CURRENT NOTES.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 248, 18 October 1924, Page 18

CURRENT NOTES.

Mrs. Marke Wood, who gave the reredos to Liverpool Cathedral, also gave £25,000 for the Choir School. The Bishop of Gloucester, Dr. Headlam, was invited to be the special preacher at the General Synod of Canada, which opened ou September 24. In St. Paul's Church. Toronto, is a stone bearing an inscription stating it was taken from the ruins of the aucient monastry of lona, Scotland, founded by St. Columba, A.D. 563. The death of Augustine Matthew Betts in Goulburn Diocese, Australia, removes a connecting link with the first missionary to New Zealand. Mr. Betts was a grandson of the Rev. Samuel Marsden. The Rev. Basil S. A. Jayawardena, a Cingalese, hag been licensed to assist at et Cuthbert's, Sheffield. He is from St. Stephen's House, Oxford. A ballot of the congregation was taken, when 516 voted in favour of the appointment and 16 against. A very fine Warriors' Chapel has been dedicated at Newcastle (X.S.W.) Cathedral. This has been erected as a Dioecesan memorial to the soldiers who bore a gallant part in the great war. It is to lie known as St. Michael's Chapel Similar chapels have been dedicated at Goulburn, as well as in the new Cathedral at Liverpool. Dr. E. Stanley Jones, who spent some yeare in India doing evangelistic work amongst the educated classes, tells how a Mahommedan student in giving his address at the closing exercise in his college, said, "We must study the BibleThere are many things in our religions that need correction, and we must correct them by the Bible." Dr. R. J. Campbell, preaching at Holy Trinity Church, Brighton, said: — "Salvation, properly understood, means something far more than anything utilitarian or social, the production of good citizens, or worthy members of the family circle. It means the creation of true sanctity, the awakening in the soul of an experience that belongs intrinsically to the transcendental order of Heaven rather than of earth. If you are united to God, you are brought into living relation with eternal values that cannot be expressed in terms of this world." Mr. T. Harold Spurgeon, M.A., D.8., principal of tho Irish Baptist Theological College, recently occupied his grandfather's pulpit at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. He is the son of the late Rev. Thomas Spurgeon, who was for some years minister of the Baptist Tabernacle, Auckland. Mr. Spurgeon preached on one Lord, and said the one true bond of Cliristian brotherhood, was based not upon any human treatise, or any body of divinity, but upon the personal acceptance of, and personal attachment to, "One Lord." Aβ to the necessity of a university degree prior to entrance of a candidate to a theological college, the "Record" has the following: "This would have excluded such mcli, for example, as the late Bishop of Chelmsford, the Chap-lain-General the Bishop of Khartoum and the founder of the Church Army— to mention only those who have been trained in the Evangelical College of St. John's Hall, Highbury. The Church that lost their services would be much poorer than it now is, and it would be wrong in theory as. well as in practice to close the door to the ministry against men of this type." "I (have no time for those supercilious individuals who are condescending enough to regard religion as necessary—even if a necessary cvil —for the sake of endeavouring to maintain <some ethical standard in the world and keeping back 'the forces of spoliation and anarchy. If religion is to be upheld and patronised as a lever for the greater security of the selfish and their possessions—a kind of aoporiflc for keeping dangerous people quiet—a kind of moral adjunct to the police force, I for one would not insult Almighty God by pleading the cause of religion."—Bishop Averill in his charge to Synod. At the last Methodist Conference, held in March at Christchurch, an application was made by the officers of the Pitt Street Church for permission to arrange with come British minister of the Wesleyan Conference to take the oversight of Pitt Street in 1926. The application was granted, and negotiations have been carried on during the past three months. A selection has now been made, and an invitation has been forwarded back by the Pitt Street trustees and the circuit quarter board. The gentleman chosen is Rev. Leonard B. Dalby, who has been 32 years in the ministry. He has been the head of chief circuits in provincial cities like Bristol and Leeds, and for some years in London also. He is strongly evangelical, and is a preacher and lecturer of outstanding gifts. Hie suitability for the Pitt Street church is endorsed by Revs. Dr. Sharp and Napier Milne, both of whom were recently in New Zealand, and he is personally known to some church officers now in Auckland. The engagement will be for three years certain, and probably for five years. It is expected that Mr. Dalby will accept the invitation.