MODERN TENDENCIES

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 278, 19 August 1932, Page 8

MODERN TENDENCIES

Moral Laxity Among Young RELIGION IN BACKGROUND Dominion Special Service. Masterton, August 18. A warning against tendencies in modern life leading toward moral laxity among young men and women was sounded by Mrs. J. S. Elliott, Dominion president of the League of Mothers, In the course of an address to the annual meeting of the local branch of that movement. Many books and picture shows at present, she said, centred around marital infidelity and debased and degraded the sacred name of love. The effect of this sort of thing on young people was pernicious, but if it could be shown to belong only to the heated atmosphere of the sex novel and the sex play and to be very rare in real everyday life, the ill-effect would be greatly minimised. Members of the League of Mothers could all help to provide an antidote to that poison by being good wives and mothers and creating in the home an atmosphere that would give healthy minds and

healthy memories to the children. It was the general belief that in New Zealand there was too little home life and that parental ties and parental control had weakened. Too often girls in their early 'twenties became blase, hypercritical and dissatisfied. The whole aim and object of too many young people was to have what they called “a good time” —a hateful phrase —and to be dependent, not on inner joy and peace of mind, but on an exciting and ever-changing environment. We had much to be proud of in New Zealand, said Mrs. Elliott, but there were certain aspects of our national life which should cause misgiving and anxiety. The figures supplied by the Government Statistician in . regard to the frequency of extranuptial conception showed a moral laxity that was alarming. She did not wish to dwell on this unpleasant subject, but she held strongly that ethics and morality could not be divorced from religion. Going on to speak of religious instruction, Mrs. Elliott .asked by what authority the teaching of the principles of Christianity was made a political question. Surely it was a matter for parents to decide, and not politicians. At all events in New Zealand the unfortunate child often grew up without religious principles and with no light to guide him through this world to the next. What the league certainly could do was to show the necessity that every mother who belonged to it should teach her children herself, or have them taught, the story of Redeeming Love.