MUCK-RAKE IMPERIALISM.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 149, 24 June 1908, Page 3

MUCK-RAKE IMPERIALISM.

. BISHOP NELJGAN ON SECULAR EDUCATION, (From Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, May 1C The Right Rev. M. R. Nellgan, Bishop" of Auckland, on Sunday evening preached one of a special series of sermons to Oxford undergraduates at the University The text was taken from St. Paul is., 27: "L«st that by any means, when J preached to others, I myself should be a castaway." Bishop Neligan asked them to think of their life at the University, j lest when they had had every advantaga j they should go through life a failure That was a perfectly right and a perfectly proper thing for any man to feel at any stage of his life; when a man did not feel like that, he was on the wav to failing in realising what was perhaps* the greatest thing to realise in life, a dependence upon God. Looking at the British Empire to-day, what did they find in every single part of it? Not that the national life had been enslaved to religion, tilt that the aim of religion had been everywhere to elevate;;the national conscience. That which alone enabled the national conscience to rise above the " sordid things of trading in pepper and coffee and such like things," had been the tremendous impinging force of the Christian conscience. That being so, they should think of the responsibilities of empire. .England had gone out over the length md- brcaCMi of the known world, and England's l danger to-day was the danger of empire—they could not know it until they had been out of England—the danger lest, when England had preached the! lesson to others, she should be, like the empires of the past, a castaway. The danger of the British Empire being a castaway was real. It was the same j danger as that of Greece. It was because • Englaud was too prosperous, too disI gustingly rich, and because England an<L j England's sons were losing something of tiieir Puritan backbone, were earing nioi-e !in Church life about non-essentials than I about-essentials.' One came.home to EngI land aftw five years of absence, and found the sswnc old silly' twaddling quarrel about tlie number of candles on the altar Jor the shape and colour of'the stone; and I out in the British Empire there were white men iiving and dying a s pagans, lie was not exaggerating. He could tell j them oE a country stocked with the best stock thai- England ever sent from her shores—for such was the stock of New I Zealand, where they had the results of an I experiment with which England was threatened, secular education. They had had thirty-one years of it, and to-day there wie men in England saying they would like to see secularism in the schools. God forgive their ignorance and their blindness! ! ■ [ As a result of trying the experiment in I New Zealand upon England's best stock, j they had a nation partly pagan. He could j take them into schools in New Zealand I vhere, out of forty children, perhaps not five had even heard the Lord's Prayer. The parents of to-day in New Zealand were those who had been brought up to believe that God was an "extra." Whether men liked it or not, the fact was that the day they put the religious lessSOE outside the ordinary school hours, they sounded in every, child's heart the note that was going to grow louder and louder as the child developed into a man, the idea that God was an "extra." As soon us tiiey got this, they had' the miii of the Empire. The thing that mattered in this business was not the attitude of the priesl, but it was the religion that the young men of Oxford would take away with them. The question was how to make the white man Christian, for, wherever they wert, it was the wirite man that mattered. Wlwl. they wanted to do was to take that word '•' imperialism " out of the dirt; it was down in the gutter with stock-exchange quotations, which were ever in the mud. It was down where men were working with the muck-rake, and it depended upon the young- manhood of England as much as upon the priest to see that the word* was taken up out of the dirt; cleaned and polished, and to see that from it's facets there should) be .light irrideseent of Him who called the British Empire into being, "apd who held the British race responsible for its continuance as a blessing to the world. \ • _ ■ _