CHURCH AND STATE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 3, 4 July 1910, Page 3

CHURCH AND STATE.

THEIR INTER-RELATIONSHIP. LEGISLATURE HAMPERING THE CHURCH. Speaking on the relationship of Church and State at St. Paul's pro-Cathedral yesterday, the Rev. T. H/Sprott pointed out the two had mutual functions. If, for instance, the State in its function, was to attempt to regulate the whole life of every citizen, it would be obliged to assign to every citizen a policeman to be his constant companion at home and abroad, in his business and in his pleasures. And even then, who would keep an eye on the policeman? It was not tho gravest forms of wrong-doing that the State could lake cognisance of. It did not and could no') undertake to make one unselfish and generous. It punished perjury, but one could injure his neighbour in character and estate quite as effectualy — sometimes more effectively — by falsehoods that did not come within the legal definition of perjury. His method was coercion, and its appeal was to the fear of retribution. CHURCH IS PRIMARY., "Plainly," Mr. Sprott added, "the Church is primary and the State secondary in the moral sphere. If the Church were uniformly and universally successful in evoking an inner reverence for moral law, there would be no need or place for the action of the Stale. The State's whole judicial machinery might forthwith be abolished, or only so much of it retained as might afford a means of impartial arbitration, in such disputes as may from time to time arise even between good and honest men.' The judicial machinery of the State witnesses to the partial failure of the Church. It is designed, as far as may be to check the external development of evil which the Church has failed to prevent in its internal beginnings. It follows from this that it is the interest of the State sympathetically to further the work of the Church. Is this done in New Zealand ?" STATE-MADE OBSTACLES. "The State," he continued, "is not fostering the work of the Church to tha extent that in its own interests it ought to further it. If moral reverence is to ue awakened and sustained, plainly the work cannot be begun too early. It ought to be an essential a/vompaninient 1 of the education of each rising generation. But in New Zealand the State offers no genuine facilities to tne Church for the prosecution of this work. . . . I believe that it is correct lo say that at the annual conference of the Medical Association of New Zealand there was a strong feeling as to the necessity of religious teaching and influence in the schools of the Dominion. This conclusion was based on grave reasons derived from professional experience." Proceeding, he contended that what was made legal in the end was regarded as being also right. 'He instanced the Gaming Act. It was intended to be restrictive, but under the legislation passed gambling had developed and increased. Perhaps the notion, not unknown elsewhere, also obtained in New Zealand, that people had outgrown tho Christian creed and the Christian morality. If that were so, nothing more need be said — the separation between Church and State was complete — but he would fain believe that things were not yet so bad, and that there was still in New Zealand enough Christian conviction to secure that the legislation of the country should be genuinely Christian.