CENTRAL MISSION.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1032, 23 January 1911, Page 8

CENTRAL MISSION.

The Central Slissiou service at the King's Theatre last evening was largely attended. In place of tho - usual address the Rev. j;. O. Blaniires gave a story recital, by Harold Begbie, telling of the fashion in which a London plumher, given over to dissolute courses, was reclaimed and transformed into a good citizen. Mr. Blamires emphasised the words with which Mr. Begbio concludes liis Siory: AY hat other-force can society devise, which will take such a man as this plumber, bred .iu drunkenness and crime, and convert him from a thief, a dipsomaniac, and a domestic tyrant, into an upright honourable aud Dure-minded citizen? Whatever conversion may be, whatever, its physical .machinery, it is religion and only religion which'can put tho machinery in motion to make a bad man a good man, a brutalised and daugerous citizen a useful member of society. The minds of politicians and sociologists should find hero in religion the oße great hope of . - regeneration, . the one single guarantee—as the whole of Tolstoy's work teaches—of a noble posterity." Pianoforte selections were capably rendered at intervals in tho servioe by Miss .Tones, of Masterton, and Mr. P. C. Newton.'