SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 December 1924, Page 13

SUNDAY READING.

MODERNISM AND THE CHURCH. “Blessed art thou Simon Bar Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee; "but My Father- which is in heaven. And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build nay church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” —'St. Matthew xvi., 17, 18. (Rev. A. H. Collins.) This passage has been a storm centre for centuries. Rome and Geneva have waged th?ir wordy warfare, here, and the end is not yet. Did Christ mean that Simon Peter, the (fisherman, was elevated to the position of my Lord the Poipe, or did Christ’ mean that Simon’s confession —“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God”—is the foundation truth on which the church rests?

I do not care to play Sir Oracle; but for once I am a dogmatist. “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ the Lord.” But sectarian strife is not the friend of truth. It builds systems and buries Scripture. It cares more for grammar than grace, and lives more in the roots ’of words than the reason of things. Verbal criticism is its chief instrument, and in competent hands may render signal service, but a truth-loving soul is better than all the lexicons. An unlettered saint will often seize truth, which eludes the verbal pedant. The Bible is addressed to the man and not to the critic as such. THE CHURCH OF TO-MORROW. This, however, is not my sulbject. I wish to speak of the Church of To-mor-row. Dr. Clifford says, “No cause can be strong on a sloppy and miscellaneous message. We must think ten years ahead of the time.” We should reverence the past and live in the present, •but we ought not to fear the future. He who fears change is afraid of God. What of the Church of To-morrow? Two brief words will open the way to my subject. First, the church is. I mean it exists. By church Ido not mean Roman, Greek, or Anglican; still less do I mean Presbyterian or Methodist or Congregational; but “The Holy Catholic Church,” ‘The Society of the Friends of Jesus,” as Dr. George Matheson calls it; or, to use Dr. Rashdall’s phrase, "The ideal band of brothers in Christ,” which includes the good and the true of .ill lands and ages and creeds. That church has arrived. It is here. It came forth with Christ from the sealed and guarded grave on the first Easter Day.

As you can follow the course of the Rhine'or the Rhone back through cities and hamlets, through glade and glen, till you stand betide their cradle in the snowy Alps, so you can trace the church back through the centuries from the Twentieth to the First, from New Plymouth to Pentecost. It has passed through a chequered history, sometimes rolling through the years like a fullbreasted river—pure and strong and fruitful —sometimes crawling like a sluggish dyke ecum-laden and ineffective; but, lock whenfc you will, the church is the most conspicuous object at any time for the last fifteen hundred years. Secondly, this fellowship of kindred spirits has justified its right to be. It has made grave mistakes. It has committed dreadful crimes. It has mistaken its duty, and sometimes misinterpreted its Divine Founder. It has cast out of its communion some of the saintliest souls that ever breathed and included some utter unworthy men—“By schis.n«s rent asunder, by heresies distressed.” THE CHURCH JUSTIFIED. Nevertheless, tne church has justified its right ?o be. In days of persecution it has been the asylum of free men; in times of oppression it has curbed the royal oppressor and compelled him to stand barefooted in the snow as at Canossa; when "darkness covered the earth and gross darkness the people” it kept the torch burning; when the nations were sunk in crass materialism it stood forth as the only advocate of a spiritual interpretation of life; when the State cared nothing for education the church provided schools, and when the State J ad no poor laws the church ministered to the hungry and the unsheltered. I am not thin-skinned wlienthe critic is out for scalps, but a large part of the criticism of the modern church is founded in ignorance of history; and when men assail the church they are Kicking down the ladder by which they have climbed, and when they stand aloof ind withhold their support -jnd their service, they are giving hostage to the foes of progress and freedom.

I can imagine no greater -calamity than this, that the church of Jesus Christ should cease to function in the wftrld. Who, then, would beat back the dark host of immorality? Who would supply the ideals and the dynamic of social reform? With all its faults, the church has vindicated its right to be, through twice a thousand years, and to say otherwise is to deny the facts of of history. If you are not a churchman or only a tepid churchman, you should ponder this anew. PERIL OF RELIGIOUS CONSERVATISM. And this leads me to the ipith of what 1 wish to say. The church that is and that is justified, cannot stand still. Our peril is religious conservatism, in beliefs and organisation. We say, our fathers believed so and such, and we must do the same. Our fathers worked this way and that, so must we. But Christianity is not a rock crystal, clear, rigid, lifeless; Christianity is a living seed, free, progressive, growing. There is no finality. Development does not mean destruction. The oak is in the acorn; the rose is in the briar; the man is in the child. Adaptation to modern needs does not mean disloyalty to eternal principle. You may hold the essence of the Puritan faith, and still not dress as Cromwell did. The Quaker doctrine of “Quietism” and “the Inner Light” does not depend on a granny bonnet and a grey gown. Life arrays itself in an infinite variety of forms, and the form is not the important thing, but the life. “Where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty.” Jesus “aid “When He the Spirit of Truth is came He shall lead you into all truth”; and that promise is not limited to the Apostolic Age. He still leads and inspires. God did not cease to speak with the close of the New Testament canon. “The faith once and for all delivered to the saints” does not mean! “the Apostles’ Creed” or “the Westminster Confession of Faith.” The English alphabet consists of the letters A to Z. Every line of “Paradi'se Lost” is construed out of these twenty-six

letters. All our poetry and; prose are an arrangement of A to Z, in various combinations. Would anyone say Carlyle was unfaithful to our English language because he did not construct his sentences after the pattern of .Spencer’s “Fairie Queene”?

