BISHOP BARNES AND COPERNICUS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19174, 3 December 1927, Page 13

BISHOP BARNES AND COPERNICUS.

(wnrmn job ths fbbss.) (By Rev. Charles Perry, M.A.) Wo have now the text of the letter which Bishop Barnes wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury after the protest against his Sacramental teaching was made in St. Paul's, and several points appear more clearly. There is in it this pregnant sentence: "I have always admitted that neither evolution nor Copernican astronomy was accepted at the Reformation when our Prayer Book and articles received substantially their present form."

Perhaps enough has been said about evolution. The Archbishop of Canterbury has made it plain that the Church of England has no quarrel with that doctrine of modem biology, and if some people imagine that the allegorical interpretation of the Book of Genesis has been trumped up to meet difficulties of to-day it is sufficient to say that &. Thomas, S. Ambrose, and S. Augustine all used it in the early centuries. But of Copernicus we have not heard so much from Bishop Barnes. It was Dean Inge who brought him into notice declaring that we still use the terms and hold the ideas of the old "threedecker" theory of the universe which Copernicus overthrew, still talk of Heaven and earth and under the earth. Nieolai Copernicus was born in 1473, read medicine at the University of Cracow, took his degree at Padua, lectured as professor of mathematics at Rome. He then returned to his native town of Thorn in Prussia, and gave himself up to astronomy, using instruments of his own construction. Ho was ordained a priest, became Canon ot Frauenburg, and was diligent in his religious duties to the end. In him. as for many another of great name, there was no necessary conflict between science and religion. After much observation he found that he could not make his discovered phenomena fit in with the Ptolemaic' system which taught that the world is fixed and flatOno clay he recalled an old fancy thrown out by Pythagoras, that the world moves and is round. His discovered phenomena fitted in with this. His, then, was the only mind to contain tho truth which now belongs to all civilised mankind. The Church, with her usual carefulness, did not welcome his teaching. The story of tho printing of his book by men who had to be armed, of the contumely and anxiety ho had to bear, is all very dramatic, and especially his clasping of the first copy to his breast on his death bed, while he muttered like a good Christian: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace." So everybody believes what he first knew, that tho world is a round ball floating with others, some of them much larger, in an orbit about the sun. and if we were to east religion and poetry and the traditional language of all civilised nations to tho winds and be seriously scientific, we should never say in the morning that the sun rises nor in tho evening that it descends; we, in New Zealand should never say that the people in England are upright but rather that they are upside down. If Bishop Barnes complains that tho Reformers of tho English Church have not accepted the Copernican astronomy, he must mean tneir language does not show it; but then no language in the Church or out of it to-day shows it. It is the" same with physiology. The heart may not bo considered now; the seat of tho affections, but there is no change in tho language to correspond with the change in scientific knowledge and probably never will be. When, then, to come to an example, tho Catholic Church teaches her children that our Lord ascended into Heaven, they need not believe that He left a fixed and flat earth for a remote situation above the spot called Bethany; but, keeping the terminology which the whole world agrees to keep, that He went up in the sight of His Disciples from a certain point on this round and floating ball and disappeared into the unseen, which is everywhere. Heaven and Hell can be realities without geography, and the presence or absence of the highest God can well stand for the imaginative language of the New Testament by which alone the great majority of mankind can conceive them. Copernicus and his system belong to all the world as well as to the Church, but neither has changed its terminology of him.

Another point which Bishop Barnes brings to mind by his complaint that the Church has not accepted the Coperniean astronomy is the comparative insignificance of the size of this earth. When other bodies in the same system are so much larger, was tho earth worthy of so much attention as the Creator has given to it according to Ghristian teaching? Abovo all, is the Incarnation of the Son of God believable? We do not know if Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars arc inhabited at all; but this we do know well, that though bulk and weight may affect and even cheat the imagination, they are not the standards by which we measure the things of the spirit such as love and peace and patience. Pascal, one of the master minds of the world, wrote splendid words when he said: "Should the universe crush him, man would still be more noble than that by which he fell; because ho would know his fate, while the universe would be insensible of its victory." But it is perhaps not necessary in this generation to argue for the value of the soul of man.

It is extremely easy to tako popular religious ideas and popular religious language, and with tho aid of academic implements hold them up to laughter and scorn, as if they were not truo for anybody. But it'is rather a cheap thing to do, and many people are grieved that such able men as Bishop Barnes and Dean Inge should do it so often in sermons and evening papers. Thore is a popular presentation of religious truth and a philosophical. We tl-ink we see both in the New Testament. We believe both will be necessary till the end of time, for that truth would not otherwise be catholic and an inspiring solace to all sorts and conditions of men. We were all children once, and needed the truth of religion then as we suppose our most learned teachers did when they were in their nurseries. Adult age, thank God, is not the whole of life, and many there are who could wish that the childlike spirit which once was theirs might be more easily recaptured. The child and •the peasant, the philosopher and the university don hold tho same faith according to their different capacities. Some hold it by clinging to picturesque terms, others may try to eliminate these, and rest onlv on ideas, but if they hold it' their likeness to one another is profound.