"THE GREATEST OF THESE IS CHARITY."

Sun (Christchurch), Volume II, Issue 533, 25 October 1915, Page 6

"THE GREATEST OF THESE IS CHARITY."

To the Editor of THE SUN. Sir,—Your correspondent, "Wake Up, Christchurch," whose excellent and thoughtful letter appears in tonight's Sun, treads on ticklish ground when he begins to. discuss the attitude of the churches to the war, and he will find that, no matter what direction he takes, he is bound to find himself up against a very solid wall of criticism. To my mind, however, there is a good deal in what he says. Surely, Sir, at such a time as this, the spirit of the wounded Christ, Who made the supreme sacrifice, as so many thousands of our fellow-subjects have done in this war, should overrule dogma, and heal some, at least, of the schisms which drive professed Christians into so many bitterly inimical camps. 1 was pained to read in your correspondent's letter—l have been absent from Christchurch for some months —that Bishop Julius has forbidden his clergy to pray to the God of all Christians in the presence of nonAnglicans. or to take part in combined services in memory of our gallant dead. A clergyman with the scholarship and wide experience of Bishop Julius might reasonably be expected to exercise a certain degree of Christian charity and human kindness in such a terrible crisis. Unfortunately he is Ht>t acting without precedent. The Anglican chaplains in Flanders have been forbidden to participate in the great combined religious services which were for months a feature of the bloody campaign there. Cases—far 100 many—have been reported in which Anglican clergymen have refused to pray with wounded and dying men of other denominations in the supreme hour of their need. How different from the story of that splendid Roman Catholic priest, who knelt beside a bounded and dying Highlander, and

comforted his last agonising mo< ments without hinting to the soldie/ that he was not the Presbyterian pas< tor he was thought to be. Did the cause of Roman Catholicism suffer by this line display of Christian love for the broken in body? With the return to New Zealand of Captain Bush King, we are told that there is now left on the Gallipoli Peninsula not a single Anglican chaplain. Would it not be a grievous sin oil the part of, say, a Presbyterian or a Methodist chaplain, if on the eve of battle, he ordered out of the ranks all Anglicans before he would consent to read the glorious words of the beautiful "Prayer before going into action"? This is most certainly not the time for academic discussion of the vexed questions which have for so many centuries shackled the world progress of Christianity, but, much as I hesitate to mention the matter, I feel that I cannot but support your correspondent's plea for a wider outlook on the deepdown essentials of the. case, and a laying aside, if, perhaps, only temporary, of dogmatic stubbornness. The question as to whether clergymen should be allowed to enlist ii) the ranks as combatants is quite another matter, but Bishop Averill might remember that the first New Zealander to win the Military Cross in Flanders was a clergyman of the Anglican Church, and that the two Australians, Hulton Sams and Digges •la Touchc, who both laid down their lives most -gloriously at Gallipoli, were also ordained priests of the Church of England. If the Empire is to emerge trium- , phant from this war, we must all have Faith and Hope, but we must not forget that greater even than these is Charity.—l am, etc., :

G. FORBES. Cashmere Hills, October 22.