TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 282, 28 November 1932, Page 6

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

TRUE LIVING. (By PRO BOKO PUBLICO.) After listening to 6ne of those dogmatic fellows telling me, to the extent of an hour or more, what is wrong with the world, I feel in the mood myself to preacli. The most striking fact about the world to-day seeuis to be the disposition to throw the blame on the other fellow. The bankers, the capitalists, the politicians, the economists —they are all to blame. The system is wrong, its management is wrong, ever} - thing, everyone is wrong except the speaker himself, whoever he may be.

Long ago I came to the conclusion that it was no use blaming systems or institutions. As a herd we have been chasing after false gods and false ideals, and we are getting what was coming to us. We came naked into this world and it is certain that we shall take nothing out of it. What, then, is the us-e of asking for more than enough 1 You will say that plenty of _people would now be satisfied if they had enough. True, but when they bad enough, were they satisfied. To quote the gentleman who is trimming hedges for me, I ask you. I remember a conversation that took place years ago on the subject of "divine discontent. Four men, three of whom made names for themselves in the country, sat on the tussocks a 110,. talked of movements and tendencies and meals. One, who was a lawyer by profession, laid it clown that there was no such thing as "progress that did not involve the making of money. He argued that men worked for economic reasons only, that they would not work unless they could take a profit "and that as soon as accumulation ceased a man might just as well stop li\ ing.

The second, who was an engineer and a suc-cessful-business man, declared tliat once a man had enough to live on—and his ideas were modest —his only joy was in the possession of power, in making things with his hands or planning them with his brain, and he put into words what I had often thought about the necessity for self-expression. The third, who was a scholar, with the other two that the motives or incentives they named were strong forces in the world. But. lie said, "thev arc leading men away from the only kind of life in which there can be true satisfaction. Accumulation and construction have no relation to living. I grant you that the man who docs not work is already dead. But wealth, power pride in achievement, glory —'these are all false gods. They inevitably bring misery, because they obscure the things that make life worth livnrr —truth, beauty, knowledge, friends, healthy and Tiappy children around one. Even religion can be worth nothing to men in this world unless it brings them peace of mind and helps them to the cultivation of those things I have named. It is not in the multiplication of wants and in the incessant effort to appease the for them that man lives the fullest life. It is in the elimination of wants, in the adjustment of the appetite to the meal, that man reaches his greatest achievement—the conquest of himselt.