In September 1940 an incendiary bomb set fire to the Natural History Museum in London. Two months later when the débris was being cleared it was discovered that some Albrizzia Julibrissin seeds a hundred and fifty years old had begun to sprout. Heat and hose-water had induced germination. Unsuspected life which had persisted through a century and a half was suddenly revived by the ravages of war.

Here is the eleventh Kapitel of Barth' Dogmatik, and the entitles it The Creator and His creation. Its three great themes are: God's Fatherly Providence, the “Negation” (Chaos or Void) of which He rules and against whose opposition He safeguards His creatures, and the ministry of angels. Before he passes on from the first to the second article of the creed, Barth promises a further Kapitel dealing with the ethical doctrine which rests on our understanding of God as Creator. The doctrine which he has to expound and establish in this sector of the theological field is at once the most familiar and the least secure element in the Christian outlook of modern men. We all know the kind of thing we are expected to say about God's Fatherly care. Professor Farmer's book, The World and God, gave substantial help towards saying it in the modern climate of thought. But there are plenty of signs that Christians tremble in face of the obligation to relate the vast and complex range of experience to the action of God. It becomes increasingly difficult to speak as though the wealth and variety of cosmic reality can be intelligibly related to the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ and to the action which He takes at that focal point. And what one expected from Barth was a rethinking of the doctrine of Providence on a Christological basis. What he has to say is not excitingly novel.

It is commonly accepted as a basic principle of Presbyterianism that the conduct of public worship belongs exclusively to the Minister under authority of the Presbytery. Strictly speaking the position is that matters entering into the actual performance of public worship or the administering of ordinances are the business of the Presbytery and the Minister is recognised as the executive officer of the Presbytery. What this amounts to in all ordinary cases is that there is vested in the Minister the entire responsibility for the ordering of the Service—a very grave responsibility indeed.

In the discussion concerning the doctrine of baptism two fairly clear and steady datum-points are provided by the views of the Roman Catholic and Baptist Churches respectively.

In A Recent publication, Professor Wladimir Weidlé of the Russian Academy in Paris has some things to say about early Christian Art which are of intense interest to the Church historian. Unlike the Christian artist of other ages, he declares, “the early Christian painter or sculptor made no attempt, even unconsciously, to let the form of his work answer in some degree to its specific religious and Christian content… The form in these paintings and carvings simply carries their content, and makes no attempt to express or embody it… What is most remarkable is to find this indifference not to be confined to form in the ordinary sense of the word, but to extend to the inward form—the dramatic or poetic rendering of the given subject… We find no attempt made to imagine how a thing must have looked at the time when it happened. The only peculiarity here to be seen is that the inward form is, in this art, simplified and condensed to the vanishing point; something there must be, but there is as little as possible.” (The Baptism of Art, pp. 8, 9.)

It was Gerald Heard who said: “Newton banished God from nature, Darwin banished Him from life, and now Freud has banished Him from His last stronghold, the soul.” The one thing I wish here to suggest about that dictum is this—that if for great numbers of our contemporaries the effect of Newton, Darwin and Freud has been to banish the divine, it has even more emphatically been to banish the demonic. St. Paul's “principalities and powers” and “spirit forces of evil” are now known, we are told, to have been mere apocalyptic imagination.

In Mark 10.17–31 (= Matt. 19.16–30 = Luke 18.18–30) we have a section made up of three parts: (1) the episode of the rich man who asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10.17–22).; (2) a conversation between Jesus and His disciples (Mark 10.23–27); and (3) a remark by Peter (in Matt, it has a question appended) and Jesus' reply (Mark 10.28–31). The whole section might be entitled: “Riches and the Kingdom of God”.