CHRIST IN THE INN

Evening Star, Issue 18339, 28 July 1923, Page 7

CHRIST IN THE INN

CHAPELS FOR HOTELS IDEA.

It may bo a lazy religion that requires chapels in hotels (says tho ‘Literary Digest ’), but there are some who behove that the idea is worthy of consideration. At any rate, John M‘‘E. Bowman, proprietor of a numbei’ of hotels in New York and other cities, announces that ho will have chapels for meditation and prayer constructed in all his hosielries. Special services will bo held in tho chapels from time to time, but the principal purpose, we are informed by Now York newspapers, is to proride a place where the guests may go for quiet worship at any hour. The innovation was suggested to Mr Bowman, we are told, by Joseph 11. Wilson, a Philadelphia attorney, author of ‘A Chapel In Every Home.’ On the hotel proprietor’s favorable decision Mr Wilson comments, as ho is quoted in the New York ‘Tribune’: “There has boron ‘no room in the inn ’ for Christ since His advent on earth, and now, far the first time in history, it has been provided. Mr Bowman’s adoption of this idea constitutes an epoch. It is one of the signs of the times for which we have' been looking. It is practical Christianity in tho largest sense of the word.”

It is a pleasing notion, thinks the Tacoma ‘Nows Tribune, 1 saying that “there is need for just such restful spots in every city. Tho churches supply them to a certain extent, but there can hardly be 100 many. ’ln providing for the spiritual ns well ns the temporal comfort of his patrons, the hotel man doubtless will add to the popularity of his hotels.” But to the Rochester ‘ Post Express ’ the plan appears “to be about (he last word in luxury in religion,"’ indicating “the existence among us of a sort of religion that is more stylo or sentiment, not real, not spiritual, not founded upon conviction.” “To persona of cxpci lence the placing of a chapel in am hotel seems almost a sacrilege, for not an hotel in tho world, no jpaltor how carefully conducted, can escape being at times the abiding place of immorality of ono kind or another.”