SPIRITUAL LIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 August 1938, Page 7

SPIRITUAL LIFE

RELIGION THE BASIC CONTENT. Religion is the basic content of the spiritual life' of man, it is as necessary for life as air is—that is exactly why so many people do not notice it, just as they do not notice the air, and they do not value its life-giving power, writes the first President of Czechoslovakia, the late Dr T. G. Masaryk, in his philosophical work, “Modern Man and Religion.” And still, he continues, there are many, many people today without religion. Is there no contradiction here? There is not. Science, too, art, too, morality, too, belong to the spiritual substance of man, and how many people there are without a real scientific education, without art, without morality! Such people only are without religion—or they have it to extraordinary, unique degrees. Meanwhile I would say only this much—that the fight of philosophy and science against positive religion is not a proof that philosophy and science are in themselves anti-relig-ious. On the contrary, from this conflict, from its tenacity and long duration (it is as old as philosophy and religion), we might draw a directly opposite conclusion. Just because religion is not indifferent to philosophy and science there is a conflict between them. So also in other fields (for example, in politics) the parties and tendencies close to one another are in the sharpest opposition to one another. Many a philosopher fights religion because he himself is full of it.