THE CURSE OF SHIRKERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 473, 1 October 1928, Page 14

THE CURSE OF SHIRKERS

MEN WHO DO NOTHING SERMON AT ONEHUNGA “A shirker is a footballer who takes money from a bookmaker to lose a match. He is cursed for the rest of his natural life.” This was one of the Rev. Lionel B. Fletcher’s modern illustrations to his sermon at the Congregational Church, Onehunga, yesterday. His text was “Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.”—Judges v., 23. The Christian religion, said Mr. Fletcher, was a call to arms, a call to action. If we were not careful, there would come a curse upon us, as it came from Meroz, because they had stood by and done nothing to assist their compatriots to throw off the yoke of the Canaanites. Meroz was once a great city, but now it is a valley of desolation, a collection of a few mud huts and diseased dogs. Everyone despised a shirker— Deborah and Barak had called Israel to arms but very few had responded and the people of the city of Meroz were among the shirkers. Inactivity was the sin of Meroz as it was the sin of New Zealand to-day. The people of Meroz were quite satisfied to go on their way living on the fat of the land and making money. They would not help the enemy, but they also would not help their own side. They simply did nothing. Mr. Fletcher drew a vivid picture of the scene of Rorke’s Drift on the Tugela River when 18 British soldiers were surrounded by 4,000 Zulus. They surrendered, but fought on to the last man. “If one or two of those men had shirked then,” said the preacher, “they would have been shot by their own mates.” HELPING NEITHER SIDE There were thousands of shirkers in our midst to-day. “You don’t help the enemy, but you don’t help us to kill him.” The worse enemy we had to contend against to-day was the drink traffic. It was the direct cause of nine-tenths of the poverty, misery and degradation all around us. “God will damn and curse every man and woman that has anything to do with it.” There were thousands of professing Christians in the churches who never did a hand’s turn toward fighting the vice and iniquity that were growing up in this tremendously selfish generation People were rushing on from one pleasure to another at such a pace that he predicted a great mental smash sooner or later. Already thousands were nothing but nervous and mental wrecks. The abnormal development of old people’s nerves in young people’s bodies was worrying the nerve specialists to-day, and insanity was increasing at such an alarming rate that if a halt were not called, further additions would have to be made to our already enormous mental hospitals. Hundreds were smashing down under the strain, while the professing Christians looked on in smug complacence like the people of Meroz. “Don’t live in the same skin as a coward,” enjoined the preacher. “Don’t live like skunks and rabbits in a hole, but come out in the open and fight God’s battle like men. Get right into the work of God and fight the vices all around you.”