RELIGIOUS COQUETRY.

Waikato Times, Volume XIII, Issue 1168, 20 December 1879, Page 2

RELIGIOUS COQUETRY.

TO THE EDITOB. Sir, — It is truly said that it would bo good for the tone of the churches that preachers should be gentlemen. So too the illiterate clergyman is marked off in most cases by a very definite barrier from tho University-bred man. Hq is praoti- ; cally doomed never to rise beyond some | small incumbency, because he lacks tha social tact reasonably desired in a church dignatary who3e position makes him a link of union between the highest and lowest orders of society. An unmatured clergyman— whatever his piety and zeal is— ia not acceptable either to the ticlx or the poor. But the modern literate parson factories aim only at teaching particular Shibboths, and do nothing to inculcate social tact and refinement, to say nothing of higher culture. They do not so much as try to make a silit pui-se out of thd bristly raw material at their disposal. But to my mind that is the very smallest part of the evil which I deplore. What I desire to see is that people, -without leaving the social grade in which they move, without ceasing to be artisans, farm laborers, and -what not, shall nevertheless be ladies and gentlemen — gentlemen in all essentials of culture. It is a good thing that men shall be readily able to rise from the grocer's counter and Sunday School teaching to the pulpit. But I regret to say this class never dovetail with their own preaching. Hence we have tho class of religious coquets — persons who flirt with personal piety, and because they do not find in one aect all the pleasure they hanker after, immediately fall in love with some other. It is vain to argue with such persons. If you entreat them to remember that consistency is a jewel, they will tell you they prefer the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, and that thit is all they are after. They are peculiarly susceptible to the subtle magnetism of friendship. I am only pointing out afc present toe tendeneice of an illiterate temperament, with a strong- religious basis, to fly from one form of religion to another. There are some preachers who seem born to run the gauntlet of religious belief ; sceptics before they enter the church, they often settle upon a csecd that has been consecrated "by ages of assent. For some time a preaoher having j some such antecedents as those will preach ou this platform, iintil circumstances induce him to go in for a change. When he delivers a farewell sermon before a weeping congregation, which may well weep and mourn his heresy. It is not wonderful that something of the reputation of the coquet should attach to a, preacher of this description. They fall in love with creed after creed, only to jilt them all at last; and by the. time they reach the average boundary of human life it is no unusual thing for them to turn their back on the church altogether, and take to writing pyschological novels, or the invention of some new horse, dye, or drug, or some other pursuit eagerly unused by the human family. But when I come to dissect the conscience of the cla»S6 of vacillators of whom I have been speaking, I must confess,of being considerably in tha dark. Analyse as you will you cannot discover the. hidden nature — like the ways of the Almighty it is past finding out. —l am, &c, Coup de Grace. Te Awaamtu, Dec. 16, 1579.