EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume LI, Issue 4444, 26 April 1930, Page 1

EVOLUTION AND IMMORTALITY.

The discovery of sub-human fossil remains near Pekin provided the text for a sermon by Bishop Barnes in Manchester Cathedral in which he discussed the bearing upon belief in immortality of “our growing certainty as to man’s animal origin.’’ Bishop Barnes said he was asked whether Pekin Mian had an immortal soul. “At what stage of mir evolution did the soul within us become worthy of eternal life i? Alternatively, must we not allow that we, 100, must perish absolutely at death, as do the animals from which we have sprung? Many arguments for the immortality of the sold —some good, some bad —have been put forward. But I personally am convinced that the ground of u reasonable belief in personal iramortality is to be found in the fact that men are loyal to goodness and truth. Because wo cannot admit that the wages of goodness are dust and nothing more, we are forced to claim that eternal life will be the reward of righteousness Thus 1 say that when, in the ape growing to the stature of man, there lust appeared a faint understanding of the moral law, at that moment a something worthy of eternal life was born in him. Then the process of soul-making began. The animal began to put on humanity. Personality, as we know it, is a most mysterious tiling; blit almost certainly it is on earth as imperfect as it is mysterious. As we see it, it is linked to a particular development of brain and nervous system so that we cannot imagine the exisIcnce of mind apart from such development. Yet, assuredly, mind is no product of matter. The higher may only he able to manifest itself through the lower, Imt it is not derived from it. Similarly, I would urge that llio distinctive personality of man is not rightly to be thought of as derived into to from the mind of the ape. There appeared, when the human soul began, a new quality of being witnessed to by man’s moral consciousness. That quality is, L believe, fundamentally independent of the organised matter needed for its manifestation. So, though man be one of a group of mammals more or less closely akiu to himself, we need not hesitate to say that he is decisively separated from all other annuals, nor need we hesitate to claim that in him is a soul which, if true to its own nature, shall enjoy eternal life.”