Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 17, 1908

A Non-Christian View

It is a thousand pities that the opportunity should be afforded to a non-Christian editor to rebuke the methods employed by professed Christians in raising money for church expenses, but so it is. The editor of the Times (Tokyo, Japan), a leading Japanese paper, gives his view of church bazaars. His comment, translated, reads thus:—

Church bazaars are among the most curious and eccentric forms of Western civilization imported into Japan to a moderate extent. Primarily the logical idea would be that if a community wants to raise money for building or repairing a church, people would simply put their hands in their pockets, pay what was needed or as much as they were able, and be done with it. But that is too direct and rational; the freaks and fads of the quaint Occident imperiously demand something that can be called amusement. And in this light they form an interesting study. The Yokohama Union Church Bazaar last Saturday was more amusing than a museum of curiosities. The queer “ins and outs” and why and wherefore of each item in the bazaar would afford ample material for a lecture on Strange Manners and Customs of a Strange People.

Even a heathen can see the incongruity between catering to this demand for amusement and the claim of Christianity to deliver its believers from the follies of the world, and such exhibitions constitute a stumbling-block in the path of the Christian church and its efforts to Christianize the heathen.