CAUSES AND EFFECTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 30, 6 February 1933, Page 9

CAUSES AND EFFECTS.

NEGLECT OF THE SPIRITUAL.

CANON ARCHDALL'S ADDRESS,

Present-day political, economic, and educational tendencies were referred to by Canon H. K. Archdall, headmaster of King's College, when preaching at St. Mary's Cathedral yesterday. He took as his text Christ's retort to the hostile Pharisees and Sadducees: "Ye hypocrites! Ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times?'-' Canon Archdall said there was hardly a sphere of current life where some process of demoralisation was not going on. It was against, our modern complacency to believe such a thing, but that would not alter . the facts. In politics we heard little about right and wrong. The standard was expediency, and short-sighted expediency at that. But there was always a day of reckoning for the worshipper at the altar of the goddess expediency. It was extraordinary that few remembered that the causes of our present difficulty lay in past years, when both State and private individuals went in for an unreal scale of living. If the country had tried to put its affairs in shape in the years of prosperity economic difficulties would never have upset us as they were now doing. There was nothing""- wrong with the productive power of the soil, but .man stepped in, because of the breakdown of credit, on which all commerce depended, and the system of exchange of goods arid services crashed. It was not recognised that credit was fundamentally a spiritual matter. "If politics' and economics illustrate the Lord's law of moral cause and effect, it is still more patent in the realm of human culture and education," said Canon Archdall. "No civilisation has yet risen over mediocrity without a great culture as its base, and no srreat culture has ever yet been built without a * spiritual . foundation and a moral discipline." There was a tendency to train specialists without any real knowledge of the real problems of life, and that was why the professional classes tended more and more to be unable to rise above the mass standards and give any sound lead to society as a whole. A weakness wm also the lack of any proper recognition of the moral and spiritual basis of the home life. We so"Tht more and more to relv on State action, which weakened the family, and so""tit to do bv force of Parliamentarv action what ought to be learned freplv in the home. . No wonder, said the preacher, there was a problem of youth.