IN presenting the annual report on this subject we regret that we are unable to give a more favourable review, but at the same time there are some encouraging features which we shall mention in due course.
The question of Sabbath observance has loomed large of late, especially in the north, where protest meetings have been held to rouse up public opinion against the continued desecration of the Lord’s Day by excursion trains and ‘buses run in defiance of God’s law and the best feelings of the wisest section of the community. The evil work has been carried on despite the representations already made, but it is to be hoped that the monster petition sent to the L.M.S. Railway Company from the Highlands will put an end to these unseemly Sabbath excursions by train and ‘bus. In some watering places already there has been an approach to the continental Sabbath with deplorable results. If the majority of our work people only realised what a precious heritage they have in the Lord’s day they would refuse to submit, we believe, to the economic slavery that is being foisted on them by graceless combines and companies that are becoming a menace to the true welfare of the community by their disregard of the claims of God’s law.
It is to be regretted that Sabbath concerts and golf are permitted in various places, although in other localities such things are not allowed.
The motor-car that is so useful for ordinary purposes is much abused by many who career about in it on the Lord’s day to the annoyance of all right thinking people and to their own spiritual loss, for they are bound to suffer in their souls for such flagrant abuse of God’s gifts. Even from the point of physical wellbeing man needs the day of rest.
Many of the citizens of Edinburgh were greatly pained by the action of the Town Council in giving permission to special bands to perform in Princes Street Gardens on the Sabbath, and this evil example is now followed by Inverness. It has been arranged that the Carluke band shall come, and during the summer months give musical selections in the Islands on the Lord’s day. This was carried by one of a majority in the Town Council to the regret of all lovers of the Sabbath. The councillors who opposed it have the satisfaction of knowing that they have God’s approval of their action and that of the Christian public. Inverness had a fine tradition of Sabbath observance, and it is deplorable that some of its citizens should now forsake the worthy example set before them by their forefathers.
Now that the General Election is near, there is a danger that some members of each party may hold political meetings on Sabbath. Already this is done by some Socialists, and this may tempt a few of their political opponents to follow their wrong example. Profaning the Sabbath day by political meetings will certainly not be in the best interests of the country. We would urge our people not to support any candidate who favours political meetings on the Sabbath, and who is not sound on Protestant principles.
The opening of warships in the Cromarty Firth for inspection on the Sabbath is deplored by the Committee, and they take strong exception to the view expressed by a certain minister that Sabbath inspection of the Fleet is harmless in itself. It is not what any individual thinks that matters in this respect but what God says, and He commands us to keep His day holy and devote it to His worship and service. We believe that if the claims of the Sabbath were expounded in the pulpit as they should be all over the land, that holy day would not be so widely profaned as it is at present.
In regard to attendance on the means of grace, we are as a Church holding our own, and the services on the whole are well attended.
The Committee would like to see a better attendance of children at the services in some places. Those who neglect the means of grace now will realise their mistake in the end.
In many parts of the country the public worship of God is being neglected to an alarming extent. It was stated recently in a lecture delivered in London that there was in the city and other parts a lamentable shrinking in attendance at public worship, and unless they took the question to heart the day was not far distant when many of their churches in the central areas of their cities and towns would cease to be. In one district eleven out of twenty-four evangelical churches had been closed in forty years. Things were much the same in the Established Church. The Roman Catholic Church felt it least, probably due to its emphasis on the necessity of attendance at Mass, the liberty of the people to spend the rest of the day in pleasure and their fewer and better placed churches. According to this lecturer, there were areas in London where there were sights as coarse and degrading as in the African bush. “Within the central sweep of this city,” he declared, “there are sights which if, you saw them, would make you think you had seen hell.” It is little use, he continued, to expect outsiders to serve the Lord by going to church when members of the Church serve the devil by going for a motor ride. It is estimated that only one person in twenty-two of the Protestant population goes to church—not five per cent.
