WOMAN PREACHER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18765, 19 January 1923, Page 10

WOMAN PREACHER

PULPIT’S REALITY. MISS MAUDE HOYDEN'S CRITICISM. The Padres’ Fellowship, at the closing session of its annual meeting in Manchester, was addressed by Miss Maude Royden. Miss Hoyden spoke mainly in criticism of church weaknesses; of insistence upon minutiae fa the neglect of more important issues, of the opposition to the ministry of women—an opposition sometimes of a quality ‘‘indescribably nauseous” —and of timidity or silence in the face of vital national and international problems. Miss Royden suggested that there was a tendency for religious people, and especially for ministers of the Gospel, to live up to a pattern which was not always very congenial to them. It was, she admitted, imposed upon them by the outside world, hut perhaps they tried rather too easily to live up to it. When she entered the ministry she found immediately a quite artificial standard of values. At dinner in a women’s club, for example, everyone but herself was offered a cigarette. If smoking were wrong, nobody there should have smoked; if •it were right, why should she also not have smoked? From this Miss Royden went on to speak of the little things with which religious

people were apt to concern themselves. When she began to preach the Bishop of London, she was sure, was more concerned about the sort of hat she wore than almost anything else. W T aa it not rather tragic that people should be concerned with such absurdities? At the No More War Demonstration on August 4, none of the churches were represented as such, though, no doubt, there were thousands of .church-people there. One woman in the demonstration was asked: “Don’t you think all the churches should be walking in the procession ?” She replied: “Oh, the churches are too busy trying to stop a few kids playing games in the parks on Sundays.” Here was the world crashing into ruins, and this was the comment of the outside world on the churches' attitude. THE OPPOSITION TO WOMEN. This adoption of an artificial standard among religious people had created what in the jargon of psychology was called a "complex.” In her political work, said Miss Hoyden, she had never come across quite the same quality of opposition that die had met since entering religious work.

In politics there was a certain coarse brutality about the opposition to women, but it was in a sense straightforward. In the opposition to women in the churches she had sometimes found a certain sliminesa which gave her the horrors. It was an opposition with something indescribably nauseous about it, betraying almost an obsession with sexual things. No politician had ever said quite the same sort of thing about the women who wanted the vote ns had been said about the women who wanted to preach Touching upon the question of “political” sermons, Miss Boydcn asked her hearers to realise that sometimes there was a politcal issue which was really absorbing the minds of everybody in the church. If the preacher insisted on them leaving it outside, they took into the church with them a feeling of unreality. Half of her own congregation, for example, were unemployed, and the other half went in fear of unemployment. Yet they went into the church to hear her preach about—well, last Sunday she preached to them about the Atonement. In 1918, on the anniversary of the outbreak of war, four of her friends went into different Anglican churches in London, and in none of them was the war referred to at all. To her that seemed inhuman at a time when all the congregation were thinking of the people they had lost, or feared to lose, and of all the horror and anguish and dread of that time. So with the crisis in the Near East. When sho announced that she would preach on Ihe Near East, the hall was so crowded that a great many could not get in. The reason, she knew, was because the subject was driving everyone nearly mad; the idea of going to war again was such an obsession that people could not forget it.