BISHOP’S SERMON

Hokitika Guardian, 8 November 1927, Page 3

BISHOP’S SERMON

RESPECTABILITY AND RELIGION

CHRTSTCHURCH, Nov. 7

• For respectability, the world has certain rewards, and somehow respectability has always teen confused with religion. There are plenty of things to make us sad and gloomy without adding religion to them. It has sometimes, of necessity, been presented so, said Bishop West-Watson, speaking at last night’s service in connection with the Jubilee Celebrations of St Saviour Church, Sydenham. There are those who say that th. abounding vitality of our yoim people is a matter only for anxiety,” lie said. “ Religion like that would never accomplish anything. It is not part of the Christian faith that the golden days were in the past. The best is. yet to come. That is our faith and hope. There are great difficulties to be overcome.

“ There are still some amongst us who can remember what Christchurch was like fifty years ago,” said the Bishop. “In those days tiie Church spoke to the people in a rather different way from what it does to the present generation. Those early folk laid the foundation stone of this church truly and well. You go on building on that foundation.

“ Between 1877 and 1927, how much has happened! How far off are some of those days of which we now read in our history hooks. \Yo read and are sometimes rendered uncomfortable by the great opening that has been made by Science, of tho history of man in the world, and the history of the world itself, and the further possibilities of mail’s diseovereios.

“ Fifty years ago the great controversy against the first teachings of Evolution was at its height. AYe have to realise that after all we know so very little, and there is so much yet to he gleaned.

Of course the circumstances of our lives and the lives of those people fifty years ago are very different, imagine those early settlors going to the AVest Coast, looking forward to the day when they would ho linked up with the great world by wireless, when there would be electric light and telephones. Our lorefnthers could hardly have imagined it. “ Communication lias made the world so much smaller. Movement is so much easier. AYe have not settled down yet. It seems to me that a new race lias sprung up, with all its own characteristics and all its own achievements to look hack upon. The Church and State it is developing along its own line. It views the English tradition with reverence hut not with the reverence of those men and women of 1877. All that means a different attitude to things in Church as well as things in State, and these changes bring now problems before us.”