DINGWALL ORPHANAGE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 890, 6 February 1930, Page 11

DINGWALL ORPHANAGE

PRIVILEGE AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR TRUSTEES

SPEECH BY MODERATOR “By this bequest, the late Mr. Dingwall has conferred a great honour, a great privilege, and imposed a grave responsibility upon the trustees of tho orphanage, and also upon the presbytery of Auckland,” said the Rev. Professor William Hewitson, moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, in opening the Dingwall Presbyterian Orphanage this afternoon. “Although the Church does not control the orphanage, it is responsible for the membership of eight out of eleven trustees. Four of its ministers are trustees ex officio, and the presbytery is required to appoint annually four laymen to the hoard,” the moderator continued. “The chief wealth of New Zealand is not to he found in the flocks and herds, but in the children of New Zealand homes and New Zealand schools. The privileges and responsi-

bilities of the trustees are further increased by the wise and wide powers of discretion given them by th© will of the founder. The trust is singularly free from hampering conditions by which the usefulness of some men’s generosity is sometimes sadly diminished.” LACK OF VISION It was desirable on such an occasion to form with some fullness the ideal at which the Church was to aim, paid the professor. As in the prophet’s day, so it was still that people perished for lack of vision. As h© conceived it, the ideal of the trust was to fulfil, that was to fill full, the parental relations for certain children who had suffered incalculable loss by the death, the disabilities, or by the neglect of their parents. What were the duties of the parental relation of an orphanage trust? He would say they were the care and development, of the physical, mental, and spiritual powers of children to the highest degree possible to them, until they reached the years of personal responsibility, when they assumed the care of their own lives. This was not unlike the wish of the gentle, apostolic mother-nurse, St. Paul, for the church family—that they might be consecrated through and through, and that in spirit, soul, and body they might be kept without break or blame. After quoting from a report by Sir George Newman, that one in four children entering schools in England at the age of five needed medical attention before being fit for education, the professor said the orphanage trustees would give careful attention to the health of their charges. It was known that the health of children in this Dominion was less precarious than that of children of the United Kingdom, yet th© country should not lull itself into a false security. "Everyone in a position of trust; like this will feel it imperative to keep in close and continuous touch with the medical profession,” said Professor Hewitson.

SPIRITUAL CULTIVATION Probably tire Church was giving more thought and service to the spiritual cultivation of the child than she had ever done, the moderator continued. In the provision of buildings, the preparation of literature, the training of teachers, there had been an astonishing activity within the last quarter of a century, and yet there was a distressing leakage between the school and the church. Probably, with an increasing emphasis upon the Sunday school, there had been a neglect of the true place of culture, for the soul of the child was the home, and not the school, and that its natural and God-appointed teacher was the parent. There was more than an attractive assonance in Dean Inge's words that “Religion is caught rather than taught,” and it was in general caught from the father and mother. In a book on the homeless child, called “Oliver Untwisted,” by Miss M. A. Payne, there was a pleasant picture of the spiritual atmosphere created in a children’s home by a matron, a wise and good woman: “Not one child’s trouble was too small or too great for her to grasp. She would spend a whole week of her scanty leisure times in trying to win the love and confidence of a little thief or neurotic. Compulsory and bored attendance at Sunday chapel was stopped, and after a few weeks the children went happily, and voluntarily.” “We must remember that the body, soul, and spirit are not three separate and unrelated parts of human life. On the contrary, they act and react upon one another, and together | make up one human person,” the professor declared. Christian who is ignorant is to that ’extent a defective Christian. The unity of the human life in its elements of body, mind, and spirit is suggested by the way in which the three vocations of the doctor, the teacher, and the clergj--rnan merge with one another.” PLACE THAT IS DUE Presbyterianism has been accustomed to pride itself on its zeal for education and to boast of Knox’s ideal of a church and school in every parish. I am not so sure that our zeal for education remains unimpaired. .1 think that we, in common wit-h all the churches* have not given the place that is due to the body in a perfect scheme of redemption. A British Wesleyan evangelist used to say when he was advocating making churches : comfortable that he had never known i a man converted with his toes cold. ;

The churches too often overlook the fact that it is difficult, if not impossible. for a person to be a Christian under the physical conditions under which some are doomed to live. For the Church to take an active part in Health Week work, in hospital equipment, and in the promotion of medical knowledge was not to be engaged in a side issue, hut to be doing something that was an integral part of the religion that taught that the body was the temple of the Holy Spirit, and says therefore, “Glorify God in your bodies, which are His.” “I have thus indicated what I think are the parental duties of the orphanage trustees,” said the Moderator in conclusion. “They may be summed in the prayer of the apostle who was the father and the gentle nurse-mother of his children: ‘The very God of Peace sanctify yon wholly; and your whole spirit, soul and body be presented blameless.’ ” '