"For Honour's Sake."

Auckland Star, Volume XIII, Issue 3704, 24 June 1882, Page 3 (Supplement)

"For Honour's Sake."

Tne nineteenth century has well-nigh lost all sense of honour. Man has bartered his soul for money to maintain his family in a glaring pretentiousness which shuts out from his hearthstone every vestise of repose, and shuts in a legion of bad spirits that cry give, give, give. Ho knows it not, yet is man so dwarfed, debased, unhappy by reason of thia pretentiousness and the indulgence of the lowest passions, that ho must persecute with all the envy of wilful ignorance those who have distanced him in life's race sufficiently to offer such tacit reproof to ignorance and pretentiousness ai shall make them hateful to those even who have trusted in them. Except as the innocent suffer for the guilty, our sorrows are of our own making. Wo persist in calling good evil, The thoughtful study of daily experience, and of history down to "A History of Our Own Times" (McCarthy) teaches that expediency, of which pretentiousness is the legitimate outcome, so entirely mars while it rules the actions of men, that he who works in defiance thereof can afford to become the target of coarsest ribaldry until his work ia heralded a triumphant success. Whether that work be the liberation of the slave, black and white; the overthrow of the liquor traffic; tho reform of a barbarous and effete medical school; of a still more effete orthodoxy; of social and political blundering; or the one crowning work of man's redemption from each and all of these crying evils. Dethrone pretentiousness within and around ; know that the real, at its worst, is better than pretence at its beat, and yon have advanced some steps towards the repose the many sigh after in vain. Happily, science with her keen intelligence is bringing her Incontrovertible facts to bear bo directly upon the shams of heart and of life that to be true is fast becoming the necessity of our very being. As mental discipline far practical purposes the study of the exact sciences must surely be unrivalled ; so severe a Btudy is it, that but few are half good enough to devote themselves thereto. Giving light aud love to all, Bcience will unite in mystic bonds all the kingdom of the earth—joint heirs ns they are in the terrors of disease and deatb. For lionour's sake shall be thewatchward of the twentieth century. Hence, vested 'interests must in the future appealfirresistibly to the honour, conscience, compassion ot men, or they will ring their own deathknell. If, as science would fain teach, the reign of law is omnipotent amid such warring elements as earth, air, fire and water, why is it not equally potent in man's petty affairs ? Why do not ahips arise full-rigged from the {great deep; the habitations of man spring from the earth at a bound; why should tbe once richly cultivated soil return to its native barrenness instead of producing more and more glorious results ? To man the one only jarring element in nature's fair domain that his works are the fruits of labour and pain I Who shall solve the mystery of mysteries called life— the life that man cannot give with certainty to the tiniest blade of grass even under the most favourable conditions 1 And if at the voice of God, the sweetest music man has heard, the false have crawled like worms, the true have stood nobly erect and claiped hands with Cod himself. But the true must get yet nearer to the truth practically—to the good in all forms and shades of opinion, if they are to bless mankind. The good cannot hurt the good,nor the bad either indeed. There is nothing wrong but sin. Selfish isolation has cursed the world too long already. Selfishness is seemly in the brute, but brutish in the man,