I want to examine briefly "the spirit of this world" in terms of our own society. Intellectually we live in a defeated age. Whatever the future will have to say about this generation, whatever tribute it will pay to its valour and endurance, it will not name it among man's groat epochs; it will never rank it with the age of Pericles, of Augustus, of Elizabeth, of Victoria, with those eras, in short, in which man has walked with confidence, shaping life according to his purpose, and sure of his future. There are "horrid faces in the gloom", and hopelessness has reared its ugly head. Why?

First because the fact of God's existence has been diligently eliminated from the thinking of the day. I commend to you the recent book of Professor Butterfield. "Christianity and History". There is no need for me to stress the authority of the professor of modern history in the University of Cambridge. And Professor Butterfield says quite simply: "It is not always realised that belief in God gives us greater elasticity of mind."

Duped by the pundits, young people sometimes imagine that faith in God commands a sacrifice of mental freedom, a circumscribing of the wits. Nothing of the sort. Life and the world are seen with greater clarity when faith in God sanctifies the mind.

It is those who refuse to make the great assumption who see facts awry. Leave out a basic fact and all manner of disaster is likely to overtake one's reasoning.

Read again Well's entertaining fantasy, The Kingdom of the Blind. The newcomer to the Andean valley was quite unable to talk to the blind inhabitants. His language, rich in the terminology of sight, meant nothing to them. They lacked a dimension of the mind.

The best minds, if firmly determined to follow an atheistic pattern of thought, can be similarly bemused.

Biblical View of Nature

The second basic fact which the common thinking of our age refuses to entertain is the Biblical view of human nature. Frustration in more than one sphere is inevitable when basically corrupt creatures are treated as fundamentally good. A recent book of essays of that great classicist, Cornford, contains a paper entitled "The Unwritten Philosophy". Cornford takes a somewhat pessimistic attitude towards philosophy in general, suggesting that most systems are finally based on what the philosopher desires to be true.

There is vast significance in the unrevealed premise. There is safety in remembering that fact when you hear more, than one persuasive voice. Behind much of the philosophy of our day lies a vast human desire to be independent of a creator, and to exalt a creature who has little to commend him.

Unchallenged Conscience

Much of our confusion in our thinking springs from the desire to find an early explanation of the universe which does not demand too much discipline of life and which leaves the conscience unchallenged. This desire, and its products in damaging and vitiated thought, can be traced back to Voltaire—back indeed to the Sophists, for Aristophanes wrote his entertaining comedy The Clouds to satirise this very phenomenon.

Philosophy has its social reflection. Surely, as Wells was constrained to admit, man is "at the end of his tether," Hither has his thinking led him.

Perhaps a return to the point where he abandoned God as an element in his thinking, and on exploration of the road which takes God and His Word into solid account, might remove the confusion from life and thought. Thoreau remarked long ago that men generally are living "lives of quiet desperation". The word is truer every day. The alcholism of the day, its escapist literature, its hectic tone, are symptoms of minds adrift, betrayed by the leaders of thought.

Rationalists

Wells, Shaw and Russell and a dozen others have done their work well.

Their eloquent expression of the spirit of the age has blinded the minds of those who do not believe and prevented the light of the glorious gospel of Christ from shining to them. Who can teach Latin to those who resolutely refuse to believe that inflections can produce a pattern of sense? Who can teach arithemetic to those determined to reject their multiplication tables ? Who can bring to repentance those firmly fixed in mind against the existence of Cod and the fact of human sin? Emotionally the age is in petulant rebellion, which manifests itself in a dozen ways.

Revolt Against Rhythm

Consider the revolt against rhythm in poetry and music. Rhythm is biologically based and is part of the divine scheme of things. In art the some spirit produces distortion of basic realities and corruptions of nature. In his novel "That Hideous Strength", C. S. Lewis shows the diabolists who seek to rule England at work on a human soul. Part of the corrupting process is the destruction in the mind of all that is straight, orderly and disciplined; meditation in a room which, in a dozen clever and subtle ways, violates human order is a feature of the training.

Meaningless Drivel

The meaningless drivel which often passes for poetry today shows the ultimate stage in this process of corruption. Break down the vision of the straight and true In form, and the straight and true in thought will follow.

As an example chosen at random, read Rimband's Hunters of Lice. Such shocking nonsense is the product of a mind no longer able to conceive the beautiful and which has last the vision of the clean and straight.

It is the same with music. Those who have gone on long enough listening to modern five prefer it, because there is a subtle unhealthiness and immorality at the heart of it, the end result of a rebellion against order and its fundamental truth.

Order

No scientist could proceed far with his investigations without a belief that order is basic in the scheme of things. Order is of God. The emotional revolt against order is in essence a revolt against Cod. It springs from that hatred of all discipline which is the last corruption of human nature. As it is impossible to bring to faith those who refuse to entertain the possibility of a God, so it is impossible to make Christians out of the petulantly self-assertive and the emotionally rebellious.

"The Spirit Of The World . . ."

Intellectually and emotionally the Christian only can be mature, He only has accepted the premises necessary for clear thought and mental and moral discipline.

For the Christian in this bewildered age there is a stability of mind and a clarity of vision all others lack.

This article is re-printed from a paper produced for the 1953 mission in Melbourne University.