"HEREAFTER OF SLAIN."

Taranaki Daily News, 31 August 1915, Page 2

"HEREAFTER OF SLAIN."

CRITICISM OP SERMON. Owing to a sharp difference of opinion concerning a recent sermon preached by the Key. P. J. Wuinwright in the Gisborne Baptist Church on "The Hereafter of the Slnin," and also because of the inability of the church members to accept a statement defining his views with greater clearness!, Mr. Wuinwright li«h tendered his resignation as minister. This war, the preacher is reported to have said, would revolutionise very much in our social life. Many of our theories would have to change' to meet new facts. Picture the problem which arises when an old mother, bred in the stricter religious school, received the fatal telegram about her boy in the trenches. She knows that he has not been a Christian, in her sense of that word. He has never been to prayer meetings and surrendered himself to her Master, and now lie has given his life for home and country. What has become of him? Where is his spirit? She knows that, according to all her beliefs —beliefs in which she has been trained from earliest infancy—her boy must now be in hell, and yet her mother's heart contradicts her religions convictions. It is a terrible question for her to answer, and in thousands of cases this problem is arising. The preacher declared that he was only expressing his own convictions in what followed, and he urged all to be true to their intelligence and conscience. The men who give their all and pass out into the beyond with shattered bodies have sacrificed their life for home and country, for freedom and fair play. Will those millions who have thus died pass into mi everlasting hell, because they have never realised the beautv and the irrace of Jesus Christ, and because through mountains of prejudice and ignorance they have never understood the urgent need of self-surrender to Him? "To me such a thing is unthinkable, unbelievable,'' said the preacher. "Just as Christ welcomed those who did not know Him, because tliev possessed his spirit, so 1 believe Tie will welcome those who, not knowing Him, shed their blood for their country, gave their life for what .seemed to them right. Not in the higher mansions of heaven, perhaps, will they be received, but in some humble station, where they will grow and develop into saintliness and ChristlikeneßS."