MEN AND RELIGION.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5485, 9 October 1929, Page 2

MEN AND RELIGION.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

PRIEST’S WORDS AT GRAVESIDE.

On Monday, afternoon the Rev. Father Taylor, parish priest of Paeroa, in speaking at the graveside of the late Miss Teresa Sheehan, Rotokohu, said some weighty things worthy of the consideration of the average person.

Within the past two weeks, he said, he had visited that graveyard, in that sad official capacity, no less than six times. He had buried a child three weeks’ old, a woman well advanced in years, and now they were consigning to her last resting-place a girl in the prime of life. All this should suggest and emphasise the most important fact of life, namely, that at the end of it was death. The truth of the threat of Sacred Scripture was before them in all its stark nakedness : “It is appointed unto man once to die.” That had only one meaning, namely, six feet of clay. The subject was developed in terms of a recent experience which was his in which the sons of a mother who had dropped dead boastingly declared, over their mother’s open grave, that they denied Christianity and anything in the nature of a future life. It was tragic and painful, said the speaker, and he asked why not tear the crucifix from the coffin lid and trample it underfoot, because, if not in actsual fact, then at least in thought, they were insulting that sacred emblem. It meant nothing to them. In terms of their belief their mother’s funeral was a great big mockery. Why the expense and pageantry of a funeral if they believed there was no hereafter ? Why prayers and ceremonial ? The answer was silence !

In conclusion, preparatory to sympathising with the relatives of the dead, Father Taylor appealed to all, whether Catholic or Protestant, as professing Christians to live the life of which they boasted. No matter what their religious persuasions, let them express their sincerity in terms of public worship. “Something is better’ than nothing, and, as a sequence, some religion is better than none,” he said. Hundreds in this town, as elsewhere, professed to be Christians and lived pagan lives. He appealed to the men to give a decent and manly example to the coming generation. “Many of you,” he said, “profess to be Christians, and yet you never darken a church door. You are responsible for the future Christian spirit of Paeroa; and what example are you showing ?” A weighty and terrible responsibility was theirs which could not be shirked. Their criminal negligence must be paid for in time or eternity. In conclusion, Father Taylor appealed to all men present, whether Protestant or Catholic, to do the decent thing by Almighty God and worship Him publicly, according to the knowledge and light accorded them.