PLEASURE ON SUNDAYS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19891, 9 March 1928, Page 10

PLEASURE ON SUNDAYS.

EFFECT OF THE MOTOR-CAR. BEACH INSTEAD OF CHURCH. [BY TELEGRAPH. —OWN COItRESPONDENT.] CHRISTCHURCH, Thursday. In the popularity of the motor-car, the Rev. Lionel B. Fletcher, of Auckland, sees one reason for diminished church congregations. Addressing the annual assembly of the Congregational Union of JNew Zealand this evening, he declared that the motor-car was one of the most revolutionary agencies the world had ever embraced. A family was never the same after it possessed one. A man began with a humble second-hand car, but he rarely stopped there if he had an ambitious wife and children. He soon found that his whole financial habits had changed. He had to face new expenses and new demands on his earning power. But, more*, he had brought in an agency which broke up the old-fashioned lil'o to which he had previously been accustomed. " It is not long before his son gets a car, too," said Mr. Fletcher, " and in a land like America, where cars and petrol are cheap, three and four members of the family have a car each. Then the children are rarely at home. Tm-j house becomes a place in which to sleep, and sometimes in which to eat. Summer shacks can now be built, and used, because distance is nothing. Week-ends during the summer are the fashion, while populations migrate, families split up, churches are forsaken, the beaches are thronged, the hills are populated, the old sanctities disappear, and a new feverishness possesses the population. "No criticism can prevent this. Itis an accomplished fact, and the present generation accepts it as part of its life. The old idea of Sunday has practically gone—gone with the family altar, where the head of the house was the High Priest and asked God's blessing as the children gathered round the table. But there is little of the family table now, so there is no meeting place for family prayer."