THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, MAY 26, 1906. CHURCH LAMENTATIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13187, 26 May 1906, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, MAY 26, 1906. CHURCH LAMENTATIONS.

The special faculty for looking at the dark side of things, which we call pessimism, is one that is easily acquired both by individuals and ' societies. Nothing is more easy than to see that in this world of ours neither things nor men are as food as they might be ; nothing can be much less difficult or less profitable than, in consequence of this, to spend our time in lamentations. Somewhere near two thousand years ago the folly of the men who wasted their time in praising the virtues of the past, of which they knew little, and lamenting the vices of the present, which they did little to cure, had become proverbial; and it has remained so ever since. • Yet the solemn lamentation recently uttered by a committee representing the Free Church of Scotland would seepi to show that the tendency is as strong as evet.. The worthy members of this committee have felt it to be their duty to denounce a good many things in a tone of lamentation worthy of Jeremiah, though they seem to have been a good deal less successful than he was in suggesting a remedy. The decay of the spiritual life is the text on which the Free Church authorities found their lamentations, and this they attribute, with a free-handed impartiality, to all sorts and conditions of men in modern society. The King, it would seem, dishonours the Sabbath both at Home and abroad ; society people are worldly ; workmen are irreligious ; and rationalism and Socialism are advocated and adopted by many. The Spanish marriage of the Princess En a is thrown in as a specially outrageous instance of the evil of the times ; and on the whole the outlook is pronounced to be a particularly bad one. All this, of course, is a comparative estimate, • like all the estimates of which humanity is capable. King Edward's observance of Sunday is, we may presume, too near to the standard which the Free Kirk Committee brands as " Continental and no doubt, when compared with the standard approved by John Knox, and even by Scottish society a hundred years ago, it appears extremely lax. The Spanish marriage of an English Princess, again, though it was something over which the King had little or no legitimate control, would have been prevented at any cost by Knox and his compatriots, even if it had called for the permanent imprisonment of the misguided young lady. As to irreligion, it is probably hard to separate the idea as it exists in the mind of the typical Free Kirk elder from an obligation solemnly to attend and painfully endure long church services,, chiefly remarkable for sermons long drawn out and more than sufficiently dogmatic. It is not hard to imagine for ourselves, the regretful sighs with which the worthy members of the committee must have looked back to the good old times when old and young looked upon an all-day attendance at the kirk as the correct and necessary way of obtaining a Sabbath rest. It is not so now and'in the change they can only see a flood of irreligion sweeping over society, and sapping the very foundations of all that is desirable in modern life.

A leading Scottish newspaper, we arc told, has ventured to criticise the report as showing a lack of wisdom, modesty, and common sense, and probably most people, even in the land of John Knox, will agree with the. verdict, and will dismiss the matter with a smile. This will be natural, and yet, perhaps, scarcely fortunate. The Free Kirk Committee might not be altogether -wise in reporting as they did, but there can be little doubt they were in earnest. They might not be very modest nor commonsense in their way of expressing their views; but at least they believed what they said—probably with a very strong conviction indeed ; and this quality is valuable. It may be true that no other Church would have publicly committed itself to such extreme statements and such wholesale condemnations, and yet it is probably true that religious people in many Churches take very much the same view of the situation, and are in full sympathy, if not with the denunciations, at least with the lamentations of the Free Kirk Committee. To them, as well as to the elders, the tendencies of the age appear wholly irreligious. To them the altered attitude of society, and especially of the younger generation, towards various church observances seems a dangerous, if not a fatal, sign. They look on Sunday amusements as snares of the devil, and the increase of free criticism and of Socialism as undoubted specimens of his handiwork. It is perhaps, natural that, under the circumstances, they should give way to lamentation, and yet, perhaps, it may be true that in this very tendency lies the only really discouraging features of the whole matter. Lamentation is a confession of weakness and failure, and it may well be argued that it is one quite unworthy of a Christian Church. If society is growing more worldly, there can be little doubt the Churches .are to blame for it, and the easy device of denouncing other people, from the King to the mechanic, will do little to cure the evil.

A new * Reformation f rather than a renewed lamentation is the task religious people and the Churches should set before them, And the reformation should bcgia at- hone. The age is a new one— viewer in many respects than any that have gone before it. ~ The old order of men's ideas has given place to new, and therefore to a large extent the old methods of reaching men's minds and influencing their actions must be renewed also. To lament the decay of the old Puritan Sabbath is as futile as it would be to lament the passing of the age of chivalry, with its traditions and limitations. If the Puritan Sabbath was of any ,value at a]l, it was as a means to an end. It found men earnest and impressionable from a- certain point of view, and the observance appealed to, and it may be assisted, them. It certainly does not do so to people of our race in this new era of the evolution of society, any more than the observances of the age of chivalry did to the English and Scotch people of the .Reformation period. And is it after all so very certain that there is ground for special lamentation in the matter Is i f certain that the world is more worldly and less spiritual than it was in the age of; Knox, or in that of chivalry Religion, if it is anything, must surely be a thing of every-day life and conduct, and not a thing of Sunday observances. This, at least, would seem to be the view taken by the world's great teachers ; and it is one that suggests questions as to the correctness of the.opinions held by many religious people on the subject.' The question is not one of church-going on Sundays, but of business and life throughout the week. The religious man is the man who lives well, works well, and thinks well, and it may at least be doubted whether past ages of our history were so very superior to our own in these respects. That men and society, are not by any means all they ought to be is probably as little questioned by the Socialist and the free-thinker as by the Free Kirk Committee ; the matter of real importance is not how to lament, but how to improve it. This was the original mission of the Christian Church. As we know it was largely a success at the time, but it did not owe that success to observances. If it is to be an active and not merely a protesting factor now it can only be accomplished •by adapting its methods to the needs of the time.