RELIGIOUS WORLD

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

RELIGIOUS WORLD

PRESENT-DAY OUTLOOK.

(Contributed.)

RELIGION TO-DAY.

AN INTERESTING SURVEY.

"Have we any ground for expecting a revival of religion?" asks the Rev. Francis Underbill, Warden of Liddon House, writing in the London dioceean "Leaflet." The answer, he declares, is a simple one. "The revival has already begun." But there are causes for sorrow as well as grounds for hope. Dealing with the first, Mr. Underbill writes: "Many of us in London are depressed by the state of the Church, and especially of our own parish church. No doubt there are parishes where all is well and prosperous. But there are certainly others where all does not seem to be going well; where congregations are sparse, where there is a perpetual struggle to make both ends meet, often ending in failure; where whatever life there is seems to be on the point of extinction, and priest and people are depressed. The great pulsing life of the world goes on round about, and it is difficult not to think of our Church life as an unregarded backwater, left behind and forgotten in the hurry of the modern world. It seems as if the old people would not move, and so the young go away. And we dimly realise that this is true, not only of our own parish; the whole neighborhood is pretty much the same; rttfidecanal chapters and conferences try to beat up interest, but they are dull affairs, even in the opinion of those who go to them. There is, in fact, a general sense that the Church is tired.' It ia, useless to ignore these symptoms. If we ourselves are interested in our Church affairs, we cannot pretend that the public in general cares in the least •bout them." But there are also grounds of hope. There is, to begin with, a new spirit of prayer. "A few years ago a handful of. us met in the Jerusalem Chamber under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, and bound ourselves by a simple but comprehensive rule of prayer. To-day thousands whose names we know, and many more thousands of whom we know nothing, are with us. There has been no advertising, no publicity of any kind; the fact that so many have joined, and that names from every part of the world come in, shows that intelligent prayer is what men and women want. "Secondly, the new knowledge of the last hundred years has been leading, little though some people realise the fact, to a new religions spirit. The battle has been tremendous. Every inch of the ground has been contested; over and over again prominent religious men have declared that if such and euch a- new idea be admitted, it means the death of the Christian religion. And over and over . again the Christian religion has assimilated the new knowledge, and has not died—rather has been deepened and strengthened by it. "Thirdly, there is a new spirit among' the young, people. It is easy and cheap to cry out that the young.men and women of to-day are hard, shallow, irreligious. But it is at least a gross exaggeration to talk so to-day. T findV more real interest in religion among young people than at any:time of my life; and I am in a. position to see a good deal of them. ...... "And fourthly, there k the new and unmistakable movement towards Christian unity all the world over. In detail this is full of peril, and we have' to look carefully to 'our principles. But the fact that men and women no longer regard schism as inevitable, or as a duty which they owe to the particular aspect of religion they hold, k a new sign of grace."

BEADING AND STUDY.

ADVICE TO HOME MISSIONARIES.

(By the EEV. JAMES MILNE, MA)

This, was the subject for discussion recently at St David's Church, where the Presbyterian Church held its annual. Summer School of Theology for the benefit of home missionaries and ministers in the Auckland district. The subject was introduced by a helpful address from Rev. J. Hubbard, MA., 8.D., of the Bom-bey-Drury Church. Mr. Hubbard emphasised the. import* ance of study for ministerial efficiency. Reading kept the clergy Out of ruts, from which, when they fell, they could scarcely be extricated. It had been recommended to preach from experience; but even experience was > wont to run / dry. . The late Dr. White, of St. George'* Church, Edinburgh had advised ministers even to sell their beds, if without such sacrifice they could not. provide themselves > with books. Mr. H. 6. Wells, a master of fiction, had expressed hie profound won* der at what must be the annual output of journalists' and parsons. ' If ministers were to give out, to keep fresh it was obviously necessary they had to take in. "So," continued the speaker, "read, read, read!" Thus, it was contended, should the reproach of the pulpit" be largely lifted'; and the hungry- sheep about ft should not be so wont to lift up their heads in vain to be fed. How to Scad. In all reading and study, continued Mr. Hubbard, time must be turned to the best account. There should be wrestling in deep reading, and with concentration it was' wonderful -, how much useful, effective ettidy could be put into one hour. There were various methods of culling, and even preserving the fruits of extensive reading. To this end, a notebook end fountain pen were found helpful by some students, who could thus and readily not any matter worth while in each chapter of a book, or even summarise the whole. Underlining was another method, which, if done so as to conserve the continuity of its meaning, gave the contents of a book almost at a glance. Novels were approved by many ministers for reading,' especially the work of the masters of fiction, who were generally great stylists. Even a look into a modern novel occasionally was not to be condemned, as it gave preachers an idea of what their congregations were reading/ . ' *"'."'', ' ~f"..'" ' Sunday Evening and Monday. ' There were times in the minister's week. when no serious reading or study should be attempted Nothing of the kind should be touched of a Sunday evening, after the stress and strain of a heavy day's work, nor , dn; a Monday,, which was the minister's Saturday. A «nm» court, a garden, a game of cricket i for the health of a . V "s-'V '}'.'■ :.•'•'■'!■

