PREACHING before a famous association of scientists, a distinguished English prelate has recently remarked upon the stupidity of "the suggestion that there must be a barrier between knowledge and belief"! The exclamation is ours, and we use it because of the significant intimation, involved in the word "barrier," that while knowledge and belief may and should amicably dwell together, they pertain to two separate and distinct departments of thought.
In view of the long-time war of words waged between them,this thought of possible fraternity between science and religion may be classed as "advanced." Nevertheless, the Christian Scientist sees clearly that such a view is altogether opposed to spiritual progress, and that so long as it remains it will not only explain but perpetuate the startling and,to Christian thought, humiliating contrast between the achievements of physical science and those of Christian endeavor.
The indifference of the great majority of physical scientists to Christian teaching and their irresponsiveness to religious appeal, is surely traceable to the fact that in their estimate religionists are unscientific;that they are seeking to buttress creedal contentions,rather than to find the truth. Physical scientists have always stood for the advance of certitude, of demonstrable knowledge, while for the most part religionists have stood for the maintenance of traditional beliefs. There has been a tacit clerical (and consequently general) consent to the relative unknowability of spiritual truths as compared with physical phenomena, and this attitude is immediately related to the fact that, while the physical senses have been cultivated, used, and regarded as capable of supplying a reliable basis of philosophical determination, the spiritual senses have been thought of as having to do simply with a life to come. Spiritual faculties have consequently been ignored and thus left latent and undeveloped.
