LAND AND THE CHURCH

Evening Post, Volume XCII, Issue 75, 26 September 1916, Page 2

LAND AND THE CHURCH

At Brooklyn Baptist Church on Sunday evening Rev. W. S. Rollings gave his second monthly address on_ social subjects from a Christian standpoint. Speaking on tho land question, he said the message of the story of Naboth's vineyard, as told in 1 Kings, 21, was still hot for the nations of Christendom, and applied to many of the conditions existing even in New Zealand. Where land monopoly hiad been the means of feeding the fires of lust for gain, poverty, wretchedness, crime, and seething social discontent existed. The disintegration of the Roman Empire followed land monopoly, as the French Revolution was preceded by it. On the other hand, contentment and happy social conditions reigned where the peasantry tilled the soil. German militarism, was the- Ahab to-day in the interii—tional world-j-her oovetousness and lust for .gain, although it had despoiled and -robbed its Naboths, would yet make that nation, bite the dust as_ surely as did Ahab. The time was coming when tho universal ownership of land would bo recognised as the Divine law. At a conference hold in the church after the servico the- subject was further discussed. It was generally agreed that steps should be taken to securo the return of legislators who would oppose the alienation of the land from the common people into the hands of monopolists.'