REASON AND RELIGION.

At St. Paul's Church on Sunday morning the Rev. J. W. Owen preached on the above subject, taking for his text " Make proof of all things: that which is excellent hold fast." He said:—
In "Butler's Analogy" it is very truly and grandly said that "reason is indeed the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning anything, even revelation itself." The sterling Englishman who wrote that book, strong in the sense of doing his duty, had no dread of being called a rationalist; and, in a sober truth, every man ought to be very much ashamed of being anything eke. The Apostle Paul by the advice embodied in our text equally asserts the away of right reason, for it would be absurd to counsel men to make proof of various things and to act on the result of such judgment were they incapable of effectually performing the task.Far beyond Bishop Butler, and far beyond the Apostle Paul, we find that the Divine Promulgator of Christianity—whom we reverence as our lawgiver and king—speaks of men as possessing such discriminating power, and in the tones of a grieved and astonished indignation rebukes them for neglecting to use it: " Why do not ye of yourselves," He demands, "judge that which is right?" And conscience—that mysterious inward thought reader—that knowledge we have with ourselves of being dependant on and responsible to a Power beyond ourselves—impressively reminds us of the presence within us of this reasoning faculty, for otherwise its claims for due exercise would not make themselves felt. To train and strengthen this faculty of reason so that it may yield fruit of increase, and to bring it to bear upon religion so that religion, seeing it is concerned with the most important and lasting issues of life, should interpenetrate all that man does, is then it would seem a chief end of any system of education. If only we do really bring reason to bear upon the subject of man's mental and moral training the commonsense of experience must force us to own that apart from religions influences—I am not now affirming anything about the particular nature of such religious influences, but simply affirming the principle in its broadest form—apart from religious influences no system of education is worthy of its name. . . . .
After calm and dispassionate review of human history we are forced to arrive at one of two conclusions: either the religious instinct is by the force of nature indissolubly connected with man's moral constitution, or the world of man has always been, and still—for the more part—is hopelessly insane. For it is quite beyond contradiction that at far as human thought can penetrate backward, as far as toe records of historic annals still unfold their marvellous pages, as far as even monumental evidence rears its time-defying and ofttimes indecipherable message, everything enforces the existence of religion in some shape or other in the past—and it is matter of common fame that throughout the world of to-day the man utterly destitute of religion is to the man who claims to possess a religion of some more or less definite nature, as one to a million. So that it is a mere fact of experience that the inhabitants of the world have ever been, and still are, as regards the vast majority of them under the enslaving grasp of strong delusion, or else this prevalence of the religious instinct among them is proof that our race is so constituted that belief in a Power above us (to whom we are in some sense responsible) is designedly part and parcel of our being—part and parcel of a moral constitution, whence due exercise of the reasoning faculties can evolve convictions of recognised truth, which abuse of those faculties can degrade into a source of misleading and noxious superstitions; or once again, and this alas is the commonest outcome, which neglect of such faculties can cause to become so dormant that it seems dead, and it really, to all practical purposes, inoperative. But if reason further stretches on its gaze beyond this portion of human nature into other actualities of that nature, and traces on the onward course of civilisation ; if it marks the savage turning shepherd, and the shepherd community settling in the camp and village, and the village growing to the city, and cities advancing to become the pulsing, throbbing centres of national life, and the world, as a whole, with whatever still hideous taints remaining, becoming more and more a home of settled order, fixed law, and crescent culture —reason most either vacate its seat or conclude that such are not the resultant acts of a generally mad people, and therefore that the religious instinct which has so largely obtained among such people is based, after all, upon some real need in their existence, and consequently upon fact as it is; and furthermore reason is led to the conclusion that, seeing our race has ever needed and used this instinct to enable it to do what it undoubtedly has done, the instinct must still be necessary to the race to enable it to advance to what it yet may become. Whereupon any really rational enquirer finds be cannot afford to put religion aside as unimportant, but must proceed to investigate religious phenomena as factors of the world's progress and to investigate where there is material for investigation, namely, in written records. Orally transmitted religions admit of but very little investigation, from the conflicting nature of evidence about them, but even they serve as a sort of collateral proof of the continuous and general existence of the religious instinct among all the various families of the earth. Taking in hand, however, the more reliable material of written record the enquirer discovers that there have been (ah, scathing satire on foolish man's lust for separatism !) but eight religions founded on certain sacred books, upon writings which have been regarded by those accepting them as more or less inspired—as claiming more or less to unveil the mind of the Maker to the mind of the creature. From these eight sources the whole earth has been almost universally overspread ; and from them spring nearly all the incredible number of today's religious systems. Whence those eight sprang man's reason cannot positively say. But reason points to a certain instinct or sense implanted in man's constitution as the organ or faculty whereby these flowed into man's being from their ultimate source, and so it is we come to recognise in the ancient world's lost religions man's earliest and crudest surmises as to the issues of existence, and in the eight book-founded religions historical man's nearer approach to the truth. ...
