Article November 11, 1911 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from James De Normandie, Walton W. Battershall, R. J. Campbell

[James De Normandie in Christian Register.]

You may say then, Is it not a time of discouragement for us all in this social and business world and this widespread and open denunciation of the church? By no means. This is to me an age of encouragement and hope. In all these deep-seated movements I read an appeal, an awakening to more of that truer spiritual religion out of which life and peace must come. The church has not failed, Christianity has not failed, religion has not failed. The difficulty is that the church does not quite know how to adjuct itself to the new conditions of thought and life. It hears the demand, loud, increasing, universal, for a truer religious life. A fierce light has broken upon it, and the light reveals how much of the same spirit which brings the world's unrest has entered the church, and it goes on in the old darkness. "The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not." But it will, and its high ideals will be made more effectual than ever, only it must still hold to its mission of presenting spiritual verities, and not be turned away to fruitless preaching or discussion of all the social activities of which the air is full. Every doctrine of the church which seems to us harsh and cruel and false, and now discredited among intelligent men, except theologians, had a natural and necessary development out of received views about the inspiration or revelation or infallibility of the words of the Bible and about the divine government; but they are outgrown, they are like some of those wharves on our old seaport towns, riddled and weakened by the lithodomi, those silent borers of the eternal seas, and the church cannot bring itself to another interpretation of its doctrines and another application of its energies. It is not making of religion what the age demands of religion. But the better life will come, and it will come in and through the church, which is girding itself as never before to bear witness to a higher spiritual life. A time comes to society, as to the individual, when the ravages of covetousness and self-indulgence can no longer be borne. If you suppose infinite goodness, you have indefinite and constantly renewable possibilities in man. The idea that human nature—you and I—can be changed, born again, is one upon which, rightly received and rightly interpreted, lies the hope of the world. No one can be a pessimist who believes that God rules in the affairs of men. Every one who in any high way believes in the fatherhood of good, must be an optimist.

[Rev. Walton W. Battershall in Churchman.]

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