ECCLESIASTICAL AFFAIRS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXII, Issue 97, 14 May 1900, Page 4

ECCLESIASTICAL AFFAIRS.

A GRKAT MISSIONARY CONIiR^NCE. OSIXIOISM OF THE WE9TMIItBTER CONFESSION. (Per R.M.B. Moana at Auckland.) Sam Fbancisco, May 18. Preparations have been under ' way for four years for an Ecumenical Missionary Conference about to come together in Carnegie Ball, New York. Representatives of every Protestant denomination will be present, delegates coining from all parts of' the globe. There will be a discussion of various plans Tar Christianising non-Christian parts of the inhabited globe. ExPresident Harrison will call conference to order, and Mr. Grover Cleveland (also an ex-President) will have part in the gathering. Other American laymen who will participate are Justice David J. Brewer, John D. Bockfeller, Colonel Charles Denby, President McKinley and John Wanamaker. Great Britain will send some of her most renowned men.

The Rev. Dr. Hillis, speaking in the New York pulpit formerly occupied by Mr, Henry Ward Beecher and Mr. Lyman Abbot, bitterly attacked the Westminster Confession of Faith, and withdrew from the brotherhood of the churches. He has been followed by tiw Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, the political purifier of New York, who said in his pulpit in the Madison square Presbyterian Church:—"We ought to have a new Confession of Faith.. It is surprising that the Presbyterian Church is able to do as much as it is doing with such an incubus strapped upon us S/s we are tottering under with our present confession. The thing needed is not a system of theology, for that is what our present confession is, but a simple, brief Saxon statement of half a dozen of the vital ingredients of Christ's message to the world. I could get along with a confession containing but the little Jesus said when trying to make a Christian of Nicodemus: 'God so loved the world,that He gave His only! begotten Son that whosoever believed in Him should not perish,■ but have everlasting life." At any rate, we want a new creed now amending this one, which will *ot meet the necessities of the case. Better give it a dignified place in a museum for what it is than hack-it to pieces and revamp it for what it is not."