RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Evening Star, Issue 22382, 4 July 1936, Page 6

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

[By Forward.]

THE CHURCH AND ITS MISSION. The church has never been able to forget its real mission. It lias been called to witness to the meaning of the eternal in the midst of time. It has never lost the power of courageous suffering. It has never called for martyrs in vain. And its prophets have been the supremo/ moral and spiritual voice in the* world. She lias been the actual instrument in. history of the timeless splendour of the life of God. It made royal tho speech of Chrysostom in, Constantinople, it mastered the twelfth century in the mystical devotion and the commanding leadership or Bernard of Clairvaux, It won the heart of tho world in the lovely and radiant piety of St. Francis. It made a pulpit more splendid than the throne or the grand monarch in the days of Massillon and Bossnet. It renewed the spiritual life of Germany in the pietism of the seventeenth century. It changed the quality of tho life of England in the eighteenth century revival under Wesley. It. became a passion of sacrificial service in Xavier and Livingstone and Albert Scweitzer. It became a social conscience in Maurice and Kingsley, and on tho other side of the Atlantic in Rauschenbusch and Josiah Strong. In the dialectic of the Neo-Thoniists it is bringing new life to the Latin communion in our own time. And in the theology of Karl Barth once moro Protestantism confronts the transcendent glory of tho life of God and that living word which makes all things new. The Anglo-Catholio movement is reminding us that it is the very genius of the material to wear the livery of the spiritual. All about the world in a thousand places and a thousand ways the church is rising to reflect the timeless splendour of the ethical love of God. This spiritual entity, which is the soul of all the Christian communion, and the salt without which the life of the world would lose its savour, works with ceaseless energy and undiscovered loyalty and persistence in the lives and tho institutions of men.

EQUALITY OF WOMEN WITH MEN IN THE CHURCH. In tho church to-day women give a large part of the money, but do not have an equitable share in determining how their gifts should be spent. They raise money for a new Sunday school, but a committee of men (not very interested) decide upon the plans. Women do a largo part of the work of the church (see any Sunday school), but an assembly of men only decide upon the policy. Women largely pay the piper, but men mostly call the tunc. Tho biological fact of sex excludes women from a seat in the General Assembly. Intelligence _ and spirituality should be the determining qualities tor a seat in. this and other church courts. In the world generally women are getting a steadily greater place in the rule of things. The Army and the church (a sad combination) are tho exceptions. A woman is general of a mighty organisation like the Salvation Army, but m tho Presbyterian Church a woman cannot bo pastor of a small congregation, unless that congregation be on the foreign field. Why? Can anyone say that woman has less capacity for church management than man? Is the P W M.U. less efficient than the Men s Society ? Ah 1 yes. But then she is; a woman! But in Christianity sex distinctions are ignored. Men and women Should be equal. , ~ . In England women can be elders and sit in the Assembly. In Scotland there is a definite movement (as yet unsuccessful) to obtain for women full , admission to the ministry.' Surely the future thing will ho that position in the church will be filled by the most capable person, irrespective of sox. In the great Christian church in South China, and other parts, that rule is already followed. '•

MYSTERY. A short time ago everyone was reading that best-seller ‘ The Mysterious Universe,’ by Sir James deans. The mystery was there before the days of modern astronomy and physics. Here is the Persian poet’s cry thrown out against the mystery of the world:

There was a Door to which I found ' no Key j There was a Veil past which I could not see. But to-day there is presented in a new guise the riddle of the universe. The world exhibits marvels of vastness and marvels of minuteness; on the one hand the stars, on the other the atoms. First the vastness of the stars. The roof is off the world, and we are gazing into immeasurable space. Tako-ddie head of a pin to represent the sizo'of that immense circle which the earth travels through in its annual journey round the sun, and, on the same scale, the universe stretches out for four million miles on every side. There is profound mystery. But the solution of it is perfectly simple as wo have it from Jesus. It’ is that size does not count. God is spirit, not space; measured, tiot in millions of miles, but in love. The problem is not really changed by adding billions of miles, for there is mystery enough already in any single constellation. All these figures are useless, until we have first learned the astronomy of the eighth Psalm: “ When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers ... 0 Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth.” Or we look at the minuteness of the atoms. They are no longer to be regarded as the bricks out of which the universe is built. They are themselves systems, little universes of their own, where the electron revolves round its nucleus several thousand million million times every second. Here is mystery upon mystery. But God is spirit, and size does not count. What does count is the purpose in the universe, and God has made us part of it. At the centre and core of His plan Ho has sot the lives of men. The answer to the riddle of the universe is God. There is still the riddle of God. There is mystery here. He is infinite and wo are finite. We have not mastered very much of the lessons He has been teaching men since the beginning of the world. We might know him better, too, if we wore better. Our soul is the organ by which we learn about God, and we have not kept, it pure and sensitive. Nevertheless, the solution has been put into our hands. The answer to the riddle of God is the Cross of Jesus. We -think of our own highest conception of love, and then we take a great leap outwards and upwards into the unknown. For the'love on Cavalry is not just heroic love, which we have seen in men, or sacrificial love, which we have read of or witnessed, but redeeming love. Hero was One Who did what no man can do. He took away the sins of the world. “ To understand this is to understand Christ; to understand Christ is to understand God; and to understand

God is to understand the meaning of the universe and of life. The Cross, then, is the key. . If I lose this key, I fumble. The universe will not open to me. But with the key in my hand and heart I know I hold its secret.” To those who are the disciples of Jesus is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom. God made the world ; God loved the world; God gave to the world His only Son, that, having Him, we might have everlasting life. —E. P. Dickie.