HENRY VARLEY’S MISSION.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 464, 19 April 1890, Page 4

HENRY V ARLEY’S MISSION.

AN UNSINNING LIFE. Auckland, April 14. The lecture hall of the Y.M.C.A. Building was crowded on Friday afternoon, when Mr Henry Varley gave hia customary exposition of the Scriptures. In the opening prayer Mr Varley asked that they might be saved from getting hold of the right truth in the wrong way ; that they might see that if they said they had no sina they were deceiving themselves, and if tempted to think that sin was not within them, might they be taught it was not so ; that if they said so, they were giving the lie to God. After a hymn bad been sung, Mr Varley gave an exposition of the 4th chapter of Ephesians, beginning at the 17th verse, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk in, the vanity of their mind.” Mr Varley said he was going to show the difference between the old man they had put off and the new man with which he was replaced. The reason they had so deep a consciousness of their sins was not because they had discarded their spiritual light, but because they were in the light. The 22nd verse read : “That ye put off concerning the former conversation, the old man, which is corrupt, according to the deceitful lusts.” Mr Varley said that the renewal was day by day. Christ had put aside the sins of the flesh so far as the attached penalty was concerned. The text said that the old man was vain. For his part he considered a mannish woman or a womanish man as very bad, but a vain old man was worse. Then the old man was proud,of dark understanding, alienated from God, ignorant, blind, past feeling, given to lasciviousness,given to all uncleanness, corrupt and deceitful, a liar, angry, of a sinful nature, connected with the devil, idle, given to corrupt communication, a corrupt teacher, rejector of the Holy Spirit, bitter, clamorous, given to evil speech, unkind, hard-hearted, and unforgiving. This was the nature of the corrupt old man they had to put away. Mr Varley then went on to show that the new man was just the opposite of all these idiosyncrasies of the old man. He said he was very grieved when he heard young Christians say they were without sin, for they were near a fall. Jesus Christ by His wonderful atonement had swept away the penaiy attached to the fall. They had died unto sin, but lived unto God, in Jesus Christ. He would admit that if it was competent for a man to abide constantly in Jesus Christ, he would commit no sin, but if he was to admit that there was never, any breach in their exercise of faith, then he must admit that they were perfect. Therefore they must let their faith grow and cultivate it, but never dream of affirming that they gradually improved from the body of sin. They must bear in mind that Christians traced their geneaology nob from Adam but from Christ. The new man was to be right, whole, and true, so said God and they could nob add to that. He did not know a whole man in Auckland. He knew a man in Australia who would give £SOO to some missionary enterprize, and at the same timo grind down his employees. He did nob consider that a whole man.

MR VARLEV ON “CHASTITY.”

Fully two thousand men of Auckland crowded the Citv Hall on Saturday evening to hear Mr Henry Varley’s promised lecture on “The Advantages and Obligations of Chastity.” Below and upstairs the seating accommodation of the hall was crammed and many had . to.- content themselves with standing rQom only.

Quite a number of the medical profession of the city were present. Dr, Kenderdine was to have presided, but was unavoidably absent. After devotional exercises Mr Varley rose and spoke. The lecture occupied about an hour and a-half, and was characterised by the deepest earnestness. It was listened to throughout with intense interest, and the thrilling portions of the address were received with the loudest of applause. Some of the facts cited by the lecturer in his address were astonishing, and served to show the need for plainspeaking by men of Mr Varley’s stamp on the vices with which he dealt. Mr Varley was evidently thoroughly acquainted with his subject, speaking as a man who knew what he was talking about. His hearers recognised this, and the appreciation of the great value of the lecture was unanimous at the close. On many occasions during the evening, and especially when Mr Varley related the doings of the notorious Madame Vine and the man Reeder in Melbourne, and the escape of a New Zealand girl from them, and his efforts in securing for the two a sentence of twelve months imprisonment each, his story was greeted with quite a storm of applause. Mr Varley first referred to the vices practised in the boys’ public schools in England, and to the evil results they entailed. He urged on young men the urgent necessity of living a pure life, and pointed out the terrible consequences to the nation of vice and licentiousness. The lecturer spoke at length on the “social evil,” and brought forward some startling facts. He bitterly denounced the sin ot seduction, and if he had his way the seducer should be banished from society. Mr Varley brought forward in support of his contentions for purity of lifo in young men a remarkable fact in connection with the native schools in Bombay. He had it on the authority of a friend of his, one of Her Majesty’s inspectors of schools in Bombay, that Parsee boys in the schools of the country were up to the age of fourteen or fifteen the brightest, quickest, and most intelligent of students. At that age they married, their girl partners being generally about twelve or thirteen years of age. The change in the mental and physical characteristics of the youths very soon became apparent after their matrimonial unions. They became dull, listless, devoid of intelligence andquickness, andwithoutinterest in their advancement in life. This effect was an inevitable product of the boy-and-girl marriages, unions made long before the children were fitted to marry. It was the opinion of very many that until these child-mar-riages gave place to a better state of things the Parsees and Hindoos never could really become a manly nation, in the true sense of the word.

It was a sad thing, but it was a fact that prostitution must in some degree always exist, as the world was at present constituted. But it was not the function of a government to regulate the traffic. When a legislature regulated prostitution, then it was regulating and recognising vice and crime. Godly women of the place should do on the female side what he was endeavouring to do amongst the men, and try and win from their life of sin the fallen sisters of society.

