G.B.S. ON LITURGY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 127, 30 May 1940, Page 10

G.B.S. ON LITURGY.

A SCATHING CRITIC. MARRIAGE SERVICE A HUMBUG PRATER BOOK SUPERSTITIONS LONDON. Mr. George Bernard Shaw tried to revise the Prayer Book—and failed, says the "News-Chronicle." In the April number of "St. Martin's Review," he reveals that the Rev. "Dick" Sheppard once asked him to "try his hand" at the job. The Burial Service and the Marriage Service went first. The Baptism Service fared better—"there was nothing revolting in it." Of the Marriage Service he writes: — "Nothing could have been better than the simple form by which I was myself married at the West Strand Registry; but when, later 011, my wife and I attended a fashionable wedding at the earnest request of the bridegroom, we both agreed that rather than go through that ceremony we should have dispensed with legalised marriage altogether. "Intolerable." "It was not the hackneyed and entirely vulgar objection to the plain declaration of the purpose of marriage that revolted us. It was not even the falsehood and folly of dictating absolute vows on points that must obviously be conditional. "But when it came to assuming that as marriage is the consummation of original sin it must be understood on this occasion as symbolical of the union of Christ with the Church the intrusion

of sophistical humbug on the deeply serious occasion became intolerable; and I left the church swearing that nothing would ever induce me to listen to that service again."

Of the Baptism Service: '"I have been invited by both Protestants and Roman Catholics to act as godfather for their offspring, and have astonished them by replying that I could not decently oblige them in view of my disbelief in many of their tenets, and mv firm determination to do everything in my power to shake their child s belief in them." "Revision Impossible." Mr. Shaw then settled down to consider the order of Common Prayer. "I was soon convinced," he says, '"that revision is impossible. The book is so saturated with the ancient and to me quite infernal superstition of the atonement by blood sacrifice, which I believe Christianity must get completely l'id of it if it is to survive among thoughtful people, that I could not delete it without leaving the book an eviscerated corpse. The Thirty-Nine Articles,"' he says, "should be drummed out of the Prayer Book with all possible ignominy," while the Apostles' Creed "contains so many statements that in the opinion of many good Christians are not statements of f ict that it, too, had better be dropped. "All this means a new prayer book. 1 have not yet attempted to write it. and doubt whether, if I did, it would I*' accepted from such a profane fellow as I."