“TOO MUCH TALK.”

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5247, 5 March 1928, Page 4

“TOO MUCH TALK.”

BISHOP’S CONCLUSION.

SUBSTITUES FOR RELIGION.

“ The one thing that is wrong with the woHd,” once said an inmate of an insane asylum, is that, there is entirely too much talking.” Bishop Charles Fiske, of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Central New York comes to the same conclusion, and in Scribner’s Magazine, he makes an attack upon welfare organisations as time-wasters and a substitute for real religion. He called his article “ The; Confessions of a Penitent and Puzzled Parson,” and states at the outset that he considers himself “a social reformer who has. at undertaken the task of reforming himself.” He cites a large number of movements which he has participated in or been asked to j°in, and tells us :

“There are now so many conventions conferences, . discussions, groups commissions, and uplift gatiherings of every sort that any one of us may have a perfectly grand time travelling about and attending conferences designed to show what sh°uld be done, and foregathering with those who are so busy learning what to do that they have little time to do what awaits their zeal and knowledge. ,ln my own church I find 1 it expected of me that I shall attend over fifty ecclesiastical gatherings each year, and the number could easily be increased were it not f°r perpetual vigilance on my part.

“Second, there c c me more than occasional doubts as to the character of much of our welfare work. It 'has been commercialised and professionalised to such an extent that a special kind of appeal is n«w being made for its support—an appeal to- pride of patronage from wealth —and l one begins also to feel that much of the work is an excuse for substituting opportunities of action for the difficulty of real thougiht and conviction.

“The average business man says Bishop Fiske has been encouraged to believe himself religious if he sings long and loud 1 about the duty of service, and insists, that, unlike virtue, which is its own reward, service brings in large monetary returns. So :

' “America has become almost hopelessly enamoured of a religion that is little more than a sanctified commercialism ; it is hard in this day and this land 1 to differentiate between religious aspiraton and business prosperity. Our conception of God is that lie is a sort of Magnified Rotarian. Sometimes, indeed, one wonders whether the social movement and the uplift in general has not become, among Protestants, a substitute for devotion ; worse than that, a substitute for real religion.”’.