SMOKING SERMONS BY A POPULAR DIVINE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9307, 9 March 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

SMOKING SERMONS BY A POPULAR DIVINE.

Ok January 21, Dr. Parker delivered the fir3fc of his addresses to working-men, between twelve and one, in the schoolroom of the City Temple. There was a tolerably good attendance when the doctor began his talk, and by half-past twelve the room was crowded. The hand-bill in which Dr. Parker announced his intention to hold four meetngs for talks to working-men nays:—" Working-men, I intend the above talks to extend over four Mondays. Come in your working dresses. If you like to bring your dinners with you, bring them. If during the address you would like to smoke your pipes, smoke them. If at the end of the address you want to ask any questions bearing upon it, ask them. Make this meeting well known amongst your fellow -.workmen, if you please. Throughout the whole arrangement do not treat me as a minister, but as a man. At the end of the four addresses we shall see whether we shall go on or stop. The matter will be very largely in your own hands." It could hardly be said that the gathering was wholly or, indeed, chiefly composed of working-men. Broadcloth was more general than cordurov, but nevertheless there was a good attendance of genuine labourers, evidently fresh from their work. They did not, however, bring their dinners with them, and there was not a single pipe to be seen. The proceedings were characterised by great decorum, the speaker's easy flow of characteristic oratory being disturbed only by ejaculations of approval, applause, and occasional " Oh, oh's." The I doctor himself evidently had some doubt as j to the character of the meeting, for his first words were, " Unless I am greatly deceived by appearances, the working-men have not yet arrived." He was met with several cries of " Here's one, 1, to which he replied, " I thought that between twelve and one we should have seen men in their shirt sleeves and paper caps, and variously marked and branded with the high order of labour. lam glad to be set to rights. I mean to have working-men here about whose genuineness there can be no possible mistake before I have finished. But we cannot do everything at once." In order that there might be no mistake about the kind of audience he wanted to attend these talks the doctor denned the term "work-ing-man,"' which he admitted was a large one. It implied, he said, a great deal of occupation, various in its quality and in its purpose, and he might have included a good many people under the designation of working-men who at present would hardly permit themselves to be so described. But what he meant were labouring-men, men who got up early in the morning and worked with their hands for a daily wage, real bond fide out-and-out working-men. Dr. Parker addressed himself to the removal of one or two "Mistakes about Preachers." He said he wished that there were a thousand Dickenses to brand with satirical scourge the Chadbands and Stigginses who falsely posed as true ministers of the Gospel, and went on to argue that a preacher deserved to be paid, although there ought to be no question of payment when he spoke to the outcast. When he was asked to make intellectual and religious provision for merchants and others, who came to the service in their carriages, why should these persons be allowed to escape from remunerating the man who had given to them his time and thought ? There were sympathetic cheers at this point from the audience, and the speaker proceeded with the admission that some ministers shut themselves up in their pulpits of cabinetwork, made after the pattern of a wineglass, and were never to be " got at." For his own part, he was there- to be " got at," and he invited honest questions, and even contradiction. There was nothing, he said, in Christainity opposed to the proper use of this world, and he denied that ministers should be "joy-spoilers." In closing his chatty discourse, he acted rather than narrated the story of a rustic who had taken his child away from school, and when asked why he had done so said, "I be no scholard myself, but I knows I'd not have my child teached to spell ' taters' with a ' p.'" This was the kind of criticism with which intellectual teachers had to contend. With an invitation to his hearers Dr. Parker concluded, as he drank to himself in a glass of water, " Hers's to the preacher who submits himself to cross-examination !" There was an immediate response, querist after querist resolutely plying the doctor with grave and knotty points as to the alleged apathy of the higher dignitaries of the Church of England to the needs of the working-man. Dr. Parker, in reply, gave the clergy credit for doing earnest work, admitted that the archbishops and bishops were not so highly paid, deprecated the introduction of partisanship, but, as a Nonconformist, finished up by affiming that there should be no Established Church.