RELIGIOUS FORCE

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 169, 17 June 1940, Page 2

RELIGIOUS FORCE

FACTOR IN SOCIETY. APPEAL BY BISHOP. “Nothing distresses me more in this new nation than the terrible neutral-, ity in religion. Everywhere I go l meet the nicest, friendliest, and kinclliest of people who say quite irankly that religion has no use for them. They come to Church noiv and. again, subscribe to its funds, and are quite sympathetic with its aims, but they are still sitting on the fence of neutrality. . Thus the Bishop of Wellington (lit. Rev. H. Holland) addressed arresting and challenging words to the big congregation in All Saints’ Church, last evening, in the course of an eloquent sermon. His Lordship had immediately preceding the above passage quoted a definition proffered by. a speaker in an Oxford Union discussion regarding religion—it could be offensive, defensive, or “sitting-on-tlie-fencive.” It was the latter attitude which the Bishop condemned in no uncertain terms. “I want to challenge you to become out-and-out Christians—it is far too risky a policy for some people, who come to Church sufficiently to become j respectable and obtain an insurance i policy for the next world, but they have a jolly good time in this world. . It is no good sitting on the fence—von must put God first—-before everything else. It will interfere with a lot of things you do on the days between the weekends—how you make your money, the sort of pleasures you indulge in during your leisure time. “[ wish the whole nation could hear something of the sterness of Christ’s words that ‘He that is not with Me is against Me.’ Ye cannot (not ye ‘must not ) serve God and mammon. Any man who sits on the fence never gets near to God or Heaven. The neutral in religion, as in everything else, always loses. SUBTLE SIN. /■ “For the regular Church-going man and woman there is a more subtle foini of neutrality—the belief that they are satisfying the demands of the Christian life when they are living decent and respectable lives. Men who have discovered what Christ really means have left that 1 country behind long ago. There is danger in the gospel of respectability—the terrible danger that it may lead us into tlie sin of the IP}] <II*IS6G. Bishop Holland said lie believed that, because New Zealanders had not observed Whit Sunday as they should, there had been lost something of what the first Pentecost had meant to the heathen world—when men were, in fact, intoxicated by the Holy Spirit in' contrast to the present dull respectability. That was the type of Christianity that must be revealed in the present crisis. “It is tragic that so many young men and women think that they have to go to a cocktail party to ‘get a kick out of life,’” His Lordship proceeded. “They can get it in the Christian life. The new world that is to come cannot begin anywhere else. Is God in your office where you do your planning, or is He out in the waiting-room? Can we in New Zealand begin right over again? The only remedy that can save the world is Christianity,” the Bishop declared. Canon G. Y. Woodward read the Lessons, and Rev. D. Y. de Candole also took part in the service. Hymns specially appropriate to the occasion were sung, Mr J. Holmes Runnicles being at the organ,