Saturday, March 21, 2009

Certainty

Religion exists not to answer all questions, or to clear up all mysteries; if that were its purpose, it could never be accomplished, for life grows, not less, but more mysterious as the intellect enters more fully into its truth.

The stars were wonderful enough in all conscience, when we thought of them as lamps of light set in a solid sky to guide the sailors on their journey over the trackless sea; but they are a million times more wonderful, now that we know them to be blazing worlds, that move through the vast infinities of space in accordance with exact mathematical laws.

Our own bodies were wonderful enough, when we thought of them as created in a moment by the fiat of the Almighty from the dust of the earth; but how much more wonderful they have become since the sciences of physiology and embryology have taught us to trace their growth through countless stages, from the humblest kind of beginning to their present complex end.

Knowledge does not take from, it adds to, the wonder of the world. It is an infallible rule that the more a man knows the less he knows. He knows that he knows nothing compared with what there is to know - that he is but a child playing on the shore of an infinite sea of truth and picking up tiny pearls of wisdom that, by the grace of God, are cast up at his feet.

Religion leaves a million questions unanswered and apparently unanswerable. Its purpose and object is not to make a man certain and cock-sure about everything, but to make him certain about those things of which he must be certain if he is to live a human life at all. Religion does not relieve us from the duty of thought; it makes possible for a man to begin thinking.


- G. A. Studdert-Kennedy

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