THE PLEASURE AGE

Evening Star, Issue 20257, 19 August 1929, Page 9

THE PLEASURE AGE

“ WORK OF THE DEVIL ” BISHOP OF BATHURST’S ATTACK ACCUSATION AGAINST WEALTHY i,CLASSES. Press Association-—-By Telegraph—Copyright - SYDNEY, August 19. (Received August 19, at 10.5 a.in. ■in his address at St. John’s Church, Eirchgrove, Dr Grotty (Bishop of Bathurst) made an attack upon “certain minorities who are keeping the people apart and are destroying fellowship in order that political programmes might not bo thwarted.” He described it as the work of the devil. “It is no use praying,” lie said. ‘‘lt is time that professing Christians got out and did something.”

The bishop accused the wealthy classes of engaging in. , r pleasure chase and ignoring their responsibility' in social service. They must get snobbery and social hate hi* of the church and out of tho peoph he added. SYDNEY, August 5. “ Industry is a workshop, vast and interlocked. A fighter in a workshop is a misfit. Tho bludgeon is out of date. AN EARLIER ADDRESS. Conflict there must always he, hut the idea of conquest on either side must bo frankly dismissed. This snarling and shaking of fists across barbed wire entanglements, while every moment markets arc being lost, plant lying idle, new substitutes supplanting coal, and tho spectre of poverty growing daily nearer to women and little children, is a barren business.”

Thus Bishop Crotty, speaking at Bathurst Cathedral last night, on tho fifteenth anniversary of the outbreak of tho war. There had always been a class conflict, he said, and there always would be one. Tho only question was whether it was going to bo"‘a destructive or a creative conflict. _ People would have to make up their minds whether tho world was going to be a homo or a hell. If, however, tho church was going to talk about peace, it would have to bo the kind of peace that honest realists could envisage and respect. It was idle to look for a peace which involved the dismissal of conflict from tho relationships of races, sexes, or classes. To talk of peace in industry in that sense was a fatuous and fantastic dream, which merely irritated the tired people engaged in its baffling and exhausting conflicts. What must bo looked for and worked for was a continuance of conflict, but a conflict turned from destructive to creative ends.

Class conflict lias been a prime factor in social change, but it would not come to an end with the triumph of the proletariat. It had not come to an end with the triumph of capitalism, and a proletariat triumph was not going to end it either. The old capitalism has been based upon the uncritical assumption that if everybody looked after himself the future and the common good might be taken for granted. That was merely the sentiment of the elephant as it danced among the chickens. There was no justification for the old expectation, that a conflict consciously self-centred would drift automatically into anything creative or constructive, ft had hot done so. The remedy of scientific socialism was oven more hopeless and bizarre. All conflicts were to be reduced to one, which was to he intensified and kept fiercely destructive. All conflicts have been reduced to one. and that one resolved by the victory of the proletariat, existing occasions of conflict would disappear.

Social conflicts could not be eradicated between sexes, classes, or nations, be continued. But any attempt to keep them on a destructive level, deciding them by conflict and physical force, could only load to death. Two things dominated industrial life to-day. One was fear, and the other was force. Those were two sides to one utility, and if they armed it could only be because they were afraid. Sooner or later people must make up their minds to taco their social conflicts without either. Men in the coal trade and elsewhere would simply have to move out. and at once, to an intelligent cooncratinn, bent not on mutual destruction, Im b on finding and realising their destined unify, through vitalising and creative conflicts, in which neither side ip the nature of tilings could win, or wish to win. Common sanity was forcing this solution on them.