Eugenics and the church / by J.H.F. Peile.

  • Peile, J. H. F. (James Hamilton Francis), 1863-
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Eugenics and the church / by J.H.F. Peile. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    EUGENICS AND THE CHURCH By The Rev. J. H. F. Peile When I had the honour of reading this paper before the Eugenics Education Society, I prefaced it with a few words, which need not be repeated in print, on the opinion that it needed some courage in a clergyman of the Church of England to show publicly a sympathetic interest in the work and aims of the Society. I do not share that opinion : but the mere fact that it can be held and expressed by anyone suggests the question why it should be accounted a remarkable thing that a minister of religion should be interested in the problems w7hich this Society has been formed to study, and should take part in its counsels and discussions. The pages which follow are chiefly occupied with an attempt to answer that question. I. Our first purpose then is to ascertain the reasons for the Church’s reluctance to take up the question of Eugenics. When we say Church in this connexion, we mean, I think, the clergy, not as exclusively forming the Church, but as expressing its average corporate opinion. And as practical persons, we shall do well to contemplate not exclusively an ideal, what the Church ought to be; but the existing fact, what the Church is—with which we have to reckon. (^4) First then we must remember that the idea of a Science of Eugenics is to most people a startling novelty. It involves the application of the methods of exact study to conditions which they have hitherto been taught to leave in a twilight of mystery; and proposes in the light of that study to guide and control the working of laws which have hitherto been the especial sphere of Nature; that is to say modified and interfered with at random by fortuitous and irrelevant changes which civilisation has brought into the physical conditions of Mankind. The thought that such study and such control are either desirable or possible