The Churches Of The Future.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19243, 3 December 1930, Page 8

The Churches Of The Future.

QONFUCIUS, Buddha and Mahomet, as well as Christ, are among the figures carved in stone above the main doorway of the new Riverside Baptist Church, New York, the largest Nonconformist Church in the world, on which untold millions of dollars have been lavished. The new age of religious toleration is strikingly symbolised in the choice of immortals thus commemorated in statues, for great scientists and philosophers (many of them condeiYined as heretics in their day) take rank with saints, angels and religious leaders. Old-fashioned Fundamentalists are aghast to find Charles Darwin, their pet aversion, given a place of honour, and the presence of Einstein has also jarred them. Einstein, incidentally, is the only living man represented, and I hear that his choice was urged

on the Church by leading scientists of America and Europe, who declared he was the greatest living man. Other scientists carved over the door are Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Dalton, Faraday, Pasteur and Lister. The philosophers similarly honoured include several who, in their day, were attacked as atheists, the list including Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Epicurus, Aristotle, Seneca, Epictetus, Plotinus, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and ending with Emerson, the only American among these immortals, and himself the victim of a heresy hunt. Moses and Buddha. In the ranks of religious leaders Moses stands shoulder to shoulder with Confucius, whilst after Buddha and Mahomet follow Origen, Saint Francis of Assissi, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Bunyan and Milton. William Carey, the pioneer missionary, and David Livingstone are the only figures of modern times in this group. Christ is the central figure of the whole design, about whom all the rest are ranged.