"THE NEW MORALITY"

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 124, 21 November 1935, Page 22

"THE NEW MORALITY"

MENACE TO FAMILY LIFE The "new morality" and the modern menace to the Christian ideal of family life were discussed at the concluding session of the Church Congress at Bournemouth recently, says the "Daily Telegraph;" Mrs. Theodore Woods, widow of a former Bishop of Winchester, said that the world of today challenged the Christian ideal of marriage. "To people who set before themselves comfort and a good time," she said, "it seems foolish, unattractive, narrow, too hard to follow. Human nature, they say has changed. "So, the law of marriage being too hard for these days, cut out, they say, a bit here and there; cast it aside when it cannot be made to fit; when love has gone ' there is nothing left, and those who make a failure of one marriage ought to be able to.try another. But if marriage is undertaken with this proviso it often means that differences of opinion develop into quarrels, , incompatibility, separation. "The abuse of contraceptives has become such a grave evil amongst the unmarried, accepted so unquestioningly as a provision against unfortunate consequences of immorality, that the institution of the family is in many ways endangered. Young people who have become used to this provision are not going to take the vocation of family life seriously when they marry. "Will not this assembly sound a call .to find a solution so that this rottenness at the heart of our nation's life can be eradicated?" LIBERTY OF EXPERIMENT.

Canon K. E. Kirk, speaking of the new morality, said that practices which were once regarded with horror by all who professed the Christian standard, were today advocated by many seriousminded, people in the name of an enlightened morality. That might be illustrated, not merely in the sphere of sex problems, but also in the realms of art, education, domestic life, and public affairs. Happiness was now taken as the ruling principle in ethics, but the short cut to a perfect morality by way of the principle of material happiness was a disastrous one.

Referring to what was called the liberty of sex experiment. Canon Kirk said that when we saw the novels and plays advocating such liberty with their rows and rows of elderly, disillusioned roues and feverish, unhappy, young experimentalists, one conviction was borne in upon us, and thai was that a very short trial given to the new morality by the whole of society would prove it to be an egregious and disastrous failure.