OCR Text |
Show REFORMATION A FAILURE. The Freemans Journal, commenting on a sermon ser-mon in Liverpool, says: The present day results and developments of the "Reformation" were well shown and emphasized empha-sized in a recent sermon in Liverpool by Rev. J. Ashton, S. J. How many Churches are there (he asked) deriving their religion under their numerous numer-ous types from the "Reformers" of the sixteenth century, which are upholding with success the lofty supernatural ideals of Christianity before the people of the nation? Are the people of the nation as a whole attached to those supernatural ideals? Are they growing more spiritual? Or are many of them asking, some sincerely, others with tongues in their creeks, "Do we really believe?" be-lieve?" Are they falling away into infidelity? Do they confess, as an Anglican Bishop has said they do, that in the words of the late Cecil Rhodes the Anglican Church does not interest them? What is the belief of the man in the street, the typical man of business? the woman of fashion? and, more important still, the poor I and, most important impor-tant of all, is the inability of the (Protestant) Church to influence the mass of the people on the increase? If so, what are we to say of that movement which began in the sixteenth century ? Must we not conclude that, as Froude has said, it was merely a branch lopped off from the parent stem? and that it must die from want of nourishment and vigor? that from the beginning it was destined des-tined merely to cumber the ground, and to wither ? "The Church of England is confessedly losing her hold on the great majority of the English people," wrote an Anglican clergyman in the Times, and it is losing that hold, not because its members- are leaving it to adopt another creed, but because they are falling away into secularism and unbelief. Knowing this, we understand how it is that the Protestant Bishop of Liverpool, though we sincerely sin-cerely sympathize with him, recently had occasion to deplore the fact that the Church of England only got 310 children of the 1,000 it ought to have got for an increase of 10,000 of population, last year. "He had been much surprised," he said, "to find in certain schools that the Catechism was tabooed altogether, and he was even more surprised sur-prised to find certain teachers who' had honestly confessed their doubt whether they could subscribe sub-scribe heartily to the tenets of the Church Cate chism. . . They -had to face the fact that at present tens of thousands of children were leav- . ing the day schools who had no knowledge whatever what-ever of the Church Catechism, and yet they were Church children." And what is to become of these children when they grow up? How much Christian Chris-tian doctrine will they retain and profess? About as much as those who have been brought up in the Council (public) schools. And that, Father Ashton might have added, means very little, if any at. all. In short, the "Reformation" and its ways are reforming Christianity Chris-tianity out of existence in England. |