WHY PEOPLE WILL NOT GO TO CHURCH.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 72, 25 March 1915, Page 7

WHY PEOPLE WILL NOT GO TO CHURCH.

(To the Editor.) Sir.—The subject of an ever-decreas-iug church membership and fewer worshippers has for decades perplexed the astutcst minds, both clerical and lay, throughout Christendom. Every means whereby the masses may be enticed to attend church and chapel have been tried with signal failure. Pealing organs, ritualistic ceremonies, beer, tobacco, pipes, and sponge cakes, with fatuitous apologetics at Rochdale, and thunders from Rome, have ignominiously failed to win adherents for the cult Christian. Various pretexts by both priests and a pious laity liave been put forward for this neglect of worship qnd church attendance. Not one correct. The reason why the ir-isses no longer favour the

"supernatural"' theories, so dear to Gladstone age and temperament, is that secularism and not Christianity is fighting the battle of the poor and suffering masses against the classes, which would keep them for ever in ignoble chains. It is undeniably secularism which is hastening on the cause of moral and intellectual freedom in every land, Spreading abroad the good news that science is beginning to formutate the laws of life, asserting in the face of all selfish institutions that human nature has a right, not merely to its daily bread, but to its daily love and joy. It is only in so far as Christianity is itself secular that it is the slightest influence upon the age in which we live.—l am, etc., BARA FOSTUS.