Excerpt from Church and Reform: Being Essays Relation to Reform in the Government of the Church of England There is no surer sign of real life, than the power of adaptation. A Church which is so stereotyped and stifi that it cannot adapt itself to changing times and to new needs and situa tions bears within itself the sentence of death. The truth of God can, indeed, never change. Q The Revelation which the New Testament con tains is final. It cannot, in the present dispen sation, be enlarged or diminished. But the manner in which its great truths are expressed may need from time to time to be modified and te - adjusted; and different ages and different lands will emphasise and make prominent different doctrines of the faith once for all delivered to the Saints; and new circumstances will bring out new teachings from the inex haustible treasury of the Word of God. For one, and not the least, evidence of the Divine origin of the Christian revelation is that it meets the infinite bravings of the spirit of man in all stages of his life, and in all periods of' the history of mankind, and that it is as well suited to the spiritual needs of the twentieth century as it was to those of the first. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.