SICKLY HYMN TUNES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17947, 26 November 1932, Page 15

SICKLY HYMN TUNES

ARCHBISHOP SPEAKS OUT PRESENT DAY WORSHIHP A strong denunciation of certain types of music used in the 'Churches of to-day, with particular reference to what he characterised as “sickly sentimental hymn tunes, was made at St. John s Church, Woolston, Christchurch, by Archbishop Julius, in a sermon connected with the church’s anniversary celebrations. Ho stated that there was a notable lack of virility in modern church worship, and appealed for a stronger and more manly outlook in the pursuance of religious observance. “There has been a very real, subtle, and significant change iu the church,” said Archbishop Julius. In the old days people attended services under the worst of weather and transport conditions. Today a cold wind keeps us away. We are a soft crowd. In the early days we did not mind if the Psalms were full of damnation. In 1932 our hymns are as flabby as the tail of a fish —full of a pretty, sickly-sweet sentimentality, like the stuff we have just been singing! “NICE, COSY AND PLEASANT” “The soldiers, men who faced the devil and all his works, will choose appallingly soft hymns and sing them with apparent enjoyment. Some of them must have been written in a feather bed while the composer was asleep, for they are so pale and insignificant that they would not rouse a fiea! Our sermons, too —and I speak generally—would not disturb anybody. Everything i.s nice, cosy and pleasant. And yet there are many men of vigor and virility in the outside world, and it is only when they corne into church that they seem to lose the strength of worship. Indeed, we use our church as a kind of opium den, in which a. wife can forget a husband’s bad temper and a husband his wife’s long tongue. We are full of the things that do not matter a scrap to anyone.

“We fail to reach_the hearts of men with tin's puny type of worship, and we forget that the God of Nature, Who sacrified Himself for the good of the world, is not the God of our hymns. The real teaching of the Lord appeals to strong men and women, and yet I can hardly imagine a man dying for I:is religion to-day.”