NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19170, 9 November 1925, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE PERILS OF SUCCESS. "It Is self-satisfaction that everywhere stops progress; the two cannot exist together,"' says Dean Inge, in the Guardian. "A man comes into the world with Treat gifts; at first ho makes a good use of them. This is the time when he does his best work, as a rule —just before the world discovers him. Alter ho has succeeded, wo too often trace a lamentable falling off. There is no further real advance in the man himself. Fresh honours may be heaped upon him ,but each is less deserved than tlio last. Ho is now satisfied with himself and forthwith tha vision once so keen becomes faint, the ready hand loses its cunning, the sure foot stumble; well if the conscience too does not become blunted, and if the man does not become a humbug and a hypocrite. Even in the affairs of this world, the man who counts himself to have apprehended has shot his holt; there will be nothing more of interest to say about him."

THE COMMON COLD. " It is not from rare and exotic disease that our generation is most impatient to be delivered," says the Morning Post. "There is an affliction much more grievous, and one that is at the same time so general, so familiar, that science will not condescend seriously to regard it. This affliction is the common cold; so frequent, so inexorable in its incidence, and so distressing, so undignified in its symptoms. If some research worker would discover a means of averting colds, or a means of curing them, he would indeed deserve an enduring monument as one of the benefactors of the human race. Surely hero is a field for tireless investigation! Cannot science discover for us in what the common cold consists, and how it may be conquered? Who could calculate in terms of man-hours the loss inflicted on the world by simple colds—the depletion of energy, the impairment of efficiency? Yet we are content to go on suffering this scourge, as if it were a pre-ordained visitation from which thore could he no release. Let our more complicated diseases wait. We will take the fisk of them, if only we can be delivered from the common cold."

FACING THE FACTS Commenting on the tremendous progress in scientific research and the improvement in materials used in industry, Lend Weir, in an address recently, said that while they had these definite contributions toward greater productivity and more efficient and effective utilisation of the natural wealth of the world, many industries—in fact, the entire industrial and social organisation—were in difficulties to maintain a specific standard of life. Did not this suggest that political and economic development required a little more of the scientists' formula—less dogma and more honest acceptance of facts ? He thought he was right in saying that dogma in the past had been the greatest barrier to scientific progress. It had been no less harmful in the political world. Imagination and courage m science had invariably blazed the trail for further development and advancement, and in these respects he thought the leaders of political thought might well follow the lead of the scientists and face the inexorable facts of the economic situation in honesty and sincerity.

AMERICA'S AWAKENING. "We may perceive the gathering evidence of a conflict that cannot fail to be painful, destructive and in its results incalculable," writes Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe in the Contemporary Review on America and Fundamentalism. '"Over the larger part of North America, for a century or more, a great pioneer population has been engaged in subduing the land and laying (lie foundations of a new civilisation. The -swiftly expanding forces of knowledge and inquiry reveal, at this relatively late hour, that for many millions of these people, who with their immediate ancestors have accomplished the world's greatest miracle in nation-building, there is corning the shock of a profoundly revolutionary discovery. It falls to the generation now reaching maturity to realise that the material progress of America has been made without a corresponding advance in mental enlightenment and spiritual experience. The conclusion toward which we are led by this latest uprising of obscurantism is that America is on the eve of a final encounter between its vast inertia of 'plain Bible religion' and the spirit, of the modern world. If the Fundamentalists elect to pursue the course marked out for them by Bryan the main result will be a mass of wreckage, amid which the inevitable church schisms will be relatively unimportant. And, in any event, the central question of. intellectual and social freedom still remains to Ik? decided by the American people."

YOUTH AND THE CHURCHES. " The hardest thing for me personally to stand in this religious controversy now waging has been its effect on many of our best youth," says Dr. Emerson Fosdick, the famous American preacher. "It is as though they said: 'Look at the questions over which the Church is fighting—the inerrancy of ancient documents, the credibility of this or that event two thousand years past, the literal or loose acceptance of confessions of faith written by men like ourselves centuries ago, or apostolic succession and the administration of the sacraments. These are not the real problems on which the weal or woe of humanity for centuries depends. If the Church with unanimous enterprise were seeling io make Jesus Christ and all that He represents dominant in the personal and social life of men, we should want to be Christians and should count it the greatest honour of our lives to be even a littje worthy of (he name. But the Olmrch does not seem to be chiefly intent on that aim. Once more she is deflecting the attention of people from the real problems of our time.' That is the serious and severe thing that many high-minded youths are thinking about denominational Christianity," adds Dr. Fosdick. " The determined desire of the liberals is to meet that charge by an adequate reformation of current religion which passes under the- name of Christianity, but often does not deserve it. To make liis faiths and ideals controlling in men's lives seems to us the supremo task, as its consummation would be the supreme salvation. Nothing else centrally matters except that; everything else that matters at all gains its importance only as it contributes to that,"