Excerpt from Ecclesia Discens: The Church's Lesson From the Age

The Sermons and Essays contained in this volume belong to many times and many places but they are connected by a common thought which runs through them all, and have been chosen or written as bearing on the question which is implied in the title of the book - Ecclesz'a Dz'sams; the Church which somehow seems to have lost the right and power to teach the world and now has to learn from it, if nothing else, at least how to become its teacher again. In other words, I have tried to study the relation of Christianity to the intellectual and social re volutions which appear to be moving every day with increasing velocity about us. A time of swift change winnows out roughly the temporal from the eternal; and in such a time it is well for the persons and institutions that can discern for themselves where truth and life lie in adapta tion to environment, and where they lie in resistance to environment. The two parts of this book offer what have seemed to me hints and helps to that discrimination in the case of the Church and Christianity. I have not tried this time 'to raise more questions than I can solve'; but I expect that will be the result of my attempts at solution.

In the first part of the book, the first two chapters deal generally with the religious unrest of the day; and the next three more specially with what is called Modernism. The two papers which follow, on the Sixth Chapter of St. John, ' and the Earliest Preaching, ' will probably puzzle some readers as to the reason of their inclusion. They are intended, not as serious critical studies, but rather as examples of the kind of interest that a very moderately equipped student can get from a reverent treatment of the Bible 'as any, other book.' In the second part, I have'to thank Mr. John Murray for his courtesy in allowing me to reprint the first paper called 'religio Pueri, ' which appeared originally in Tee mont/my Review. The titles of the remaining chapters sufficiently indicate their purpose; and a certain light is thrown, by the dates and places given, on the special conditions under which some of them were first delivered, and which have sometimes influenced the form of what is said in them.

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