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Show , I GEORGE BURNHAM FOSTER SAYS I ' THAT GOD WAS MADE BV MAN CHICAGO. April 23. In a book entitled enti-tled "The Function of Religion In Man's Struggle for Existence." which will bo issued tomorrow from the University of Chlcngo Press. Prof. George Burnhain Foster, who stirred up the clergy of the countrv three years ago with his attack on orthodox Christianity, has taken up a new lino of criticism. Prof. Foster advances the theory that God Is "a symbol to designate the. universe uni-verse In Its idcal.achlcvlng enpnetty." and that God was made by man. Modern Mod-ern people, lie declares, do not attend church, because they do not need It, and "not because they arc bad, but because they are good." "Nowhere," he says. "Is there such a thing as creation olil of nothing. We must wean oursidves from the habit of picturing the God of the universe as the bible God of tho book of Genesis a God who mlracally chnrmcd things, with a sword as a wand, out of nothing. There Is no creation anywhere out of magic none by God's magic. "1 am now trying to gel the church to sec that It Iibb been pu the wrong truck ,wlth Its Instinct of self-preservation, with Its dogging the footsteps of science, blocking its every advance: with Its love for dogmas rather than Its search for truth: with .its pride rather than Its service; with Its clericalism rather than Its humnnlsm: with Its facing backward rather than frontward. "It Is for this reason that there has grown up In many circles something akin to contempt for the three words church, sermon, dogmatics: church a whltcd sepulcher full of dead men's bones, a place where death I treated as If It vre life, and life as ir it were death; preaching proor that there Is still such a tiling as sounding brass and clanging cymbals: docmatlcs that science whose, only right to be Is thai men may goo what a science ought not to be." |