KIRK TAKEN TO TASK

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 518, 22 November 1928, Page 7

KIRK TAKEN TO TASK

NO INTEREST IN ANGLICAN | CRISIS MODERATOR SPEAKS OUT “Sometimes 1 feel that there are men in the Presbyterian Church who never see beyond their parish boundaries,” declared the moderator of the General Assembly, Professor W. Hewitson, last evening, when he was condemning the lack of unity between the branches of the Christian religion. “The Church of England is going through one of the greatest crises of her history, a crisis that may affect all English-speaking churches immeasurably, but so far as I can judge from the pages of our church paper, and from other sources of information, it has not interested us as a church very much,” he said. “We are more taken up with our socials, rallies, conferences, and pastoral settlements. At the heart of the crisis is the Book of Common Prayer. This is the devotional manual of the largest Church in the Empire and in the Dominion, one of the great devotional classics of the world, full of sober Scriptural- thought and feeling, expressed in English pure and undefiled, but I surmise it is an unknown book to the vast majority of Presbyterians.’ He concluded: “We have not even shown religious curiosity—to put it on that level—in the historic manual of the Church of England.”