RIVAL RELIGIONS. The Olive Branch of Friendship.

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 191, 27 February 1904, Page 6

RIVAL RELIGIONS. The Olive Branch of Friendship.

AN eminent Frenchman once remarked, "The English have forty religions, but only one sauce." Englishmen have quarrelled very little about the single sauce, but they have made a heap of trouble about the forty religions. You remember that the newly-imported cleric, Bishop Neligan, gave instructions to the clergy of his diocese recently that they were not to worship with other denominations, which doesn't exactly clear the way for the coming of the time "when the lion shall he down with the lamb. * * * Curious then to learn that, in a, Northern district, just the other day, a Catholic priest was the primemover in a gathering held in honour of a Primitive Methodist clergyman, who was removing to another charge in conformity with the peripatetic rule which obtains with his particular sect. Imagine it, ye Presbyterians, Plymouth Brethren, Baptists, Anglicans, members of Churches of Christ, Congregationalists, Wesleyans, Seventh Day Adventists, Catholics, Salvationists, and others. Imagine burying the hatchet of sectarian exclusiveness and buckling to for the purpose — not of wrangling over differences which don't matter, but of helping the old chariot alcng with a united shove ! * * * Believe us, it needed courage for that Northern Catholic priest to hold out the right hand of friendship to the Primitive Methodist, and it needed courage in the latter to accept it. Some people who are just as liable to err as you or us, and who attend either of the Churches represented by those two gentlemen, may hold up their hands m horror, perhaps, "at the suggestion of such mmglmgs The fact is, rival religionists don't know enough about one another They don't swap pulpits often enough, and they don't know what good fellows the said rivals may be. * • * We would like to see a clerical club, at which clergy of every one of the forty denominations might meet on terms of friendship. Primarily, the parsons are all after the same object —the cure of souls — and despite differences of belief, they might learn points by yielding to a broader friendship and a wider tolerance. An example has been set ip. the North which ought to be easy of imitation.