LEADERS NEEDED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 172, 24 July 1933, Page 15

LEADERS NEEDED.

PERSONALITY VITAL.

"MATERIALISM OUR UNDOING."

KING'S COLLEGE ADDRESS

"In these days it Is not easy to remember that at the back of all our social, economic and political schemes the greatest asset of a nation is the personality of her citizens," declared the Rev. H. K. Archdall, headmaster of King's College, in his sermon at the special old boys' service in the college chapel yesterday morning. He took for his text words of an ancient bidding prayer: "That there may never be found wanting a sufficient supply of men duly qualified to serve God in Church and State, let us pray for God's blessing upon all seminaries of sound learning and religious education." The ancient bidding prayer, as used in the colleges and universities of the Homeland, said the speaker, reflected the fundamental principles on which the oil educational institutions of England had been based. There was no more important task in the life of a young country like New Zealand than to seek to establish similar institutions, based on the same sound principles, for they were principles which had provided the best elements in the nation's culture, and served in times of both stress and prosperity. An Essential of Education. "In King's College we can look back to a lino of men reaching to the first days of New Zealand's colonisation, all of whom saw a vision and planned and worked for its realisation," said the headmaster. "In the early days there were Williams and Selwyn and in more rccent times John Kinder, Graham Bruce, P. S. Smallfield, C. T. Major and others. It is the supply of men from generation to generation which must be our first concern and which is the first necessity. Whatever else education lias to do it must make men who are more than machines and bigger than the particular economic function they may be called upon to fulfil. Modern fatalism and pessimism spring from the fact that we have taken the means of the Good Life as equivalent to the Good Life itself. "The ideal of personality must weave into one unbreakable strand the power to think clearly, to will strongly and to enjoy purely. Intellectual cleverness by itself will not do, for without a sense of responsibility, a capacity for initiative and vision, the mere intellect will be socially destructive. The failure of our awe is due to a widespread refusal to put first things first and to treat personality with the reverence it deserves, and we are being judged because we have tried to make relatively factors into the main absolute end. It is, in short, our materialism which is our undoing, and the only way to escape its inevitable judgment is to put beneath our top-heavy and ill-balanced age a foundation of stronger material. It is only manliness that will prevail."

Qualified Leaders. As the bidding prayer said, the supply of men must be men duly qualified. That second point from the prayer was a warning that there must be leaders qualified to lead and able and anxious to undertake an ever-growing responsibility; men who would match their manhood with the magnitude of man's need. "We do not see the importance to the whole community of leaders oE high quality because we look on young men as isolated units, whose main business in life is to make good. I can see little hope of any great renascence of life until we realise that it is only in loyalty to the group that the detached individual can find his true personality. "Any one man is as good as any other in his ultimate human worth in God's sight, but only the wisest and best can really lead. It is only the true leader who can educe from everyone in the group the highest service he has in him to render. Modern individualism and selfishness inverts all this, instead of being democratic in spirit and aristocratic in organisation, we are still too much stupidly aristocratic in spirit, anil we try to be democratic in organisation, with disastrous results. The modern worship of the State, as the one real group, helps the creation of this muddle. At this college we seek to stand for wiser and more ancient ways. We insist on the Church, the family and the school as real societies, with a life of their own and as the training ground where alone we can learn those virtues of free loyalty, where privileges and responsibilities create each other.

The Heart of Education. The ancient bidding prayer, said the speaker, went on to hope that the well qualified leaders would serve God. That made it quite plain that any morality worth the name must find its inspiring source in love of God, in worship and in reverence. It had to be learnt that the heart of education was not the production of good scholars or fine sportsmen, but the production of fine Christians. Finally, said Mr. Archdall, the bidding prayer, with its ancient sanity, pointed out that men and leaders were needed to serve God in Church and State. The State without the Church became mere secularism, a lame and helpless thing; the Church without the State became demoralised. "Not easily are we going to relearn the truth that Church and State depend on each other. We have, as has been well said, 'policies without principle, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, commerce and industry without conscience, knowledge without character, and worship without sacrifice.' Yet we have but to learn to turn our faces to the light and we will reap a marvellously rich harvest of progress and promise, for our muddle and our failure is fuller of promise • than any recent decade. Perhaps -we may soon have the courage to see that we have torn heaven and earth apart by forgetting the greatness of that great Christian faith which proclaims their unity in Christ. Perhaps we shall be humbled and see the light."