RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21829, 16 December 1932, Page 11

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION

CHURCH MOCKERIES SERMON BY DR BARNES. | (From Oob Own Correspondent.) LONDON, October 11. Preaching at Westminster Abbey on Sunday the Bishop of Birmingham (Dr Barnes) denounced “superstitions" religious teaching, which, he declared, was “radically false and fundamentally nonChristian,” and to which science could give no quarter. He had no fear, he said, that either unfettered criticism of Christianity or free scientific inquiry would in the end destroy the fundamentals of Christian belief. “ Our preachers,” he said, " seem to me too busy with attack and complaint to notice the extent to which, Christian leaders are to blame for that contempt which the Christian standpoint often receives. Have the churches consistently maintained the highest moral standards? Can any Christian investigate the records of the Roman Church with regard to marriage and divorce alike in mediaeval and in modern times without a feeling of shame?

“Again, the social evil which has increased most disastrously in our time is gambling. In Ireland the Roman Church is all powerful, and the Dublin hospitals sweepstakes flourish." Down to the middle of the nineteenth century our leading divines were fairly closely in touch with the best philosophical and scientific thought of their time. They believed—as he believed—that the revelation of Christ would grow naturally into our expanding knowledge; but any suggestion that new truth must be repudiated or twisted to accord with old assumptions, would have made them indignant. HONEST THOUGHT. " This _ attitude, moreover, is the only one possible if a quarrel between science and dogma is to be avoided. “If the man of science, by careful observation and honest thought, reaches new conclusions, the theologian must embody such conclusions into his view of God’s nature, or by equally honest thought must show how they are mistaken. A mixture of casuistry and invective is no adequate substitute for the arguments of a- trained mind. “The division of God’s realm into the natural and the spiritual does not satisfy our theological decadents. They crave for magic and pretended miracles of healing, and the conferring of a spiritual character on inanimate objects.” “ Let me illustrate these truths," he said, and reminded his hearers of a clergyman who held an annual service for the blessing of motor cars. The people smiled. “I assert that such a service is a mockery of Christian truth. We can rightly pray that God will bless a person. But to bless a machine confers upon it no spiritual character. The idea belongs to the calm of mere magic. You are just as likely to have an accident in a motor car which has been blessed as in one that has not been the object of such, a ceremony.

DUTY OF CHRISTIAN TEACHERS. “Take another example. We can, as I believe, rightly pray that God will relieve us in sickness or pain. Sometimes, as we think, a favourable answer is given. “But then we have ho reason to assume that God has acted otherwise than by natural channels. Divine answers to prayer do not belong to a fabulous region or the supernatural. "It is the duty of Christian teachers who wish to retain their respect of boys and girls trained in scientific method to assert that no well or shrine can convey a supernatural grace of healing. Wherever we may be we can reach God in prayer. There are no places or things, sacred shrines or saints’ bones, that have supernatural curative properties. “ Similarly, if oil be blessed by a priest or bishop, it does not thereby acquire any healing virtue.” HOLY COMMUNION. In the holy communion we draw near to Christ as we remember in a service intimately connected with His last supper with His disciples, His self-sacrifice for righteousness sake. With such associations the Eucharist was especially sacred, and, the bishop believed, spiritually helpful to all Christians. But when one was told that by some supernatural process, ns the result of the prayer of consecration, the Spirit of Christ became attached to/ or inherent in, the bread and wine, then from the heights of spiritual religion we had descended to magic. As he had heard Dean Ryle say from that pulpit, “There was no magic at our altars.’ 4 God came directly to the devout worshipper; He did not dwell in inanimate objects, and the whole service of holy communion was the channel of His grace. There was no point in keeping the consecrated elements in a church save on the false assumption that they were supernaturally endowed with the presence of Christ.

“ I need not give,” he said, “ further examples of the religious teaching, alike unsound and anti-scientific, which is all too prevalent to-day. I would reiterate that, in so far as it has crept into our own church, it is degenerate Anglicanism. But more especially would I insist that to such superstitions as I have described science can give no quarter. If they become established among us men of science will develop independently a more truly spiritual religion free from such absurdities; and in the end their religion will more faithfully represent the teaching of Christ.”