CHURCH FAIRS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Nov 22, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 47.

CHURCH FAIRS.

The Catholic Mirror classes church fairs as “necessary evils.” The Mirror says:—

“Fairs being an evil, and being necessary, the problem to be met is not so much to obviate their necessity as it is to palliate their concomitant evils. One of these evils, and perhaps that which arouses the strongest condemnation of the average layman, is the forwardness of young girls. Many girls, self-respecting and respected by others, modest and demure in accord with their Catholic home training or the excellent discipline of convent or parochial school, throw lightly aside all their previously-conceived and well-confirmed notions of what is proper and becoming and enter with too great zest the eager contests of the fair room. Maidens who would hitherto have blushed at the very idea of speaking to a stranger, flock to the stores and offices of merchants and business men in quest of donations of money or goods, and, too frequently, when forward request is met with refusal, polite or otherwise, it may be, seek by boisterous cajolery, by unmaidenly importunity, to reverse the first denial. In the bazaar room similar scenes, only in a more exaggerated degree, are witnessed. Girls, in the effort, not so much to assist the church in paying off its debt as to be victorious in some contest, or to have the table for which they are working come out first, venture much and sacrifice much. They will address those to whom, perhaps in any other circumstances, they would disdain to speak. Undesirable acquaintanceships may be formed, which later can not with ease be dissolved.”

No form of evil can be a necessity to the true Christianity. And a “fair,” or anything else that will mislead young girls, as described in the foregoing extract, should be banished from the church of Christ. We need only to study the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth in order to see that they are altogether out of harmony with church fairs and all the rest of the inventions that professing Christians have devised to take the place of the pleasure and also the sacrifice of out-and-out giving to the cause of God.

Is not the almost universal assent, not only by Catholics, but by Protestants as well, to the idea that church fairs and the like are a necessity, a most marked indication of a great apostasy among professing Christians? The world has absorbed almost all who profess the name of Christ. The church is filled with hypocrisy. And this is true to such an alarming extent that it is one of the significant signs of our times. Have you ever considered seriously what it portends? T.