BISHOP BARNES OF BIRMINGHAM.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19138, 22 October 1927, Page 13

BISHOP BARNES OF BIRMINGHAM.

(spiciallt •wanrwr iob trx pkbss.) (Bt the Rev. Charles Peery, M.A.) There is a danger that the general public in New Zealand may quite misunderstand the hostility which Bishop Barnes is arousing against himself among many church people. Reports have reached us that he has been publicly denounced in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, together with an account of his strong utterances on behalf ot the ddctrine of evolution, and the uninformed may imagine that hostility to him is mainly because of this teaching, whereas the truth is far otherwise. Father Frere, the Superior of the Community of the Resurrection a pronounced Ahglo-Catholic, had been made Bishop of Truro, when Mr Rainsay Mac Donald—it is said to give those oi other opinions a turn—appointed Canon Barnes, of AVestniinster, to the Bee of Birmingham. He was known to be a most able teacher of science and mathematics. Not very long before this, Dean Inge, in one of his "Outspoken Essays." h&d declared that Anglo-Catholicism Was a spent force, and it is rumoured .that this statement was the chief cause of the first Anglo-Catholic Congress in the Albert Hall, inaugurated by some London vicars, who were '-nixious to allow that it was nothing of the kind. It became, indeed, more aggressive over the whole country. After London there is ho stronger., centre of AngloCatholicism than Birmingham and thither at such a time Bishop Barnes was sent.

No reports either in secular or ecclesiastical papers have reached New Zealand that the clergy and laity of Birmingham or anywhere else have objected to the teaching of the Bishop on evolution. Educated English people are not like the fundamentalists of a Western State of America. But tinve has been strong objection all over the Church in England, and that not only among Anglo-Gatholics to his teaching oil other matters, arid it is difficult not to think that it has been deliberately provocative. He has spoken of the ordinary teaching of the Church about the Sacraments ns partaking of the nature of magic He has flouted the ordinary feeling for the riiost. popular Saint Francis of Assisi, by emphasising his bodily uncleanness—which might bo dohe of many great people of the middle ages—and neglecting. his holiness. He has compared the administration df the Uoiy Sacrament to the dying'td the pagan custom of putting a coin into thb r outli of a dead man topay Charon for his passago over the Styx. Eeligious pbople have found such sentiments coming from a Bishop of the Church deplorable and offensive, and his diocese is extremely tinhappy; but of cdUrse there are some who admire him, arid there is no doubt of his great ability in the spheres of science and mathematics.

It is important that the issue should be generally understood. When Bishop Barnes says: "Tile Scientific survey gUeS nothing to lis to repudiate the belief that man's creation wad Divitiely planned,'' religious people are grateful. When he says, "The gorilla and ciHlised man are products of the same machinery, but there lias been an unexpected variation in the cade of man," they are not staggered, fteligir .s people of education knoW the difficulties which accompany the doctrine of evolution, the differentiation of species, the inheritances of acquired characteristics, ahd all thfe rest of it, but they are not On the whole opposed to Darwinism. They did oppose it When it Was first propounded or popularised in modern'times, as they must always oppose a scientific theory Until it has made good its claims, but they do nbt on the whole oppose it to-day. They accept it or sUspeud their judgment. They have ho quarrel With Bishop' Barries on this-scOfe. But When he talks profanely, some Would think blasphemously, of Sacraments arid Saints, they wi&h he Were not a Bishop of the Chiifch, and he has probably done more to intensify the prevailing dissatisfaction with the appointment of Bishops by the Government o' the day than any one man of oUr iiirie.