SOCIAL EVILS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 139, 9 December 1912, Page 7

SOCIAL EVILS

DUTY OF THE CHURCH plain-speaking from the PULPIT. (BT tffIMKtoAM— PRESS AS8001AW01*.) MASTMTON, This Day. Rev. A. T. Thompson^ Presbyterian minister, of Masterton, in a powerful and outspoken sermon last night, challenged and condemned the silence of the pulpit on the social problem of sexual vice, supporting his contention by the plain blunt treatment of these facts by Jesus, Paul, and the Bible generally. The most hopeful beginning of reformation was the plain recognition of blunt facts. The church and religion ought to bring the impact of their life and power upon the evils of society in order to assist in their healing. The church needs to come to a new valuation of human life in its totality and as a» unity with a new sense of regeneration of the race. Ignorance, silence, m<jck modesty, and gentee' humbug in reference to human life and its divinelycreated functions are body-devouring and soul-devouring devils of our age 2 leading to corruption and abnormality of one of , the most important and most fundamental impulses placed by God in us. The care of the adolescent is one of the most crying obligations of parenthood and society, The neglect of the adolescent spells physical, mental^ and moral ruin of the individual and society. Medical inspection of schools by wise men who are also proper adolescentspecialists should be compulsory, with individual instruction to adolescents to supplement the work of parents, which is primary, but hopelessly neglected or inefficiently done. Capture scholars and the parents of the next generation are assured. What is needed throughout Naw Zealand most to-day Is a new etklc of the sexes, a raising of the moral to;ie, and the creation of a wholesome atmosphere charged with scientific knowledge of human life.