PULPIT AND POLITICS.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 13307, 17 February 1914, Page 7

PULPIT AND POLITICS.

MR FOWLDS' ADDRESS. (Special to Herald.) CHRISTCHUROH, this day. In an editorial, the Press says : "We have been favored with a copy of a five or six column address delivered m Auckland on Saturday as the chairman's address to the Congregational Union. It is the work of Mr G-. Fowlds, who left it behind him when he went to England, and it appears to call for some explanations and apologies from the Congregational body. The title of the address is 'The Drift Towards Anarchy: its cause and its cure. ■. The church's neglected duty.' It is purely political from beginning to -end, and about the middle Air Fowlds conies to the point, and affirms that all the evils of the time are traceable to the laWs relating to land. His address, that is to say, is simply an electioneering address on the ' virtues of his peculiar scheme of land ' "reform/, the single tax, and he'- asks : ! 'Is the church unable or unwilling' to lend him a hand m 'denouncing thia monster of iniquity,' by which he means the existing land system. \\"e referred the other day to the teiidency of the Nonconformist pulpits m Engla-nd to become merely political platforms, and wo pointed out that no church could do any good for itself by being degraded into a mere annex of the Radical policy. Unless the Congregational Union repudiates Mr Fowlds' violent political harangue many Con^regationalists will be deeply and justly indignant, and tbe people outside the ranks of Congregationalism will conclude that that community is pledged to further the single i tax campaign. Of Mr Fowlds'. taste m | making his address to a religious body an electioneering pamphlet we need not say a word."