A METHODIST MILESTONE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18025, 25 February 1922, Page 1 (Supplement)

A METHODIST MILESTONE.

RELIGION AND LIFE.

BT UATANGA.

The celebration by the Methodist Church of the centenary of its introduction into New Zealand should do much more than inspire' that Church with gratitude and new zeal. It is an event calculated to set the whole community thinking of tho place of religion in practical Jifo.

Tho record of this particular Church is eminently notable. It had its rise in England in a day when religion was decadent and national life needed a tonic. It brought, by its enthusiasm, a new fervour into church activities, and, as that enthusiasm consolidated into administrative- efficiency, England gained a social sanity that eventually became the salt of European civilisation. To John Wesley and his associates the world owes an incalculable debt for its eighteenth-century recovery of spiritual ideals, its nineteenthcentury social emancipations, and its twentieth-century aspirations after a higher life. Other agencies have their honour, too; but tho witness of history gives a proud place to Methodism.

John Richard Green, himself a Church of England clergyman of splendid fidelity and scholarship in the last century, tells vividly in his "History of tho English tho story of Methodist origins and influence. There was sore need of a new impulse. " Never had religion seemed at a lower ebb." Thero was widespread indifference to the great questions of religion. Montesquieu wrote concerning his visit to England : "Everyone laughs if one talks of religion." Hannah More later saw but ono Bible in the parish of Cheddar, and that was used to prop a flower-. pot. Riotous life was common, yet there was no effective police. London gin shops, by placards, invited passers-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence. It was an age of irrekgion, associated naturally with licentiousness and brutality.

Methodism's Influence. But from the middle class " a religious revival burst forth at tho close of Walpole's ministry, which changed in a few years the wholo temper of English society. The Church was restored* to life and activity. Religion carried to the hearts of the poor a fresh spirit .of moral zeal, while it purified our literature ana our manners. ' A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave trade, and gave the first impulse to popular education. The revival began in a small knot of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious deadness of the times showed itself in ascetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion, and a methodical regularity of life which gained them the nickname of 'Methodists.'"

Of these students, John Wesley proved the outstanding personal force. Ho travelled and preached, organised and administered, in a way that entitles him to eminent honour as a world-'eadcr of religion. To quote Green: "The great body which ho thus founded—a body which numbered a hundred, thousand members at his death, and which now counts its members in England and America by millions—:bcars tho' stamp of Wesley in more than name.. , , . But tho Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. ' Iks action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clorgy; aad the 'Evangelical' movement, which found representatives like Newton-and Cecil within the pale, of tho Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible. In tho nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose power was seen in the disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the Restoration. But the noblest result of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of the profligate and the poor. It was not.till the Weslcyan movement had done its work that the philanthropic movement began."

A Regenerative Force. Itr was this Methodism, with its large, sane, spiritual outlook upon life, tliat came across the world within a-quarter of a century of John Wesley's death and established itself as a regenerative force in these southern lands. It took a large share in 'cleansing the spring of Australasian history and making Polynesia habitable. Its earliest missioner to this portion of the globe, Samuel Leigh, performed prodigies of toil in New South Wales—New Zealand's parent State in politics and religion—and laid personally here the foundations of Christian service by his Church to the Maoris. His associates and successors carried the enterprise to Tonga and Fiji, and met the first definite settlement of this country with the ministrations of Christian worship Now this great organisation, prospering in fulfilment of tho purposes of a founder bold and catnoiic enough to declare " the world is my parish, has become the largest Church in Englishspeaking landß, and exerts an immense influence for good in both hemispheres. _ Yet great as Methodism is, its mission -as is the case with every Church-is to nerve that which is still greater The cause of religion is greater far than all the churches; it is as vast as human needs and interests. Religion is the one creat pervasive, influential force of human affairs. Men have often forgotten its fundamental place in life. They have talked of science as if it were something diverse, even alien, whereas without a relieious spirit science lacks inspiration and insight. Philosophy, apart from religion, has faltered and fallen in its search for truth, and art divorced from it has sickened and died.

Service to Beligion. It may be now confidently claimed tha.t nowhere docs there exist human life -that is life above the level of mere animal existence—without religion ra some measure being present. Civilisation implies it, cannot be understood without reference to it, and manifests it. Burke, in his "Reflections on the French Revolution." (lit! not hesitate to say that ' relfcion is the base of civil society. Sociologists and psychologists cannot make anv headway in their study of mankind until they have yielded a spacious place to it in their thoughts An investigation of human life that left reSon out would be no more true nor profitable than the photographing 0 a skeleton as an attempt to'explain humanity. History becomes blind and helpless when it ignores religion. "History's domain," as a Regius Professor Story at Cambridge put the act "an inaugural address «reaches farther than the affairs of State. . . . It » our function to keep in view and to command the movement of ideas which are 5 the effect, but the cause,, of public events, and even to allow some priority t0 ecclesiastical history over civil. . Our historical judgments have as much to do with hopes of heaven as with public or private conduct." , It is for its service to religion T for the inculcation and culture of the infinities S human Hfe-that any and ever/Church exists If it prove faithless to the tokU has happened so on sorrowful occasion n "he pail-it must droop and perish; bnt reliron will abide, inclestruct.be and InTlf it succeed in the task: «. any measure, a Church will wonderfully con - mand the allegiance of tboee whom it .eeems satisfied ■ to serve.