PROBLEMS FOR THE CHURCH

Evening Post, Issue 28, 1 August 1936, Page 26

PROBLEMS FOR THE CHURCH

"The Church and the Twentieth Century," published by Macmillan and Co., Ltd., consists of papers dealing with the various problems that confront the Church. Dr. Norman Sykes, Professor of History in the University of London, in the opening paper on1 "The Ideal cf a National Church," deals with a question which will come into great prominence when the report of the Archbishops' Committee on Church and State is published. The ultimate cause of the appointment of the Archbishops' Committee was the rejection by the House of Commons of the Deposited Book. Dr. H. D. A. Major, principal of Ripon Hall, discusses the necessity of a revision of the Prayer Book in the light of new thought and knowledge, while Dr. Percy Dearmer, Canon of Westminster, contributes a paper on "Public Worship and the Creeds."

Dr.> C. E. Raven, Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge University, and Carien Guy Rogers, rector of Birmingham, representatives of the movement towards a New Catholicism which shall embrace the Free Churches, write respectively on "Interchange of Pulpits" and "Intercommunion." Sir Arnold Wilson, M.P., with special reference to the demand that the Church should take a definite line on political, social, and economic questions, contributes a paper on "The Church and Secular Life," while' Dr. Douglas White deals with a specific religious and social question in a paper on "Religion and Sex." Neither Evangelicalism nor AngloCatholicism has been unaffected by the Modern Renaissance. Dr. L. ElliottBinns writes on "Evangelicalism and the Twentieth Century," and Dr. F. L. Cross, librarian of Pusey House and Wilde Lecturer in Natural and Comparative Religion in Oxford University, writes on "Anglo-Catholicism arid the Twentieth Century."

There is a foreword by the Bishop of Birmingham, and in the concluding paper the editor, G. L. H. Harvey, attempts a general survey of the position.