MORALITY.

Press, Volume L, Issue 149814, 30 May 1914, Page 16

MORALITY.

ITS SCIENTIFIC BASIS,

At the Unitarian Church, Wellington, on Sunday, the Roy. J. H. G. Chappie (of Timaru), speaking at tho morning service ou the subject, *'Tho Scientific Basis of Morality," said at tho present time, with so much Bible-in-Schools controversy, there was much need to direct people's attention to the fact that morality had a scientific base quit© apart and independent of theology. Large numbers of well-meaning people imagine that apart from theological threats and sanctions ethics can have no foundations! but thero is an overincreasing section of modernists who know otherwise and who also clearly see that there is a scientific base for morality, and that tho moral world is in lino with the perfect order of Nature and thoroughly in harmony with an orderly cosmos. More than ever it is becomng clear to thinking people that the term "God" is but the name for the "invisible right within." The word "morality" involves all social* relationships. The only religion that can survive tho shock of things must be intensely ethical, and the unwritten creed if tho future will inolude the abolition of poverty, the lifting up of tho industrial classes to the full dignity of free men, giving them the opportunity to live complete, free, true, and noble lives, and all this quite apart from superstition or theology. To-day we are not so concerned with reverence and bomago to divine persons as with reverence to divTno principles. Roigion is ceasing to be a set of feelings ir beliefs, but rather a set of social practices. To do good and be good as the result of heavenly coercion is not ethical conduct at all. Tho person who is good from such promptings is merely immoral. From a scientific. point we find tho universe infinitely truthful. So in the ethical world things should swing true,' and as tho moral naturo of man is now rapidly unfolding, in the near future there will be no room for unothical behaviour. Tho grand consummation of tho religion that is being evolved will bo found in ethical doctrines purely. Creeds and systems will all go, but this remains, unshaken. The coming Church will evolv© itself into a place where the mind will bo kept cleansed with ethical and rational thought, where no ono is bound to precedent and tradition; whero no God extraneous to tho universe will be worshipped and implored, hut _tho God within—the invisible right—will be understood in the ethical sense.