ABSENCE FROM CHURCH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21878, 14 August 1934, Page 12

ABSENCE FROM CHURCH

EXCUSES OF CHRISTIANS REFERENCES BY CLERGYMAN • Tho Dean of Rochester, Dr. F. L. Underbill, contended in a recent address that people who did not go to church on Sundays were often ns sincere Christians as those who did. Ho went on to argue* however, that there was nothing in lifo comparable to the power to pray both publicly and privately. It was the exercise of the highest human power. The Dean was speaking in Rochester Cathedral to delegates attending the annual conference of the Church of England Men's Society. Ho said that all his audience had scores of friends who were good Christians but were not churchgoers. When asked tho reason some said they found God or preferred to worship while at the fireside at home or during a walk in the Their reasons at first sight seemed convincing, and sometimes they accused those who tried to persuade them to go to church of being narrow-minded. Certain people, the dean said, tried to persuade them to believe that whereas tho Evangelicals found God most closely and certainly in private and in secret. Roman Catholics did so in public and corporate worship. That argument sounded very pretty, but he did not think it was the least bit true, because every Christian knew that God could be found in both. There were extremes of temperament on both sides, but public worship was an obligation. The Bishop of Rochester, Dr. Martin Linton Smith, said that one of tin? greatest difficulties the Church had to contend with to-day was the multiplicity of interests which every section ol the eoiuinimitv had at its command. Tie did not think there was hostility to the Church, or any deliberato indifference. but ho thought that everv person had just so much energy, which was being dissipated by present-day attractions. "Religion is not being oppressed or ignored. It is being crowded out."

The secret of the success of the Oxford Group Movement—a success in which tho speaker had been told the Soviet Government was so interested that it had sent people to study its methods—lay in the fact that it had power to capture people's imagination. Tho Church did not want "stunts," and ho thought the best way to arouse popular imagination was by the example of their lives.