Some things aren't new...

'We should never be afraid of adventurous thought. If there is such a person as the Holy Spirit, God must ever be leading us into new truth. How would medicine fare if doctors were restricted to drugs and methods and techniques three hundred years old? And yet our standards of orthodoxy are far older than that. The ma with something new to say has always to fight. Galileo, the 7th century astronomer and physicist, was branded a heretic when he held that the earth moved around the sun. Lister, the surgeon, had to fight for antiseptic technique in surgical operations. Simpson, also a surgeon, had to battle against opposition in the merciful use of chloroform. Let us have a care that when we resent new ideas we are not simply demonstrating that our minds are grown old and inelastic; and let us never shirk the adventure of thought.

We should never be afraid of new methods. That a thing has always been done may very well be the best reason for stopping doing it. That a thing has never been done may very well be the best reason for trying it. No business could exist on outworn methods - and yet the Church tries to. Any business which had lost as many customers as the Church has would have tried new ways long ago - but the Church tends to resent all that is new.

There is a wise and an unwise conservatism. Let us have a care that in thought and in action we are not hidebound reactionaries when we ought, as Christians, to be gallant adventurers.'

-- William Barclay