IRRELIGION ON THE COAST

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20832, 26 September 1929, Page 7

IRRELIGION ON THE COAST

LACK OF SPIRITUAL VISION. MR GILBERT REPLIES TO CRITICISM. (Special to Daily Times.) AUCKLAND, September 25. Retrying to-day at Hamilton to the criticism of his Sunday’s sermon by Messrs H. E. Holland and J. O’Brien the Rev. H. G. Gilbert said his sermon was directed not at the far off people on the West Coast, but at the Christian and church-going people before him. “My contentiort was that a lack of vision in spiritual things was responsible for many of the deplorable social conditions existing to-day,” he said. “I made the references complained of to illustrate part of the pressing problems in our own land to-day. As one whose lot has always been cast among working men my sympathies are naturally with them in their long-continued fight for justice and fair conditions of working, but the truth must be faced. My outspoken critics in their so-called refutation of my statements make an unwarrantable generalisation. The report was published without my knowledge, but the reporter certainly was at pains to make it unmistakeably clear that I spoke only of soihe parts and not the whole of the coast. “It certainly would be reckless and absurd and far worse to hint, let alone declare, that up and down the West Coast, among some of the finest and most hospitable people I have ever met, there pertained everywhere conditions such as those of which I spoke. Further, I gratefully acknowledge . that warmhearted hospitality is constantly forthcoming from among the very people whose Mack of spiritual vision 1— rightly,'! believe —deplored; but,'haying said that, I haver,nothing to qualify or withdraw, except' that I spoke not of funerals, but of one funeral, where exactly what I related took place. ‘‘Much that these gentlemen say regarding pictures ip quite irrelevant; but one wonders if they are really to he taken seriously when they assume an air of indignant horror at what is said respecting the sale in some places of liquor on Sundays. I would assure them that my imagination has not played havoc with my veracity, but the truth has opened uiiy eyes and the truth, as I found it, is this; That ..in some parts of the West Coast there have arisen communities that fail from being merely apathetic to Christianity are actively anti-Christian, and I hold it to be a .tragic thing both for those .com- , munities and for our country that 'such is the case. . ,

_ “But let me stress again lest, for the second time, my critics miss the point, that my' sympathies are. strongly with those communities in many of their, .social' ideals, although not always with their methods of .obtaining .them, because I believe I see in their conditions; materially and spiritually, the effect not only of a lack of spiritual vision, but also of oppression and injustice, in regard to some of which at least the Christian Church is not without blame.”