The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 by Frederick Temple
page 41 of 147 (27%)
page 41 of 147 (27%)
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truth that the holiness, the justice, the goodness, the righteousness,
which the Eternal Moral Law imposes on us as a supreme command, are identical in essential substance in our minds and in His. Indeed, the more we keep before us the true character of that law, the more clearly do we see that the Moral Law is not His command but His nature. He does not make that law. He is that law. Almighty God and the Moral Law are different aspects of what is in itself one and the same. To hold fast to this is the fullest form of Faith. To live by duty is in itself rudimentary religion. To believe that the rule of duty is supreme over all the universe, is the first stage of Faith. To believe in Almighty God is the last and highest. It will be seen at once by those who have followed me that I am in this Lecture only working out to its logical conclusion what was said long ago by Bishop Butler in England and by Kant in Germany. Butler calls the spiritual faculty whose commands to us I have been examining by the name of conscience: Kant calls it the practical reason. But both alike insist on the ultimate basis of morality being found in the voice within the soul and not in the phenomena observed by the senses. Science by searching cannot find out God. To reduce all the phenomena of the universe to order will not, even if it could ever be completely done, tell us the highest truth that we can attain to concerning spiritual things. Science may examine all the phases through which religions have passed and treating human beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can give us a history of religion or of religions. But there is something underlying them all which it cannot treat, and which perpetually evades all attempts to bring it under physical laws. For just as all attempts to explain away our conviction of our own personal identity have |
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