CHRISTABEL PANKHURST

New Zealand Times, Volume LIV, Issue 12650, 10 January 1927, Page 6

CHRISTABEL PANKHURST

LECTURE BY REV. H. E. WALLIS

A large audience listened to a very instructive lecture given on Saturday night in Maranatha Hall, Lambton quay, by the Rev. H. E. Wallis, M.A., upon the Life and Work of Christabel Pankhurst. The speaker referred to the suffrage movement and the prominent part Miss Pankhurst and others had played in obtaining votes for women by great sacrifice, devotion and persistence, though their methods were really tantamount to Bolshevik, for they broke laws and withstood law and order to obtain law. Miss Pankhurs/t’s pholosopby of life was entirely altered by the war, and she saw that she had been wrong in imagining that humanity was evolving by an onward and upward motion, but that the “vicious cycle” of disease, death, disaster and failure was ever recurring. She was staggered by the Great War occurring after 2000 years of civilisation (so-called) in Eurorie, and was led to study prop.hecy in the Bible. Hero saw the light. She saw four remedies for the world’s ills. First, “Revolution”—the way of the savage; (2) reformation, the way of the civilised man; (2) regeneration (the true way), the way of the Christian brain; (4) the return of Christ, the Divine way bringing to pass the Christian’s way not only individually in himself but universally in the world. Miss Pankhurst. full of her new faith, was now preaching with fiery enthusiasm in England to vast audiences, showing that the return of the Jews to Palestine marks the time for Christ to return. She issued some remarkable books, “The Lord Cometh,” “Pressing Problems of the Closing Age,” “The World’s Unrest,” which the speaker advised liis hearers to read. The story was divided into sections —the humour of the enthusiastic suffragette; (2), the pathos of the disillusioned politician; (3), the tragedy of a great love without light; (4), the triumph of a seeker for truth by the aid of Divine prophecy.