RELIGION MUST GO HAND IN HAND WITH SCHOLARSHIP-GRANT

"I'm trying to put religion on the map of intelligible subjects, so that every man can study it and the other sciences without offending either," said the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant'83 speaking on "Religion's Opportunity Today" at the Union yesterday afternoon. "Have the Companionship of Jesus, have the companionship of every lofty soul, but don't rule out learning."

Dr. Grant was very vehement in striking at his conservative opponents. "In the sixteen hundreds," he said, "religious questions were political questions, and an atheist or a Baptist was an anarchist. We are returning to such a condition, and can seen in religious bigotry, and ignorance, and persecution, a political threat. The basis of all this conservative certitude and attack upon progressiveness is to be favored in the miraculous character of the religious they profess and the sense of providential care and direction under which they flourish. If Jesus is to return in clouds of glory and snatch up Brother Stratton of 57th Street, Manhattan, to serve as his prime minister or grand vizier, these tirades against modern knowledge and its exponents are quite intelligible.

"Then there are the middle-of-the-road people," he continued, "who are as dangerous, but in a more subtle way, as these conservative relies of the Middle Ages. They practice a legerdemain with the words 'scholarship', 'faith', and 'creeds', with a result that they finish with the general impression that everything is all right--let scholars study; let believers believe, but don't have any controversy about anything. Unity is a good thing, but truth is a better thing. Comfort is a good thing, but truth is a better thing, Clergymen must get over the idea that their main relation to individuals is to make them feel comfortable religiously. That is what the conservative religious church member particularly wishes to retain. it is perhaps the first thing he should give up."

Turning to his discussion of religion itself Dr. Grant said, "Jesus's definition of religion is 'doing the will of God.' But our trouble today is knowing the will of God. When the ten commandments were regarded as the whole of God's law, it was easy to know God's will. Jesus made love an interpreter of God's will which immediately produced an infinite number of commandments in place of ten commandments. yet love alone is not enough to teach God's will. We must and add knowledge to love."

Then after stating that ignorance is at the bottom of a great deal of human misconduct, and that if the world knew the will of God, it would be turned into a Kingdom of God, it would be turned into a Kingdom of God, the speaker said that God's will may be best found through the laws of the human soul and of social advance. "We are to know God through human experience."

Going on to speak of faith, Dr. Grant said, "Faith is not pinned down to certain well-rooted points of thought or fact, but depends upon our general attitude toward life, let us say our love for it, our confidence in it, our inferences from it. I am the last to deny that religion deals with affections, with imaginations and personal deyotions, and with high adventure.