Timely Topics

Northern Advocate, 10 December 1937, Page 4

Timely Topics

SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

‘‘What does science contribute to religion?” asked Professor Charles E. Raven in an 'address in Liverpool Cathedral. “If the churches will take the findings of science seriously, a great and valuable development and restatement of their faith will en-

sue. They will recover thi’ee essentially Christian convictions that traditional religion is apt to ignore. First, they will gain a sense of the overwhelming majesty of the Creation. and, therefore, of God, and so a sense of man's ignorance and creaturehood. Secondly, a recognition of the place of suffering and death in the ordering of the world: ‘There is no resurrection without a crvtc.lfr.cion, and every crucifixion is a potential resurrection.’ Thirdly will come an awareness of the reality and activity of the Spirit of God, an experience of co-operation and communion with that Spirit in the fellowship of human society 'and a power to welcome and affirm as of God every effort for the enrichment and enlargement of life,”

H V: 55! K MAKING KAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES!

“Signor Feriero, the famous Italian historian of the Roman Empire," writes Mr J. A. Spender, in the “Yorkshire Observer,” “thinks that the rearmament of Great Britain has led certain persons to the conclusion that they must be up and doing while the going is good and before Britain i s strong enough to make their operations too dangerous. Hence Signor Mussolini's activities in. Spain and the Japanese attack on China in the Far East. Mussolini, according to this version, plunges into Spain because he sees British naval power rising to a point which would make competition with it hopeless in the Mediterranean unless he can rely on an Italianised Spain, Japan secs naval bases being prepared in the Pacific,, the naval strength both of Britain and the United States mounting up, the military and air-power of Soviet Russia becoming more and more dangerous. She concludes that she must act now or never. On this theory Spain and China are victims of a last effort by Italy and Japan respectively to get their way before circumstances become too strong for them. Possibly it was some such thought which Jed Mr Eden, on behalf of the British Government, to reveal the scale of British preparations in his speech at Geneva. This may lead certain ambitious people to consider whether, even now, the balance of power is what they assumed it to be when they set out on their adventures. It is like one of those road-signals marking a dangerous cross-road ahead."