The Nonconformist Conscience Dr. Rushbrooke's presidential address to the Free
Church Council on Tuesday, referring to the Free Churches as a whole as " a perpetual vigilance com- mittee in the interests of social purity, healthy relations between the sexes, clean films and theatres, the sanctities of the home," is a public and unashamed—and oppor- tune—championship of the often maligned Noncon- formist conscience. But it is not the Nonconform. ist conscience of a generation ago. That conscience would have , condemned, theatres root and branch. Free Churchmen of today have the wisdom to appreciate the stage and the, screen, and ask only that they shall be clean and wholesome. It is a reasonable demand, and unfortunately still a necessary one, and it carries the greater weight in :that in this and in so many other fields Anglicans, Free Churchmen and Roman Catholics speak . with a single voice. The Free Churches have always stood for.what their name implies, freedom from authority and the dead hand of tradition (not from the living legacy of tradition), and in days when liberty is threatened, from many quarters- they still have a distiiic- tive message for their generation.
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