MR. JARDINE REPROVED

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 191, 30 August 1937, Page 6

MR. JARDINE REPROVED

Open Letter to Duke oi Windsor's Vicar DANGERS OF PUBLIC1TY, Under the title "An Open Letter to the Duke's Vicar," the following pointed address was recently published in the English newspaper, The People: — Dear Mr. Jardine. — Until you volunteered to marry the Duke and Duchess of Windsor not many of us, outsido your own working-class parish, had ever heard of the Vicar of St. Paul's, Darlington. Now you are suddenly right in the limelight. Do not let it dazzle you. Publieity is like a strong wine and many a man not used to it finds that it goes to his head. When I wrote my usual notes in Page Twelve, I felt as most people must have done these past few days, that you had made a gesture of fine independence and sincerity. I hoped that there would be no furtber criticism of youjr decision, even against the wishes of your ' ' superior officers ' ' in tho Church, to conduet the Anglican wedding service for our former king and his bride. There is still no oecasion to criticiso that action or to question the generous and kindly impulse from which it sprang. - Nevertheless I do begin to fear that, like the Bishops, you, too, have now missed an excellent opportunity to say very little. Of course, it is understandable that you were gratified by a royal welcome, touched by the. exceptional and still rather tragic circumstances of a great ocacsion, and proud of the personal mementoes which were given you. . .But do you seriously think that the Duke of Windsor, whose one desire is now to lead "a happy and useful private life," will appreciate the publieity which you are now f ocussing upon him and his bride? Do you think that your widely quoted utterances, with their hints of steps that might be taken to meet exceedingly unlikely action by your clerical superiors, will either help to give the Duke and Duchess that little "measure of peace" for which they long, or even promote the cause of the Church you serve? There was, it appears, a big "fan mail" awaiting your return. By all means take heart from those letters of voluntary congratulations, but why tell the world about them? You are a clergyman; not a cinema star. It would be a thousand pities to spoil the effect of a warm-hearted and, in the view of many, Christian action by exaggeratihg its importance or too obviously basking in the glow of its accomplishment. To do what you did may well have been "Christian"; to talk too muck about it now that it is done is scarcely in the best of taste. This, in all periousness, from A Man of the People.