“DAMNED BY DECENCY”

Evening Star, Issue 19327, 13 August 1926, Page 11

“DAMNED BY DECENCY”

CiIPJSTLESS CHRISTIANS u HUMBUGS AND HYPOCRITES.” LISMORE (N.S.W.), July 29. Evangelist W. P. Nicholson made another of his characteristic addresses to a big crowd last night. Ho described ChrLstless Christians as Christians who had habits of Christianity hung about them like gifts on a Christmas tree, yet were as surely damned as any of the more public sinners. “ It’s an awful thing to get wrapped round with this smug complacency/’ ho declared. “ I would rather know that when I died I was going to hell than to die thinking I was going to heaven and then finish in hell.”

Ananias and Sapphira, he said, brought their humbug and hypocrisy into the house of God, and were stricken dead. If that game were started in the churches in Lismore next Sunday there wouldn’t be enough cof fins to bury the Christless Christians Every church would be a morgue. “ See them standing up in church next Sunday,” he said, “ saying their creed. If reverence and decorum wont for wings should be sprout ing from their shoulders. See them on Monday half naked at a ball. See them smoking like chimneys outside churches immediately after services. _ See .them waiting in a queue at the picture theatre. One day in the vestry, the next in the vestibule of hell. There are more people damned by decency and pride than were over damned by drunkenness and debauchery. “ You cannot go to heaven on your mother’s or father’s faith. Christianity no more runs in a family than wooden legs. You might have most pious parents and develop into the worst typo of religious pharisaicat humbug ami hypocrite. I believe that the devil would as soon damn you through the church as through an hotel. Ho would rather damn yon decent than damn you debased. Why should all you docent, respectable people go to hell in greater numbers than the wtorst rough-neck sinners?”