ANGUS CASE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 130, 4 June 1935, Page 12

ANGUS CASE.

BELATED ECHOES.

PERSISTENT OPPOSITION

ILLNESS OF DOCTOR. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, May 28. When the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of l New South Wales* met this week it received the report of the Judicial Commission on the Angus controversy, which recorded its decision last September. When the report was tabled the Rev. J. H. McGowan, who has all along led the orthodox as against the modernist section of the Church, pointed out that the report was defective in two particulars — it did not state that seven members of the commission had recorded their dissent against the h'rst clause of the judgment, and it did not mention that tiie appellants whose action had necessitated the appointment of the Commission protested against the decision and reserved ail their civil and ecclesiastical rights to carry their protest further.

Appointment of Substitute. Any attempt to move on these lines would have kindled the Angus controversy from the ashes once more, and at the suggestion of the Rev. John Edwards, one of Dr. Angus' most loyal supporters, the protest of Mr. McGowan and hia allies was included in the report, and the threatened debate on the original issue was thus averted. But Mr. McGowan made it clear that he was making this concession solely because of his personal sympathy for Dr. Angus, who is still struggling through a long and dangerotib

illness. On the question of the principles involved in the controversy his views are unchanged; and therefore when the Theological Committee recommended that the Rev. J. Edwards should take the place of Dr. Angus till the doctor is able to resume his duties as lecturer at the Theological College, Mr. McGowan returned to the charge. Speaking to the motion, he insisted that any such appointment should carry with it "the confidence of the people"; he maintained that the views held and taught by Mr. Edwards are dangerously radical and revolutionary; and he pointed to the harm, spiritual and material, already done to the Church by the dissemination of such doctrines.

In this way Mr. McGowan succeeded in making an effective speech bearing on the original question of the teaching of Dr. Angus; and oven when the appointment of Mr. Edwards as lecturer was ratified by a majority vote, Mr. McGowan still had another card to play. He gave notice of motion that lecturers on theological subjects should give an assurance in writing that they believed and would teach, in accordance with clause 2 of the Judicial Commission's finding—which reaffirms that the Presbyterian Church holds the historic Catholic faith of the Christian Trinstarian Church.