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New Century Studies and Reviews. SCIENCE IN SUNDAY SCHOOLS. Thoughts on a Suggestion that Religious Training of Children Should Conform to M odern Science.
I T HAS BEEN suggested by a prominent clergyman that the training of children in Sunday school ought to conform to the teachings of modern science so that the “accurate and solid instruction,” as he terms it, received in the day schools may not be counteracted by inaccurate and misleading statements. A glance at the text books may serve to show how solid and accu rate some of the information imparted to the child in the school room really is. One of his first lessons in geography teaches him that the earth revolves on its axis once in twenty-four hours. No qualifications are made. The child accepts it for a fact, together with the whole Copernican system—a gigantic assumption. He never dreams, poor innocent, that the book and the teacher, his supreme court of appeal, can mislead him.
The only accurate statement comes from Copernicus himself when he wrote in no uncertain words: “Neither let apyone so far as hypotheses are concerned, expect anything certain from astronomy, since that science can afford nothing of the kind.” Let this sentence be incor porated into the text books so that the child may un derstand when he reads that the earth is convex, that astronomers merely surmise it to be so, their guess be ing founded upon appearances. In reality they know no more about the form and function of the universe than he does.
To learn the accurate and solid instruction which modern science has to impart, it is only necessary to question her. What about the origin of life? Why, one of thè latest theories supposes that the germs of organic life may have descended upon “ this plant,” brought by meteors from some other system far re mote. So exceedingly plausible a theory was projected by one of the greatest “ authorities.” Unfortunately nobody has yet explained how these germs could escape the culinary process in their rapid transmission through interstellar space.
The germs of organic life always develop from life of the same kind. If any form of life be found today, it is because the parent life was here before and gave it birth.
If the Sunday school teacher wishes to keep pace with .the day school, she must tell the children how good God is to keep the inhabitants from falling off the surface of this convex ball as it goes whirling through space at the rate of nineteen miles a second. Let her tell them too, that nobody knows why it does not fall into the sun around which it is circling at that rate of speed, so that is another mercy for which they must thank God. To be sure, if He be an all-pervading Spirit without body or parts, self-existent from eternity, un known and unknowable, thanks and praise from the lower creation would matter little to him.
% Text books cite as proof of the earth’s convexity,
L U C IE P A G E BO RD EN . the circular shadow supposed to be cast upon the moon’s disk by the earth during a lunar eclipse, but they fail to inform the youthful student that there are fifty-two recorded instances where the eclipse occurred when the sun and moon were both above the horizon.
If she is to fill her responsible post with credit the Sunday school teacher will do well to take occasion now and then to show the children how the sun is grow- inghotter and colder at the same time. This is accord ing to one of the best authenticated and most popular of present theories of the solar constitution. It might also be well to touch upon the attenuated ether, show ing just what it is and how far it extends. Everything connected with the subject is so accurate and positive!
Having shown herself perfectly familiar with the proven and authenticated facts of “science,” the teacher will be able to exposit the Scriptures from this basis. The youthful mind will then be saved the confusion arising from an attempt to reconcile Genesis with Prof. Shaler, —a world made in six days with the discoveries of paleontology.
The child who will cavil with the higher critics and persist in asking disagreeable questions after hearing their clear and logical expositions of the miracles is in corrigible and should be suitably disciplined.
If he will use his reason let him be given a copy of the C e e - e u l a k C o s m o g o n y .
He is ripe enough to profit by its contents. The Fate of the M odern Goliath.
A S INTERPRETED by the founder of Koreshanity, the conflict between David and Goliath is pro phetically symbolical of the great battle between true and false science. David as the chief receptacle of the di vine energies in his day, involved five preceding Messi anic personalities. The Scriptures say that David was a man after God’s own heart. This means that he was following after the perfection which he attained in the Christ, not that he had as yet come to please God in all things.
The narrative relates that the Shepherd lad as the antitype of the Good Shepherd, picked up five stones; also that he took one stone and threw it, hitting the great champion of the Philistines in his forehead. The stone thrown by David, who represented his own subse quent development in Christ, was Peter the Rock. He was thrown down to the end of the Christian dispen sation, when he reappears in the Expositor of natural things. Now he hits the chief of the Philistines (fallacy) in the very seat of intelligence and cuts off Goliath’s head with the giant’s own sword. The scientists are put to confusion by their own statements; they begin to disavow their own conclusions. It is the marvel of the age to see theories reversed and speculations which have long had the prestige of facts, vanish like dew be fore the morning sun.
