THE RELIGIOUS WORLD

Evening Star, Issue 16197, 19 August 1916, Page 4

THE RELIGIOUS WORLD

PAPAL BAN- OF DANCING. Conditions in Europe, in part created by the war, are said by a Catholic pastor to account for the banjjut upon Church dancing.by the Pope. The entire Church in foreign lands, as well as. the Church in the United States, is included in the order of tho Consistorial Congregation. A letter issued by Cardinal Farley, consistent with one issuing from Cardinal O'Connoll, 'of Boston; Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore, and 13 archbishops of America, -forbids " under severe penalty all dancing at Church entertainments, whether arranged •for already or planned for -the. future." The decree, which appears in the official publication of the Vatican, the 'Acta Apostolicto Bedis,' roads: In the last century in the- United States the custom sprang up of gathering Catholic families to balls, which used to be protracted to a late hour at night by entertainments and otheT forms of amusement. The reason and cause given for this weTe that Catholics might get 'to- know one another and become more intimately united in the bonds of love and charity. They who were used to preside over the gatherings were goneraUy the heads of some pious work, not rarely the rectors or the parish priests of churches. But the ordinaries of the places, although they entertained no doubt of the upright purpose of those who promoted these dances, still, looking at the perils and losses caused by the

growing custom, considered it their duty to forbid them; and therefore in Canon 290 of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore they laid down, as follows: "We order also that priests will take care to remove entirely that abuse in which entertainments and balls are held for the purpose of promoting pious projects." « But as often happens in human things, what was very wisely and justly ordered in the beginning gradually commenced to fall into oblivion, and the use of balls again flourished a.nd ( even spread into the neighboring Dominion of Canada. - ' ' Knowing these things, the most eminent fathers of the Sacred Consis-. torial Congregation having consulted several ordinaries of these plaoes, and having subjected the matter _ to deep study, concluded that the decision laid down by the Third Council of Balti-

moTe must be obeyed, and with the approbation of Our Most Holy Fatter Benedict XV., Pope, they decreed that all priests, secular and regular, and other clerks are absolutely forbidden to promote or foster the said balls, even though if in aid of and in support of pious works, or any other pious end; moreover, all clerics are forbidden to be present at these balls if they happen to be promoted by laymen. This decree the 'Sovereign Pontiff ordered to become a part of public law and to be observed religiously by all, everything to the contrary notwithstanding. No other decree issued from Rome has caused so much discussion ; reports the New York 'Sun.' The opinion of some is that the effect on the ChuTch finances the suspension of a means employed in' many quarters to raise money will be inappreciable, but in other directions the opinion is quite the contrary. It is said that in Chicago alone the edict will curtail the annual church revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Brooklyn ' Eagle,' calling attention to the " kindly tolerance, even to the encouragement of recreations of young people," by the Catholic Church, thinks it "distinctly unfair to call this the establishment of a 'blue law.'" Ifc goes on to compare the Catholic attitude with that of certain Protestant denominations, particularly the Methodists, who in their recent General Conference voted not to remove from the "Discipline" the express prohibition of dancing.

RELIGION AND POLITICS- G B SHAW'S APOLOGIA. The war has evoked some striking confessions of religious faith. It has comPPjJf* manv People, to reconsider their attitude to the great spiritual realities, borne of these confessions have come from Unexpected quarters. The latest, and certainly one of the most arresting, of these sfforts at spiritual reconstruction is contained in the preface which Mr Bernard Shaw has written to his play 'Androcles.' In the course of a decided'ly interesting review of this preface ' The Times Literary Supplement' states: question, then, for ns now is; Shall we adopt the Christian will and take/the Christian direction, not only in our homes, but in our Parliaments and our workshops? Shall we at last make up our minds to have a Christian aim in all things, and bo take Christ seriously at last?' That is the question which Sir bhaw puts to us in this! preface, and no one who wishes to put the question to himself can be affronted at his manner of putting it." —"ls It Christianity That He Has Come To."— | The reviower goes on 'to state that Mr Shaw has come to his unexpected ouJierence to Christianity "unwillingly and by strange ways; but it is Christianity that

