SPORTSMAN'S SERVICE

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 139, 9 December 1929, Page 10

SPORTSMAN'S SERVICE

BAPTIST ATTACK

"VIOLATION OF SABBATH"

(By Telegraph.) (Special to "The Evening Post.") AUCKLAND, This Day. "A suggestion has been made from the Augliean pulpit, which, if it is put into practice, will amount to open and public violation of the Sabbath," said the Eev. Joseph W. Kemp in the Baptist Tabernacle last evening in an address on the controversy which has followed the announcement by Canon James in Wellington that he intended to hold early morning Sunday services which sportsmen could attend in sports garb.

"The suggestion that the church should be opened early, in order that those who want to spend the day in worldly recreations may have a little bit of religion before they begin it, is a somewhat grotesque idea, and my opinion is that sportsmen will merely snap their fingers at the suggestions and pay no attention to it at all. Suppose for a moment that this grotesque idea becomes universal, and that man, in taking his little religion before his day's tennis or cricket, appears in his sports garb and with weapons of his recreation. This would be an outrage to the Christian,conscience of others who wish to keep holy the Sabbath day. If church was to welcome Sunday tennis players, why not Sunday bathers? "At^my mid-week services I welcome any of my young people in sports garb," Mr. Kemp said. "But anyone who plays tennis on the Lord's Day is a violator of the. law of the Sabbath. This suggestion from an Anglican pulpit approximates very closely to the socalled Continental Sunday. Laxity is becoming- rife on every hand and it is one of the perils of the day."