NEW WESLEY HOUSE.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1350, 30 January 1912, Page 9

NEW WESLEY HOUSE.

OPENING SPEECH BT MISS VIOLET ASQUITH.

Miss Violet Asquith, daughtor of .the British Primo Minister, opened on Decomber 6 the now homo of the West London Mission in Kingsway. "Wesley House," as the premises are called, is eight stories high, and embodies such useful features of an institutional church as a common room and buffet, a library, a gymnasium, and a games and smoking loom, while the highest floor of all is to be used as a creche. When Iho adjacent lungswa.v Hall is finished tho whole scheme will have cost £63,000, of which X'lll,ooo has vet to l>e raised. There was an influential gathering at the opening, which was .preceded by a reception given by Mrs. Walter Runcinnui, wife -of the president of the Board ot Agriculture.

_ Miss Violet Asquith's speech in declaring- the new buildings open was graceful Ml plimseolocy, and was delivered with a confidence and ease recalling tho Prime .Minister s own manner.

'\\ e rejoice in these buildings," Miss As((imh remarked, "as in time of war we might rejoice ill a Dreadnought, for tliey have put in our hands a new and powerful instrument —an instrument, f 0 my mind, of' wider range and more varied scope than any Dreadnought which has yet been built-.

j. J there are some of us here today, she went on, after enumeratiifg' the ijurnosr* to which Wesley House will,be mil, "for whom it Ima a deeper meaning than merely the practical one. For some of us it is the realisation of a hopo deeplv cherished by one to whom this mission owes its being, the Rev; Hugh Price Hughes. It stands for a fragment of his great dream, 'the reconstruction of society on a Christian basis.' "I cannot help reminding you," Miss Asquith concluded, "that it is not by the rise and fall of States, or tho march of armies, or even the evolution of constitutions, that the face of the world has been changed, but by religious systems. It is given to you, hero and now, to maintain the tradition of personal service and sacrifice handed down to ns from tho earliest days of Christianity." As a memento of the occasion, Mies Asqinth was presented bv Mrs. JluAi J rice Hughes with a Invuitifullv-bouml copy, in two volumes, of Weslev's Jour-