Advisedly we employ the term "progressive unfolding," and we repudiate, with the scorn an unjust accusation deserves, the taunt so often levelled at Christian theology that it makes no advance, that it is a cut and dried system which learns nothing and forgets nothing. This is to say the very worst that can be said of our religion—it is to affirm that Christian theology is a dead thing. Of many so-called systems of divinity the charge is sadly true. But real Christian theology is a growing knowledge of the Living God, and had principle of life in itself, advancing with the ages, bring us forth from its treasures things new and old, and adapting essential and unalterable truth to the shifting necessities of man's ebb and flow advancement until he is landed on that eternal shore whither the surges of God's time-ocean are evermore sweeping him on. Christian fathers and divines used to teach that there was once an universal primeval revelation, and that all subsequent religions were corruptions and distortions of it. except Judaism and Christianity, which formed a sort of re-revelation of the primitive truth ; but religious thought as well as secular thought has moved on since those days (for what else has God preserved His world?), and passed from such a clumsy and indeed irreverent hypothesis as this to a far more scientific and devout level, and, as Max Muller tells us, "though such a theory of a primeval religion revealed direct from God to man, or rather to a crowd of atheists, may to human wisdom have seemed the best solution of all difficulties, a far higher wisdom speaks to us from out the realities of history and teaches as if we will but learn, that 'we have all to seek the Lord, if haply we may feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us.' " It would seem, then, that men in the world have never been, regarded in mass, without religion, and that they have produced the stupendous product of results which present themselves to careful observers, precisely because of this presence— continual presence —of the religious element in their midst; precisely because the sense of the supernatural, as controlling and ordering the natural, has never been altogether wanting ; precisely, because, in other words, rational man has always felt, in more or less distinct measure, that God is, and that he himself can master the mystery of being and of his being's end and aim, only by attaining to knowledge of the Supreme Being, and by yielding obedience to Him. So that the due exercise of right reason leads us to the conclusion that an objection against the recognition of the supernatural as affecting the affairs of men in this life is not after all so much an objection against religion as an objection against the general constitution of nature—to exhaustive knowledge of which general constitution not even the most advanced of scientists ever dreams of making pretension. . . . Suffer me to adapt some pertinent remarks of Butler to the point we are considering. "The presumption of this kind of objection," he writes, " seems almost lost in the folly of it. . . . . Let reason be kept to; and if any part of the Scriptural revelation can be shown to be really contrary to reason, in the name of God let such part of the Scriptural revelation be given up; but let not such poor creatures as we go on objecting against an infinite scheme that we do not see the necessity or usefulness of all its parts, and calls this reasoning." Most unhappily, however, there ever have been men thus lost to self-control, and it would seem that they are in increasing number, and of more serried array than they ever were before. This is perhaps only seeming. I doubt if there really are a larger host of avowed and determined opponents of religion in the world now than at any previous time; but easier means of intercourse, of intercommunion, and of exchange of intelligence, makes us more readily aware of their existence.
