RELIGIOUS WORLD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue LXI, 12 July 1930, Page 2 (Supplement)

RELIGIOUS WORLD.

PRESENT-DAY OUTLOOK. "RELIGION AND THE MODERN CHILE." REALITY OP LIFE. The subjoined notes are from a sermon on "Keligion and the Modern Child," preached on Sunday evening, June 22, in the Unitarian Church, Auckland, by the Rev. Wilna L. Constable. Mrs. Constable is co-pastor with her husband of the Unitarian Church, and is tlie only fully ordained lady preacher in the Dominion. The notes are as follow: — 'Tn recent years our ideas about the teaching of religion have undergone a change. We are no longer satisfied with repeating creeds. Our horizons have widened, and God, Whom of necessity we create more or less in our own image, has grown bigger and more wonderful with the accumulation _of knowledge and experience, and less like a despotic King. "We do not think of Him as the God of a chosen and select people; we strive more and more to realise Him as the Father of mankind. That has made a great differ- j ence in our teaching of religion to the child. "But 1 lie mind of man is so wonderful, and 60 harmonious in its working, that if we change our ideas about one thing it makes a difference to the rest of our thinking. And so, with the change in our thought about God and religion, there has come a change in our thought about children. The modern child is different in outlook from the child of previous generations, but there is less change of outlook among children than among grown-ups. The real change—and it is a tremendous change —has taken place, not in the child? but in the world's attitude toward the child. It is we grown-up folk who have changed in our thought about children, in our attitude towards children, and in our treatment of them. It is that change, rather than any change in the children themselves, that vre have to reckon with to-day. Think of your own childhood. Didn't you want to do the things you see the children of to-day doing? But the attitude of the grown-ups wouldn't let yon. A generation ago the world was essentially the world of grown-ups, and children were looked upon as potential grown-ups, and were coaxed frightened or punished into behaving as nearly as possible like grown-ups, consequently their longing was of the day when they themselves would be grownups, and free from tyranny.

The Children's Century. "This has been called, and with some truth, the children's century, and we are in danger of going to the other extreme, and of keeping the child so much in the foreground that he is becoming painfully and awkwardly selfconscious. The limelight is having a kind of artificialising effect on him. We are in danger of mistaking the childish for the childlike, and as w© go forward with experiments in education and life we may mistake a fairyland of makebelieve for the land of eternal youth. That is why we have so often in teaching religion to the modem child. •Before, in a world that was too grownup, we gave him facts without reaUty; to-day, in a world that has grown childish instead of > childlike, we are giving him fictions without reality; and the modern child will have neither, for he is still childlike enough to recognise realitv when it confronts him, and will not be put off with counterfeit. "We gave him facta without Reality when we tried to put Mm off with phrases, the exact meaning of which we ourselves would have been doubtful if we had been challenged to state it in everyday terms, and not allowed to itake refuge in texts and theological phrases. We have too often talked about the "teaching of the Bible," when all we meant was learning by heart, or rather, by memory, with little or no }ieart in it, texts and passages of Scripture. We gave the child fact without reality when we gave him Bible stories torn out of their setting, and tried to apply them to the child's own life without explaining to him the circumstance and time—things that make all the difference in the application of a story.

Consciousness of the Beyond. "With that kind of unrelated teaching of the Bible, the modern child tends to grow first afraid, then sceptical, and finally unbelieving. Unless you give them Bible teaching with its related Ibackground of history and circumstance, you will send children out from this world of unrelated facts, - given as Scripture, to the equally unreal world pf creeds and dogmas, and the children will all the time be missing the reality of life and of religion. For the real fairyland is not make-believe; it is the recognition by the mind that the things we can touch and see are not all,, ibut are the least of life, even as the jhouse is not the home. Fairyland is bur sense of the consciousness of the [Beyond, and it is that consciousness of jthe Beyond that is the raw material of all religion.

liittle Boy Blue, if the child-heart knows, Bound but a note as a little one may, Xdttle Boy Blue, we are all astray, Ah I set the world right, as a little one may ; Jdttle Boy Blue, come blow your horn. OUR BESETTING SIN. (By S.) Achilles was wound proof in every part of his body but one. He had one weak spot—the heel by which his mother held him when, as a child, she plunged him into the Styx, and that weak spot, the arrow of Paris one day reaching, inflicted "upon him a wound from which he never recovered. It is only one of the mythical tales upon which the youth of ancient Greece were brought up, and yet it is, and it was to thein, more than a mythical tale. It is a parable. We have all of us, our doctors tell us, a weak spot somewhere in our system, and we have all of us, our moralists tell us, a besetting sin of some kind or another, and let its arrow only touch \is and we are not long in falling. And what a variety and range of besetting sins one sees as one studies oneself and keeps an observant eye on the crowd. In one person temper, in another vanity, here a vulgar coarseness, there snobbishness. And so on. One could heap up the list. Some people have a remarkably keen eye for the besetting sins of others, but are strangely blind to their own. They are very observant of what other people say and do; they keep a less watchful eye On themselves. If you give yourself to studying your neighbour, you will, of course, remain in sublime ignorance of yourself. And great is the pity of it. It is a poor accomplishment that makes one quick and observant, and well posted jup with regard to one's neighbours, and leaves one deficient in self knowledge, j [Whatever may be our particular weak-'

