ARCHBISHOP OF YORK CONDEMNS SHAM RESPECTABILITY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 968, 18 March 1911, Page 4

ARCHBISHOP OF YORK CONDEMNS SHAM RESPECTABILITY.

In an address to a gathering of the C.E.M.S. at Sheffield, the other day, the Archbishop of York made trenchant criticisms of the kind of Churchmauship that wraps itself about in a garb of respectability so effectually as to exclude the circulation of the current of brotherhood that should unite all Catholics in one body, the Church ; and which has also the effect of repelling many who would otherwise be dtawn within the circle of its influence. The Church of England, he said, must take off its frock-coat, and go into the world in its shirt sleeves, driven along by the fire and enthusiasm of the love of Jesus Christ to men. If the Church of England were going to do the work it was sent lo do, it must get rid of certain qualities. It must get rid of the notion that it can rely upon what was done for it by earlier generations, The fact that the Church is established and endowed is no kind of reason why members should be less self-sacrificing in their support of their Church than their Nonconformist friends. On the contrary, establishment and endowment were of value only in so far as they opened out to Churchmen wider opportunities of serving the national life. Therefore, instead of, as was so often the case, members of the Church of England being men who folded their arms and abstained from activity in the great movements of life, they should by their position be enabled to throw themselves into those movements with far more energy and zeal than men not so situated. The Church had suffered for many years from a certain chronic stiffening of respectability. “We are too desperately respectable,” he declared amid laughter; “we want something better than that, we want zeal and fire, and some sense of what is really waiting for our Church to do in this English life of ours.” Again, the Church must be rid of its isolation. The members stood too far apart from one another. It would be incorrect to describe one of their congregations as a warm-hearted, brotherly society of men and women. It was all very well to talk about knowing one another in Heaven. The question was, did they know one another on earth ? He did not know what the Church of Jesus Christ meant unless it was a brotherhood, and though women might find it difficult to ignore differences of social positions, there must not among men be any kind of standing apart because of such differences. He desired to see Churchmen more to the fore in public and social movements, and would like to .feel that in every trade union some of the leaders were Churchmen, and that in all the political parties Churchmen were among those taking the lead and standing for truth and straightness and fair play. The municipal councils also should be largely manned by their members standing for everything that was clean and honourable in civic life.