VOICES IN CHURCH

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 4458, 17 October 1933, Page 6

VOICES IN CHURCH

CRITICISM BY REV. H. ANSON. "CLERGY WHO BLEAT AND HOWL" London, August 24. At the Modern Churchmen's Conference, at Girton College, Cambridge, the voices of some clergymen were criticised. The Rev. Harold Anson, vicar of Tandridge, Surrey (formerly vicar of Hawera and warden of St. John's College, Auckland), said that he never could make out why so many of his clerical friends who spoke with charming voices to their fellowworkers found it necessary to "bleat like sheep, or howl like dogs, when talking to God." There were many churches, he added, where the clergyman had for years felt that he had nothing either that he wanted to say or that he felt people wished to hear. Yet he was obliged by law to preach twice every Sunday, and large sums of money were used in maintaining him, which he himself knew to be of little value to anyone.

Where the clergyman had a message, and lessons, hymns and one psalm were carefully chosen, public worship still had a great attraction to both young and old, he added. In places where the congregation spent the week trying to outbid their neighbours, he confessed he did not see how their worship could be creative of anything of spiritual value. He believed that beautiful colours, shapes, and scents of flowers were a spontaneous expression of their joy in living. Even the worship of Bacchus did not consist purely of the pleasure in getting drunk, but was \ the expression also of the ecstatic beauty of the sensuous element in life. '

Kind to the Cat. Mr. Anson said that Canon Barry had poured scorn on the popular religion of "being kind to granny and the cat," but that was often a real test of genuineness. A religion of good works, however, was open to corruption. A man might build a hospital because he loved the sick, or wanted a peerage; he might become a missionary from the noblest, most self-sacrificing motives —or because he took pleasure in bossing an inferior race. Other Comments. The Rev. J. K. Nettleford, a Unitarian, of Norwich, said he thought the Church of England service was monotonous because so. much of it was the same throughout the year. Referring to the question of the attraction of public worship to the young, Miss Honor Rose, daughter of an R.N. chaplain, remarked: "I do 'not think it has any attraction whatsoever. Religion is supposed to express God through truth and beauty, we are told, but in this age of specialisation people turn to science, art, and philosophy to satisfy those needs." There was discussion on the question of innovations, such as the reading of passages from books other than the Bible. Dr. Alexander G. Cummins (New York), referring to the fact that innovations might require the bishop's sanction, said, "Some of us are in the position where if we want to do something a little eccentric we do it—and tell the bishop about it afterwards." A Witness to the Reality of God. Jn a paper on "The Church as a Divine Fellowship," the Rev. Dr. Samuel McComb, rector of the American Church, Nice, said that to-day people lived in a world that had grown more and more mechanical.

They felt themselves cogs in a vast, intricate machine. Sabatiers' famous dictum that "man is incurably religious" seemed to be refuted by hosts of people who had merely ceased to attend church but who had made up their minds that life could be lived quite satisfactorily without any belief in the spiritual world. Of these only a comparative few were professed atheists. The great mass did not deny God; they simply ignored Him. Indifference to religion was not unknown within Church, and the Church stood or fell primarily by its witness to the spirituality of life, its defence of the soul against the overwhelming weight of material things which threatened to crush out all spontaneity, all sense of life's real significance. Briefly stated, the Church as a community organised for worship was first and foremost a witness to the reality of God.