A New Song                                                                                      5/19/46

 

Scripture:  Psalm 98

 

Text:  Psalm 98: 1;  “O Sing unto the Lord a new song; for he hath done marvelous things; his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory.”

 

Prof. Henry B. Hass of Purdue University is one of those laymen who will occasionally go into a church pulpit, and, when doing so, preach a good sermon.  Recently he spoke in a church in West LaFayette, Indiana, which is made up entirely of students attending Purdue.  He used a theme which I shall use here this morning, together with much of what he said.

 

History is marked by a succession of great leaders who have said, in one way or another, “O sing unto the Lord a new song.”  Certain scientific leaders have proclaimed newly discovered truths, or new theories about truth, and have been repudiated, persecuted or even put to death for the unconventionality which later generations take for granted, and make the new convention.

 

It has certainly been true that many a religious leader has been persecuted, stoned, crucified, or burned at the stake for saying in some new form “O sing unto the Lord a new song,” in a way that has threatened to shake up old ways of thinking.  A large part of what we value in religion has flowed from them.

 

It must be admitted that a great many pages of religious history are filled with the story of enthusiasms which have cooled to dogma.  Martin Luther does some independent thinking, formulates it into certain theses, nails a copy of them on the door of the German Catholic church where he is priest, is promptly persecuted by the church and even threatened with death.  But the newly expressed truth of his church is exciting to hosts of people and spreads to thousands of people who receive it with revolutionary enthusiasm.  The years go by.  Luther’s principles are taken more and more for granted by his followers, as is at length the liberty to express them.  And enthusiasm settles to dogma again.

 

Repeatedly throughout the history of the churches, certain traditions of infallibility have arisen; a man, or a sacred writing, is alleged to be incapable of error.  When that happens, progress becomes almost impossible until some great, original thinker with courage and intellectual honesty meets the need of a new age.  Then the cycle of outraged conservatism, persecution, and eventual acceptance is repeated.

 

There are a great many people today - not alone some religious leaders, but a mounting number of scientists - who believe that the greatest need of mankind in our age is a revival of crusading religious fervor.  The scientists seem to believe this because they know the ability of forward-looking science to put mounting power in the hands of people and they know also that a dangerous number of people do not have the character to use power only for good ends.  Nor is there a sufficient body of Christian public opinion to require the good use of power.

 

During a good part of the history of our present age there has been foolish conflict between scientists and religious leaders; between the laboratory and the church; between the professor’s rostrum and the minister’s pulpit.  It is said that most real scientists expect change - new discoveries; and too few religious thinkers expect new discoveries in religious understanding.  People have worried over the supposed conflict of science and religion ever since Galileo overthrew the mechanics and astronomy of former scientists.

 

There are far too many men and women who seek the ear of people through pulpit and radio today who still challenge the tested conclusions of science in the name of outworn dogmas of frozen religious thinking.  Now and then they dig hard enough to do some harm to science.  Far more often they do incalculable harm to religion.

 

But, there can not be any conflict between true religion and true science.  Science is in the business of correcting our erroneous thinking and planning, and of blasting our superstitions, of opening new truth.  Religion is in the business of correcting our erroneous thinking and acting, of declaring eternal truth.  There can be no conflict between two ideas that are true, no matter from what field they are drawn.  There is conflict only if one or both of the ideas contains some fallacy.

 

There is hardly any conceivable conflict between science and religion over the definition of religion found in the book of James: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this; to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”  [James 1: 27].  Surely neither scientist nor theologian will object to the love of fellow man and the high standard of personal honor and integrity represented in this statement.  These are at the heart of true religion.

 

There is an Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah, that he should be “like a refiner’s fire, and he shall purify the sons of Levi.”  [Malachi 3: 2, 3].  The Levites were the traditional priesthood.  And their status and traditions needed purifying!

 

It is a striking figure of speech.  In the old process of freeing gold or silver from base metals and other material, a very hot oxidizing flame converted the less valuable elements to a mixture of oxides - the dross - which rose to the surface and was sloughed off.  The residue was bright and pure gold or sliver as the case may be.  This process is still used in gold assaying.  When a large mass of dirty-looking ore yields a bright little bead of the precious metal containing practically every trace of the gold in the sample, one can see what the prophet meant.

 

The truth of the prophecy is apparent.  Every great religious leader has removed from the religious thinking of his time some of the dross of error and superstition with which it has been clothed and contaminated.  This is one of the reasons for their persecution.  For it is an extremely uncomfortable experience to go through the refiner’s fire that burns up a cherished fallacy into dross.

