A NEW RELIGION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2102, 7 June 1894, Page 14

A NEW RELIGION.

(Fhom Our Own Correspondent.) Auckland, June 4. At the Choral Hall last evening the Rev. S. J. Neill, of the Thames, inaugurated " Unsectarian services." The rev. gentleman took as the subject of his lecture, "Freedom, Truth, and Brotherhood." He said : "I am not here to start a new church or sect. I have come to proclaim something more Catholic, more universal than any sect or church. I have come to proclaim Brotherhood — a brotherhood which includes all brotherhoods and all churches, and those of no church, for it includes all men and women of every age and clime and creed. It is therefore universal, and consequently it is perfectly unsectarian. It asks no man's belief ; it preaches no dogma. The reason Churchanity has to lament the loss of its hold on the masses is because it has in it so little of brotherhood in the broad, Christian, universal sense. I hold that a man who has solemnly promised 'so help his God,' never to chaDge bis views, never to become any wiser, never to look over the walls of the narrow dungeon in which he dwells — that man has a very poor conception of truth, freedom, or brotherhood. The man who is himself in fetters cannot make others free. The man who sees God and man only through the chinks of his creedal prison house cannot be expected to realise the boundless expanse of blue that is overhead, or the glory of the sun, or the wondrous beauty of the stars. Brethren, I am here because I preferred Christianity to Churchanity, and the teaching of Jesus to the antiquated ' Confession of Faith.'" This is the outcome of Mr Neill's secession from the Presbyterian Church over the Theosophical controversy.