Another Elizabeth City minister has the courage to raise a calm and dispassionate voice against the vicious and hateful howl of rabid Fundamentalism in North Carolina a plead for modernity and tolerance. Rev. Hilary T. Bowen, pastor of the First Christian Church of this city, says that the very life of Christianity is threatened today by ignorant defenders of the faith who are fighting for dead limbs of an ancient tree when they should be using the pruning knife.
“There can be nothing more pathetic than the self-styled defenders of the faith,” declares Pastor Bowen. “They are not defending the faith at all; they are making it ridiculous in the eyes of intelligent men and embroiling religion in controversies where she does not belong and where, out of her proper realm, she is foredoomed to defeat. Scientific problems are not matters for faith; they are matters for investigation.” Mr. Bowen goes on to say:
“Conventional orthodoxy is a curse to profess. It is like the dead and fruitless limbs of fruit trees, which should be trimmed each year from the live and fruitful parts of the tree. Permitting these dying, fruitless limbs to remain only indebts the energies of the tree to a fruitless future and dishonors the best that is lying dormant within its powers.
“Whenever and wherever the church puts down its pruning knife to rust, there you will find inefficiency, self-complacency, and potentalities lying at ease in Zion, while the hungry and thirsty souls of men wander in darkness trying to find home. Every man longs for home, just as the energetic powers of every tree strives for the best, within its possibilities.
“Christ used the pruning knife more lavishly than any other and more wisely too. He cut from the energetic forces of the religious life of his age the clogs of dead categories, threw into oblivion the chains that bound them to his age and gave the world a pruning knife, that if used will forever keep us free. . . . “
From the front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, May 21, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83025812/1926-05-21/ed-1/seq-1/
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