SINNERS IN SYDNEY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 4 February 1928, Page 7

SINNERS IN SYDNEY

“MANY IN THE CHURCH” DECLARATION BY MINISTER "There are as many pinners inside the church as outside It,” declared the Rev. T. E. Ruth, when speaking at the Pitt street Congregational Church in Sydney recently, on “Sinners in Sydney.” “The Gospel, which speaks of publicans and sinners, scribes and Pharisees, is only the leaves of the eternal diary.” Sydney offered many facilities for sinning. There were those who'Mere' lost the moment they were, released from their mothers apron-strings. Then, said the preacher, there was the type that was complete without the element of weakness—the deliberate chooser of sin. There were the righteous who despised others, self-complacent,, supercilious sinners unconscious of their own sin. This Pharisee was God ! 9 despair. Other types of Sydney’s sinners were the moralist and the social parasite. “For the final type,” Ridded Mr Ruth, “we do not need to go outside the doors. Sin is not always swaggering, blasphemous and coarse. It is sometimes gentle and mild-mannered, and comes in the guise of an angel of light into the church. How. insidious is the temptation to substitute Churchianity for Christianity !”