CONGREGATIONAL UNION OF VICTORIA.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 175, 23 October 1886, Page 8 (Supplement)

CONGREGATIONAL UNION OF VICTORIA.

Melbourne, October 13. The first business meeting of the Congregational Union for the annual session was held this afternoon. The Chairman for the coming year, the Rev. F. Browne, delivered hia inaugural address in the evening to a large audience in the Collins-streetCongregational Church. Hia theme was R 'The present day mission of the Christian Church : its relations, scope and hindrances. 1 ' The Church, he said, had a high and worthy function to discharge in conserving domestic relationships and the purity of family life. He maintained that the pulpits of the land should enunciate and commend more than they do the virtues of truthfulness and .honesty, and should plead for the slow, yet just and secure, gaing of industry and legitimate trade, as against the feverish lust of wealth, which was pandered to by the smartness and trickery of gambling speculators. It was also no inconsiderable part of the mission of the Church to educate public opinion to a right standard of political duty. Religious sensationalism was earnestly deprecated, and with respect to the atheistic secularism of the colony, the speaker said he was justified in the reflection that the worst of men, the dishonest, the impure, the intemperate, the genus larrikin, were in sympathy with it, and were ,the most blatant followers of its champion.