BOOK REVIEW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 282, 28 November 1931, Page 2 (Supplement)

BOOK REVIEW.

SERMONS FOR LAY READERS. It is not easy to find sermons suitable for lay readers, but the Bishop of Ely has provided just the kind of book required in "Our Church, and Other Sermons," published by Skeflington and Company, Limited. There are 55 sermons in all, and they follow the Church's year. They are short, definite, and practical. They are the sermons of a scholar, well versed in classical and historical learning, but they are also the sermons of one who would help the humblest Christian along the road of life. "Say your prayers, do your duty, and live in charity with all men" is his advice to those who would be followers of Christ. The Bishop's style may be gathered from two quotations. In a sermon on St. Alban, he says: "There are enough Christians in England to put a stop to war and intemperance and gambling and all the other social evils that exist in our midst; but the trouble is that .although there are enough Christians they are not Christian enough to do it." In a sermon preached on Armistice Day, he says: "May this yearly remembrance of our great deliverance disprove the charge that human memory is short, and keep fresh in the minds of young and old the debt which we owe, the duty set before usJ Surely the time has not come when we can think of discontinuing this commemoration, with its moving, heart-searching spell of silence, with its unique witness to the brotherhood of man and the Communion of the saints." The following from a sermon on "Citizenship" is timely: "No consideration of expediency, or desire to retain the approval of constituents, can ever justify a man in acting contrary to the dictates of his own conscience and sense of right." Here is a sentence on party spirit in the Church: "It is the party spirit which does the mischief, providing, the superior smile of, the extreme Anglo-Catholic, the denunciation of Romanism of the extreme Evangelical, and the claim to &11. knowledge and intelligence of the extreme Modernist." The Bishop does not mention that great fourth party which has been defined as consisting of all those "who are too stupid to be Broad Church, too bad-mannered to be High Church, and too unspiritual to be Evangelical." But he does say a word about those who "give the impression of hopeless ignorance" by denouncing as Popish things which have nothing to do with the Pope, and who don't . understand the real national meaning of Protestant, and use the term as one . of contempt. Not many sermons bear 'reading and re-reading so well as this volume by Dr. White-Thomson.