EVERY SATURDAY RELIGIOUS LIFE

Southland Times, Issue 23182, 24 April 1937, Page 12

EVERY SATURDAY RELIGIOUS LIFE

(By

POPOKOTEA)

WIFE OR CURATE?

This week I am writing of a social and moral question that directly affects some thousands of women and their homes, and touches indirectly all those who have any connection whatsoever with the Church. A few months ago the writer was conversing with a clergyman who successfully ministers to a city congregation. His mind was seriously perturbed. He wondered whether he had made a mistake in marrying. There was not a cloud in the sky of his personal felicity. His domestic life was serene. He was a victim of the problem I am laying bare in this article. He was serving in a Church that was virtually persecuting his wife. _ I have known many other similar instances. In far too many congregations, Christian people, who are treading in the Master’s footsteps, are so exacting in their demands, that the wife of the clergyman is expected to fulfil the duties of a curate. The conscience of the Church stands in need of education at this point. A contributor to the British Weekly of February 25 raises the whole matter. She asks why does the Church expect the clergyman’s wife to preside at the sewing guild, sing in the choir, teach in the Sunday School, lead the missionary organization and visit in the parish consistently. The Smiths,” she writes, “and the Joneses, and the Browns and the Greens will each expect you to come round with your husband to call on them. It is an axiom of ethics that moral responsibility is often evaded by loading it on to other shoulders. It would seem that the women of the Church have tended to do this with the wife of the clergyman. The Reformed Church needs to awaken to the mental strain it is putting upon clergymen s wives. True, they can be expected to do at least as much as any other woman in church life. But why should this group of women be asked to undertake what is never demanded of the wife of any other professional man either in private or in public life? “I implore you,” states the correspondent in the British Weekly addressing herself to the ladies of the manse, “not to immerse yourself in Church work to the point at which your house is in danger of being neglected; not to undertake so much that other people begin to leave everything to the minister’s wife.”

THE BIBLICAL WINDOW

GREY OF FALLODEN Psalm 107:8. “O that men would praise the Lord for his goodness.” “Viscount Grey was a Bible student who delighted especially in the Psalms. In 1909, while he was still mourning the loss of his beloved wife, and while the work of the Foreign Office left him few intervals of leisure, he wrote to Lady Lyttelton from his Northumbrian home:—“l went over the moor to Ross Camp today and lunched and read and slept a little in the heather. I see the wonderful beauty of the world as it still is, and I think of the happiness I have had, and I do from my heart say.— ‘O that men would praise the Lord for his goodness.’ For I have had that which is worth being bom for or dying for or waiting for; and others may have it all, too. The beauty of the world at any rate is for all who have eyes to see and hearts to feel. I shall die grateful for what I have had whether I die soon or late, and whatever happens to me between now and then.” —From “Grey of Falloden” by Professor G. M. Trevelyan, O.M. MUCH TO LIVE FOR Matt. 4:4: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” An English newspaper reported that during the period of depression a wayside pulpit carried this text: “I have much less to live on than I had before, but I have just as much to live for. Life with its hard trials may press upon us, but -it always brings to us a challenge to do our best. SPIRITUAL VALUES IN EDUCATION “Education has certainly become aif essential social function in our day. The social function of philosophy is either bluntly denied or disregarded.

The princes and rulers of this world demand power, immediate returns for investment of thought, practical results —submarines, bombs and gas—politicised science is very practical. Education they can use or misuse for purposes of indoctrination. The true educator directs the pupil in nothing but the great values—indeed he hardly even directs him to these, except by revealing to him his highest self and then leaving him to pursue his way lit by the inward light. Yet he is codifying the child’s experience, rationalizing the empirical, presenting some kind of synthesis of the social heritage and stimulating to fresh efforts to climb unsealed alps. And if he is a technical teacher, whether in a manual arts school or a medical school, he is endeavouring not only to make a man a good workman but to make a workman a good man. The spiritual storm which now rages over the world is the first planetary storm in the human record. This is making men run to the nearest shelter —hiding under the wall, as Pluto said, till the storm of dust and sleet be past. So in the confusion we have a dozen philosophies of education—naturalism, utilitarianism, proletarianism and so forth. But all men are dissatisfied, except the writers of German and Italian journals. All thinking men, not drugged with national or class opiates, feel that unless there is something stable above the flux of mundane things the whole of the present turmoil is a ghastly piece of meaningless chaos. Ido not take a pessimistic view, though I feel the hard pressure of present difficulties. I think that the theory of evolution and our mechanical advance have made us concentrate upon a strong view of progress. The old stubborn questions still demand a solution.” —From a Paper submitted to the Science Congress recently held in Auckland, by Professor R. Lawson, M.A., Litt.D., Dip. Ed., Professor of Education in the University of Otago.