VAST PARISH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 170, 20 July 1936, Page 5

VAST PARISH.

SEE OF JERUSALEM

BISHOP VISITS AUCKLAND.

YOUTH MOVE IN NEAR EAST

With a parish of 200,000 square miles, a mode ot transport varying from liorse-, back to aeroplane and a Church of j some 90,000, the Bishop of Jerusalem bears a heavy responsibility; and yet the Rt. Rev. G. F. Graham Brown, who holds the see, speaks with confidence of the future of the country and of his work. He arrived by the Niagara this morning on a visit to New Zealand. | The confines of his territory include parts of Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, Trane-Jordania and Iraq. The Christian Church there numbers some 90,000, and that is about 10 per cent of the population, which comprises 45 different nationalities. The number of the languages and sub-languages :s | legion. The bishop usually makes use of an interpreter, though he knows enough of the main languages to know j whether the interpretation ie correct. j The Jews in Palestine, he said, were at present the focus of the world's attention. When he was asked about the future development of the country, he said that the Jews claimed that | they had brought into the country j j £1,000,000,000 since 1920. With capital l it should be possible to do something, j The Jewish population had doubled in the past four years, and the percentage of Jews to tlie rest of the population was higher than anywhere else in the world. Even then they numbered only 2 to 3 per cent of the total population. In one of the numbers of "Bible Lands," the quarterly publication of the Anglican Bishopric in Jerusalem, he had written that he believed that, next to the person of the King, the Anglican community was the greatest unifying force in the British Empire, if not outside it. That, he thought, was true, •particularly of such a place as his see. It was a link with what he termed the "ambassadorial" function of the Church, i As far as he could judge, there was 'loyalty in the Near East to the persoa

of the King. On the several occasions when there had been excuse to demonstrate it, that loyalty had definitely been present. He referred to the jubilee of King George V. and to His Majesty's death. On those occasions, he said, all nationalities had come forward to express, oil the first occasion profound joy, and on the second sorrow just as deep. Youth Movements in Near East. Another tliought-provoking utterance was made b t y the bishop in the April issue of "Bible Lands," in which he wrote of the unrest in the Near East. "It is significant," he said, "that demonstrations (in Egypt and Syria) were headed by students. Though youth movements have not yet gripped the countries of the Near East as they have those of Europe, yet the day is not far distant when the youth of those lands will demand an account of their steward - I ship as well from the Mandatory Powers as from their own elders."

He said that repercussions of tha ' Abyssinian war had been felt in the Near East as well as in the Far East. { Bishop Gobart, a former Bishop of Jeru- 1 salem, had been a missionary in Abyssinia before being appointed to the See of Jerusalem. Thought had been stirred by the result of the war. The function of the Church in Jerusalem, he said, was to represent the Anglicans in that city, and to minister to them, and also to bear witness to the truth of Christianity. The Church of England in the Dominion had helped the Church in Jerusalem financially, and he had come to tell Anglicans here of his work. Bishop Graham Brown is the sixth Bishop of Jerusalem, having been consecrated in 1932. He was born in Lan-choo, in the Province of Kansen, where his father was a missionary in the China Inland Mission. He succeeded Bishop Maclnnes in the See of Jerusalem.