In contrast to the indifference to religion that prevails among the masses of our people, with all their precious privileges, we may mention the devotion of idolaters to their false gods. Three of our judges have been occupied for days over a dispute about an Indian idol. There are two million people in India called Jains with Shirpur in the Bombay Presidency as their centre. This small community cannot agree, and are now disputing about an idol’s waist-belt. For 19 years the rival parties have been quarrelling as to which has authority over an idol in the temple at Shirpur. One party desires to plaster the idol in such a manner as to show it is wearing a waist-belt and a waist-tie. The case, after being tried by several judges in India, has come for final decision before the highest Court of the Empire, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. These poor heathen people are showing the greatest zeal for the honour of their idol-god when multitudes in highly favoured Britain are quite unconcerned about the claims and the honour of the God who created them. This leads us to observe how great the need is of sending the Gospel to these benighted people. The followers of Christianity, nominal and otherwise, number about 682 millions, while there are 1165 millions who are not Christians. These may be roughly divided into Mohammedans, Confucians. Taoists, Jews, and Animists—such as worship animals and lifeless objects. The Gospel is slowly making progress amongst all these as the reports of the Bible Societies show, and yet many in our own land are only becoming Gospel hardened.
The question of temperance has its encouraging aspects although the annual expenditure on drink is still far too high. We spent last year about £288,200,000 on drink, not far short of the interest charges on the National Debt. The whole of the expenditure in Europe last year on armaments was only about 45 per cent. more than the expenditure of this country upon drink. Recently we celebrated the building of the millionth house since the War. These houses have cost £300,000,000, and in the same period we have spent more than four times as much on drink. One encouraging feature is that drunkenness is not so common as it used to be. Contributing causes to this are no doubt the high cost of intoxicating liquors and the better enlightenment of the general public on the evils associated with drink.
It may not be out of place here to say that some of the black races in Africa are being demoralised by cheap spirits, and our Government should take steps to prevent this. The imports of spirits into the Gold Coast and its dependencies had increased from 330,000 gallons in 1920 to 2,720,000 gallons in 1927. Ninety per cent. of the spirituous liquors imported were gin, which was particularly deleterious, and had all the characteristics of prohibited trade spirits. That it is delivered on the Gold Coast for 5s 8d a gallon in comparison with 25s 6d a gallon for whisky, proves it to be a very low grade article. There can be no doubt but this vile stuff will counteract the gracious influences of the Gospel among the poor blacks, and we should send a strong protest to the Colonial Office against it.
Coming to the subject of betting and gambling, we find these evils as widespread and prevalent as formerly. There were two causes for rejoicing, however, in the decision declaring newspaper coupon competitions illegal, and in the passing of the Juvenile Messenger Bill, which safeguarded children from a growing evil. In 1923 the Select Committee on Betting and Gambling estimated that the annual turnover of money on the turf in Great Britain was £200,000,000. There were 5,000,000 betting telegrams every year, and the two main forms were betting on the turf and betting on football results. Greyhound racing developed rapidly a year or two back, but fortunately has now received a check, and many companies that had been formed to make money out of this imbecile sport were now in liquidation. The Government’s betting tax, which was not a success, has been repealed, and no wonder, for it exploits the vices and encourages the weaknesses of human nature. With regard to the introduction of the totalisator, a prominent politician said, “The totalisator is a highly ingenious machine, which combines the qualities of cash register, lightning calculator, and stationary bookmaker. But what is not everywhere realised is that it can only be introduced to this country if we are prepared to repeal an important section of the law which limits gaming and wagering. Moreover, it is difficult to see why if stationary constructions are permitted on racecourses they should not be permitted in many other places. The end of this sort of legislation would undoubtedly tend to the encouragement and, I fear, the increase of excessive gambling, which, to speak plainly, does almost as much harm in this country as the evil of excessive drinking.”
