RELIGIOUS NEWS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3294, 12 August 1911, Page 3

RELIGIOUS NEWS.

THE DUTY OF OPTIMISM

'Take broad views of things,” said Dr Wright, Archbishop, of Sydney, to a number of University Christian Union students, assembled in Sydney the other day. ioung men like themselves, lie said, one would assume to be the last people to feel pessimism. But youth was inclined to be a little over sensitive, and things take effect on us in youth that we would disregard in later years. Trifles perhaps they might be, but they loomed large, and some of us at least had experienced the feeling that the world was out of joint Then, again, there was a time in the opening ci life when we began to get a little disillusioned, and found people in whom hitherto we had trusted or had respected were not quite all we had thought they were. Thence came the false argument “As with one, so with all, ’ t’rd we felt that the noblest ideals were only dreams, and time spent on their, was only wasted. When we were tired with tlie effort to uplift the world, it was very tempting to say it was a poor world, that the best was always downtrodden- and the worst always triumphant. What was the best cure for such pessimism? Take the New Testament, the most genuinely optimistic book one could find. The writers of it were the last people you would expect to be optimstic and yet through the book you found a spirit of buoyant hope. _ Joy was one of the essential characteristics of their lives, and of the lives we should lead, and it was so because, in spite of the social conditions about them, they were living a citizens of a better world. They fulfilled their citizenship in the ordinary world onlv because they felt themselves to be citizens of a better and more enduring Empire.