NOTES ABOUT THE CHURCHES.

Otago Witness, 1 June 1910, Page 14

NOTES ABOUT THE CHURCHES.

FROM ALL SOURCES.

Owing to . its endowment fund having been : ncreaaod to 300,000 dollars by a gift of 180,000 dollars the First Presbyterian, Church of New York will not have to make way for a modern skyscraper as was feared. This donation insures the preservation of the church, which was organised two hundred years ago.

Bible readers may shoitly expect a new edition of the Revised New Testament. All the proof sheets have been passed. J'. aims at putting the English reader a i nearly as possible into the position of o; •) who call read the original Greek. j ;

will prove to be a concordance and a 003 • mentary in one, since it contains easL/ the largest collection of marginal references yet produced, illustrating the New Testament from every part of the Bible and the Apocrypha. The work cf compiling the references was begun ioiiy years ago by two eminent Bible scholars, the late Dr Schrivener and the late Professor Moulton. The latter himself gave to the enterprise labours that spread over 25 years. When he died more than ten years ago, two other scholars, one of them hisi own son, took the work up, and have now brought it to a successful conclusion. New Testament students are eagerly expecting the day when this new aid' to their studies will be put into their hands. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the proprietors of the Revised Version, are at the back of this valuable undertaking.

We need no greater testimony to the value of the department of church and labour of the Home Misvsion Board of the Presbyterian Church> than a glance at the results of its work during the past seven years, under the direction of Rev. Charles Stelzle. Among the results are the following:—Largely attended Sunday afternoon mass meetings are held throughout the winter; 157 ministerial delegates of various denominations a.re engaged in 117 cities to act as chaplains to working men; a distinctly religious article, prepared by the department, is published weekly in 350 labour papers, through which a million working men and their families are reached; a temperance movement to secure labour halls free from the saloon's influence has been inaugurated; noonday ehop meetings in various cities; shop meeting campaigns and industrial parishes have been established; Labour Sunday is observed by practically every denomination in America; the country church problem is being investigated, rural workers trained, printed inat;er for pastors and workers distributed, and a policy of reconstruction for all country churches is promoted; 172 students are enrolled in the correspondence course in applied Christianity for ministers and Christian workers; a sociological reference library has been established, and the organisation of similar movements in other churches has been effected.

A' curious confession of a future Archbishop's failure to make his own children love Sunday occurs in Mr A. C. Benson's causerie in the current issue of the Church Family Newspaper. Discussing the preservation of Sunday observance, Mr Benson lays it down as a first principle that the young generation should be brought up to love Sunday. "My father" (afterwards Archbishop Benson), he says, " loved Sunday very much; it was to him by far the happiest day of the week, and there was about him on Sunday a certain tranquil and cheerful air, which made itself felt; in all he did or said. He took very great pains, I now see, to make us love the day, and it is pathetic to me to think that he did not succeed in doing so. The truth was that he laid out every detail of the day for us, and the result was that, instea<l of being in any sense a holiday, it seo'-'v' to be a. day of constraint and eontii; ■ engagements." Mr Benson urges thai: :;■•>

fiense of discipline should overshadow the day, and that there should be variety and change in its occupations. All ordinary, work should be reduced to a minimum; second, that it is equally a Christian duty to set apart a definite part of the day for religion (aiming, however, at quality rather than quantity); and third, that the day should afford a real change to everyone. " I have no deeire," he says, " to see Sunday secularised; but the worst secularism of all is to> make it a purely unoccupied day, for that is the soil in which the worst weeds of the soul flourish."

(Lecturing at Bow Church, Cheapside, the rector (the Rev. A. W. Hutton, M.A.) said Christianity was persecuted in the first instance as a heresy. The whole history of religion showed that heretics were detested more fiercely than criminals. The spirit of persecution was in evidence right up to our own day. The Church of England was in some senses a persecuting Church until 40 or 50 years ago. The Scottish Church abandoned persecution as a. weapon to maintain orthodoxy onlv 30 or 40 years ago. "Congregational churches in our own country," continued the rector, "are even now in a few cases making the effort to revive the dying embers of the old hatred of unorthodoxy. The Roman Catholic Church ma-'ntains without hesitation the principle of persecution, though the times are such that any attempt to punish heretics would be thwarted by tho action of the civil courts."