Gambling is a vice against the social welfare of the people, and its motive was to get rich quickly without honest labour. By means of it huge sums annually passed from the hands of fools into the hands of knaves. Another of the social perils of the day is the influence of the Cinema. It has been calculated that 30,000,000 people in this country visited the Cinema every week, and the picture theatres represent a capital value of £32,000,000. It is a rare thing to see a queue at a church door, but it was quite common at a picture palace. The influence of the Cinema for good or evil was very great, and it had an effect which was harmful to the best interests of character. Of course there were news pictures and subjects which might be called educational, but, good as these were, they were, on the confession of the Cinema people, not their chief business, and occupied only a small part of the programme. “The temptation,” it has been well said, “was always to lower the standard in order to extend the market to suit the crowd’s taste. It was surely unworthy to seek profit out of the excitement induced by feeding the lower instincts of man. The average Cinema picture was an unmanly travesty of the sacred and heroic sentiments of life.” It was very difficult to undo the harm caused by a false view of life presented six days of the week to millions of people in the Cinema. It was especially harmful to the moral welfare of children who had exhibited to them matters of which it was undesirable that they should have any knowledge at all. Not only so, but they were apt to suffer in their bodies, for their nerves may be unstrung and injury done to the eyes in the effort to follow the rapid motion of the pictures.
Ritualism and Romanism are still making progress in the nation. The Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England, although chastened by the dramatic defeat of the supporters of their new Prayer Book in the first debate in the House of Commons, were by no means discouraged, and their hopes were high before the second debate that on this occasion they would win, but to their intense disappointment the defeat of their policy in the second debate was more thorough than in the first. The strange spectacle is now presented of Bishops sworn to defend the laws of their Church, deliberately breaking these laws by encouraging the use of the Deposited Book rejected by Parliament. We fail to see how they can reconcile this unseemly attitude with the claims of conscience. The conduct of the Bishops will not help the ritualistic party, and may tend to alienate entirely the minds and sympathies of many from the Church of England. It is possible that the rejection of the new Prayer Book may have given a temporary check to ritualism in some Anglican churches. In Scotland Irish immigration is steadily helping Romanism. The Committee are of opinion that there should be laws passed by the Government restricting and regulating the inflow of Irish to Scotland. Otherwise, in a generation or two, the Irish may almost equal half the Scottish population and Roman Catholicism will have a firm hold of the country.
It is satisfactory to record that the Stirling Education Authority have won in the action between themselves and the Roman Catholic representatives concerning the new school erected at Bonnybridge by the Roman Catholic Church. The Authority rightly refused to take over and pay for the school at the expense of the ratepayers, and when the case came before the Court of Session it was decided that they would have to pay for the school. They appealed to the inner Court, with the result that they gained their case. If this is sustained it will check in some measure Rome’s propaganda through educational channels. Romanism, like the grave, is never satisfied with what it has, and now that the Papacy have been given some measure of temporal sovereignty and a large sum of money by the Italian Government, they will use it for the advancement of popery in every part of the earth. It may mean that they will over-reach themselves, and in the end contribute to their own downfall.
There are many indications which show that we are living in a materialistic age. The Moral Law has come to be regarded by many as obsolete and not binding on the enlightened sinners of our modern civilisation. The authority of the olden laws of conduct, parental, social, and religious, is not so strong as it used to be. It is assumed in most plays and novels that there is no binding standard of moral life, and much modern philosophy regards morality as relative with no absolute right or wrong in it. This means that many people have no kind of principle about morals, and this causes multitudes to fall back on secularism, paganism, and pleasure-lust with ultimate disappointment to themselves and the eternal loss of their souls unless they accept God’s way of salvation. In an address delivered some time ago, it was stated that “the bastard freedom—asserted in many plays and novels and in much of our modern life—which knew no commandment but the negation of the Seventh, and which was without faith not only in God but also in man and woman, is providing neither individual happiness nor social security.” This is true, for it is the glorious Gospel of Christ alone that can give true freedom and happiness here and hereafter.
In concluding this report we would seek to acknowledge our indebtedness to the Lord for His forbearance with us in face of our innumerable shortcomings, and we would urge upon His people to plead with Him constantly to revive His cause in the midst of the years, and to hasten the day when the glory of Emmanuel shall fill the whole earth as the waters cover the deep.