YOUTH AND THE CHURCHES
SIR,—May I be permitted a brief last word to my letter of November 24th after reading the correspondence in your columns and a number of letters personally received? All are evidence of a deep interest in youth, the churches, and religion itself. Most would appear to endorse the view that the essential IT is a personal sense or " knowledge" of com- munion with an author of values transcending but immanent in the material universe—the Christian belief being that, in a unique sense, Christ shed light on this possible relationship and revealed the way to its achievement. But there would also seem to be many, not personally conscious of this " knowledge," who nevertheless have convinced them- selves of its validity and accepted the Christian way of life a§ the highest.
But various once satisfying—in the then knowledge of the material universe and the origin and nature of homo sapiens—theological explana- tions and definitions have now quite obviously ceased to be convincing to many of these young (and not so young) people. The Virgin Birth, the implied geographical Heaven and Hell, the implied human per- sonification of God in such phrases as " the right hand," and the Fall are instances. These seem to them to have become inconsistent with the knowledge that, during the last r,000 or more years, honest candi- dates for truth have acquired along the different approaches of science, art and religion itself. They may be capable of subtler and more mystical interpretations. But whether that be so or not, there would seem to be a large body of opinion, even amongst the clergy, that belief in them is not a necessary pre-requisite either for the direct experience of God or the leading of the Christian life.
That being so—or is this crying for the theological moon?—could not the Church, as a whole, reverently consider whether the time has not come to embody in a Creed of to-day the essentials that it does demand for membership and then, on the eve of its approaching campaign of evangelism, announce this to the faith-hungry world in the simplest pos-
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