THE DRIFT ROMEWARDS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 209, 4 September 1899, Page 2

THE DRIFT ROMEWARDS.

The course of addresses on the great question of tlie day—Ritualism —was continued last evening in the Weststreet Church by Mr G. Aldridge. He reviewed the position of the English Church from the Reformation down to the birth of the Tractarian Movement, which has come to a head in late years under the name of Ritualism. The English Reformation, he considered, was due more to the dissemination of the Scriptures than to political effort, although both combined in the result. That result, however, was not decided enough; men were blinded by the light of freedom, and, halting and hesitating on the path to liberty, they had left enough leaven in the lump to make trouble. The special danger in this wave of Ritualism which is inundating the English Church is that the Church is a state institution; is bishops sit in the lawmaking- chamber, and the monarch is its temporal head, therefore any question which vitally affects the constitution of the Church has a reflex action upon the British citizen, be he dissenter or infidel. There could be no doubt as to whether Ritualism did thus affect the church, and through the church the citizen for it involved British freedom, it meant turning our allegiance into a foreign channel; it meant if successful the introduction of a priestcraft that could sap national and private vigour by its powerful engine, the confessional. In short, it was a retrograde movement that would hark back to a state of things to escape from which our fathers shed their life blood. As regarding- its doctrinal significance, it was an elevation of mere anise and cummin to the detriment of the grand fundamental teachings of the Holy Scriptures—a question of garments and genuflexions as against the kingdom of God and the life and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. A sorry barter, indeed, but especially valueless when considered in the light of past experience, and when we remember that British freedom accompanies the exchange. D}d not our fathers protest against this veiy thing, that it is the same who can doubt. Rome's motto is semper eadem, and she has countenanced things in the past which to reverse now would be to deny her own infallibility, and that she cannot do. No, let us abjure her and her ways, and the ways of those who are drifting- to her, remembering our fathers' struggles, and, standing1 fast in the liberty wherewith Christ made us free, be free men in deed and truth.