“WHAT DOES MR GULLIVER MEAE?”

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 434, 4 January 1890, Page 6

“WHAT DOES MR GULLIVER MEAE?”

Auckland, December 30, Under this title the Rev. E. H. Gulliver delivered an address to a large audience in the Choral Hall last night in reply to a recent letter in the “Herald ” signed “ Bef°gged.” The speaker said that he made it a rule not to reply to newspaper correspondence, but the present case was exceptional as it raised, in temperate terms, a question he felt bound to answer. He was accused of being “vague,” and was asked to give some first principles for the guidance of conduct. Now, vagueness might be a siga of carelessness, or it might be inevitable from the nature of the subject. If he were asked to give the dimensions of the Choral Hall there would be no excuse for vagueness, as a two-foot rule would settle the matter to the fraction of an inch, bub if he were asked the dimensions of a molecule of matter his answer, though the closest approximation to the truth that could be given, would be necessarily “vague.” If it were a question of the duration of the solar heat, or of the past duration of life on this earth, still the answers must be “ vague ” from the very nature of the questions, although given with all the weight of profound scientific research. The simple point at issue was this, “ Is religion such a subject that its treatment involves vagueness, and if so, in what degree?” Now, religion dealt with man’s relation to a higher power, and in following that line of thought they were brought face to face with questions of the most profound and transcendent nature. Whether those questions could be .solved or not, they arose; and they had to be faced. The nature of God, the meaning of creation, the immortality of the soul were such questions. If we took the ideas of man on the nature of God, wo found that in every case the lower the religion the dearer and more definite the God, and that just in proportion as we rose to higher views of God, so did our words about Him become vague. The more lofty the ideal, the more undefinable. If we looked at this earth as the writers of' the Bible regarded iv, Knowing nothing of its try,e shape and movements or its relation to surrounding space—if we limited our knowledge of God to the records of a small bribe of men and were satisfied to ascribe to Him the human passions of vengence, hatred and repentance -our definitions might indeed gain in preci don, but few would maintain them to be more worthy of God or of His works. Bub now let us breathe the air of the nineteenth century, drink in its widespread knowledge of the cosmos, look at the earth as one little sphere among hundreds of millions, sweep through the depths of space where the telescope opens up to us ideas of time and size and space whose vasbness paralyses the imagination, realise that other nations and tribes than the Jewish claim a share in the noble gifts of life, and produced each in turn their God-inspired men —awake to thoughts like these and we feel the old definitions which once sufficed to speak of God fall from us like the discarded shell of the chrysalis when tho butterfly wins the glory of its wings. All the anthropomorphic figments of a rude and ignorant conception of God pass away and we can only bow, silent and overwhelmed, before what meets our gaze, for words of ours can never define, thoughts of ours can never grasp the splendour of the vision. The vagueness of our words was prompted, not by atheistic denial, bub rather by the deepest religion. We wore overwhelmed by the thoughts aroused by our present knowledge—should we rush to the dictionary for Avoids to define the infinite ? . Not so; we would leave that to the presumptuous and the rash, and rather maintain a silence which may be agnostic, but is none the less consistent with the deepest reverence. Again, if we take the question of creation we feel that we cannot dogmatise. We take Genesis and find that the story of creation given there no more helps us to realise it than the Indian story which rests the earth upon a tortoise, but stands tho tortoise on what ? We take the grandest guess of modern times, the nebular hypothesis of La Place; it only removes our difficulty further back, it fails to solve it, and vagueness haunts us still. So also with the immortality of the soul ; I believe there is a truth in the idea, my hopes and the hopes of most men point -that way. I cannot think of such a life as Shelley’s, cut off in that cruel Mediterranean squall, without hoping and trusting that a nature so loveable and powers so divine may in some inconceivable and undefinable way attain to the fruition so sadly missed here ; but on all these questions I admit the charge of vagueness, or in other Ayords I decline to dogmatise about things of which I have, and can have, no sufficient knowledge to justify such dogmatism. I repeat that on these questions I maintain a position of reverent agnosticism. What is agnosticism ? It means not denial, but simply the admission of the limitations of our knowledge in these questions, and who am I, or who is any one of us, except the fool or the child, that we should speak definitely on subjects which the more we study them the more they baffle definition ? On these subjects, then, I neither assert nor deny, but there is another subject mentioned by the “Herald ” correspondent on which 1 am conscious of no need for vagueness—a subject which admits of being dealt with in the same clear way as the statement that two and two are four. I refer now to questions dealing with conduct. My friend asks why (in the absence of dogmatic teaching and its external pains and penalties) should he not do such evil as

it might please him to do ? I will tell him Because the laws of God written on the great Book of Nature effectually forbid it. I say the Book of Nature purposely, though the same laws may be read in the pages of the Bible if we use it with perspicuity. Now what are these laws? They are as undeviating and far-reaching as that of gravity. They are, without any paltering or evasion, instances of the working of what may be truly called natural law in the spiritual world. If we take a glass of water and drop some sulphuric acid into it, heat is at once evolved. If we handle hot iron ive are at once burnt. If we rub a stick of sealing wax it will at once attract a ball of pith. In all these cases there isa clear connection of cause and effect, and there is the same connection of cause and effect with regard to conduct. The evil-doer punishes himself, and tho punishment is far more certain than if he were consigned to tho mediaeval Satan and his myrmidon angels. “ Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” and thus the wrongdoer stamped on his own forehead the brand of Cain. His fearful punishment was inherent in his conduct, and consisted in an inevitable “evolution towards evil." “Each evil act, each thought of wrong, Each word that gives such thought expression itising defiant to the tongue Scourge each alike their own transgression.” They had to choose between a historic basis for religion and a natural basis. In the former case they must remember that no human language or history could withstand the tooth of time, the records became ever more and more inadequate and inaccurate —while religion based on the firm foundation of natural law, on the laws of God written in the open Book of Nature, was subject to no such limitations and hindrances, but was free to rise with the aspirations towards good implanted in the breast of man to ever loftier heights as widening knowledge threw open in ever wider vistas the vision of the universe.