END OF THE ERA

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 3, 4 July 1922, Page 7

END OF THE ERA

UNREST, UPHEAVAL, AND

CHANGE

BISHOP SPROTT EXHORTS

COURAGE.

A word of encouragement 'and hope concerning the troubles of the day was uttered by Bishop Sprott in his address to the Diocesan Synod this afternoon.. : "We live in an age of universal unrest, upheava.l, and change—an age of unsettlement not only in the world, but in the Church; for in these respects the Church ever, shares the fortunes,-of the world—creeds and churches, as well as. Governments and politics, social and industrial systems, are being shaken," said Dr. Sprott. "Some, perhaps, hope and many fear, that all things are going down in one common ruin. I am not usually what could be called a" cheerful optimists, but I venture to think both hope and fear are premature. It is well to remember that in an earthquake not everything that trembles falls.

"This is the salutary reminder that is contained in what is to me just now one of the most consoling and sustaining passages in the whole Bible., The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, a group of Jewish Christians in the first %ge, lived in just such days aa ours—days of upheaval . and change. Then, ac now, men's hearts'were failing-them for fear of what was coming upon the world and upon the Church. In these circumstances ■he speaks his strong, consoling word— 'Whose voice then shook the earth; but now hath he promised, saying, Yet once more will I make to tremble, not the earth only, but also the heaven. And this word "once more" signifieth the, removal of those things that are shaken as of'things that are made, that.the things which are not shaken may remain,' . "Not) all man's life is illusion; not all the highest hopes and faiths,by which he lives are the baseless fabric of a dream. There is within them,, and beneath them, an eternal and imperishable substance, which shall survive all change, and shall be all the more shown as it is, when the perishable has fallen away. . I think this passage was in the mind of 3. 8.. Mozley, sometime Regius Professor of Divinity in Oxford, when in a sermon preached in 1870 he uttered words which now prove to have been-strangely prophetic, and with which I shall close this address: 'We live amid closing histories, and amid falling institution-; there is an axe at the root of many trees; foundations of fabrics have been long giving way, and the visible tottering commences. "The earth quakes, and the heavens do tremble." The sounds of great downfalls and great disruptions come from different quarters; old combinations start asunder; a great crash is heard, and it; is some vast mass that has just broken off from the a_>ck, and gone down into the chasm below. A great volume of time is now shutting, the roll is folded up for the registry, and we must open another. ' Never again— never; though ages pass'away—never any more under the heavens shall be .seen forms, and fabrics, and structures, and combinations that we have seen. They have' taken their place among departed shapes and organism* in the vast mausoleum Which receives sooner or later all human creations. The mould in which they-were made is broken, and their successors , will be cast from a new mould. The world, is evidently at the end of one era, and is entering .ipoh another; but there will remain the, Christian Creed and the Christian Church, to enlighten ignorance, to fieht with sin, and to conduct men to eternity.' " V