REV. DR GIBB'S RETURN

Otago Witness, Issue 2856, 9 December 1908, Page 30

REV. DR GIBB'S RETURN

SOME IMPRESSIONS.

<Fjiom Ovft Own Corkispondkitt.) WELLINGTON, December 3.

The Eev. Dr Gibb, who has just returned to Wellington from a trip abroad, has been giving his impressions to a Post reporter.

" I lave seen a great many cities of the world at one time or another," said Dr Gibb, " but London is the most wonderful and fascinating of them all. You have often heard men speak of the way the immense traffic of the London streets is controlled by the police. It positively thrills one to watch these men at their" work and the splendid response which the people make to their Injunctions. The thing is intensely interesting in itself, but what chiefly impresses one is the fact that it is symptomatic of the spirit of England all otfer. The British people enjoy the maximum of individual freedom, but their lives and possessions are better protected than anywhere else in the world. In Paris if you want to cross a busy street you take your life in your hand,, and run as you have not run since your boyhood. In the still busier streets of London you get across without loss of dignity or any kind of risk. There is the quiet, self-possessed constable in the middle ot the street. Up goes bis hand, instantly the traffic stops, and you go over as comfortably as if yon were in a desert. Foreigners are loud in iheir admiration of this phenomenon ; but, as I say, it is not the thing in itself that most impresses one, it is the light the thing casts on the law of England and the people of England. It is a good thing to be a freeborn British man."

In connection with church work, the most interesting thing Dr Gibb had to say was about the Homeward tendency. " There is one phase of Church movement at Home," he says. " which is disquieting to a convinced Protestant. What the end of it all will be no man knows, but it can hardty'be questioned that there i* a Homeward movement on the part of a very considerable section of the Church of England. The direct activities of the Roman communion ' did not impress me so much, though they are very much in evidence in many .quarters, as the Romanising processes that are taking

place in other cormnunions. It is scarcely creditable that north of the Tweed in the Established Ohurch of Scotland there should be any symptoms of this kind of thing, but there are. Jacob Primmer, of whom you may have heard, is doubtless something of <a fanatic, but the case of St. Cuthberi, which he brought before the General Assembly, was suggestive of much. They have Introduced what Mr Primmer calls graven images into that venerable old building, and carry through a "service which is, to say' the least, very high. Of course, there was bound "to come a reaction from the bareness of the structures and the severe simplicity of the old-time Presbyterian worship, ani most progressive men in that communion desire a fuller and more beautiful service than is customary ; but the tendencies in evidence at Home are certainly significant. After my last visit to the Homeland 13 years ago I said I believed that the battle of the Reformation would have again to be fought out there, and I am now even more of that opinion than I was then."