“COMRADESHIP”

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 November 1931, Page 10

“COMRADESHIP”

PUBLIC HOUSES AND CHURCHES. LONDON, September 5. Subjects discussed at the closing session on Saturday of the Modern Churchmen’s Conference at Oxford included: Public houses as a counter attraction to the churches, and Art and sport as means whereby modern man sought to escape from himself, and to foiget his diseased

isolation. “I often think,” said the Rev- J. C. Hardwick (Vicar of Partington, Manchester), “that there is more Christianity in a bar parlour of a publichouse on Sunday morning than there is in the church, because men in the public house have a sense of comradeship over their beer which the people in the church lack.” It having been pointed out that as a rule public-houses are closed during the time of church services on Sunday mornings, Mr Hardwick said that lie had noticed men going into a publichouse opposite his church at noon on Sundays and he often thought that people enjoyed themselves better in the public-house than his congregation enjoyed the sermon. (Laughter). Mr M. O. Burkitt, a Cambridge, lecturer, said that there was a village near Cambridge where a number of men met and drank beer while listening to the broadcast service. They were not allowed to order beer during the service. When asked why they did not go to church they replied that their method was “So much more friendly-like.” Mr Hardwick said that the religious value of public-house fellowship might sometimes be a sloppy thing, but it led to a lot of genuine comradeship among working men-

Speaking on “The Challenge of Life,” Mr Hardwick said that science could not satisfy our psychic needs, one of which was the need for distractions and amusements. As an answer to that modern man supplied himself with cinemas, wireless, and inexpensive literature. Thus Mr Edgar Wallace and Mr C. B. Cochran were as indispensable to the modern world as the scientific ex-pert. They helped to satisfy our psychic needs. European is busy because he is unhappy. His external activity is a compensation for inner unrest. He strives by making a noise to escape Irom himself. He is full of activity and vitality, just as were the Gadarene swine; like them he is.the victim of neurosis- His frustrated soul erupts in senseless activity. “It has become almost a platitude that our civilisation, unless it gets its deeper psychic needs satisfied, and so finds peace, will perish in convulsions. Science has placed in our hands means of mutual extermination which for efficiency surpass anything hitherto dreihnt of. Science, though it cannot cure our malady, has supplied a means of swift suicide of which the delirious European will soon avail himself.” PRISON BREAKING. Civilised man was subject to so many inhibitions that he rarely felt free and happy, but must be always on his guard lest he offended against the code. Modern man felt all the time that he was coping with hostile forces which would get the better of him in the end. He felt isolated from his fellow-men, whom he had come to regard as competitors in the relentless scramble for a living. He was imprisoned in a cage, against the bars of which he flung himself in neurotic desperation. He could only compensate himself for his imprisonment by distractions, drugs, and sexual stimulation; or, if he remained moral, by business enterprise, sport, truculent chauvinism, and so on- To some extent the modern man attained the compensation Which he needed by constructing powerful machines. The aeroplane and the high-powered car were artificial extensions of -personality and personal strength; pent inhibitions were eased by a burst *Bf speed-

“It is through a strange nemesis that modern man’s destruction will come through those machines which be created to provide himself with a wider life.” Mr Hardwick said that the two games most popular with the middle class to-day—golf and tennis —were individualistic, selfish games, but debased as they often were, art and sport remained the means whereby modern man sought to escape from himself and to forget his diseased isolation. Asking why religion failed, to attract to the same extent as art and sport, Mr Hardwick said that great emphasis was laid upon faith, which meant “believing without evidence things he suspected to be unique.” PATH TO THE ANGELSSir Arthur Thomson gave an address suggesting to-day how the Darwinian Theory, when the “bogey of chance” is eliminated, might be reconciled to the idea of God, and hinting at the more perfect mn of the future, with ever-greater and greatei - mental attributes.

Man was indeed at the top of a stately genealogical tree, but was he any longer “but a little lower than the angels”? To say that man was the long result of time, Sir Arthur held, did not prevent us believing that he was the child of God.

He was speaking on “Man as an Organism.” Man’s body, he said, was a walking museum of relics, dwindled and useless remains of organs and tissues that were ? well developed and functional in less highly evolved forms of life.

“The evolutionary view, he said, “may become more accepeable and mere accurate if we get rid of the bogey of Chance. Erroneous views have been sown by catchwords that are floated about like thistle seeds. An aboriginl fortuitous concourse of atoms was followed, we are told, by many a chapter of accidents, until at length man appeared as a final episode.

“But this phraseology is in great part unwarranted. When Darwin called unborn variations ‘fortuitous’ he meant that we did not know much about their complex of causes; but the more we know about them the less fortuitous they appear- There are chances no doubt in the struggle for existence just as in a w’eljl-fought football match, but the idea of organic evolution as a ‘chapter of accidents’ is decreditable if not discredited. “Man becomes more intelligible, and therefore more controllable, when we recognise his affiliation and the prehuman strands that linger in our fabric. It is encouraging to know that we have behind us not a descent,

but an ascent, and that there is some appreciable momentum in the right direction- Besides original sin there is original righteousness. The largest fact in the story of organic evolution is the growing dominance of the mental aspect of life, and of this trend modern man is for the time being the climax. “But who can say, .especially in our very imperfect understanding of the mind-body relation‘that this emancipation of this side of our being has reached its limit?”