CHURCH CONGRESS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 142, 13 December 1923, Page 11

CHURCH CONGRESS

RELIGION AND MODERN LIFE

DANGER OF UNDUE DOGMATISM

THE INTELLECTUALS.

fFROH OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) i ' LONDON, sth October. Plymouth and its populace were privileged last week to listen to a wealth of wisdom from the notable ecclesiastics who had assembled ior the Church Congress. The Bishops of Exeter and Truro.were the joint presidents. ' The latter, in his inaugural address, dwelt on the differences .between the spiritual lives of people in town and country. The discipline of town life, he said, forced a man to think quickly and superficially. The countryman's thought on matt" s of importance, if slower, was Bounder. The townsman would weary ere he had spent a tenth of the time the countryman gave to profound real meditation. The countryman differed from his neighbours, and was proudly conscious his individual attitude. The priest who had learned to follow ecclesiastical fashions with the adaptability. j>f a Parisian dressmaker found himself strangely out. of touch with men who thought for themselves. Long periods of solitude. gave the countryman great spiritual opportunity. Absolute solitude had spiritual power. Our Lord and all the saints had valued the coutnryman. The preacher had an added responsibility. The townsman would forget the preacher's .words, the rural .dweller never. Religion was strong in, and unbelief absent from, the villages. The Church must consider how best to work this fertile soil. The priest read his ecclesiastical review or paper, and became 1 cßnversant with the details of some point of ecclesiastical custom or. ritual. He held strong opinions on those questions, and defended them with vigour, while the countryman was thinking of those endless mysteries, " Why plants grew here and fail there," " Why soil is fertile or a beast is sick," or." Why one tree bears and another is barren, 1' and, except that priest and people both spoke English, they were as far apart in thought as a Chinese from a Westerner. I THE CONTROVERSIAL SPIRIT. In the realm of'faith, gaid the Bishop of Truro, speaking on the living Church, authority must justify it-self to the modern mind before the modern man, especially the wage-earner, and the student would accept and act upon it. The modern mind could not tolerate old dogmas and ancient formula*, and hence the need for fearless restatement; that did not mean the sacrificing of the truth to the expediency of modern thinking. He was no modernist, but was not afraid of modernism, as in the long run it would mean the application of the ancient faith to the practical and intelloctual problems of to-day. There was danger vjn undue dogmatism. .. There, was folly in imagining that we possessed the monopoly of truth; There was waste of time in finding heresy in every new 1 theory . -Ajl truth was not ; yet ours, and old; truth assimilates! new 'without- denying itself. Theories had their use; they passed and truth, remained. At once they must have better understanding and fuller co-operation, not-in subsituV j tion for. unity, but as preliminary to it. I For them the Church in this land meant j home reunion and real unity within their own ranks. He ventured to plead for a better understanding of each other, for a more determined effort in the spirit ef fellowship and Christian, considerateness to compose their own differences ■and settle their own controversies. Controversy need not divide them. It would boa dull world, and hardly a better world, if they all thought alike' and worked alike and worshipped alike j it was the controversial spirit that divided. He saw signs of its passing, and thanked God. WINNING. THE "INTELLECTUALS." ",The Christian Ideal and its Intellectual Conditions " was the subject of an address by .the Rev. Canon de Candole. The' Church's shyness and fear of its critics, he said^had led it to show a certain impatience^ with intellectuals. The result was that many of them had cut themselves off from organised religion. The reason was that the Church, either through lack of sympathy with, or in ignorance of, the workings of the modern mind, had failed to present the Gospel in such a way as to win for it the consent and obedience of thoughtful men and-women. V

On the Church's »ide there must be a! frank recognition that modern thought necessitated some changes in the modes of expression. New knowledge had come to light, and fhere had been formed new theories of matter, of 'the structure of the universe, of the development of terrestrial life, and, the origin of! man. They no longer believed that the' earth was the' centre of the universe, or that the Bible record of creation was scientific. From the side of the intellectuals they must ask for open-mindedness. ' Prejudice was not the peculiar possession. of the religious man. They must ask the scientist for a frank recognition of all the facts of human life, notably those of religious experience. The witness of their reality was unchallengeable. It was useless to say that the whole mysticism was a matter of disordered nerves and imagination. Granted that spirit on both sides, they could surely march together as allies in the cause of truth. Even miracles was not the obstacle it once was. Believing in' God as One always at work in. the world the antithesis between natural and supernatural tended to disappear. Man was made for God, and could nst rest till be rested in Him. The Christian faith had . nothing to fear from modern culture if it were but true to the cry of the human heart. BIRTH CONTROL. In the course of an address on the results of the impact of the Christian faith and ethics on the coming generation, the Rev. T. W. Pym referred to the subject of birth control. The coining generation, he said, were critically examining standards and rules of life. There was the question of birth control. ; The yoing men and women of to-day were already demanding whether from the Christian point of view such regulation was morally permissible. Whatever the Church's final attitude on the subject, it must show proof of having thought it out, and if in the negative, the answer must be a considered negation, not merely the old phrase, " You must not do this." Such an injunction from the Church had very little power of restraint. The world was very tired of the Church's unreasoning negative commands, but the sinister aspect of the growing interest in birth control was less the important problems of sexual morality, child welfare, married happiness or misery, which it raised, than its deadly attractiveness as a supposed short cut to the millennium. He was conis taritly met by the statement that the • . '■ •

cure for industrial ills was birth control. Assuming some foim of education in birth control seemed necessary, and alsp right, the idea that this could be the reason for seeking no other way out of the nation's present distresses was as selfish, fantastic, and ruinous as any nation ever conceived, but it was a notion very quickly gaining ground. A " WAY OF LIFE," Dr. Cyril Norwood (Master of Marlborough College), speaking oh the " Christian Ideal in Schools," said that he would present Christianity fearlessly as something which had no need of reservations, and nothing of which to be afraid. He would accept sensible modern criticism to the full, both on the Old and New Testaments. He wo\ld try to lay the foundations of a' Biblical critical scholarship. Only at the same time he would always strive to make it clear that the root of the matter did not lie here, and that we were using our knowledge and criticism first and always to get back to Christ. Whenever he was at all puffed up by any slight sense of knowledge that he might happen to persuade himself he possessed, he hoped that he alwnys thought with humility of those words of our Lord: " I thank Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that Thou has hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes ; certainly he would never let sixth form boys forget them. The first Christians were fond of speaking of their religion as the way; they were Perhaps nearer in time to Him Who was the Way, the Truth, and the Life; but they would do better in the schools if they could present their religion more as a way of hfe and less as a more or less intellectual assent to a number of propositions.