he has come to, and-it startles h.ji liko a new discovery. If we say that lie is an unpractical dreamer or a dangerous revo- . lutionary, -we must say the ;amo also of Christ. " But the people who are really dangerous and unpractical are those who lead a man in a wrong direction because they tell mm that he has no sense of direction at all, and must always be tho prey of blind, forces outside him. Mr Shaw does at least believe in the human will, and this belief has led him to believe in Christianity as the only conscious and clear statement of what man wills when he does will at all. It is will and direction that matter above all tilings to man, that make the life or death of all human society. We believe that we can have an anti-Christian will and an anti-Christian direction. This is our great mistake. Whatever is anti-Christian is in its nature absence of will, absence of direction." "It leads to wars like the present, ■which some men think they want, but only because they do not know what they ■want. The very German fanaticism in this war is but a perversion of the desire for salvation entangled with egotism and not fully conscious of itself. If that depire, which drives the Germans like sheep to the slaughter, became conscious of itself and freed from egotism, it would lead them not to war but to peace." —iA Force Like Electricity.— "Mr Shaw seems to be a little ashamed of bis own admiration of Christ—he spends too much of the preface in telling us what he does not believe about Christ, in explaining that mankind for the most part navs believed nonsense about Him—hut, with all his peculiar emotional prudery, he cannot hide his emotion. Christ is to him a real person, who meant what He said. fie is ' a'<fact. % force like electricity, only needing the intervention of suitable political machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with revolutionary effect.' " The, originality and the value of the preface lie in this: that Mr Shaw does not, like many Christians, despair of the application of_ Christianity to politics. He says that Christianity can have no reality, that it cannot be believed in, until it i 3 to politics; that the Christian problem-is to apply it to politics, since without such application men cannot even begin to be Christians. The man who says that it cannot be applied to politics does not believe in it; it is to him merely an ideal; ho may wish that it was true, but .he does not think that it is. "Mr Shaw, on the other hand, thinks that it is true. He believes that the principles laid down by Christ are right biologically, that Christ did, in fact, make a scientific discovery about the nature of man and of the universe, and that mankind have hitherto failed to make any •practical us© 6f this discovery because they liAVfl not believed that it was true. They have thought that Christ told them what they ought to be, and that, no doubt, He was right, but they could not, as a society, attempt to obey His commands. But, according to Mr Shaw, He told them that if they behaved in a certain manner xesrultg would Tfory ig®

not behaved in that, manner, and the results have therefore not followed; but'that is scarcely a reason why we should say that Christianity is a failure. :

—Try-It in Politics.— "Men must believe in (liristianity enough, to try it in politics: until they do that they have not made trial of it at all. Politics are a moral activity because tiey are an activity of man; and man is either a moral agent altogether or not at all. He cannot believe that, politically and economically, he is the pvey of blind forces, but that ho becomes a responsible moral being as soon :;& >he leaves Parliament or his office and goes home to his wife and children; that he is a moral agent when [he gives sixpence to a blind beggar hi the street, but not When he pays'wages or when lie votes. That ie Mr Shaw's contention, and it is obviously true. If our society as it is makes it impossible for.-us to be Christians in most of our relations with-each other, then we must either tryto change our society by political means or pretend no longer to believe in ChrisFor either the teaching of Christ is in accordance with the nature of the universe, in which case it will work m all things; or it is not, hi which case it is mistaken, and we had better dethrone Him for Nietzsche. But as Mr b'haw contends, our experience 'of other doctrines in practice might not induce us to give the doctrine of Christ a trial : '"lt maybe that though 19 centuries have passed since Jesus was born, and though His Church has not yet been founded nor His political system tried, the bankruptcy of all other systems when audited by our vital statistics, which srive us a final test for all .political systems is driving us hard into accepting Him net as a scapegoat, but as one who was much less of a fool in practical matters than we have hitherto all thought Him.'"

A CORNISH LOCAL PREACHER. Spending the last week-end in a village in Cornwall (says a correspondent of 1 he* British Weekly'), I was fortunate in hearin- a bcal preacher of the real Billy Bray tvne Taking as his text 'Search the Scriptures/ he began by saymg that preachers were not always hke Apollos, "mighty .in the Scriptures. He then proceeded: "Now my ,1 , ',i, Ve latel y been reading a book ml lled T £° . Gos P el in Bssekiel,* wrote by lhomas Guthrie, who was once a fine preacher in Edinburgh and a Doctor o' Divinity too, and in the eighteenth chapter of his book tins great man, in grand words which read like poetry, 'shures us that before young Rebekah promised to go with old Eliezer and marry Isaac she paid a last visit to a mother's grave. Dear people if he had read the fifty-third and fifty-fifth verses of the twenty-fourth of Genesis, he would have known that her mother weren't dead, let alone buried."

ZEPPELIN DAMAGE TO CHAPEL PROPERTY.

At tho annual conference of the Primitive Methodist churches at Nottingham on June' 19 Mr John Coward, of Durham (chairman of the Commercial Insurance Company),' reported that the present year was the jubilee of the company, and that daring their career they had paid no less than £38,331 to the trustees from profits, thu3 relieving local burdens. The directors had made arrange-, nients under the Government scheme for the insurance of connexional properties against war risks, and 2,024 policies had °been issued. As soon as the German arch-fiends got into'the Midlands and committed damage a remarkable demaud was made for these policies. The oompany paid eleven claims as the result of an air raid bombardment, not for direct damage by bombs on chapels but by the breaking of windows and doors through concussion.