PRESBYTERIAN SYNOD AND DOCTRINE.

Evening Star, Issue 21845, 8 October 1934, Page 14

PRESBYTERIAN SYNOD AND DOCTRINE.

TO THE EDITOK.

Sir, —I imagine that few Presbyterians are much interested in ecclesiastical finesse of the so-called “ courts ” of the church. Prom all you hear from the layman and those represented under that name, members in the pew are wide awake to the fact that there is something gravely at fault both with the doctrine and polity or ecclesiastical “ law ” of the church. And those outside - “ organised Christianity ” feel and express their own astonishment at the evident contrast of the official machinery of the church with its written professions—the utter want of candour, the quality of “ boldness ” that recommended Peter and John, though not college-bred, to the higher critics of their day (Acts iv., 13). A Canadian monthly (the ‘ Evangelical Christian ) just to hand, referring to the malign influence of Modernism within ' the Christian Church, quotes the_ latest issue of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, which declares that Higher Criticism is doing within the'churches the work of Voltaire, Paine, and Ingersoll. ‘ Ihe modernists,” the atheists declare, ‘ arc now in control of all the larger Protestant denominations, and, working from the inside, discredit the basic teaching of Christianity in the name of Christianity.” This is not true of the people, but it is true of not a few theological colleges and of groups within the churches, who, “ by pulling the strings,” have got into the saddle, control the machinery, and direct the course.

I have no intention of carrying on an interminable argument on ecclesiastical finesse with the Very Rev. Janies Gumming and Rev. J. D. Smith, clerks of Synod and Presbytery, who are arrogating to themselves functions superior to and foreign to their proper duties as “ clerks of the court.” It is appropriate to quote from a paper of the Presbyterian Church in U.S.A., where this very subject is debated—the duties and powers of clerks: “The duties of clerk are strictly clerical in character. To him has been assigned the duty of recording and preserving transactions and giving extracts from them, and not with interpretations of the acts of the court.” It is a pity clerks here about did not recognise their own constitutional limits. The Very Rev. James Cummnig made some comment of little value on my ‘Brief Statement,’ but the exclusion of all reference to it from the ‘‘official organ” is not going to be brushed aside. People asked me whether I had referred to the committee the editor’s refusal to give a place to the commendatory notices 1 had received. I mentioned in my last that Professor John Collie, convener of ‘ Outlook ’ Committee, had put mo off. Well, since then his committee has met and (of course, in my absence) dealt with me as a vile culprit, wrong again, and send me this resolution, which ought to be pondered by Presbyterians, men and women: “The committee are greatly surprised that you should desire the hospitality of the columns of the ‘ Outlook ’for any' P ur * pose.” What do you think of thatr These men pass motions m favour of freedom of speech and Press. To keep within limits I shall take space only to say that, with almost the same mail, I received from India, from the principal of Arcot Theological Seminary, Rev 7 . C. R. Wierenga, M.A., D.D.. a “letter announcing the completion of the translation into Tamil of my whole booklet of eighty pages—a booklet, he says, ' of “ superlative worth.’’ “ Excluded from official organ.” , . . May 1 also .add that Presbyterians interested in the Angus case— ‘the gravest issue ever faced in Australia, says Professor R. G. Maclntyre, of Sydney, who occupied Knox Chuicn pulpit here for some months some years | lC r o —will find U full record of it in the ‘ Biblical Recorder,’ placed in the Athenaeum and public libraries of New Zealand and Australia. It is edited tor twenty years by that'contemptible person excluded from the “ official’organ, who signs himself below.—l am, etc., October 4. P. B. Fkasee.