Faith, Not Sanctimoniousness, Religion’s Main Requirement

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29271, 1 August 1960, Page 10

Faith, Not Sanctimoniousness, Religion’s Main Requirement

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, July 31

“Let us try to rid ourselves of the stained-glass-window picture of Our Lord and try to see Him as He appears in the New Testament.” the Governor-General (Lord Cobham) Said in an address at St. James’ Church, Lower Hutt, this morning. “In the New Testament He was a vivid, youthful, compelling figure who, in about 15 years of life, lit a fire that was to spread all over the world and preached a Word that was to bring light into the darkest corners of the world,” Lord Cobham said.

“There was nothing meek and mild about the Man who drove the money-changers out of the temple with the lasb of his tongue. “Try to imagine the cold serene courage of the Man who turned his face resolutely toward Jerusalem, knowing what lay at the end of that lonely road. “Other creeds have come and gone, but this one lives on in the hearts of millions." Lord Cobham said there ts nothing in life that laughter does not illustrate and liven.

“The solemn people who equate religion with sanctimoniousness have done it a great disservice. “We have been plagued for the last 100 years by people who have been unwilling to accept the simple fact that the great, all-pervasive spirit whom we call God is responsible for creating all life upon this planet and perhaps on hundreds of millions of

planets elsewhere in the universe,” he said. “Man, with his pygmy brain has the colossal impudence to try to account for creation in other ways- There ts, I believe, even a bunch of simpletons who assert that all matter is mere illusion, that because a person dies, or he is merely absent, things which he cannot see, hear, smell or feel, therefore cease to exist. “They do not realise that this life is not the end but the beginning.”