CHURCHES AND PARSONS.

Saturday Advertiser, Issue 29, 29 January 1876, Page 7

CHURCHES AND PARSONS.

COUNTRY. St. John’s Church, Milton, is a very homely description of stone building, having an unpretending cross on the top of the front gable and a wooden detached bell tower, at once the Sabbath summons, and the “vain glory of St. John’s congregation,” who, with an excess of liberality, quite foreign to their nature, contributed the funds for its erection and the addition of the bell within it. On the top of the tower is the “symbolic cock,” and it is said that on moonlight nights the game birds living .in the neighbourhood try vainly to crow him down. The inside of the church is in keeping with the outside, having plain, uncomfortable, modern pews, plain reading-desk and altar, plain corner on the left side, “ entering for the choir,” pretty plain music and singing, with a plain font on the right side. At the church door is a portly vestryman, very attentive to strangers and ladies, and altogether indispensible to the church. Parson Coffey, the present curate of St. John’s Church, is found to be a plain man, and altogether in keeping with his surroundings. He preaches from plain texts, plain, unvarnished, common sense and tiuth, for which he is plainly hated and defamed, “ blit for all that he is faithful.” His style is simple, connected, illustrative and instructive ; but, like his salary, his church, and his surroundings, it is too plain by half. People do not want to know their weaknesses, failings, and faults, in resume, from the parson in every sermon, peop e are painfully alive to these things without being reminded of them. So parson Coffey’s sermons are unsuitable to the majority who are composed, of course, of publicans and sinners,” the former of whom have taken exception to the parson, more “particularly because he has lately been guilty of consistency, in becoming, for the sake of example, a member of one of the Total Abstinance Societies of Milton. There is. however, not the slightest doubt that Parson Colley is a well-meaning Christian Churchman, and has done nothing in all his Tokomairiro ministry to throw other than honor on the cause he heralds, and wherever he may go lie will find from the same causes the same results ; but there are a few exceptions, for the sake ot charity, and he therefore pleases somebody, and by doing good wins someone’s love.