'We are living in the twentieth century, and if we are to speak a living message to living men, and if we are to do the work of the church in our own age, we must be willing to modernise our message and our methods. The terminologv of the seventeenth century does not Jit our modes of thought, and the machinery of that period is out of date. Our task, and it is not easy, ifi to keep firm hold on the vital tilings of religion, we must be willing to modern our speech; to do the work of God with tool adapted to twentieth century conditions. A PLEA -FOR MODERNISM. The Church of To-morrow will be the church that works with Apoetolic zeal, and purity, and freedom, through men and method with the touch of modernity. There is no future for this church or any church that does not keep resolute hold on the best things in evangelicalism, and still giatefully and gladly welcome the assured results of modern scholarship. If we attach reality to Christ’s promise of the Spirit to lead us into all the truth, what right have we to stand still or walk in mortal fear of modernism? Multitudes of men and women are hostile to the church, not because they find it hard to 'believe in Jesus Christ, but because they cannot trust their fellow-men. The plain truth is, we are living in a new world. Let one example serve. Even the most thorough-going Fundamentalist cannot forbid us to believe in the new conception of the universe. Copernicus has spoken. We are compelled to see that the earth is not a flat plane with the sky over it like an inverted bowl, and the sun, moon and stars revolving for its so l © benefit. This planet is a mere speck of star dust, whirling in a moving universe of illimitable vastness. In the lig-it of this new knowledge the whole doctrine of creation has to be thought out afresh. The world is not yet made, it is being made. The world is not dead, it is a living universe. God is not an absentee landlord; He is the Eternal Spirit. “Through every living soul the glory of a present God still beams.”

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” And this new conception affects nearly all do-trine from the Creation to the Last' Advent, and we need to adjust our thinking. KEEPING HOLD OF REALITIES. Can the old faith live with the new? There is no need for a new Bible, but there is need for new readers. The Croes abides, but we need “pure eyes and Christ’an hearts” to look upon its great mystery. The -church stands, but it can only stand as it keeps hold on realities. “New occasions leach new duties, Time mikes anciert good uncouth.” If it be asked in what direction the modern world is moving, can there be any doubt ae to the answer? Simplification, democracy, Catholicity, compassion, are the words tfTat describe it. By simplification I mean the movement seen in mechanical scien'ce and in social science. Men are nnpatient of the complex. You; Edisons and Fords seek to get rid of cumbersome machines that involved friction and Joss of power. They “swap” the old for the new, if the new : s simpler in its mechanism. In social science they reject “tradition” and “precedent” and seek to find simple justice. The chufich of yesterday developed a theology that was technical and They had to do it; and I don't blame them. But we need simpler statements of essential things; yes, and fewer things called “essential.”

The val ie of a creed does not lie in the number of its articles, ibut in the strength, the purity, and intelligence of a few root principles, really believed and actually practised. We have religious phrases such a<. “The Blood of the Lamb,” “Come to Jesu's,” “the Doctrines of Grace,” and many another which mean nothing to the man on the street and a large percentage of our Christian congregations. These phrases are dear to us, and they stand for great facts, but our business is to 'cast them in forms that will icach and thrill the modern mind. THE CUMING OF DEMOCRACY. The second fact of the modern world is the coming of democracy. Of its political side 1 say nothing, save that politics ie the science of right living. But Demos arrived. His grandfather was a slave, his father was a serf; but Derao.s is a citizen. He has had a rough passage, but he is in port, and he hae come to stay. His mind is simmering with new thoughts. He wants many things and he has the right to want them. His coming is bound to affect the future in church and State. Autocracy in either is doomed. Any church that seeks to rule through privilege and caste, and draws a sharp line between clergy and laity, and sets up a Spiritual House of Lords, will be brushed aside. Demos has no time for Popes or Priests or Presbyters. The Church of To morrow must be the church of the people. “The rich and the poor meet together, the Lord is the Maker of them all.” NEED FOR UNITY. Catholicity in thought and sympathy is the third sign of the age. Whether organic union of the churches is possible or desirable, is an open question, but the spirit of unity is in the hearts of men. Our divisions are pitiful and wasteful, and the thing's whiich separate are the small dust in the balance compared with the things that unite. How great is the body of truth held in common by a truly pious Roman Catholic and a truly devout Baptist! There are a good many doubtful clauses in modern Christianity, but we have been stiffnecked in our crochets and lukewarm in our principles, and the Church of Tomorrow will reverse that, and prayerfully seek the points of contact and likeness. Our Lord really did mean something when. He prayed for oneness, and we should seek to discover His meaning. Oh! the wicked waste due to sectarian rivalry and competition! 'COMPASSION AND FELLOWSHIP. Finally, compassioness is a mark of the twentieth century. We are more sensitive to pain and wrong. We have read the story of the Good Samaritan. We have noted that Jesus cared for man’s physical state, his hunger and rags and disease. He was the Saviour of the body. Jesus was not a mono-

maniac. If men were hungry he did not give them a tract but. food. Oh! how He loved the children and their froTicsome ways! How humane He was, how broad and how brotherly! How He loved the souls of men! Yon canand have a church that is worth while, if it is onty a pulpit. It must be a fellowship.

The Church of To-morrow ? Ayill there be a Church of To-morrow? There will, if the church dares to be as simple, as democratic, as catholic and as compassionate as Christ was; but if not He will remove her candlestock and .provide some other instrument to work His sovereign will. Church of God, “Arise, shine for thy light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”