STAFF AND SCRIP.

Observer, Volume XXXVI, Issue 38, 27 May 1916, Page 3

STAFF AND SCRIP.

Christianity and Commerce

A BUSINESS man having told the Bishop of Waiapu that it was impossible for a man to live straight and honestly and achieve commercial , success, the Bishop has most obviously believed it—it being a rather pitiful fashion to believe ill of one's fellow man and incidentally of the men whose money supplies the salaries of bishops. Perhaps if the bishop had said that this informant found it personally impossible to be honest it would have relieved , from a most undeserved stigma the great trading community, which is essentially the church's support. Business men have taken the trouble to answer the bishop, who, among other things, deplores the supposed fact that we are not fit for victory because we're so wicked. One supposes it is the same kind of wickedness that has built up British trade to such an extent as to give \is sufficient money to finance a war appallingly expensive in good lives and good gold.

One-would be glad to know if the ecclesiastical exercise of centuries which consists in blaming everybody but ecclesiastics k considered nice and kind and helpful during a period of dreadful stress when the mothers and fathers of all nations are mourning their dead. One would like to be told by exceedingly comfortable clerics whether the Carpenter would have done these things, and whether the overturning of the tables of the usurers in the Temple was the act of a Man of humble means or of a roan who got as much as possible out of His ministry. Do you ; for instance, know any registered flagellant of humanity who obeys the injunction to take a "staff and scrip," to take "no thought of the morrow/ 5 and to "love thy neighbour as thyself"? There are in New Zealand no people better worth preaching to than the preachers who so often presume that humanity can live on emotion and not "by bread alone," although they themselves are kept alive by the commercial princes that the church anathematises. One does not blame any person (as does a daily paper correspondent) for becoming a bishop, for it is a good position, and well paid through commercial sources.

One Has not heard of a cleric refusing a see on the ground that successful trade has made his large salary possible. We do not believe' that the average layman is more ■"callous and thoughtless" than the averages clergyman, holding most strongly that humanity in the bulk is good and honesty whether it wear dungarees or surplice, a shilling cloth cap or a shovel hat, and it is to be exceedingly deprecated that ■century after century the clergy., or some of them., acknowledge their own impotence by stating the results have been so small. In fact, whenever a spiritual leader blames humanity he is blaming himself for his inability to do his own job effectively. Without the commerce whose dishonesty Bishop Sedgwick derided there would be no salary for the Bishop of WaiapUj and he therefore derides his own livelihood. The commercial instinct is as true a part of the spiritual leader as it is of any layman whom he flagellates. A cleric who receives a "call" is

"called" by the fact that the business men of the place to which he goes have made enough profits to give him a better paid job than the one he vacated. The sum of the "collection" varies according to the commercial success of the congregation among whom the plate circulates.

If the clergy gauge the worth of their fellow men by the congregations who go to hear themselves abused, then it is a very poor standard of comparison indeed. Humanity in the bulk does not differ from the time of Caesar to the time of George V., and the eternal exercise of pretending that all men are evil who are not turned oiit on a clerical lathe is a poor way to earn a salary, large or small. The Bishop of Waiapu blames a country whose men are laying down their* lives to keep the sacred institutions of Britain alive and to carry on the system of the Church. The Bishop of Waiapu blames the business men as dishonest on the evidence of a man who was evidently indulging in some very necessary introspection. It would be foul fighting to make

a list of dishonest clerics or sinning spiritual leaders, but not more unfair fighting than that of

besmearing the means by which bishops live and earn their salaries and palaces. In the meantime there is no evidence that any bishop intends "'selling all that he has and give to the poor" or of taking "staff and scrip" in the ancient poverty stricken Christian way.