ENGLISH MODERNISM

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 93, 17 October 1934, Page 19

ENGLISH MODERNISM

DR. BARNES'S DEFENCE

THE TEST OF TRUTH

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, September 5.

•' English modernism is wholly alien from unreason or violence," said Dr. Barnos, Bishop of Birmingham, at the Modern Churchman's Conference. "It seeks to join religious enthusiasm to truth, to porauade men that truth is the strongor when it is freod from boliefs that are outworn. People wrongly think that we have created the difficulties which in fact wo try to surmount. Thoy foolishly believe that if only wo would bo silent the new knowlodgc of our era could safely be ignored. We are attacked, distrusted, feared. But wo shall win becauso our work is nocded." Dr. Barnos said that there existed a widespread tendency to ignore or belittle, or even to repudiate, tlio Old Testament. "Tho primitive passions let loose during the Great War found some support in certain Old Testament narratives, though in fact they were no more typical of the teachings of the great Hebrew prophets than extravagant wartime sermons were of tho teach, ings of Christ. There has of late grown up an understanding that the feverish animosities engendered by war are not admirable. As a natural consequence those whose remembrance of the Old Testament is associated with stories like Saul's slaughter of tho Amalekites feel little attraction towards the Jewish Scriptures. "The first chapter of Geaesis obviously cannot be harmonised with the scientific conclusions which naturally all English children now learn as part of their education. Our.modern outlook has created a background of thought against which we cannot maintain the traditional belief in the infallibility of Scripture. There is a third reason why the Old Testament is disregarded. At the present time anti-Semitism is, unfortunately, widespread. In Britain and America it has not grown to such absurd lengths as amongst the Germanspeaking peoples of Central Europe. But if you hate the Jews you naturally disparage their greatest contribution to human civilisation. As we enumerate reasons why the Jewish Scriptures are avoided we must take account of the age-long antipathy between Cathoho and Jew. , ~.*,. "From the low esteem into which the Old Testament has fallen, modernists must rescue it as part of their professed object of exhibiting the Christian faith in its uncontaniinated beauty and power." '