 

A perfectly human reaction among the devotees of a non-Christian religion was recounted by a returned missionary.  The mission possessed a microscope through which native young people could see the bacteria and protozoa moving about in the water which they drank.  It was a dominantly Buddhist area.  One of the cherished tenets of the old Buddhist faith is that it is wrong to kill animals.  Be it tiger, cow, mosquito, hawk or rat, an animal has a right to live and it is wrong for a human to kill it.  The revelation that there is microscopic life in drinking water was profoundly disturbing to the devout Buddhists.  One can hardly do without drinking water.  Yet how can one drink without killing the life which the microscope reveals in the water?  To sterilize the water by boiling or chlorination, even if this were to be suggested, would be no solution, for that also would mean killing the organisms.

 

The mission was honored by the visit of a couple of Buddhist priests.  They looked through the microscope and then offered to buy it.  Thinking that Western ideas were taking hold with gratifying rapidity, the missionary sold the microscope to the Buddhist priests.  You probably know what happened to the microscope; it was immediately smashed.

 

Smashing the microscope is a favorite method of dealing with newly suggested truth - and uncomfortable longer-known truths.  But there is a lot of that kind of thinking among a great many of us.

 

For decades, one group of scientists has scoffed at the idea of the superiority of any one race of people.  There are certain differences in average color of skin, contour of facial bones, resistance to or susceptibility to diseases and so on; but these do not mark a race as “superior” or “inferior” say the scientists of anthropology.  The idea of the superiority of one race is a myth.

 

Now that is unhappily a fallacy that is widely and erroneously held as fact by an appalling number of white people of the English-speaking and north European races.  It isn’t entirely foreign to some of us.  But we have just fought a war largely because a man named Hitler lied to the German people about this matter.  He had to put certain anthropologists and even a few religious leaders in concentration camps before he could get away with it, but that he did not hesitate to do.  On the other side of the globe, members of another nationality were fed a dogmatic lie about the superiority of the sons of heaven.  They were even superior over others of their own color whose ancestry was not akin to the Nipponese emperor.  We didn’t like it - in Germany or Japan.  To us it seemed so utterly false as to need no proving.

 

Now the war has been won over the armed might of that force in Germany and Japan.  If we take our eyes from the battlefields, I wonder what we could see at home if we wanted to.  Do you suppose a Negro could get his woolly hair cut in a barbershop of our city?  Or his hungry stomach fed in one of our cafes or restaurants?  Some minister or perhaps some teacher or some other individual person might take him into a home for rest and a meal, but that is no solution to a tough problem.

 

It was a tough job for our soldiers, sailors and marines to conquer Nazi armies.  How much harder it seems to conquer a foolish idea that scientists say is wrong!  Incidentally, the Christian religion says the same thing in the pronouncement that all men are brothers under one God.  But it is hard for many of us Christians to hear.

 

We now live in an age when one mighty explosion over Hiroshima thunders: “You must learn to live together or you shall die together!”  There isn’t much time for the solution of the Negro problem, the Caucasian problem, the problems of the Oriental and the Occidental; the Nordic, the Latin; the Semitic and the Gentile.  For centuries, the voice of ethical religion has been saying “you must.”  Now science roars, “or else - and be quick about it!”

 

In a poem entitled “It is Time to Build,” Elias Lieberman writes:

 

            I am tired of echoes in the old house:

            Echoes of ancient hatreds and historic feuds;

            Echoes of outworn slogans;

            Echoes of pompous fools long dead;

            Echoes of statesmen whose folly is more enduring than bronze.

 

            Man’s mind reaches past the stars,

            Probes into the atom,

            Measures waves of ether in the infinite spaces;

            His soul trembles at a brother’s pain,

            Sees light through jungle darkness,

            Sings with faith and tenderness the vastness of divinity.

 

            But he still lives in an old house,

            An old house with echoes.

            Tear down the rotted boards;

            Scrap the bat-haunted chambers;

            Stop the babbling of simian tongues

            Pretending to blabber wisdom.

 

            It is time to build new towers for a new age.

            I am tired of echoes ... echoes ... echoes ... in the old house.

 

The new house will be built.  How soon I cannot say.  That depends on the desire of people for truth and our desire and willingness to distinguish between truth and outworn traditions.

 

Engineers and research laboratories have presented the world with a new truth which may carry us forward to a new and blossoming era.  Poverty and infectious disease can be gradually conquered.  Man’s spiritual nature may rise to new heights. -- Or it can all issue in grim and far more horrible wars and a continual fear of sudden extermination.

 

It is for our generation to decide whether we shall meanly lose or nobly attain the great hope of man.  It is time, says Prof. Hass, “to sing unto the Lord a new song.”

 

------------

 

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 19, 1946