SCRIPTURAL PROBLEMS

THE AGE OF MAN. THE MILLENNIUM AT HAND. “ Some Sceptical Objections Considered and Answered ” was the subject of Mr Varley’s Sunday afternoon address in the City Hall, the building being filled to its utmost capacity. THE AGE OF MAN. Mr Varley said, in the course of his address : The man who tells you that humanity is much older than the Bible says it is, tells yob what is altogether false. We do not say the earth is only six thousand years old, but that man’s history upon the earth’s surface is of that age. There may have been upon the earth other beings before man lived upon it, bub there is nothing in that to disturb our faith in the Word of the living God. God would nob have said Adam was the “ first ” man if there were millions before him. The first man was nob a monkey. The first man was “of the earth—earthy,” and the Bible is positively conclusive that man’s history upon tho earbli does not exceed 6,000 years. THE MILLENNIUM.

Speaking of the millennium, which he believes to be very near at hand, Mr Varley said that dispensation will see one King over the whole earth, and a complete cessation of war, except in the first tremendous conflict, when the Lord Jesus Christ comes to the earth. There will be no Queen Victoria when Jesus Christ is Sovereign over all. There will be no Czar of Russia, and here I will say there ought not to be. A monarch that will tolerate the lashing of women, that will send men to the wilds of Siberia, that will abstract from his people fifty millions sterling as he does every year —he may wonder that Nihilism is found in his country ; he may be surprised that bombs are ready for the carriage or railway in which he rides—but it is no surprise to my mind. (Loud applause.) I believe that we are within a few years of the setting up of the majestic government of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is something for your politicians to think about; there is something for your working men that do not like the idea of the New Zealand lands being locked up. and I greatly sympathise with Henry George in a lot of his views, but, and I say it with all reverence, I would rather have Jesus Christ than Henry George to rectify these wrongs. AGE OF NATIONS. Returning to the question as to the age of man, Mr Varley said : “I defy you to give one single conclusive proof that man is over six thousand years old. All the talk about the wondrous age of the Chinese nation and of prehistoric nationalities on the earth’s surface is pure theory, say of the type of my friend Professor Darwin.” Going into figures, Mr Varloy showed that while the present population of the earth was fourteen hundred millions, a reasonable computation for a period of six thousand years would give, untold billions of the human family. THE FLOOD. It was pointed out, Mr Varley said, that millions had been swept off the face of the earth, bub this he had never seen proved, and reckoning backwards, by no method of calculation could ho make the present population of the earth reach back for six thousand, years. Ho got back just as far as the flood. Many people, Mr Varley said, thought this was a very strange act of a loving God, but he (Mr- Varley) thought; it was exactly the thing that God ought to have done. Some had said to him: Do. you believe the God of mercy commanded Joshua to “go and exterminate this people,” and'his reply was: “ Undoubtedly I do.” He confessed that he would be put in a much mote difficult position where.he asked why God bears

with bad men so much as He does, but h e attributed this to the long-suffering mercy of God. If, however, he (Mr Varley) beard to-morrow that God had cut down a dozen ripe sinners in this city, he would recognise it as a beneficent work to the people. How long was God to defer the punishmenb of those nations which were guilty of the most frightful wickednesses ? Human life was God’s property, and if it was abused and He withdrew it, how could they find fault ? He (Mr Varley) was convinced that it was the right thing to exterminate the Canaanites. A PRECIOUS FABLE.

Some said the Bible was but a tissue of fables. Well, ho asked, “Where does a tissue of fables come from? You must account for it.” Mr Varley read the Ten Commandments, and commented on each in passing, and said, “If these Ten Commandments were observed in Auckland, why, it would be a paradise. If a bad thing will make a good fellow, we must have the bad thing ; but I don’t believe that I believe that only a good tree bringebh forth good fruit.” Sir Varley next expressed, in the most forcible language, his opposition of superstition in connection with religion, and, in support ot his view, he stated that in consequence of the exclusion of superstition the Englishspeaking races were now going ahead in all quarters of the earth. SABBATH OBSERVANCE. Mr Varley next dealt with the supposititious question : Is the law to be acted up to as it is given here? He replied : Nob the letter of it. The Lord Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath, and while I rejoice and teach emphatically that there should be nothing done on the Lord’s Day that could bo put off bill the Monday, or anything left till the Lord’s Day that may be done on the Saturday, that it is a day of rest set apart for the worship of God, for home comforts and for all that means rest, and that is bound up with tho beautiful institution of the day, I am sure that God never intended the day to be a day of slavish dread of Him, but that the family might rejoice by reunion in His presence, and that that beautiful day should be the brightest heritage that man possesses on this earth. In drawing his conclusions, Mr Varley said that in his opinion one of the very best remedies for immorality was the union in legitimate marriage at the age of two or three and twenty of healthy young persons of either sex. Many young men at once raised an objection to this, saying that they could never afford bo do such a thing at their time of life, that a wife only blighted a young man’s prospects, was a hindrance rather than anything else, and so on. This was utter nonsense. (Applause.) Why, many a man had dated the commencement of his fortune and prosperity from the day of his mai-riage, and a good and faithful wife was a helpful auxiliary in the race of life whose value could never be told. He himself had much to thank his own wife for, and he could say she was tho best woman that ever lived. (Laughter and applause.) Young men were vastly mistaken when they imagined that a wife was a hindrance in their fight for fortune. At the close of his interesting lecture Mr Varley was accorded a hearty vote of thanks by acclamation, and the audience gave expression to a wish that another lecture should be given next Saturday evening-