PLACE OF THE CHURCH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 160, 8 July 1932, Page 8

PLACE OF THE CHURCH.

"CANNOT REMAIN SILENT." MORAL LAXITY AND OTHER EVILS. HIS EXCELLENCY'S VIEWS. "What are the place and the vocation of the Church to-day?" asked hie Excellency, the Goveinor-Geneial, Lord Blcdisloe, during his address at the opening of St. Lukes Presbyterian Church, Remuera, laet night. "Is it to remain silent, unmoved, impotent, while tho Bible is untaught in many homes, as well as in our schools?" Private prayer was falling into disuse and public worship was neglected by many professing Christians, while home lifo was being replaced by aimless and unsatisfying emancipation from domestic ties, domestic responsibilities, and sometimes from domestic virtue and conjugal fidelity. Frothy, unedifying and sordid literature, and still more sordid cinema pictures, were regarded as the normal mental recreation and intellectual pabulum of a people who justly claimed to have a higher average standard of education tluiii that of most civilised countries. Owing to moral laxity, more than one-third of the firstborn children of all parents in our midst were conceived outside the bonds of lawful wedlock. His Excellency said emphatically that the Church could not remain silent in the face of such things. Not only was the time ripe for a great awakening of vigorous Christianity and for the reinstatement of the influence of the Church in the body politic, but the message which it carried was the food for which hundreds of thousands of hungry souk in this country were, perhaps all un-j consciously, craving. On the pulpit of St. Luke's was inscribed the truest of all proverbs, "Where there is no vision tho people perish." His Excellency referred to tho fact that St. Luke's was dedicated to "the beloved physician," and said the therapeutic value of Christianity was infinitely greater than that of the drugs of the most experienced human physicians, and many of the latter now! readily recognised the fact and acted upon it. I