FORM AND FUNCTION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 65, Issue 5492, 1 July 1942, Page 6

FORM AND FUNCTION

; lOULD DEVELOP SIDE BY SIDE “We can see changes taking place f every stage of evolution: new con- <. .ions demand new organs; form and f action develop side by side! life ; tains fresh levels of richness and of s Tictural complexity,” writes Dr C. L Raven in his booke “Lessons of the 1 ince of Peace.” Yet such changes t. e not automatic. At each level there ? e types which do not adjust thems ves, which persist in a cul de sac < being or become increasingly dej. ncrate. The march of life leaves t am by the wayside. That in these ci ys when its environment, physical

and mental alike, has been transformed by the inductive method,- the Church should find its traditional equipment out of date, is no sauce for surprise or for discomfiture. It would be absurd to suppose that intellectual formulae appropriate to the GraecoRoman world of the fourth century should be adequate to the problems of to-day; that methods of gvernment derived from the system of imperial Rome should suit a modern democracy; that forms of prayer and types of service expressing the outlook and aspirations of the fifth or the sixteenth centuries should interpret and satisfy the worshipper in the twentieth. It is obvious to any candid enquirer that they do not do so, that revision is long overdue, and that a vast mass of careful study and reverent experiment is available for the reformer.”