“Looking to the East.”

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIV, Issue 26, 29 June 1910, Page 63

“Looking to the East.”

ADDRESS BY MR JOSEPH MeCABEMr Joseph McCabe, one of the leaders of the Rationalist movement in Great (Britain, arrived by the s.s. Wimmera, from Sydney on Sunday, and was met by a number of those interested in the movement in Auckland. In the evening he delivered an address in the Unitarian Church, the building being altogether too small to accommodate the hundreds desirous of hearing him. Mr McCabe is a speaker of great force and power, a deep and accurate student and thinker, and a man of strong and striking personality. His address was an entirely extempore one, based upon a passage in one of the readings during the earlier portion of the service. This was not, he said, the first time that he had found himself beneath a Unitarian roof, and he had always found that those gathered there were “looking to the East,” searching, in the light of progressive thought and culture, for the true and the beautiful. It had been said that science was indifferent to the claims of the heart, but this was entirely erroneous, the scientist and the artist walked hand in hand, and heart and mind were indissolubly associated. The theory has been expounded, by members of the clerical body among others, that many thinking men and women look more for their theology to the poets than to the theologians, and in discussing this phase ot the science and art controversy, Mr MeOabe briefly epitomised the teachings of some of the greatest poets of the Christian era, beginning with Dante, whose imperishable trilogy, though it may be the cathedral of mediaeval belief, shone at the windows with the white light of humanism, His purgatory, so far from following the theological formulae of li'.s day, was a place • Where the soul voluntarily isolated itself till purged of the sins committed during mortal life, and whose punishment scale was founded upon'the* standards, of pagan Aristatie and pagan'Plato. Shakespeare came at that springtide of life when the discoveries of Galileo had shattered the belief in a •platforrfi of a world, a few thousand miles of flat land and water, enclosed in a crystal firmament, in which tiny stars were stuck just as one strung them on the ceiling at Christmastide, and upon which the angels walked and watched the doings of humanity. Galileo flung the heavens backward and revealed an infinity of space, and in the new' thought born of his discoveries Shakespeare’s genius came into being. There was much debate upon Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, but whatever they might have been, the growth of his thought could be followed, from the reckless abandon of his earlier plays, such as “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” to the cultivated beauty of ‘‘The Tempest,” in which, leaving altogether his. earlier channel of thought, he drew the character of true and perfect woman hood. In his later years his one great aim was to make his characters beautiful and attractive, and a spur to humanity to rise to true nobility. After him came a little ice age of Puritanism, and with that age one of the greatest poets of all time. Milton. whose grand organ notes would reverberate when his theology was wholly forgotten. But, though living in so ice-bound an age, Milton refused to accept the belief that Satan was an arch fiend seeking to destroy humanity. The psychology of Goethe’s teaching was dealt with in masterly fashion, Mr McCabe showing how. in the second book of Faust, the German philosopher poet, preached a high idealism and a great ethical message. Ilis evolution from the pessimism of the twenties to the gradual realisation tiiat true happiness lay in the renunciation of the ego, and in working for the good of his fellow men, was skilfully traced, Mr McCabe remarking that Goethe spent- a lifetime of suffering and mental anguish only to realise this truth as a blind old man of sixty. William Watson, D’Annunzio, and Maeterlinck were briefly touched upon, and theaddress concluded with a reference to the power of man to create a greater world for himself by character and to the gospel t»f “Do good, for good is good to do." To-night Mr McCabe lectures on “The Evolution of Man" in the Choral Hall, while to-morrow and Wednesday he speaks in the Federal Hall.