An Auckland Controversy

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 41, 8 October 1903, Page 1

An Auckland Controversy

A whirlwind of energetic controversy has been shaking Auckland of late. It was all about the running of Sunday trams A small majority in an exceptionally heavy poll decided in favor of the running, and there, for the time, the matter rests. But occasional tiemors of controversy keep vibrant an atmosphere that is still heavily charged with electricity. Polemics rumbled angrily in pulpits, on platforms, and in the columns of the secular press. The discussions served to demonstrate the extraordinary vitality — even among clergymen, who certainly ought to know better— of the absurd notion that the Christian Sunday is identical with the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday). In fact, among a vehement, if unlearned, portion of the disputants, Sunday was habitually referred to, in the religious slang of the Puritan days, as ' the Sabbath ' .(Saturday), and the proposal to run trtie trams on Sunday was pilloried as ' Sabbath desecration.' It is passing stirange that such a blundering use of common words could endure to owv day among people who protess to read the Bible and to base upon it their many and ever-varying religious beliefs.

With the general question we deal at some length in another part of this issue. Here we content ourselves with touching upon that immoa:tal catchwoird, ' the Continental Sunday.' Of course it was flung like a lyddite shell right into the tiiick of the Auckland Sabbatarian dispute. Years of residence and travel have made us tolerably familiar with the Continental Sunday and its various phases in various lands. But ' the Continental Sunday ' of pulpit and newspaper discussion is quite a

different tihing. It is a vague, undefined, formless terror —an AwEul Warning, a Popish Rawhead-and-Bloodybones to secure lukewarm and undutiful Protestants into turning the Lord's Day of the New Dispensation into the discarded Sabbath of the Old. In practically every case, when the expression, ' the Continental Sunday,' is used, the inference is drawn, or left to be drawn, that the Catholic countries of Europe are the sole ' Sabbath-breakers,' and that the Church is in some unexplained way responsible for this distressing condition of things. The Church's general attitude on the subject of Sunday rest and worship is touched upon sufficiently elsewhere in this issue. It is sufficiently well known. It has not altered down the ages. Unfortunately, her ideas have been antagonised by large bodies of lawmakers. This has been especially the case since the epoch of the great Frenoh Revolution. Since that date modes of thought and action have rapidly risen which are in rank antagonism with Catholic and even with Christain ideals, both in the home and on the floor of legislative assemblies in Continental Europe. Add to this the fact that the legislatures in all or nearly all of the real or so-called Catholic countries of Europe are, and have long been, dominated by the Freemasons— the Church's declared enemies. France, Italy, and Spain are melancholy instances in point. Again, the * Continental Sunday ' is at least as well known in Protestant countries in Europe as in Catholic. In Germany, for instance, Sunday is a favorite day for amusement—meetings, picnics, concerts, etc. ' Orthodox .German pastors,' says Chambers, ' take their households to miscellaneous concerts on Sunday evenings, and would consider hesitation to do so as a remnant of mere Jewish prejudice. 1 There— as we have recently shown in the case of England and America— Catholics are by far the best churchgoers. And this, so far as the Fatherland is concerned, is fully and frankly admitted by the Rev. Dr. Williams, an American Protestant author, in his work, « Christian Life in Germany,' which was published in 1897.

A Protestant writer in the ' Edinburgh Review ' for October, 1880, voices the contrast in still more emphatic terms. ' The land which was the cradle of the Reformation,' said he, ' has become the grave of the Reformed faith. ... All comparatively recent works on Germany, as well as all personal observation, tell the same tale. Denial of every tenet of the Protestant faith among the thinking classes, and indifference in the masses are the positive and negative agencies beneath which the church of Luther and Melancthon has succumbed.' ' In contiguous parishes,' says the same writer, ' of Catholic and Protestant populations, one invariable distinction has long been patent to all eyes and conclusions. The path to the Catholic Church is trodden bare, that to the Protestant Church is rank with grasses and weeds to the very door ' Berlin, with its two million inhabitants, has church accommodation for only 60,000 or 70,000 of its greatly preponderating Protestant population. Yet Sunday after Sunday its ministers preach to rows of almost empty benches. The Rev. Dr. Williams' book, already quoted, has the following : l It is said by persons who have made careful examination that only about one-third of those who die in Berlin in any given year are buried with religious service.' On the same page (57), speaking, of Germany as a whole, he says : ' Nowhere in the world is the Roman Catholic Church doing better work.' But one has not to go to the Continent for a Sunday that is godless in a wholesale way. Prominent Protestant divines whose words are before us estimate that barely five per cent, of the population of England attend public worship, and that great masses_ of the people are as pagan as those whom St. Paul portrayed in such immortal though fearful words. A London Protestant clergyman, Rev. W J. Dawson, in a discourse delivered some weeks ago at the conference of Free Churches, said : 'The sooner we get rid of the delusion that London is a Christian city the bettor . The plain fact is that London

is a pagan city with only a moderate leaven of Christianity in it and is slipping back deeper into paganism with every decade.'