HARRY LAUDER AS PREACHER.

Northern Advocate, 1 September 1913, Page 3

HARRY LAUDER AS PREACHER.

This famous music-haall artist, known all over the world, if not in person, at least through the gramaphone, is a true Scot in his regard for religion. His emphatic protest against Sunday toil and any secularisation of the Sabbath will be re-

membered by those who followed the London agitation against the Sunday opening of places of entertainment. Lately, at Bristol, he addressed an afternoon gathering in Castle Green Congregational Church. He is a lifelong friend of the minister of that Church, the Rev. George Adam, and he not only spoke on the power of sociability, but also sang "The Children's Home" and "There is a Green Hill." His text was Proverbs xxvii. 17: "As iron sharpeneth iron, so the face of one's fellow man conveys something to his neighbours." He dwelt in a homely fashion upon the value of human brightness and cheerfulness, urging that this should begin at home. No social life, he declared, was to be compared for effectiveness and beauty with that of the happy home circle. There was no friends like father and mother and sisters and brothers. "I have always lived," he said, "on the sunny side of life's street." He closed his address with an appreciation of Sunday School work and the Boy Scouts.

"I mean every work of what I say about Sunday Schools, because I went to the Sunday School myself," he said. He mentioned that he is a total abstainer, with what he called a personal contempt for the sham sociability of drinking. The twelve hundred people who gathered to hear him listened with rapt attention.