EARTH'S GREAT QUEEN.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17412, 26 May 1928, Page 13 (Supplement)

EARTH'S GREAT QUEEN.

THE AGE OF IDOLS AND OF CHRIST. (By “Darius.”) » o Briton? : nmy countrymen. beware: Gird, p-irrt your heart?, the Roman? once were free. Were brave, were virtuous . . . . n luxury ! Bane of elated life, or affluent States. What dreary change, what, ruin I? not. thine 7 How doth thy bowl Integrate the mind ! To the sort entrance or t.hv rosy rave How dost thou lure the rortunate and great. ! Dreadrul attraction ! while behind thee gape? The unrat.hnmable guir where Ashur lies. O'erwhPlmed. forgotten . . . and beauteous Greece, And the great. queen or earth, Imperial Rome.” This warning, which has all the significance of inspired prophecy, was uttered in the year 1770. by an almost, forgotten poet, John Dwyer.. There is no more dreadful warning In the world than t.he ruined city by the Tiber, once the Empress of the Earth, where “impious tyranny vouchsafed to smile,”, and arms and trophies cumbered all the field of Mars. She look toll of kings and princes of all kingdoms and principalities, so that. Kipling's poem might have been a description of her homing galleons laden with treasure filched from many lands. » our bulk-heads bulged with cotton. And our masts were steeped in gold, We ran a mighty merchandise, Of niggers in the hold.” Nothing But the Changeful Sea, Rome is no more as once she was when Horatius "kept the bridge in the brave days of old.” “ Then to their daily sport the noble, youth Rush’d emulous to fling' the pointed lance, To vault, the steed or with the chariot’s wheel In dusty whirlwinds sweeping to the goal.” Once filled with so many pomps and sounds of war, now ruined lies old Rome. Yet. still, as if a vassal beneath her old sway, the new city crouches at her feet. Her olden shrines, radiant roofs, proud columns, spacious floors of marble and mosaic, dust among kindred dust, and of what was of yore remains to-day only her shining sea. Was it to lust and luxury Rome succumbed? Wc study the symptoms that were apparent immediately before Probably Rome had as much need'of frequent wars as a tree has of pruning. In her a race has changed its character and its capitol. Even the language is dead, but Vespasian shall live again, and blow from a golden trumpet the story of her later fame.

Temporal and Spiritual Power. The old Home died to temporal dominion and rose to spiritual power, and who shall say the loss has been creator than the gain! So long as her ambition is single, |o establish a kingdom, not of this world, tier foundations may assist to hold up Ihe mighty structure of the world's civilisation — that is, if pure religion and undeflled continues lo be the guide and solace of humanity. But are there not strange signs and portents that forebode, even the doom of the Church? All Christendom has been advised of serious dissension in it, through the attempted revision of the prayer-book, in the direction of sacramental reservation, etc. The Archbishops, confident in themselves and in the hereditary Lords, thought to fonce this measure on the Established Church, and the Commons promptly threw it out. There is not a suffragist in England, who has not a right to say through his Parliamentary representative" whether there shall or shall not he a radical change in the rubrics of the National Church. The Archbishops view their ecclesiastical debacle with alarm. A crisis has arisen because secular England will not accept the altered prayer-book as Christ's charter to his ministers. There is an ominous silence maintained by Ihe watchful outsiders—a sjlenre of wonder find partly of dismay, that in this ajre the Church should he divided against,itself and against the Parliament of Ihe people.

It is hut a little while ago that an Archdeacon professed himself convinced, that within two hundred years, the Church as we know it to-day. would be„ non-existent. Hell is extinguished, and. according to Dean Inge, the personality of God is doubtful, the virgin-birth does not obtain credence with many ministers and priests, evolution has taken the place of special divine creation, and, to quote the Dean again, "God is certainly not the head nf the clerical profession." A Pagan Festival.

Two hundred years hence, then, according to a priest of the church, "Dust to dust, earth to earth, ashes to ashes," may be spoken over itTwo hundred years hence- and Christmas will have become of no more significance than an old Roman festival of pagan days, according to my friend the priest. And it lis not in a single mind amongst the ministers of the Church that such thoughts abide; far from it.

There is a sinister symptom present that the Church is being converted by "The Outsider" to agnosticism, rather than the agnostic is being converted lo Christ by Ihe Church. In these days, when Ihe Church has conceded so much to human intelligence, it is dangerous in the. highest degree, to provoke even the feeblest insurrection between Ihe horns of the altar, and to risk an alienisation of the very tolerant feelings of the masses by any reversions from established rubrics.

It is almost beyond pity that such, an opposition against the Church as that recently experienced in the Imperial Parliament should have been so inadvisedly aroused, and nothing nowsaid or written can minimise its significance in the widening of the breach between the Church, and humanity, the effects of which ar'e apparent even in this far outpost of Christianity. The world of our Empire is already going luxury-mad. Multitudes have no higher ambitions than ease, sport, and carnal pleasures. Christ, the Empire's hope of glory, appears to be dying the second death, when a voice sounds in this sacred place, even like the voice of the far-away multitude of old, "We wjll not have this Man to reign over us. Away with Him and crucify Him"' A Pagan England may fall as fatally, as once, but not forever, fell Pagan Home, whoso eagles flew over England ere the gentle Christ was born.