ness, whatever may be our inborn defect, we should know it, and resolve and strive to overcome it. It is the Bible that tells us that if we resist the devil he will flee from us. There is hope, therefore, for the weakest and most handicapped of us in determined resistance. William Lloyd Garrison's bold announcement in the first number of "The Liberator" should be our constant announcement to ourselves all our life lone, for we shall have something of a fight all our life long. "I am in earnest. I -will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch." We ought to resolve and endeavour to promote and preserve our spiritual and moral health. Our hearts are the objects of as many temptations as there are microbes seeking to find in! our bodies a happy hunting ground, and there is always a strong current of unbelieving minds flowing against us, but, if we take advantage of the many helps provided by the prevision and wisdom of our Maker for conserving and adding to our inner strength, we shall succeed. And the ■ greatest of all helps is the presence of Christ in our heart.

CURRENT NOTES. Extensions have been carried out on the Methodist Church, Mount Eoskill, costing £000. The renovated church was officially opened last week by Mr. A. Peak, vice-president of the Methodist Conference.

The Rev. Raymond Preston, from Australia and England, will conduct a. series of evangelistic services in Auckland from July 2(i to August 20. The services will be held in Pitt Street, Dominion Eoad, and Kingsland Methodist churches.

Dr. R. G. Cochrane, the secretary of the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association, is carrying out a tour of six or seven months' duration in Africa, during which he will travel from Cairo to the Cape. The aim of the tour is to provide an opportunity for discussions with Government officials, missionaries, and others, as to the best means of combating leprosy.

Dr. L. P. Jacks and Dr. Henry Gow, states "The Inquirer," will retire next year from the staff of Manchester College, Oxford. Dr. Jacks will be succeeded as principal by Rev. J. H. Weatherall, M.A., minister of Essex Church, Kensington, and Dr. J. Cyril Flower, of Cambridge, will become senior tutor and bursar.

A book lias recently been published called "The Outcast in which the author advances the curious hypothesis that the ground on "which our Lord was condemned to death by the Jewish authorities was that He was guilty of "sorcery" and blasphemy. He was offered as a sacrifice to an offended God, and the multitude acquiesced because they were Incensed against Him for not openly proclaiming Himself the Messiah.

The Lambeth Conference which is now being held is one of a series that began as far back as 1867. Its aim is to promote unity between the churches, and to offer suggestions for the guidance of those who are praying and working for •its achievement. The Bishop of Colombo, in a pamphlet entitled "Union or Disunion," speaks of the task of reunion as "perhaps the most delicate which God has ever called upon man to accomplish."

Mr. J. J. , Jones, town missionary in Brighton, England, for sixty-one years, attained his eighty-seventh birthday on June .19, and there was a public meeting to celebrate the event. Mr. Jones' long span of service was illustrated in a striking way at a Sunday school festival held recently in the Dome at Brighton. He was invited to open the proceedings with prayer, and it was then stated that he fulfilled the same office at the Robert Raikes centenary concert in the same hall fifty years ago.

Maurice Hindus, who is a Russian by birth, has written a book which he calls "Humanity Uprooted." It is a book on Russia. He says in a preface, in which he records his observations and as the result of a year's wanderings some time ago in his native land: "The civilisation Russia is seeking to enthrone today never was on land or sea. She has no models to guide her. She wants a society without religion, with sex freedom, with external compulsions removed from the family and from love, with mental and manual workers reduced to a place of equality, and with the individual depending for his salvation, not on himself, but on the group."

The Rev. and Mrs. Lionel B. Fletcher expect to leave Wellington for San Francisco by the Makura on Tuesday. They will be away for a year, and are due back in Auckland by the Aorangi in July of next year. Among his other engagements when away, Mr. Fletcher will attend several. Bible conferences in America, and will conduct a week's mission in Chicago. In London he hopes to be present at the May meetings of the Congregational Union, and will be one of the speakers at the Christian Endeavour Jubilee in the Albert Hall. During the Rev. Lionel B. Fletcher's absence from New Zealand the Rev. Albert V. Whiting will have charge of Beresford Street Church and will occupy the pulpit.

"The best criticism," says the Rev. W. E. Gladstone Millar, "is constructive. It tends to build up a body of truth that will remain. The worth of the Bible is derived from its power to reveal truth that will remain, truth that will not be affected by varying categories of thought and altering modes of expression. The function of criticism is to enable the Bible to express that truth. . . . The truth of the Bible is the truth contained in the Tightness of a certain attitude on the part of man towards existence, the complexities of his own nature, the difficulties of human relationship, the postulate of a superior power and the fact of death,"

"One would almost think," says a writer on "Prophets" in one of the weekly Home journals, "that the mod-

ernists were prophets, for everybody abuses them, and 'there's none so poor as do them reverence.' But are they prophets? I wonder. Apain, one might be allowed to'doubt if those severely antagonistic to the modernists, the fundamentalists, the traditionalists, the literalists, could be called prophets, since they think so highly of themselves. And are the present-Jay critics of the creeds and churches prophets? Hardly, because they aTe too negative in their criticism. A prophet must come from God and lead us to God. All prophets of God* teach the same truth, and it is this, there" is one God, one Good, one Love. Love God, love your brother with all the fullness and freshness of your nature, and God will manifest Himself in you with power. They preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God as Jesus did, and live it, and prove it true."