The Haslingden Gazette. — 1909-05-01 (Haslingden, Lancashire, England)

BISHO? OF MANCHESTER AT CLAYTON  'NEW GOSPELS WITII MYSTERIOUS NAMES."  On Sunday evening la,t Bishop Knox preached at Clayton-le-Moors Parish Church, when the edifice was crowded in every part, great difficulty being experienced in finding seats for the worshippers. Tho vicar (Rev. F. Lindon Parkyn) read the prayers.  The Bishop's sermon, which was purely theologioal, was a quiet, earnest, thoughtful, and eloquent exhortation to Christians to remain true to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith. Ho chose for his text the 14th verse of the 4th chapter in the Epistle to the Ephesians. "That we be no longer children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine." Be said he had chosen the text because it was clearly the neuron from which the collect for that day had been taken. The doctrine which the text was asking them to be true to was the heavenly doctrine of the evangelist St. Mark. It might be asked, what is the heavenly doctrine of St. Mark? They knew whit were the doctrines of St. John, St. Matthew, and St. Luke from the gospels bearing their names, but what of St Mark? St. Mark's gospel was the earliest form of the gospel that we possessed. It gave us the figure of Christ as Ile was, so to speak, photographed on the minds of those who saw Him. The narrative went on with almost breathless haste, and it was all the mom valuable to us becaum St. Mark did not stay to make his own comments. The Bishop then went on to sketch the main features of the life of Christ as presented in the Gospel of St. Mark, and said that part of the heavenly doetrine of St. Mark was that Christ would not at any price be a party leader. Had He been willing to take sides, Our Lord might easily have been leader of a great party; but there was no position that He more absolutely refused to take. The Jews expected that He as the Messiah wou'd have taken the kingdom, but they were mistaken. In the 2nd Book of Esdras, one of the Arachryphal books, it was stated that Eidras was torrnented with the question "How wee it that God allowed the heathen to prosper and the Jews to be trodden underfoot?" Christ's disciples must have expected Him to lead the conquest of the world, but they found that often He held Himself from the people, and only at last gave them Ibis clue: "Tho Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and give His life a ransom for many." Other heroes and martyrs had welcomed their fate almost with joy, but Our Lord approached his fate with the most awful agony. He did not face death with the stoicism of the Red Indian, but was bowed down with the most terrible apprehension. Although Ho could have come down from the Cross and mattered His enemies at a word, He did not do it, but went deeper and deeper into this blackness of darkness that enveloped Him. His purpose was to win a Kingdom of God on earth not by force, but a kingdom of love, and to lead the people by the sacrifice He made to say "Truly this is the Son of God." That was the heavenly doctrine of St. Mark. At the foot of the Cross we could say good-bye to personal quarrels, jealousies, and enmities, and the ems and follies of the world. There were many people drifting away and inventing new gospels with mysterious names. but the one place where them fads and fancies were dispelled was at the foot of the Cross. For if there was no sin in the world, no such thing as a sinner, and if God did not love the sinner, and the Cross did not mean that Christ died for him, then the Cross of Christ did not  represent what they understood it to represent. but it represented a stupendous and horrible and unmeaning murder. The Bishop concluded with an exhortation to the members of the congregation to lay hold of the fundamental meaning of Chriet's sacrifico for erring mankind.