England by G. W. Bailey

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 20, 1911

England

By G. W. Bailey

IT has been our privilege to labor for nearly a year and a half at Portsmouth, one of the most important naval ports of the greatest sea power on earth. On every side one is met by soldiers, sailors, barracks, and forts, while in the harbor float the giant war-ships, seemingly asleep, but ready at any time to pour forth death and destruction. The papers announce provision for five new dread-naughts by an increase of £3,788,800 in the naval estimates for 1911-12.

Amid such surroundings, the Free Church Council convened, March 6, in the great town hall. This body is a union of the non-conformist churches of Great Britain, and represents one half of the religious people of the country. The new president, Rev. Charles Brown, who succeeds Dr. Jowett, took for the text of his opening address “the present truth,” meaning the facts, duties, and necessities of the present time. He began with politics, although he had been warned off that ground by his friends. All manner of questions of moral and spiritual importance were bound up in politics, he declared. Peace among nations, the drink traffic, land laws, care of the poor, education, Sunday trading, were questions about which the churches should bring pressure to bear on the government of the day. A part of the present truth, unwelcome but certain, seems to be that the weekly day of rest (Sunday) is being filched away from us.

The subject of the disestablishment of the church in Wales is now before the country, and Canon Ottley, honorable secretary of the Imperial Sunday Alliance, said that if they allowed the Sunday observance to pass away, there would soon be no churches nor schools to disestablish, and they would find England becoming dechristianized and paganized.

The archbishop of Canterbury sent a message to the council to show how sincerely he appreciated “their readiness to combine the religious and industrial forces of the country in safeguarding, for all classes, the opportunity for the due observance of Sunday for its highest purposes, and especially in promoting such amended legislation as may tend to reduce all Sunday business and labor to the minimum.” Canon Ottley said he was also authorized to say that his majesty the king heartily sympathized with any movement which would insure for the working people their Sunday rest.

Another subject which was before the council was that of church unity. The council is itself a union of non-conformist churches, and the vision of union with the established Church of England has been revived; but if there was to be any unity and co-operation between them and the members of the Anglican Church, it must be on the lines of a frank recognition of each other’s churchmanship, and the equality of their standing on the Christian faith. The president said that if he was told that in order to become a true member of the Holy Catholic Church, he must become an Episcopalian; and if in order to become a valid minister of the new covenant, he was bidden to submit to reordination at the hands of a bishop, he would respectfully but resolutely decline.

Sir Oliver Lodge, one of England’s greatest scientists, gave an address before

a well-filled house, in which he stated his belief in the continued existence of the dead, and that they could occasionally be communicated with. To illustrate one point, he supposed that the corpuscles of the blood were endowed with reason, and asked what conception a corpuscle could have of the manifold interests and activities of man, still less of the universe known to man, of which he himself formed so trivial a portion? “We are the white corpuscles of the cosmos,” said he. “We do serve, and form a part of, an immanent Deity.” Further, he said: “The sunshine is not the sun. Christ is the sunshine—that fraction of transcendental Cosmic Deity which suffices for the earth.”

In view of the foregoing it seems clear that according to the ideas of the Free Church Council, the combination of the religious forces of the country, and this union then bringing pressure on the government to enact legislation for the observance of Sunday, are all among the things which compose the present truth; but most of the readers of the REVIEW know that these are the forces which will combine to oppose the real present truth. G. W. BAILEY.