WORLD FRANKLY PAGAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20343, 26 August 1929, Page 13

WORLD FRANKLY PAGAN.

AN OPTIMISTIC DIVINE. | TREMENDOUS OPPORTUNITY. That the Church has a much greater opportunity now that it is faced bv a frankly pagan world than it had during the church-going nineteenth century was an opinion expressed by Dr. W P>. Sclbie. principal of Mansfield College. Oxford. in a recent address on "The Christian Doctrine of Salvation." at the annual ((-inference of Congregational ministers at. the college. "We live in very strange times." he said. "We always say that, but often without any idea of what we mean. We are reproducing to-da\ the situation of the early Church. The early Church was up against a pagan woild. and we aie tip against a pagan world today. "Fifty years ago it was respectable to be a Christian: everybody went to church, not because they wanted to. but because it was respectable to do so. Rut to-day wp are much more in the position of the earlv Christians—faced by a frankly pagan world. People have no u>c for Christianity, and that is going to give us a tremendous opportunity if we only know how to take it.

"It is a far greater opportunity than we had 50 years ago. when everybody was smug and used pious phrases, but when the Christian Church was unsound at the core. If we can only get people to belong to the Church to-day it really ought to mean something. It is possible for us to recreate theology, and in a form which will really take hold of intelligent people.

"I wish we were doing it much more than wo are. You can learn a great deal from the study of the medieval mystics, for their situation was very similar to ours."

-At smother point Dr. Selbie said: "'Theological labels are no more trustworthy than the labels on tins of jam or fruit; you have no more certainly that they mean what they appear to mean."