VOICE of the NATIONS

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 70, 15 December 1928, Page 17

VOICE of the NATIONS

SAYINGS AND WRITINGS :: :: OF THE TIMES :: ::

The Consecrated Idol. “A Hindu idol may be made in Birmingham and bought for a few rupees in an Eastern bazaar. The children will play with it with offence to none until it receives consecration by the priest. Then, as its devotees suppose, the spiritual presence of the divinity which it represents appears within it. I have been criticised for comparing Eucharistic magic to Hindu idolatry: but, as most missionaries know, the parallel is exact. We must sweep away such primitive fancies. They are harmful to humanity because they corrupt religion by falsehood. The essence of religion is to teach that God is revealed through goodness, beauty, and truth, and that He is only rightly worshipped as the worshipper helps to create these values in the world. I find a sacramental revelation in a wood carpeted with bluebells or in a blackthorn hedge.”—Bishop Barnes. Lost Ideals.

“In the Labour Movement we see a great force hich owed its initial impetus very largely to idealism. It has put the notion of fellowship into its political appeal, and so has marked a real moral advance (as I think) on a progressive appeal based on liberty only, though it is sometimes liable to forget that liberty is the indispensable basis of fellowship. On the other hand, we have heard speakers for the Labour Movement commending fellowship in the very spirit of pugnacity; and one is driven to the conclusion that the ideals will come to very little unless a force stronger than mere idealism comes in to keep the followers of those ideals true to them. Moreover, all social reform is in the last resort personal reform, and nearly all the agencies tackling problems of personal character are manned by the Churches, even when not conducted under their name.” —Dr. Temple, Archbishop of York. Let the Good Swamp the Evil.

“The best way to combat what is evil is to create what is good. Bad literature will be but little read if there is ample provision of good literature. Mere negation leads to nothing good. Emptiness of mind will fly to that which is denied it. Our legislators, if they are wise, will make as little fuss over evil literature as they can. “Censor by all means obscene literature, but do not create by political means associations of people whose legal function is to be virtuous above their fellows, and to show this by rummaging about until they can discover obscene passages in books and give publicity to them. . . . We grow nobly like what we love, and ignobly like what we hate. The soul has laws just as unalterable as the laws of nature.”—The “Irish Statesman.” The Actor.

“To be a great actor you must be a perfect musician,” writes Mr. Sydney W. Carroll in the “Daily Telegraph.” “You must have a sense of rhythm, of harmony, of melody. You must also be a great painter. A painter of portraits. Every make-up must be studied from life. The dress you wear, the way you walk, must be inspired by the .artist’s brain. You must before you can achieve real greatness on the stage be a real philosopher, a thinker, a perfect poet. You should have the vocal range of an opera singer with the mental alertness capable of realising the deepest subtleties of Shakespeare.” Privacity a Modern Luxury.

“Privacity will be, obviously, the opposite of Publicity. I say it will be, because I do not think the thing at present exists. I conceive myself to be inventing it. offering it to a sorelytried world, which, I earnestly hope, will hail it as at least meeting a longfelt want. . . . There is one radical difference between publicity and privacity, which on the whole seems to me to be strongly in favour of the younger art. Publicity is a necessity; privacity is a luxury. Publicity pays for itself, or it is no good and nobody wants it; privacity will have to be paid for by those who seek to enjoy its benefits. Eventually there may come to be charitable foundations for the purpose of providing privacity for deserving persons who are in urgent need of it and cannot afford to pay the price. . . . But the main thing in its favour, as an art, is that it is going to be so terribly difficult. All the tendencies of the age are against it. The privacity artist must fight his way up the stream, while the publicity agent paddles easily down it, looking as if he was making twelve miles an hour and actually by his own exertions making about two.” —Professor Bernard K. Sand well, Professor of Economics at McGill University of Canada, in his book, “The Privacity Agent.”

The Civil Service and Bureaucracy. “As regards the exercise by public Departments of legislative functions, there is this, I think, to be said. In any Statute which gives to any administrative authority the power to regulate the ordinary relationships of human life, a certain degree of elasticity is desirable if just and efficient administration is to be secured. The demands upon parliamentary time make it almost inevitable in present circumstances that the Statute itself should be limited to the formulation of principles and the creation of the necessary administrative machinery, leaving matters of detail to regulation, and I believe that infinitely better practical results can be secured in this way. It has seemed to me, and I have followed these matters pretty closely, that attacking the bureaucracy is sometimes only a convenient, if oblique, method of attacking the responsible Government of the day; a method which perhaps—and I say this with bated breath —has particular attractions from the point of view of those critics who profess the same political creed as the Government that happens to be m power ”_Sir John Anderson, Permanent Under-Secretary to the Home Office in an address at the session of the Institute of Public Administration.

