Article November 26, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Willard L. Sperry, Federal Council, Zona Gale, Edward Yeomans, Sallie A. McDermott, Roscoe C. E. Brown

[Extracts from "The Disciplines of Liberty," by Willard L. Sperry]

"A well-known fellow of an Oxford college and Canon of the Church of England can write: 'I may have been unfortunate, but it is certainly the fact that I have never heard a single sermon devoted to emphasizing the all-important fact that the love of truth is a fundamental element in the love of God. To love God is to hate delusion and to long to know that which really is. The love of truth is perhaps that aspect of the love of God which is the most completely disinterested.'

"The ecclesiastic must always be puzzled and dismayed by the prophetic assurance that 'there is no church in heaven.' Such a heaven to the 'high church' mind will be a place shorn of all earth's dearest interests and tasks. With the Church abolished there will be nothing for the ecclesiastic to do. But the freeman will understand this prophecy because he will not hesitate to apply to the Church the standard by which he measures all institutions. The best and most effective institution in history is that which aims to fulfill and supplant itself by freemen. The far-seeing institution, in the forerunner's spirit, is willing to decrease just in so far as its mission is realized by an increase of true liberty. Canon Barnett used to say that no philanthropy ought exist as an organized effort for more than twenty years. If it is an efficient institution it will have realized its particular end in that time. If the end remains unrealized, it would seem that the institution has become more concerned with keeping up its own organization than with serving the world, and it had best dissolve. . . . He once said that his highest ambition for Toynbee Hall was that it might become unnecessary. The highest ambition which any churchman can have for the historical church is that it may become unnecessary. If he really stands in the right relation to religion he looks with great desire for the coming of those days of which the Lord saith: 'I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts. . . . And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me.' John Tauler says, somewhere, that the holiest man he ever knew had never heard more than six sermons in his life. When he had heard these sermons and saw how the matter stood with him he went and did as the preachers said and the matter ended there. It is because so few members of the congregation take the offices of the Church directly and wholly to heart that churches and ministers still have a work to do. A race of men like Tauler's friend would empty and close the churches inside two months! But that would be the millennium, for such is the heavenly end every true Christian institution desires."

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Signs of the Times

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access