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The vortex theory of matter is displacing that of the indestructible atom. Virchow rejected the Dar winian hypothesis on the ground that its advocates failed to produce the missing link. The popular theory of the center of the earth as molten fire is discredited.
At the same time the revision of creeds and rejection of dogma mark a similar change among the churches. The fact is that Koreshanity has a way of putting- leading questions which lay bare the palpable absurdity of long cherished beliefs and conclusions drawn from assumptive premises. Instead of floundering in a bog of untenable theories many persons are ready to accept the plank to terra firma which Koreshanity offers in its demonstrated premise.
Giant Despair and Giant Error are one and the same character. The blow which decapitates Error puts an end to the keeper of Doubting Castle. Bats and owls will be the only denizens of the foul retreat.
Across its haunted threshold no human foot will step. Hope has come with Truth, her double. Great Results From Seeming Trifles.
THE MOST TRIFLING circumstances often decide the weightiest matters, and the destinies of na tions hang upon a slender thread. A shower was the means of the French defeat at Waterloo.
A thistle saved Scotland from falling into the power of the enemy. The hissing of a goose on the Capitoline Hill prevented early Rome from being taken by the Gauls, thus assuring supremacy to the descendants of Romu lus. Had Columbus continued his course; sailing due west’ as his ship was headed, he would have landed upon the mainland, not an island, touching first upon the peninsula of Florida. Had he landed here and taken possession of it in the name of Spain, the whole course of history for the past four hundred years might have been changed. But as it happened, when Columbus was approaching the new world though still far out at sea, a flock of land birds flying toward the south came in sight. Thereupon Alonzo Pinzon begged Columbus to follow in their wake. He refused, but finally allowed his first decision to be overborne by his subordinate.
This was a decisive moment in history. Had he per sisted in refusing to change his course, the same des potic power which held sway in Cuba for four hundred years would have been firmly planted on the main land, lustead of being a great amalgamating center for the production of a new race, all America might have been caught in the iron grip of the Spanish Inquisition.
Without the religious freedom which America has offered and which has been her chief attraction from the first, she could never have moulded the supreme product of the ages, a people prepared for conjunction with Deity.
The Spanish rabble, vexed that the new possessions broughtno treasure to enrich the crown, dubbed Colum bus in derision “Admiral of Mosquito Land.” The loca tion of these islands renders them the strategic key to the Western world. Though their importance was
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wholly undervalued in the time of Columbus, when they were supposed to form part of Western Asia, they con stituted no mean return for the help which Spain had given him.
Elaboration and Interradiation o f Thought. O NE OF THE MOST beautiful laws which Koresh anity teaches is the interconvertibility of matter and spirit, a law which is not confined in its operations to the field of physical research, and is not without a most important bearing upon psychological activity.
The ground or basis of all thought is the food supplied. The brain cell is the seat of combustion where the sub stances introduced into the physical organism, after they have been already appropriated and transformed, undergo their final metamorphosis. Matter and spirit are not only interconverted in the brain cells, but there is a very subtile radiation of spiritual energies toward the body and the brain.
The necessity for concentrating the mind upon a given subject calls into activity whole groups of related cells. Some of these may be located in the brains of other persons physically remote from the one who is trying to develop the subject. The interradiations of mind explain why so many scientific discoveries are simultaneously produced by several claimants. Each wants to patent the invention as exclusively his own.
There is a very close connection between groups of per sons who are investigating the same subject, and the honor of discovery may be justly claimed by more than one. All these groups are dominated at the present time by one mind, which constitutes the central cell for the elaboration of scientific thought. As in particulars so in generals. As this central brain elaborates thought its radiations pass out toward other minds or cells ac cording to interattraction.
The Character of the Primitive Man. T HE CENTURY DICTIONARY, commenting upon the etymology of the word man, which some refer to a Sanscrit root meaning thiuker, remarks that such a derivation is unlikely, it being highly improbable that primitive man in his low state of mental devel opment could have thus described himself. It will not be long before the Koreshan idea of primitive man as the prime, head or centre of creation will replace the degrading belief of our origin .in the cave dweller.
The glory of God is the intellectual principle, and it is written that He will not give his glory to another. Therefore man when he becomes perfect in wisdom must be God.
Koreshanity never takes away anything without giving something better in its stead. If we never made mistakes others would never have the pleasure of setting us right.
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 17, No. 14 · Feb 20, 1903 · PDF pp. 6-7