Ethics and Christian Ethics

Extract

An Indian student, returning, after completing his course at a British university, to his own land, told his tutor that in India at least he would find once more that truth was one and indivisible. On being asked what he meant, his reply was that in England everyone separated scientific from religious truth, but that to Indian thought they were one. So familiar is this dualism of truth to us that we pass over its strangeness without question. In the Middle Ages Europe was of the same opinion as India is now. What then is the reason for the rent we have torn in the seamless vesture of truth? The answer is found by retracing our steps to the days when the old wineskins of theology were bursting under the pressure of the Revival of Learning, and, more important still, the layman was becoming the scholar. The Reformation issued no general licence to every man to think as he liked, but it at least allowed freedom of thought within certain bounds. Had Thomas Hobbes, for example, been born in 1488 instead of 1588, he would hardly have lived to die abed at the age of 91. Hobbes was not a great thinker, but he was a great iconoclast, and he created a critical temper of thought which showed itself in many who were in no sense Hobbists.