“The Bankruptcy of an Age”

Anglican prelate H. R. L. Sheppard, at one time dean of Canterbury Cathedral and canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, wrote his work The Impatience of a Parson almost two decades before the advent of the atomic age. Yet some of his statements sound as if they were written today.

“We do not hesitate to confess that the times are out of joint,” he wrote, “and the weapons we forged for our safety are broken in our hand. There is considerable confusion in the minds of those who were once our trusted counselors; the ring of confidence is lacking in their speech. The situation is the more difficult since stern reality has forced us to give up our mid-Victorian belief in an automatic progress towards perfection; as a matter of fact, it gave us up in August of 1914, and we have not yet recovered from the shock. We have been obliged in recent years, as Dr. Fosdick has reminded us, to contemplate the bankruptcy of an age which had some right to consider itself the most humanely progressive, the most enlightened and the most secure in all history.

“We have been reminded lately that during recent years twenty-four thrones have been overthrown, including those of the greatest land empires of the world. During those years we have seen the worst war that has ever taken place, costing over ten million lives; we have experienced the worst famine the world has hitherto known; and the worst pestilence known to man, taking a larger toll of life than the war itself. . . .

“We may not forget what has happened to the civilization in which we so trusted. Progress in science and education and an increase of knowledge all round have not fulfilled our hopes for them by making life safer and more agreeable for our fellows; indeed, with selfishness unsubdued, man is as much more dangerous as his power for mischief has increased. Professor Huxley was justified when he said, many years ago, that our highly developed miracles had given us a command over nonhuman nature greater than that once attributed to the magicians. We are not to be trusted with this fresh acquisition of scientific knowledge; we cannot handle it either to the glory of God or for the welfare of mankind.”

A “New and Daring Approach”?

Under the heading “Christian Family Living” a writer in The Christian Century, March 3 ,1954, discusses the Sunday school and points to the “primacy of the family in Christian education,” that the “parents are the first teachers of religion, that the faithful Sunday-school pupil spends 90 hours under the influence of his home for every hour spent in church, and that the child is available to the training of parents in those most plastic years of life when he is not in direct touch with the church at all.”

The writer further observes that in spite of these facts some denominations “act as if parents do not exist. It would be better, far better, if we disbanded the conventional ‘Sunday school’ entirely and began with a new and daring approach.” And what is that “new and daring approach”? “Put our Christian educational task where it belongs, on the shoulders of the parents, and put the church at their service.” The sum and substance of the plan that follows is to organize classes to educate the parents so that they in turn can educate their children in the home.

While this may be a “new and daring approach” for organized Christianity it is not for the witnesses of Jehovah. The modern witnesses have been doing this very thing for many years, while the Bible records that Abraham did so about four thousand years ago, not to say anything about Moses’ commanding it a few centuries later.—Gen. 18:19; Deut. 6:4-9.