Editorial January 26, 1907 Issue

THE DEMAND FOR A SCIENTIFIC RELIGION

John B. Willis

In an article appearing in the current Homiletic Monthly, a distinguished British scientist refers to a forthcoming "age of religion ... when, divorced from superstition and allied with progressive knowledge, it will no longer remain for the solace of the few but will be recognized as a genuine power by the many, and become a vivifying influence among the masses of humanity."

Assuming that the phrase "progressive knowledge" stands for the outcome of the application of the scientific spirit to religious inquiry, we have in the above quotation a statement that but repeats that essential teaching of Christian Science which forty years ago was prefaced by Mrs. Eddy with the awakening words, "The time for thinkers has come. Truth, independent of doctrines and time-honored systems, knocks at the portal of humanity" (Science and Health, Pref. p. vii.).

Gradually, but surely, the world is coming to see that individual and organized religious progress is to be realized only as we escape from superstition and are loyal to the requirements of scientific demonstration as a test of truth, and when we remember to what extent considerations for tradition and for personality—the mesmeric influences of venerated beliefs and sectarian shibboleths—have shaped the course of religious history; when we recall what heresies and horrors have grown out of human pride and lust for power; when all the foolish and frightful apparitions of the Christian past array themselves before our thought, then we begin to understand what it would mean to have a church, a Christian life, and an individual conviction which is undistorted by superstition and which is established by scientific demonstration, and how great will be the revolution in thought which effects this end.

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