NO CHRISTIAN HOME LIFE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16608, 26 March 1928, Page 5

NO CHRISTIAN HOME LIFE

MENACING MODERN EVIL AN OUTSPOKEN BISHOP Eleo. TW. Copyright—United Press Asan.l fN.55., and A.P.A., and Sun.l (Received March 26, 10 a.m.) LONDON, March 25. "The world to-day needs a faithful fulfilment of women's normal function. This cannot be achieved in female priests and bishops, but in Christian wives and mothers," said the Bishop of Durham at the Diocesan Conference. "The enormous decrcaso in .the number of ordination candidates has brought about a crisis in the Anglican Church, resulting in church schools having disappeared in most parishes. Assistant curates are rapidly going; incumbents are ceasing to bd; and parish priests are becoming ministers to such congregations ,as they can gather. "A generation is growing up in industrial districts not • possessing the elements of Christian faith. I do not believe the crisis can bo met by women priests. There is no assumption of female inferiority in their exclusion from holy order.-, but only a recognition of woman's distinctiveness in natural functions which cannot be ignored. The spiritual achievement of individual women, past and present, do not .justify'such a doyjir. turn from ' Christ's institutions and such a breach of Christendom's traditions as th." admission of women to holy orders in equality with men. "The most menacing modern evil is the repudiation of a woman's wifely and motherly functions, largely due to tho multitude of single women who, in consequence .of the war, are unable tomany, . and are therefore seeking alternatives. This repudiation, dictated by o. perverted notion of sexual equality and made possible by a misapplication of science, implies disintegration in family life, and the elimination of the principal discipline in which citizenship is divinely ordained to develop. This deliberate, shameless, active propagandist abuse constitutes a challenge which the churches dare not ignore."