"WHY WE ARE ALIVE?"

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 140, 11 June 1909, Page 2

"WHY WE ARE ALIVE?"

SIR OLIVER LODGE ON PROBLEMS OF EXISTENCE. Speaking at St. John the Evangelist's Church, Westminster, on "Life and Its Meaning," Sir Oliver Lodge

said that- the question sometimes raised: "Why are we alive?" could not be answered, but they were gradually realising that life had a meaning greater than what had been conceived in any previous age.

In the lowness of their ancestry he discerned a message of hope. But there was the Fall, and the Fall was a consequence of the rise in the scale of existence, just as to fall off a scaffold one had first to go up it. The race rose out of a state of innocence, a state in which the animals were. Acts which were sinful to human beings were not sinful to them. The animals did not know good and evil, or, at any rate, only the higher animals, partly by reason of their association with humanity, but those were the exceptions. The knowledge of good and evil, and power of choice, were distinguishing human attributes. They could not have conscience and free will without the power to go wrong, and the power to go wrong ! practically meant going wrong, and j that was the Fall. The potentiality i was the rise, the actuality v«.;.-, tha , Fall. i Why should the human nee h:\vo j been permitted to go wrong P Be- i cause they were men and not mach- - ines, because their responsibility I must be a real responsibility. "Wei are fragments, chips of Divinity," j said the speaker, "in so far as we: have this power of really choosing! one thing or the other. We are not \ distinct, separate, something outside ' the universe, but we are a part of ■ the universe, a part of the Godhead, though how insignificant a part!" Continuing, he said that evil was a blight upon the best. In all cases ; evil was a relative term. A disease | was merely a parasitic organism out i of place—where it was not wanted. There were no weeds in botany, but

in gardening, and, given bad: surroundings, they would grow. It was said he had asserted sin was rion-exis-tant. He had never said that. ;It was necessary, to discriminate; between evil' and sin. Sin meantthe choosing of;evil, .rratiher than -i goody -by a i creature, s Its'irieant seeing the better and choosing the worst. Pain _ had not been wholly an evil, but it was a necessity in the stage when the race began to have the power of motion.