EXTREME HERESY

Southland Times, Issue 19171, 15 February 1924, Page 5

EXTREME HERESY

AMERICAN CHURCH DISPUTE. CHARGES BROUGHT AGAINST AGED BISHOP. (By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright). (Australian and N.Z. Cable Association.) NEW YORK. February 14. (Received February 14, 11 p.m.) The Fundamentalist controversy, which despite conciliatory efforts,, has been enlisting new rebels, reached a high point when the Protestant Episcopal Church of America brought charges of extreme heresy against Reverend William Brown, aged 68 years, formerly Bishop of the State of Arkansas, and now a member of the House of Bishops. The Reverend Gentleman is charged with teaching, through a book, entitled “Communism and Christianism,” a body of doctrines which are contrary to the Church. The Bishop’s persist refusal to resign attracted wide notice, especially in view of his advanced ideas. All his former associates agree in calling him the most extreme of Modernists. His opponents within the Church have dubbed him “the Bishop of the Bolsheviks and Atheists,” and Bishop Brown has accepted the title.

American journals give great prominence to the dispute in the religious world. To one journal a fight seems the only way to “prevent Christianity from being robbed of its supernaturalness,” and to a Liberal organ the greatest need of the hour appears not to be “patience, sympathy and good humour,” but the temper of the battlefield. “The great defection is upon us,” writes a stalwart opponent of liberalism, the Rev. Clarence Edward Macartney, in The Presbyterian. “It is even now at the gates, and we might as well recognise the state of affairs and act occordingly.”