might continue to shine for some fifteen billion years, and ’ that ; the _ upon earth might drag out a chilly existence for a Mllion years or so. It was, however, possible that the sun might suddenly blaze ont or shrink, and in either case the race would be at once extinguished. “ For most of us,” Dean Inge added, “ the prospect that tiny whole of history will one day be as it had never been—that nowhere in the vast universe will there be life or intelligence or consciousness—is rather chilling. “ If, on the other hand, it is the lot of all that is born into the world to fulfil in some measure a finite and temporal purpose'in the mind of God, and then to take its place in the eternal order, there is nothing fatal in the discovery that the life of stars and planets, like the life of individuals, has its destined term.” If life and soul and spirit were the result of a strange and unlikely accident in one corner of the universe, a mere evanescent flicker which would soon disappear and leave no trace behind, a local symptom of the ‘disease of dissolution, it hardly seemed as if God could he what they had supposed Him to be. He did not say that it destroyed his philosophy, but it did to some extent chill his faith. His way of escape was to remember that we did, as a matter of fact, frequently ascend in heart and mind above the world of time, space, history, and even personality. That,was what ho mea,ut by reality as a kingdom of absolute or intrinsic values. “I know well that in all that we try to say of ‘ heaven ’ we use grotesquely inadequate and crudely pictorial language. It is a pity, because astronomy destroys our pictures. But it dees not spoil what we mean ,by them. In popular teaching we must not disdain picture book theology.