The young missionary, Hudson Taylor, wrote a typically earnest letter to his sister Louisa, aged 17, from Swatow in China in 1856, in which he said:

      "There is one thing I would especially warn you against . . . one of the greatest curses of the present day--the practice of novel reading. If you value your mind and soul, avoid it as you would a dangerous serpent . . . The only safety lies in avoiding novels as one of Satan's most subtle snares."

      The founder of the China Inland Mission may in fact have had no time to spend with novels, although he confesses a temperament attracted to them. But a general rule which would forbid Christians to use (or write) novels would make our understanding of his own century the poorer. For the nineteenth century novelists often give the flavour of their times better than many histories or the tedious memoirs so favoured then.

      But it seems to me that Christians are often inhibited from a proper use and appreciation of secular literature by the sort of rigorousness in moral view, which Taylor shows. While it is true that most Christians, who read at all, do read novels and a wide range of other secular literature, it is often with no serious effort to relate this material to their faith. We use the word "worldly" to raise a suspicion about something religiously. And the Scriptures contain a derogatory sense of "worldly." But the fact has not always been realised in proper focus that there is a true love of the world warranted by Scripture. God created and loved the world. "God likes life; he invented it." And too often the notion of separation from the world has been simply an unscriptural and inhuman abandonment of proper responsibility in God's world.

      I heard recently an expression of opinion that it was a matter of the greatest concern that artists and the church community in Australia were pretty much divorced. And if that is true of the general situation, it is probably accentuated within our own community. Why should this be so?

      Plato wanted to banish unruly artists from his Ideal State because they would depict aspects of life, which he thought, unedifying. They would depict men (and gods) in their baser activities, and Plato felt that this was no help in training the young, or keeping the citizens of the Ideal State hard at work. And the almost complete insulation of the church community and artistic and cultural activity in our country probably points to something of the same sort of thinking on the part of religious people. What are thought to be moral considerations cause us to keep our distance from the sort of prickly integrity, which artists of any sort must have if they are to picture the human situation as it is and not as any person or community would like it to be.

      This alienation, however, is a cause of poverty, both in art and in religion. For art can quickly become sordid and trivial when it is wholly persuaded by a modern mood to ignore the insights of religious faith. And religion becomes a private cult without the power (or the concern) to speak to real human conditions when it is uninformed by the sensitive integrity of the best artists.

      We live in one world, where the secular and the religious are aspects of the one reality. We have attempted to live in water-tight compartments: "unspotted by the world" has been interpreted as meaning "we have as little contact with the world as possible, for we have nothing to learn from it." And that sort of arrogance has nothing to do with humility or love. At an early stage in my life I had to look closely at Christadelphianism, and recoiled from it (into the College of the Bible) with the instinctive feeling, "God is bigger than that!" I later came to know and cherish the verse in Deuteronomy 32:3, "Ascribe greatness to our God." Too often we are content with second best in the service of God. And it is only by letting the highest standards of human achievement measure our offering to God and man that we will be alerted to our own shortcomings. Many films, purporting to be religious, by their shallowness, have created unfavourable impressions on anyone with any critical ability at all. One viewing of the film 'A Man is Ten Feet Tall' gave me an abiding sense of the horror of the crucifixion. For me that was a religious experience. The film, Carmen Jones, with its picture of the corruption and destruction of a human being, had the same effect on me that I imagine a morality play must have had on mediaeval audiences. It is not necessary for a film or book to be "religious" for it to speak to the deepest places of our spirits. So I am not persuaded that the Marshall-Graham-Peale type of religious literature (to mention only three names) is to be thought of as the high-point of a Christian's reading. There are a great number of modern writers who are probing much more deeply into the concerns of man and God and many of the official theologians of the churches.

      If, as I have been trying to suggest, there is a vital place for the labour of understanding the best art, within the Church, then what can be done about this among us?

      1. It is part of the work of ministers to do their homework in modern literature. John Doberstein, in an introduction to the translation of the sermons of Helmut Thielicke, 'The Waiting Father', points out that "nothing in this world is alien to this preacher," in his effort to interpret faith to contemporary life. H. E. Root says:

      "We shall have to come to terms with a world in which old patterns of morality no longer direct or inspire because they no longer have life. We shall have to admit that we have no ready answers to the questions people ask because for so long we have insulated ourselves against their questions. Christian faith has been an ark of retreat."

      Paul Tillich speaks of his whole theology as:

      "An attempt to use the method of correlation as a way of uniting message and situation. It tries to correlate the question implied in the situation with the answers implied in the message."

      It is this sort of labour that our churches, by and large, have shirked. And while responsibility rests on preachers to do more work in this area, there must be a demand from churches for it.

      2. Rising standards of education must have their fruits in church communities, so that there is a real demand for preaching that is relevant to the modern situation. Most of our churches get the sort of preaching that they are ready to listen to. A proper expectation and alertness sharpened by acquaintance with the best literature would call forth a new sharpness and clarity from the pulpit. Proclamation of the Word of God is not simply saying--it is also listening.

      3. Can we anticipate the day when we do not have to look only at secular journals for information about significant happenings on the field of literature? Perhaps the Literature Department can consider working more directly in this field, so that it is not primarily engaged in interpreting the brotherhood to itself, but in witnessing to the gospel in this world.