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And that we know of the existence of this organised (aye, and well and carefully organised) conspiracy actively at work in the world to deprive the world, as far as it can, of that religious element in its training which reason and experience show has enabled the world to do the wonders it has done, should be additional reason for vigilance. He is an unwise man who is careless about the merely suspected movements of a known foe, but he is a downright fool who shuts his eyes in silly security to dangers which he has but to look around him to see. It behoves us as rational Christians to know and perceive; we have no license to be careless. You, in this congregation at least, have been warned again and again that the great conflict now being waged in the world—a conflict beside the issues of which all other issues are dwarfed into absolute nothingness—is whether the supernatural, that is to say God, shall be accorded any recognition in the affairs of men. . . . .
The strenuous organised determination on the part of certain men to get rid of the supernatural in our own day is the direct outcome of a course of materialistic thought, which is now known as positivism, aptly described by a thoughtful writer as "not so much a philosophy as a method of philosophising—a way of thinking about science, life, and religion." During the past 50 years this school—sprung from the German Hegel and the French Comte, with Strauss and Renan as Biblical adulterators— has attained considerable dominance in intellectual circles ; and, as usual, the rankest and worst parts of the system are those which the generality have most eagerly grasped at. The leading idea of this school is that an unchanging material law governs all things—the world of history as well as the world of matter. We admit the unchanging law; we deny its materiality. And the confident assertion of this idea, as the one explanation of life, proves that its assertors are theorists of a most extreme character, who seek to explain away the existence of the supernatural by the mere imposition of their favourite theory. They are acute to see that the common religious instinct, founded as it is on recognition of the supernatural, is against them—fatal, indeed, to their theory. Consequently they attack and seek to undermine not only Christianity, but even the barest Theism as a philosophical mistake. They do not condescend to submit their assertions to proof, but simply play the dogmatic role they so loudly denounce in others, and insist on an unconditional surrender to their theory, which, as Principal Tulloch graphically said, "denies God and dishonors man, in that it takes away from the former all personality and freedom, from the latter all spirit, all life beyond natural life ; degrading God, in fact, to a blind fate, and man to mere matter." Now it does not require much knowledge of ordinary human nature to see that such a system as this—in that it shelves or seems to shelve the religious difficulty—must present several very tempting features to that hard worked and much vilified class of men whose very business of life is to legislate for the complex material interests of the communities they have to manage. The church and the world have never been able to run smoothly together for long: where both are in earnest it is not possible they can do so; nor is it even desirable that they should, for they are intended to react the one on the other—and yet it is only together that they have the promise of the life that now it as well as that which is to come. Religion has always been more or less of a thorn in the side to the statesman in his official capacity, partly on account of the vices and dissensions of religionists, and partly because where religion is true to its mission it has ever insisted on obedience to God being far above obedience to any merely human enactment. When then a philosophical theory is formulated which offers to free men from all troublesome considerations as to the supernatural, and when such a theory is belauded and patronised by the intellectual and literary classes, and pains are taken to spread it among the people by means of popular lectures and pamphlets, there is nothing to wonder at that a huge temptation presented it self to Governments to seize upon and take advantage of this movement, and, especially in younger countries, have they succumbed to the temptation. At any rate, in these colonies it is at present an accepted State maxim that the State—as State—has nothing to do with religion; and the outcome of such a maxim is that in order to perpetuate its release to merely material action, the State, by no means inconsistently, has determined, as far as it is concerned, that the children of the land shall be reared in a like attitude of unfaith, and it has accordingly banished religion from the State school. There is nothing wonderful about this outcome:—" If men do not think fit to keep God in full knowledge, God gives them over to minds incapable of right thought to do unseemly deeds." It is not wonderful, but it is lamentable to the last degree, and persevered in can only result in the substitution of mere gregariousness for healthy national life, with subsequent relapse into barbarism. Thomas Carlyle, who will hardly be regarded as animated by any intense ecclesiastical bias, says very plainly: " Religion is that which ministers life and warm circulation to the whole body politic, and without it society would become a dead carcass, deserving to be buried." And yet again and again we are told that it is a settled and not to be questioned colonial State axiom that the Government and the public school stand apart from all consideration of religion—God's guidance for the statesman and for the schoolmaster is not to be so much as invoked by them publicly. There are those of us, however, who will not be forbidden to speak, and who will do all we can to prevent the perpetuation of this devastating policy.

 The South Australian Advertiser 30 October 1888,