MONARCHY AND CHRISTIANITY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 139, 14 June 1934, Page 22

MONARCHY AND CHRISTIANITY.

The Rev. H. K. Archdall's King's Birthday sermon, as reported in your issue of June 4, throws a new light, to me at any rate, on the character and conduct of our early kings. I wish, however, that he had specified t6 which of them he was referring when he said that "not only did the King himself recognise that his own obedience to law, human and Divine, was the way to stabilising the throne, but he taught his people to respect those principles." Does this apply to all these momirchs, or only to some of them, and if so, which? King John, for instance? I notice that the service concluded with the singing of the National Anthem: — Send him victorious, Happy and glorious. Few people bother about the meaning of words they are singing, so perhaps it did not matter muchj but it does seem incongruous that a congregation that had just been listening to a sermon on the superiority of Christian to pagan ideals ehould have lyrically proclaimed its acquiescence in the utterly antiChristian notion that the principal business of a king is to fight other kings, and that the more humiliation and suffering he can inflict on them and their subjects the more happy and glorious ho must be himself. X.