JAZZING NOT A SIN

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 124, 26 May 1923, Page 9

JAZZING NOT A SIN

CLERIC DEFENDS PLEASURE.

Dancing, cards, the theatre, and the racecourse, properly used, found a. defender in the Rev. G. Gordon Bell, vicar of the Church of the Holy- Sepulchre, Auckland, who addressed a women's meeting held in the Choral Hall :al Christchurch on Thursday evening, in connection with the Church Congress (states the " Sun "). "A Christian should ,enjoy the' good things of life, but he cannot be truly happy unless he has really, given himself to God. If he makes a god- of pleasure, he will very quickly lose his capacity for ' enjoyment." That was the keynote of Mr. Sell's address. Eeal Christians, he declared, should be able to laugh, and. laugh, and laugh; if they couldn't, there was something wrong with their Christianity. "If you're good, you can't have a good time, was the devil's own lie. No one could be won to Christ if he believed that by becoming a Christian he must give up the good things of life. When people said that card-playing, dancing, and the theatre were wrong, and the racecourse was the road to Hell, it .was fair to infer that their judgment was warped. " I can't jazz," he continued. "My wife has tried to teach me, but I. have failed' miserably. I have many times enjoyed a waltz, and I used to be particularly partial to a good set of lancers. They don't dance lancers in Auchlahd, and I don't know why. When a girl is putting on her frills and flounces to go to a dance she doesn't think she is doing anything evil. When she is putting on those beastly cosmetics—l don't know why girls in New Zealand use powder and spoil their complexions, but they do —she thinks she is going to have a right good time, ami she usually does. "I don't get many . opportunities of going to the theatre, but from my earliest days I have attended . theatres, and, generally speaking, there has been profit in it. There are. plays that are debasing and lowering, but such plays are the exception rather than the rule. For the majority of people a visit to a theatre is one of the best forms of rucreation, and very often they learn more from a play than from a sermon. "Again, I don't mind \ telling you— if you don't let it go any further—that I sometimes have a baud of bridge, i have never had money on a game; it would spoil the game. I have found enjoyment and recreation and have uot found any sense of sin as a result of thesa things." There was quite enough sin in the world, Mr. Bell went on, without the intervention of people who tried to invent new sins and to find sin where there was none. He wanted to Qualify all his remarks to this extent: he did I not want anyone to go away and say that he had advocated dancing and cardplaying every night. There was a time and a place for everything. Christ had suffered that men might have the power and the capacity to enjoy the good things that God had given them. Girls who went to dances every night soon found themselves jaded. Pleasure* sought as the be-all and end-all of life soon palled. No one could be truly happy unless he was* good, unless he had really given himself to God. Such a one could enter into every enjoyment without fear of falling into temptation. Those who honestly tried to live a. consecrated life would get the fullest enjoyment out of life.