DANGERS OF MODERN LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14531, 19 November 1910, Page 2 (Supplement)

DANGERS OF MODERN LIFE.

PLEA FOR SELF-ASSERTION. The concluding meeting of the Church Congress at Cambridge was marked by a noteworthy address by Dr. Paget, Bishop of Stepney.

What was the. most disturbing element in modern, life, he asked, if it were not the claim for self-realisation and self-as-sertion ? In every manner of voice, now pleading, now harsh and strident, now very eloquent, now faltering and hesitating, the plea for self-assertion was making itself heard. It was disturbing the home, it was revolutionising education, it was throwing our social relations into confusion, it was disorganising social life. " I want to be myself; I want to live my own life; I resent from the very bottom of my heart the conventions, the restraints, the crippling education which restrain and bind me." That was the cry of modern life. "I want to be myself; I want, to live the life which I believe I was meant to live."

The strain was most conspicuously felt in home life. If, indeed, a 6 there was grave reason to believe, home life was breaking up, we should be thankful that there were symptoms apparent that something was seriously amiss. Modern medicine supplied us with a whole vocabulary of phrases which attempted to describe those vague signs of uneasiness which told that something was physically wrong. Was there not something mentally and spiritually wrong when they saw, to their sorrow, the increasing symptoms of the same sort in the modern home '!

The desire to restrain on the part of the parent, the growing resentment on the part of the children, the parents' complaint of unresponsiveness and ingratitude, the children's complaint that they were not understood, and that they were not allowed to do as they liked, or to play the parts that they ought in lifethis conflict of ideas and opinions, getting more bitter day by day, was just a symptom of a thing 'which ought to be working smoothly, and was not. This self-assertion and sullen reserve led easily through peculiarity and eccentricity to the dreary land of the crank and the freak.

We insisted on self-assertion and wanted self-realisation. It was often only a larger stage to play silly antics on, and a larger audience to listen to our talking nonsense, that we sought. We ought rather to bei zealously on the look-out for a self ti&t was worthy of assertion,.