Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 5, 1947 G.B.S. ON CATHEDRALS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 90, 5 February 1947, Page 4

Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 5, 1947 G.B.S. ON CATHEDRALS

ANENT the building of .Cathedrals in glorification of the Divine a correspondent has sent up in the following views of G. B. Shaw, which are taken from his biography written by L. B. Collis. Shaw’s contention is that cathedrals are made holy by the labour of those who build them, and Collis has apparently shown this without leaving room to doubt. It would be absurd to deny that he is bubbling over with laughter and gaiety, that he has a sense of humour far more acute than most of us, writes Mr Collis. “It is one side of Bernard Shaw which must always be remembered. It is as much the real Bernard Shaw as any other part of him. But there is another side of him of much greater importance, a part unknown to most and entirely neglected by the general public. Namely, Shaw the church-goer. The newspapers all now talk of Mr Shaw being a very religious man, but having no religion themselves they do not understand what they themselves mean by that term. They vaguely understand that Mr Shaw derives no stimulation from the slaugh-ter-house and snatches no pleasure from the bottle. They hear with amusement that he takes neither tea nor .coffee, neither morphia nor opium, that he neither chews gum nor smokes tobacco, but they do not realise that he does take one stimulant: the stimulant as he himself puts it of going o church’—when there is no service on. I have heard him say (in the laughingly matter-of-fact tone he always instinctively adopts in order to hide his feelings) that an empty cathedral is the one place he can go into and pray and express his soul. And has he not written, ‘There I find rest without excitement, both of a quality unknown to the traveller who turns from the village church to the village inn and seeks to renew himself with shandygaff. Any place where men dwell, village or city, is a reflection of the consciousness of every single man. In my consciousness there is a market 7garden,\ dwelling, a workshop, a lover’s walk-above all a cathedral. My appeal to the master builder is: Mirror this cathedral for me in enduring stone; make it with hands; let it direct its clear and sure appeal to my senses, so. that when my spirit is vaguely groping after an elusive mood my eye shall be caught by the skyward tower, showing me where within the cathedral, I may find my way to the cathedral within me!’ “And has he not protested how in the presence of a great cathedral ‘you forget yourself and are the equal of the beggar at the door standing on ground made holy by that labour in which we have discovered the reality of prayer’? Now I-emphatically say that no one can hope to understand Bernard Shaw or to have the faintest glimmering of what he is driving at unless they recognise this essential part of him—the ascetic mystic - who walks with God.” ,V, _ .