Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1931, Page 23

course without any contact with religious teaching or in-
fluence.
The result is that young people who come from Church
homes too often lose all contact with the religion of their
fathers before their university course is completed, if they
have not been rendered positively hostile to it.
Our Universities have become so large and the courses they
give so numerous, that one may often obtain a university de-
gree without ever knowing from the work taken that there is
such a thing as religion. This is a complete reversal of the
original purpose of the College and University and its results
are causing real concern to serious minded men and women
who care for the future well-being of the race.
The triumphs of modern science have given us the rail-
way, the steamship, the aeroplane, the telegraph, the telephone,
the radio, the daily newspaper and a thousand other extensions
of the range of human life. Time and space have largely dis-
appeared as barriers between man and nations. The old
human groupings, the homie, the school and the Church have
been faced by the shifting, restless tides of human life and
have been profoundly modified. In short, we have changed
from a static to a dynamic age and neither the Church nor the
University has fully realized what has happened.
The Church has busied itself with its own pressing tasks of
organization, administration and ministry, leaving the task of
education to the State and other secular agencies. The Uni-
versities have carried on courses of investigation and instruc-
tion, without seeing clearly their inter-relations or significance
within the large whole. Our young people are overwhelmed
by the sheer wealth of knowledge at our disposal and flounder
about helplessly, getting an education without stopping to
think what education means for character and for life. But
all this, instead of bringing us to an impasse where we must
give up in despair, has brought us to a point where we may
make a new beginning and enter an era spiritually rich beyond
our wildest dreams. Modern education and the Christian
Church both began in the attempt to transmit the experience
of God in Jesus Christ to the whole world, and education and
religion have both been revived and enriched whenever the
race has returned to the simplicity which is in Jesus Christ.
Advancing knowledge and deepening religious life has
again brought us face to face wTith the ultimate fact of human
life, Jesus the Christ, and made it possible to evaluate and ab-
sorb that life as never before. In Him we have God revealed
in human life and human life revealed in complete one-ness
with God. “I am come” He said “that ye may have life and
that ye may have it more abundantly” and part of that more
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