fight the reaction of the Sunday. A spell off for recreation on the Monday had a tendency to make possible on the other days of the week much that otherwise might prove impossible. The ideal for a parson was to be in his study early of a Tuesday morning for three hours of strenuous study each working day until the Sunday. What to Read. The advice had been given to read anything and everything; but Mr. Hubbard maintained that Scripture was essential, as it was well known to all preachers that illustrations from the Bible had remarkable efficacy. He commended, too, the study of biography, as to be preferred to that of what was know as the "new psychology"; also he advised the memorising of the psalms as a wonderful aid to public devotional exercise. Sermons were not recommended for reading, save only those of the great preachers, and then only for etadj of style and production of effect in efficacy. It was deprecate t that little, scrappy treatises., on such monumental themes a 9 the Holy Spirit and Atonement were often preferred to standard works, concerning those subjects. The advice was given to read deeply rather than widely. Home missionaries and ministers alike were warned that it was not gifts akin to genius so much as hard, persevering work which in the end told in the preacher's task. The duty to which they were called was to present God to their generation, the greatest job a man could take in hand. To undertake it without prayer was to court failure, but to pray without work was presumption. CURRENT NOTES. Dr. Charles S. Macfarland, reporting to the Federal Council of the Churches of America on religious conditions in Europe, stated that he noticed an increasing movement towards Church cooperation across denominational and national lines.

It was decided at" the conference in Wellington of representatives of the various branches of the Young Women's Christian Association of New Zealand to arrange for a Chinese secretary to visit New Zealand for a period. The idea is to increase the knowledge in New Zealand of China and its people, in order to deepen the conception of world fellowship.

The progress made by the Methodist Church in the New Plymouth circuit ia shown by the fact that at a very conservative estimate the value of the properties held by the circuit, not including th» Gray Institute, is over £25,000. A new pipe organ has been installed at the Whiteley Memorial Church at a cost of £2000, all of which has been paid, with a small balance remaining.

The annual ceremony and service for blessing the, sea and for the commemoration of the drowned was held recently on the Atlantic shore, of Coombe Valley, near Morwenstow. The service-was veiry impressive. It was held on the rocky shore under thehigkmaasive diffs of the north Cornish coast and was, conducted by " the Vicar of Morwenstow. The Dean Rural of Stratton gave an address. ~ ■•..■•■.?■ >^ : ' ■-.••.

been made in Bradford CnthedMfi during the process of cleaning. The renovations in th» roof have revealed all round the chancel a number of beautifully carved oak panels, dating back to the days when artists took as much care with those parts of a church hidden from the congregation as with those which could be seen.'* • Even now that the panels have been cleaned and polished, they can hardly.be seen from below, but a dose inspection reveals that each separate panel has been given a separate design.

The Rev. Thomas H. Whelpley, of Chelsea Presbyterian Church, New York, holds that religion must seek to control men's conduct and impulses by something more vital than controversies and disputes over barren theological differences. Be told his congregation recently: T have gone with crowds to their night dubs, their gambling dena, their hall; bedrooms,, their duplex Park Avenue .apartments, and their wretched holes on the lower east side. They batter their heads against the city walls. Life gets them. Discouraged, defeated, they give up. The gutter claims them."

Dr. F, W. Norwood, writing in the London "Evening News," stated:"l hold that the greatest of our political questions—such as peace between nations, right relations between Capital and Labour, housing, education, and the removal of barriers to trade and good fellowship—can never be settled, except in what I would call a truly religious spirit. I mean by that, the very opposite of a sectarian spirit; I mean ' a fundamental conviction that the world we live in is not freak or a chance agglomeration of atoms, but the product of Divine goodwill, and that; with wisdom end fair dealing between man and man, practical politics may be, and must be, the correlative of the religion."

Dr. J. H. B. Mssterman,- Bishop of Plymouth, in a sermon preached at Swansea in connection with the Trades Union Con* gross, took for his text "Love is the fulfilling of the Law." Referring to the Churches, he said: **We have failed, because we have loved our party, our sect, or class, or our country, more than we have loved Jesus Christ. And while we go on doing that we shall always fail. But what might not the Churches do if they became companies of men and women,the supreme motive power of whose lives was their loyalty to Jeans Christ 1 What might they hot do—and I what might they not suffer, too, for loyalty to Jesus Christ means the way 1 of the Cross." Later the Bishop said: "A man who limits his loyalty to his Own class, or nation, or race, is plainly guilty of disloyalty to Jesus Christ."

In the palace garden at Ripon, the bishop on a recent Sunday afternoon addressed a gathering of cyclists and motor-cyclists. Dr. Burroughs ' spoke from the terrace of the palace, the congregation sitting on the lawn in front. He said that to be a good citizen in any walk of life a man must have a keen sense of the community, of responsibility, and in the long run people could not be good citizens unless there was the root of the Christian attitude towards God in their -hearts. It was; so easy to spend a perfectly innocent and pleasant Sunday afternoon in the open ajr, and at the end of it realise that they had not thought once of Him,whose day it was. Upon the place they were giving God in their plan of life depended whether they were going to be sense a success or a failurs jpi thfir true selves. --rWriting to correspondent states Sunday in July at Maiden Bradley is known locally as "Cyclists' This j«sr mors