EASTER SERMONS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21647, 18 May 1932, Page 20

EASTER SERMONS

IN LONDON CATHEDRALS FAITH LEADS TO KNOWLEDGE (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, March 29. The Dean of St. Paul’s (Dr Inge) preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday from the text, “ Thomas, because thou hast seen Me thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed” (John xx. 29). He said he particularly wished them to notice the way in which St. John continually passed backwards and forwards between the universal and the particular. This was St. John’s method of reconciling faith and knowledge and making them help instead of hindering each other. For faith apart from knowledge lost itself in particular events; it degraded religion into a mere Wonder-story; and knowledge, apart from faith, lost itself in general truth; it transformed religion into a theory of the universe. St. John’s Gospel, humanly speaking, saved Christianity ns a religion by blending faith and knowledge, combining the universal and the particular, passing continually backwards and forwards, idealising the real and realising the ideal. This was the religions l view of life. Faith was not based on sight, as St, Thomas thought; sight was the consummation of faith, not its beginning. Nor was faith based on pure thought and rapt meditation, as others had supposed. No. The life of the man was the vision of God. Faith led to knowledge, and knowledge again was the basis of a higher faith. THE RESURRECTION BODY. At Westminster Abbey the Dean of Manchester (Dr Foxley Norris) preached from the text, “ I shall not die, but live ” (Psalm cxviii. 17). ,He said that the Creed,_ formed, as they believed, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, expressed the full faith as understood by the Church. As they said, “ I shall riot die, but live,” they meant, not dim permanence to a disembodied soul, but the life of body, soul, and spirit realised as Christ taught it would be. Body and soul alike belonged to the whole man. These were great mysteries, and they should be careful not to define and dogmatise too much. Who knew, even now. what the body was? ((.’he scientific account of it 100 years ago was very different from the scientific account of it to-day. If men knew so little about their own material body, was it likely that they could understand much of the resurrection body in which they believed? What they did know was that by the eyes of men the resurrection body of the Son of Man was seen, that He rose from the dead with His body, and that in some way Rg yet beyond man’s comprehension they would rise again. They might well leave it there. “Wo shall not die, but Wve,” was the Christian hope. THE ONLY HOPE. The Bishop of London (Dr WinningtonIngram) preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday evening from the text “ But God raised Him from the dead ’ (Acte xiii, 30). There had been nothing very encouraging about the last 18 years in human history, he said. We professed to believe that “ God has made of one blood every nation of the earth,” and that we were all “one in Christ Jesus”; but one would not think so from the hatred and suspicion still current in the world, and though we have been driven (rightly, in his opinion) in self-defence to erect some tariffs, that did not prevent the establishment of tanu walls all over the world being the most senseless policy ever invented for its own ruin by the humau race as a whole. Was it possible to imagine a more foolish policy to pursue? Every economist told we that the world would never prosper again, or unemployment vanish, unless all the nations of the world traded freely with one another and unless the locked-up resources of gold and food were liberated for the use of the whole world. TheVe could scarcely be a more bitter satire than the state of the world to-day upon the last words of tho Apostle of Love:—“Little children, love one another.” But into this black night entered God at last; God had a way of biding His time. With a touch, but with a touch which echoed through the universe and far away beyond the twinkling stare — “ God raised Him from the dead.” Herod, Pilate, Judas, Caiaphas were hurled into the nothingness from which they came. But it was not the victory over these miserable men that mattered for a moment, but the glorious attestation by God Himself of every word that Jesus Christ had spoken on earth. Because "God raised Him from the dead” Egster Day was the day that changed the world. If God raised Christ from the dead, then the human race had a future; the earth might be burnt to ashes or frozen to death —it would make no difference; “it is the men, not the walls, that make the city.' It wag the unseen world which was the real world. Our friends were not the handfuls of ashes that they seemed, but the redeemed and purified spirits who had passed on to a fuller and more radiant life. . ... And so with the passing moral pessimism of the day. We need not really be afraid of a few popular critics who scoffed at Christian morality to-day. If God raised Jesus from the dead, then the Beautitudes still stood as the moral standard of the world for ever. Was there any hope on Easter Day of real peace in the world? He could only answer, “Easter Day is the only hope.” It might be that we were going to be taught the right Jesson by the sheer failure of every other way. Perhaps the hopelessness «of every other method might teach the stubborn human race that, as Love won, after all, on Easter Day. so Love alone could raise the world to prosperity and happiness once again. FALSE GUIDES. Cardinal Bourne, preaching at Westminster Cathedral, said that the whole of civilisation was undergoing transformation, and our own country was inevitably affected thereby. No one really knew what would be the ultimate result of the different measures which had been adopted to meet the grave financial situation suddenly revealed to our astonished people eight months ago. Ever since the great religious upheaval of the sixteenth century civilisation had been drifting farther and farther away from the old landmarks of definite religious faith, and of generally accepted moral principle. Men had raised up, apart from God and His Christ, a monster of which they had lost control, whose actions they could neither understand nor foresee. Throughout they saw impotence of leadership, uncertainty of action, evasion of true issues as a consequence not of deliberate action, but of the drifting of civilisation from all sure moorings. The remedies suggested in the press, in books, and in broadcast addresses, were - often far worse than the ills they were intended to alleviate. The writer or the speaker was frequently a man who did not profess to accept the validity of the moral law written by the Creator in the consciences of His creatures. He disregarded or derided it. The revelation of God, the teaching of Jesus Christ, tho testimony of Christianity were meaningless to him. In the light of his own unaided and obscured vision he came forward with abounding self-confidence to set right a suffering world. Clearly there was no salvation to be found in such guides. Thus men drifted along, and too many became accustomed to seek relief in doctrines and in practices which directly violated the natural law and the long, unchanging traditions of the Christian Church. They had therefore constantly to keep alive the solid, immutable fact flint.in Jesus Christ were nil things made, and that without Him nothing could be made or remade. To Him and to none other, to His teaching, and to no other doctrines must they look for that refashioning, restoration, and healing of tho world, the need of which was manifest to every thinking man.