Present Day Urge of Youth. “A Church that went out to fight corruption, commercialism,, greed, and exploitation would have behind it the enthusiasm of the youth that mattered, the intelligent, earnest youth that today is contemptuous of the Church’s timid contradictions. People are watching with dismay the hold that Bolshevism on the one hand, and Fascism on the other, are gaining over the mind of youth. I fear iron creeds and the domination of dogma. But the fascination of these fighting faiths to youth is, that they seem to be doing something, to be getting somewhere. The ‘under twenties’ of to-day are contemptuous of the comfortable. With intelligent minds they are experiencing the bitterness of being used as robots, or, still worse, of not being used at all. No creed can reach them that preaches contentment and Heaven’s delights. They believe that their elders have made a horrible mess of things and are not much better than they are. It is an uncomfortable creed for their elders, but it is a stimulating challenge to the Church of the Carpenter of Nazareth." —Miss Ellen Wilkinson, M.P. What is Preventive Medicine? “Preventive medicine means the organisation of human nurture—the cultivation and health of maternity, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adult life, old age, the postponement of mortality; and such cultivation means not only the central and local provision of medical and sanitary agencies for the fuller control of morbid process, but the development of the body and mind of man that they may reach, in each individual, the top of their capacity. Nothing is more certain than the fact that the physical advancement and health of mankind i is dependent not upon a ‘doctor’s stunt’ here or a ‘sanitary institution’ there. ; but upon the whole social evolution of the people. Now these desired ends are not reached merely by announcing them; still less by leaving things to chance, drift or fate. They can in any case only be partly reached in each generation, and none of themcan be reached at all without foresight, organisation and expenditure.”— Sir George Newman. Chief Health Officer, British Ministry of Health. The Pageant Defined. “A Pageant is a Festival of Thanksgiving, in which a great city or a little hamlet celebrates its glorious past, its prosperous present, and its hopes and aspirations for the future. It is a Commemoration of Local Worthies. It is also a great Festival of Brotherhood, in which all distinctions of whatever kind are sunk in a common effort. It is, therefore, entirely undenominational and non-political. It calls to-' gether all the scattered kindred from all parts of the world. It reminds the old of the history of their home, and shows the young what treasures are in their keeping. It is the great incentive to the right kind of patriotism: love of hearth; love of town; love of country; love of England. Therefore the Pageant week must begin bn a Sunday with a joyous service in the Cathedral or Parish Church, and in all other places of worship; or (which is perhaps better) a united service on the pageant arena. A Pageant is the History of a Town from its remotest origins down to a date not too near the present; expressed in dramatic form; that is to say, in spoken dialogue: in action: in song and in dance, where dance and song are admissible.”—Mr. Louis N. Parker, dramatist and producer. An Unrealised Agency. “It is good for Anglo-American understanding that the best work of religious thinkers beyond the Atlantic should be made as available for British readers as British theology is over there. In the circle of international relations the confusion is worse confounded and passes into Bedlam. Every people, race, creed, nation, polity is heard clamouring for justice, defence, security, compensation, reparation, the right to annex, the right to expand, the right to adjust boundaries, the right to levy discriminating tariffs, the right to take a recalcitrant debtor by the throat and cry, ‘Pay me that thou owestl’ And as we think of all this welter and tangle and snarling, hateful confusion of human affairs, this Gordian knot into which the world has managed to tie itself up, over it all sounds the clear and sweet reasonableness of Jesus saying to me, ‘Freely ye have received, freely give.’ We have been thinking too much about what is owing to them, too little about what they owe . . . not enough about

what they are privileged to give . . . too little of duties.”—Dr. Howard Robbins, Dean of New York. Equal Pay for Men and Women. “The Civil Service is one of the few professions now left in which women, even though doing identical work, receive less remuneration than their male colleagues,” writes the Civil service correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph.” “This question of equal pay for equal work is one of the four principal items in the programme which the Civil service associations are preparing to submit to Parliamentary candidates at the approaching general election. The House of Commons, on two occasions passed resolutions in favour of the principle of. equal pay. The first of these resolutions, on May 5 1920, endorsed the principle without qualification. The second added the proviso that, owing to the financial position, the question should be reviewed within three years. And there the matter has remained ever since, so far as the Civil service is concerned. The men object to the lower rate sanctioned for women, because it leads to the displacement of men. and the women object because they consider it humiliating to their sex, as well as unjust on economic grounds. In most instances, the starting pay is the same for both sexes. It is in the higher scales that the differentiation is most marked.”