“VICES OF SMART SOCIETY”

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 April 1932, Page 10

“VICES OF SMART SOCIETY”

DEAN INGE’S COMMENT. '«£■ LONDON, February 29. Preaching at Holy Trinity, Sloancstreet, S.W., yesterday, Dean Inge made a pointed reference to preachers and novelists who draw a large public by depicting the vices of to-day. There were, he said, two Christian virtues which were entirely spoilt, if we thought about them —purity and humility. The pure mind had no temptation to dwell on scenes of which it was a shame to think, and put them away gladly, except when a sense of duty called to help a brother or sister out of the mire. It was a state of mind poles asunder from the prudishness which sometimes called itself a zeal for purity. “It. is easy.” ho continued, “to get a crowd of listeners to hear a speaker draw a lurid picture of the vices of smart, society—drawn probably’ partly’ from imagination and partly from backstairs gossip. It is easy to get a

largo sale for a novel representing a psychological study of a mind infected with strange vices or an exposure of some state of town life. “But no one who can enjoy preaching such sermons or listening to them, no one who can enjoy writing such nooks or reading them, has the grace of God in him. The rebound from Victorian reticence has now gone much too far.” Humility was a characteristic quality of the Christian. The pagans despised it as a servile temper, which it was not. The monks practised it as a mortification of self-respect, which it was not. The monk had to show his humility by obeying all sorts of preposterous orders and by almost literally allowing himself to be trampled Oil.

“I am told,” added the dean, “that the same methods are not entirely unknown in some of our modern sisterhoods.”