CHURCHMEN AT PLAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1942, Page 4

CHURCHMEN AT PLAY

AMUSEMENTS FAVOURED IN BRITAIN.

The 447 clerics and the 406 laymen of the Church Assembly make the nearest thing to a Parliament that the Church of England possesses, says the “Manchester Guardian.” The current “Theology” has an informing inquiry into the amusements most popular among its members. Golf comes easily first, with tennis a good second and the reflective pleasures of fishing, gardening, reading, and music well up the list. Motoring, walking, boating, and hunting are included. “The really striking thing,” notes the writer, “is the way these men and women differ from the masses of the people, whose characteristic pleasures are cinemas, racing, ‘the dogs,’ watching football matches, bridge, whist drives.” Of the Assembly members one layman alone confessed the cinema as one of his amusements, one layman and one parson liked watching football, one parson played bridge. As for racing, “the dogs,” and whist drives, they were left out altogether. There seems a sad chasm between pastors and flocks on their holiday afternoons. One other interesting point comes from an inquest into families. Children from Assembly marriages are 2.3 for the clergy and 2.2 for the laity. “As at least three children are needed to continue the race, the class of churchmen here represented is far from reproducing itself.” Hard economic circumstances, it seems, are taking from us that lustre of our race the large family in the country vicarage, a nursery of sound Imperial administrators.