NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19699, 27 July 1927, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE CHURCHES AND RELJGION. "The Church, we are told, is losing contact with the masses; largo sections of the working class, especially in the cities and the industrial areas, are either indifferent to religion or openly hostile; the well-to-do are equally deaf to the call of religion, and contemptuous of church services," says the Scotsman. "It is no use their complaining of this counter-at-traction or that —girding at Sunday trains and Sunday golf, the growing secularisation of the Sabbath, and so on. Whining is not fighting. People will never be prevented from devoting six days to business and one to amusement, or five and a-half to business and one and a-half to amusement, by general denunciations of their wickedness. They do not read these denunciations, or, if they read them, they only smile. They do not feel that what they are doing is wrong; they haye no sense of the spiritual loss they are suffering, whereas they are able to give a positive valuation to the pleasure they are receiving. People will go on neglecting the observances of religion, neglecting their spiritual needs, until they are supplied with a motive for acting otherwise. In the old days, upbringing, social and family habit,. and perhaps also a deeply embedded fear of the hereafter, acted as a spur to religious endeavour. All that has changed. We are living in a new age. The religious sanctions that our fathers respected no longer hold us. It is the duty of the churches to supply new sanctions, or to re-create those of former days which can be re-created in a world that has radically altered. The churches need, as much as any other organisation, a general staff to think out ideas, and a plan of campaign, or several plans of campaign. They have able enough men to carry out the operations, but hitherto they have been content to work along stereotypod lines, whereas the making of fresh contracts demands, new or revised methods."

RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.

Very similar views of the problem discussed by the Scotsman are presented by Dr. Fort Newton, in the Atlantic Monthly. "Much of what is called religion, as usually interpreted, conveys nothing real or helpful to the average man; it contains little to link on to life as he knows it," he writes. "Its outlook is remote, its imagery alien. Its ideal and insights need to be restated in the terms of our time, in plain everyday speech, so that men can understand it, lay hold of it, and attempt to live up to it. We want finally to get rid of the idea that a bad man who believes a creed is more religious than a good man who does not. As a rule, the best men are not those who are most sure of their salvation, or think most about it. They are those who, while aware of their own failings and limitations, do not indulge in morbid reflections on their own spiritual state, but put their power into a life of love guided by truth. Many a man who has only a hazy idea of what it means to love God is really doing it all the time, in the most real way, by helping his fellows along the road. If such words seem to be trite, they are none the less true, truer by far than many a dogma; and it is by such things that we learn that religion is not a thing apart from life, but life itself at its best.**

HOME BUILDING. Discussing the social significance of the building society, in a recently-published book, Mr. Harold Bellman says building societies encourage systematic thrift by every means in their, power. "They create an incentive for saving in the minds of thousands of people to whom the normal channels of investment present no attractions whatever and encourage them to form habits which persist even after the primary object has been attained. Further, the building society investor consciously or unconsciously becomes a social benefactor, for' he is employing his surplus funds to enable his fellows to be well housed and to acquire capital value and a stake in the country. . . . Home-ownership is a civic and national asset. The sense of citizenship is more keenly felt and appreciated and personal independence opens up many an aveuue of wider responsibility and usefulness. The benefits of home-ownership are not only material, but ethical and moral as well. The man who has something to protect and improve—a stake' of some sort in the country—naturally turns his thoughts in the direction of sane, ordered and perforce economical government. The thrifty man is seldom or never an extremist agitator. To him revolution is anathema; and as in the earliest days building societies acted as a stabilising force, so to-day they stand, in the words of Mr. G. N. Barnes, as 'a bulwark against Bolshevism, and all that Bolshevism stands for.' Only a few short years ago building societies were, in the main, little knowp and purely local associations, existing more particularly to minister to the needs of the 'industrious' classes. To-day, by virtue of the indispensable social service they render to all classes of the . community, they have earned the indisputable right to . a place in the front rank of the nation's great institutions. The purely local has become tlip "consciously; gational." -