Article December 24, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Henry Ford, Heywood Broun, Willard L. Sperry, Charles Dawbarn

[From an article, "Free Trade in Ideas," in New Zealand Herald, Auckland, New Zealand]

It is apparent that a new spirit is coming over the discussion of theological problems. Theology is coming out into the open and stating her case with some courage before the court of modern scholarly judgment. Of this there are many evidences, the latest being the characteristically candid statements of Dr. Rashdale and Canon Barnes at the Modern Churchmen's Congress. We may differ widely from their views, but the sight of free men dealing frankly with truth, as they see it, in a free world, is refreshing to every man of open mind.

Those who would shape the public thought must not be strangers to the temper of their times. And ours is an age of intense and sincere intellectual activity. The human mind has thrown off its fetters and is rejoicing, perhaps a little boisterously, in its freedom. Religion and politics, journalism and literature, music and the fine arts are all seething with a new and almost unintelligible life. The common questions of thinking men go down to the very roots of things and open up problems of which the theologians and statesmen of yesterday scarcely dreamed. A new world has been created by the dazzling discoveries of natural science in which our father could ill domesticate themselves; and with the new world have come great shiftings of thought. We are working our way through to a new conception of the universe, but we have yet a long way to go. There are philosophic circles where doubt is going so deep that the very validity of our intellectual processes is questioned. There are thousands of reading, thinking men lost on the uncharted seas of speculative theory. Hundreds who attend the Christian churches feel that something has happened to weaken the old faith in God, in the divine personality of Jesus Christ, in the hereafter. The new atmosphere has invaded our factories and workshops. . . . Men are alert, candid, fearless in thought, suspicious of traditionalism, of obscurantism, of clerical authority.

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