SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19946, 13 November 1926, Page 19

SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

PERPLEXING QUESTIONS. BISHOP ADVOCATES FRANK ATTITUDE. tFnou Ouh Own Coebespondent.) LONDON, October 8. The Archbishop of York (Dr Cosmo Gordon in the course of an address bsiora the Church Congress at Southport, advocated a bold and frank attitude towards science. The Church had sometimes looked with indifference, if not suspicion, he said, upon the free movement of the spirit of man in science, literature, art, and politics. The result of this division was, on the one hand, that the Church was, so to say, turned in upon itself. It lost touch with the great currents of human thought and effort, its worship became dull and conventional, its teaching became hard and dogmatic its internal controversies became bitter. Authority stiffened and stifled whsn the breath of liberty no longer moved around it On the other hand, the free spirit of man, finding itself strange and unwelcome in the Church, tended to break away, to become arbitrary and wilful, to lose reverence, and self-control. Liberty, for lack of the restraining hand of some sympathetic authority drifted into licence. First let them consider the new movemsnt in the world of science which was feeling after a epiritual interpretation of the universe. For long years science was so inevitably occupied and excited by its amazing conquests of the power of Naturs that it had not time or care to look beyond. But now it was beginning to ask questions about fundamental pre-suppositions hitherto taken for granted about the meaning of the universe as a whole. It was beginning to feel the need of a philosophy. NEW REVELATIONS OF THE DIVINE. The Church must indeed leave science to take its own way to find its own road to ultimate truth. Now its members would jig to accept whatever truths ill region of natural science or historical criticism seemed to be really established and to welcome them as new relations of the Divine working. How was the Church to face the young man and woman who asked frank and perplexing questions about religion? They belonged to a post-war generation. They were in no mood to listen to the voice of authority. They were thinking for themselves, and they would accept no answer® which did not express or appeal to real and vital experience. He advocated gatherings quite informal and unconventional where these frank questions were encouraged and answers equally frank given.