The Faith and Practice of the Quakers

THERE have been many transition periods in the long history of the Christian Church, and this is not the only such period that has seemed to the thoughtful observers of the time to be critical for religion. But there are many sound reasons for the judgment that this is at least one of the most momentous of all the transition epochs through which the Church has ever passed. It can well be predicted, I think, that when the Church emerges from this period of transition, it will come forth more profoundly transformed than was the case at the Reformation, or at any other epoch since Pentecost. If that profound transformation here predicted does not occur, it will be because something much more serious than transformation has happened. If the Church is too deeply intrenched in its ancient system and dogma to adjust to the new situation which confronts us and to the expansion of truth and light now going on, then the Church will become a congealed and rigid institution, out of contact with the onward march of life and thought, left behind in the unfolding process and useless as an organ of the Spirit—a withered branch. The hundred per cent, conservative may think that he is “saving” the Church by his resistance to progress, but he is “saving” it only by a method of shrinkage and arrested development, which looks very much like another form of “losing” it. Failure to adjust to the progress of expanding life is only another way of spelling death.


The issue now before us is not merely one between the scientific interpretation of the universe and the Biblical interpretation of it. If it were solely that, it could in time be settled by the gradual process of thought, for the mind can in the end answer the questions which the mind asks. If one answer is right and the other answer is wrong, some day the right position will conquer the wrong, and truth will drive error from the field.