RELIGION AND SCIENCE.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIIC, Issue 14329, 20 October 1910, Page 2

RELIGION AND SCIENCE.

ARCHBISHOP OF YORK ON A TRUCE OF GOD. THE GREAT MYSTERY. The relations between Religion and Science formed the subject of a sermon preached by the Archbishop of York bo to ro the members ot tlie British Association in the l'arish Church at Sheffield last month.

Taking for his text ■• Wisdoni in all entering into holy souls, making them, friends of God," Dr Cosmo Lang said that the middle of the mneteentii century was marked by the 'constant cutlision of scientists and theologians, and a warfare of words between scientists who had a taste for literature and theologians who had a, vigilant but suspicious interest in science. But or late years there had been a striking change. The best men on cither side were conscious xhat there uas a call for truce, a truce of God, a time to adjust misunderstandings, to retreat from rash and hasty claims, to think out their own positions more e.eariy, and to understand the positions of those who seemed to differ from them with greater sympathy. On the one hand. Science seemed to have become aware of its necessary limitations. It was more conscious than it had been of the gaps still unbridged, of the mysteries stil! unexplained. It had come to a stage in wh'cii it was rather occupied, with patience and faith, in testing its own hypotheses than in proclaiming that they gave a iull and tinal explanation "of man and things. Science wa s more impressed by the consciousness of the mystery which still enfolded the ultimate causes and constituents of the materia! world and the oricin of life, and with this sen.-.- of inysiery there always came the kindred sense of reverence and of worship. Materialism 01i Naturalism as a self-sufficing theory of the universe, might surely now !>'•• described as discredited by ' the besi: : scientific minds. A true Agnosticism, J which humbly recognised the limits >f ; scientific had taken the i place ot that false Agnosticism wim.ii ; declared dogmatically that bevnud ■ those limits there wus nothing that I could ho known.

On th<. other hand, Religion had equaliy <uuio tu ruooguise its own limitations. Interpreted by its hast minds, :i saw that its claim to find in a personal God the ultimate author and worker of all things gave it no rigiit to docde, a priori, the methods '-■: His working in the world. Above id., it had learned to reconsider Its own conception of God, and to look wpnn Him not as standing apart from iiiituiv ami asserting His power by 00 .-.•l-i-n-,! arbitrary Interferente with the laws fie had ordained, but as dwelling wit.nu it revealing Himself through it, over all, yet „, j,|| am } through a'll working out His will. Religion and iheo.ogy pr;.elaimed alike that Ho and no mere blind energy, was tho AVorker, but ,t was for science to give tidings of the way in which He worked.

The cauoe of Ihu old conflict was the mistaken diisir.i for uniformity. The way of e.sea;*i was tins newer friends!: p. this desire for ir.i'y. But a new danger would arise if we ten' to rest satisfied with that —namely, the danger of acquiescing in a permanent division of faith and knowledge, ,f leaving faith to the emotions purl restriit'ng knowledge to science, of allowing each to go its own way in peace, hut without intercourse, of turning respect for difference of sphere into a voluntary separation instead of into a true friendship.