ENGLISH LICENSING BILL.

Evening Post, Volume LXXV, Issue 121, 22 May 1908, Page 2

ENGLISH LICENSING BILL.

AN AMAZING SERMON. A BISHOP'S MIDNIGHT MARCH. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, 10th April. Apropos of the much-discussed Licensing Bill, I may .mention that a most amazing sermon — an outburst against the measure — was delivered last Sunday by a Church of England vicar, the Rev. Forbes Phillips, at Gorleston. He said that Christ was born in a publichouse, and had made his home for a time on what we should call licensed premises. Representatives of modern Pharisaism in the House of Commons, in obedience to orders from religious cranks, proposed to plunder a legitimate branch of English industry. Very few men were drunkards, but he had known women ruined by dress, and he had known drapery to lead many a girl to ruin. On one night during tfte week he (the yicar) visited 20 publichouses, and ho did not find a single case of disorder or drunkenness. One of jblie biggest drinking places in the world, saifl Mr. Phillips, was the National Liberal Club, and it was the headquarters of men who would close decent" publichbuses ! Was "England, he queried, 1 to 'be by honesty or hypocrisy, manliness of religious hysteria? He was told some of the bishops supported the Licensing Bill, but "more than a few of our bishops were merely political jobmasters. These bishops, of course, would not have been seen at the marriage in Cana ! The church would not accept its gospel from the House of Commons, an,d the Nonconformist conscience was not going to be set up in the place of Christ, who would not nave been accepted for the Nonconformist ministry to-day because he was not a teetotaller. The only use for the Bill, declared the preacher, was to set it to music and send it round the provinces as a comic opera, the modern version of the I "Forty Thieves." A man had a perfect right, to drink what he wished, and he refused to compromise with the Pharisees promoting this Bill. A MIDNIGHT PROCESSION. But if the Rev. Forbes Phillips could .not find any instance of drunkenness in his cruise, the Bishop of London apparently has a different experience in his diocese. The other night the bishop headed a big procession, organised by the Church Army, which marched through a squalid part of London in the neighbourhodd of Pimlico, and speaking of his experience afterwards to the boys of the Duke of York'u School, he said : "Do not despise a drunken person. I saw something of what was going on from the point of view of my midnight .march on Saturday. If you had seen at about 12.30 on Saturday about 150 of your fellow men, some of them lads who were not much older than the biggest of those iik this school, all of them half drunk and some very drunk, and men, mostly about 40, you would have seen a sight which would have stirred you up to any effort for temperance in England." Of this midnight procession, a correspondent writes : — "To adapt an expressive phrase concerning frills, there are no gaiters' on the Bishop of London. He not only approves the robust methods of the Church Army, closely modelled as they are on thoso invented by General Booth, but ho is willing to take an active share in them. Thus it. came about that about midnight for nearly an hour and a half, the ruler of the mightiest See in the world tramped at the head of ,a_ procession through the most lively purlieus of Pimlico; sang hymns with the fervour of a common 'soldier' ; shook hands with all and sundry who accosted him, and about 1 o'clock in the morning was talking straight talk to the variegated assemblage of waifs and strays who had been collected during the march. "Lightened by the glare of thirty torches, and fortified by the music of a very able-bodied brass band, the little procession — which was a pretty big procession before it had gone far ! — set out from St. Jamcs-the-Less, at 11 p.m., after a few encouraging words from the bishop, who walked between the Rev. T. Greatorex (vicar of the parish) and the .Rev. E. Rainbow. Numerous halts were made on the circular route, generally outside publichouses. A hymn was sung, a cordial invitation to attend the service 'drunk or sober' given, what time the officers of the army did spade-work in tho bars, and dug out 'cases' suitable for presentation. The women hovered on the outskirts of tho crowd beyond the rim of light made by the torches. They silently followed on when the procession moved, still keeping in the gloom. And when it halted for the last time and the announcement was made that 'men only' would be admitted to the meeting, a sigh of disappointment went up. Another injustice to women ! But it was a false alarm, and the women who followed to the church were welcomed by the bishop as 'sisters.' "

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