CONGREGATIONAL UNION

Evening Star, Issue 17921, 17 March 1922, Page 7

CONGREGATIONAL UNION

THE ANNUAL MEETING.

The annual meeting of the Congregational Union of Now Zealand opened at Christchurch yesterday, the Rev. F. Warner (Auckland) presiding. The report stated that the work of the various churches had been well maintained. Regret was expressed at the loss of many colleagues and workers during the year, and mention was made of the bequest of £2,000 to the pastors' provident fund by # the late Mrs Daldry, of Auckland. The Committee on Union expressed its appreciation of the courtesy and cordiality with which the Presbyterian Assembly had received its overtures. In the afternoon Professor Chilton delivered an address on ‘ Communities, Animal and Human.’ v PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

In the evening the chairman gave his presidential address on ' The Response of Church to the Cry of the Times,’ in the course of which ho said: Paul Robert has given us his inimitable panels _ representing ‘Christ in lucldustrial Life,’ ‘ Christ and the Intellectual Life,’ ‘ Christ and the Life of Nature.’ I would fain borrow a like method of craftsmanship from those men who begin in faith and work on until a. glorious sight is theirs that I might give to you in a succession of panels a of the theme before us. My first is the ‘Panel of Pleasure.’ From the cradle to the grave men are crying for pleasure. In these, days the cry seems to be rising in compass. Everywhere it parades itself, ‘there is nothing so ostentatious, so spectacular, so variegated as pleasure. The Church should not be the stern, frowning censor, but rather the guide, philosopher, and friend* in the great arena of pleasure, against which there is no Citrietian edict. Jesus Christ is nownero depicted as the censor of true pleasure. His first public act was to participate in the festivities of a marriage. Ho recognised, I think, ‘our innate love of the drama when Ho so tenderly alluded to children playing in the market place. Jesus Christ was a great diner-out, according to His biographies, and ‘ The Table Talk of Jesus’ is bright with arrowy beams and flashes of insight into human iiic which the world will never allow to die. If men and women arc. crying for pleasures that are gross, pleasures, that are cheap, pleasures that spread their banquets on the edge of then the Church must be in answer to that cry an export in unveiling the pleasures that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. In the second panel wo have ' The Cry for Rest.’ IN ever was the world so restless as to-day. The times are out of joint. We are living amid the whirl of restlessness of eager peoples. Iho storm is as wide as the world. ‘1 no whole earth quakes, and the tremor is felt in its uttermost parts; but ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,

Though much is taken, much abides. The civilisation of the past has often been built, upon the patience of the poor. The new civilisation must be built upon the equal rights of all men. The past has often witnessed the civilisation of the ammunition waggon, to use Kipling’s dictum ; but the Church proclaims a coming time when men shall learn war no more and when peace, with all its victories, shall possess the earth, and on the throne of the world shall sit One whose right it is to reign—Jesus Christ, Die Prince of Peace. The reinforcing millions of the earth are crying for rest, and these masses represent the most potent factor of the times. They demand what they conceive to be their own. On the whole they are characterised by justice and humanity, and if now and again we witness an open revolt on the part of a section of Die great mass may it not mean that an expiation is being demanded for the terrors, the humiliations, and the insults of centuries? This may be the interpretation of the cry to those who have ears to hear. The Church must never bo animated by any party spirit. It is above all parties. A merely political Church has its-doom pronounced in the very word political. It must denounce covetousness in whatever form it appears, whether in master or man, in combines or communities, in families or in empires. Tho Church proclaims the right of true life to all men, whether the low-born serf or the highest-born of earth. The Church is for the world tho refuge of rest, and the Master of the Church is tho great Restpost of the ages, and His message through the Church is:, “ Como unto Mo, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and 1 will give you rest,” This, is His answer to the cry of tho times; rest that touches the whole man and breathes over all the world, a benison which stays the throb of restlessness ; rest for the tml-wom laborer, for through it he finds that oppression and avarice, gaunt famine and poverty are gone, and there is industrial xmrest no more. Rest for tho thinker, for scowling doubt has fled, and the clouds of error are lifted from tho fair face of truth for ever, and there is intellectual unrest no more. Rest for tho lover of men, for wrongs aro redressed and contradictions harmonised, problems solved, and there is moral unrest no more. Rest for tho soul of man, for tho wranglinga of theologians havo ceased, the unscientific, the unreasonable, the narrow interpretations of the mind of tho Master' have passed away, and foolish hair-splittings aro no more, and there is spiritual rest unto tho sons of men.

My third panel is ‘Tho Panel of Brotherhood.’ Among all the discords of the world one cannot help detecting the note which is tho cry of brotherhood. Men are crying across all frontiers to their brothers for they are beginning to realise that they are tho victims of a broken brotherhood. War always breaks up brotherhood. The late Silvester Home, one of the oUlstand-' ing personalities in modern Congregationalism. used to say that he was never able to escape a great sentence in ‘ Tho Organisation of the Early Christum Church,’ by Dr Hatch—namely, that the unaccomplished mission of Christianity is to reconstruct society on tho basis of brotherhood. Surely this is the true aim of the Christian Church. It aims at a united humanity in tho fellowship and practice of brotherhood.

Then my next panel will bo one representing ‘The Cry for Certainty and Authority in Matters of God and the Soul.’ Through all the ages the soul has ever had ono supremo need-—the need of God, and side by side with this has been the consciousness that God needed man. That need has ever haunted Him. The craving for certainty and authority in religion is one of the most distinct cries of our times. The old accretions have gone; men with reverent scholarly hands have chipped away the plaster with which misguided men have sought to preserve the pillars ot truth in the m-eat temple of religion, and lo! wo aro face to face with columns of majestic splendor of wo littie dreamed. The pillars are more beautiful for being uncovered, and the temple rises to more magnificent proportions. Am 1 wrong in being proud when I say that the contribution of Congregationalism to political intelligence, to commercial morality, to philanthropic effort, to deep spiritual life has helped undeniably to lift the life of Hew Zealand to a high place amon& the provinces of our beloved Empire? If Congregationalism has done that, then it has done nobly and well, and J believe it has done it because it has*sought to follow the widest ideals, and has not preached a narrow and stunted Gospel, because it has uttered God’s evolving message to the people. While in no way have we abandoned the Child of Bethlehem, yet. we have outgrown Him, because His growing life was within us, and we have preached the Christ of to-day with all Ilia accumulated manhood of the centuries. The Church, then, must be the living Church of the living Christ if it is to give a true response to the cries of the times.

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