THE HEROIC IN MAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19328, 15 May 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE HEROIC IN MAN.

DIAGNOSIS AND REMEDY. BY KCTAK.E. Dr. Mott believes that the besetting sin of our age is the love of softness and of ease, and that our salvation lies in an appeal to the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice that is fundamental in all normally constituted men. He can speak with authority. Better, perhaps, than any other man of our time, he knows his world. His hand is on the pulse of the high idealed young men and women of all the nations. The diagnosis and the prescription of so wise a physician are of supreme importance to all that look with perplexity on the strange confusion of aspiration and disillusion that, marks the world in the backwash of the Great War. We are sick to death of phrases. We have heard enough, and more than enough, of making the world safe for democracy and wars that were to end war. The high mood of war days has passed, and a bewildered world faces its stupendous problems weary in body, soul and spirit, with no clear star to guide, and content for the most part to meet each day as it comes. Can we trust that somehow order will resolve itself out of chaos? ('an we fall back on our faith in human nature, and take it for granted that there are forces implanted in man as man that will of tlieir own accord mould in their own way and in their own good time the better world we hope for?

I should say that is the commonest attitude of mind to-day. I think that is partly what Dr. Moti means when he speaks .if our love of ease and softness. . period of tremendous action has exhausted the world's capacity to think and to act. There must be a period of recuperation, of convalescence after the febrile days of war, when resei*ves of strength, of thought and feeling and will power can bank up once again. While the reservoir is slowly filling, life must carry on as best it may. The safest plan is to let it alone. Self-sacrifice.

But Dr. Mott is the last mail to advocate a policy of laissez faire, and I think he has in mind, too, human attitudes that were obvious long before the war. For how long the fat years of peace and prosperity dulled man's ears to the voices of the spirit, and deadened his heart to the things that matter. George Eliot saw in the end only one supremely good thing in man, the. power of voluntary self-sacrifice. This was the basis of her ethics, and here lay her hope for the individual and the world. Selfrealisation would come not through selfassertion, but through willing selfabnegation. I suppose the world has never believed that, and never believed it less than in these difficult post-war days. For all the countries of Europe poured out their blood in the rapture of a high sacrificial mood that counted not the cost if the end were won. And half of Europe lies under the shadow of defeat, its sacrifices, as great as our own, to end in utter failure: the other half with the victory its sacrifices had won turning to ashes in its mouth. It is a bold man who calls for further sacrifice to-day. There is always the disastrous knowledge that while men were enduring the horrors of trench warfare, there were thousands at home gloating over swelling banking accounts. That is, perhaps, the hardest thing for the soldier to swallow, and nothing has done more to create the cynical attitude that expresses itself in the determination to seek in the future the easy way and compel life to yield its maximum of sweets before the capacity to enjoy them has pone. But Dr. Mott has the courage to send his ringing challenge to the young men and women of to-day. He sees plainly that the way of ease and indulgence is ultimately the way of death. With all that the war has meant of horror and suffering, he does not hesitate to appeal once again to the heroic that lies at the basis of most men. The Age of Short Cuts. There is no doubt that ours is preeminently the age of the short cut, of the easy path. You find evidences of that everywhere. It is the age of the quack and the beauty doctor. Men will ignore every law of health, and then make the fortune of the quack nostrum seller, who promises to make up, over night, the wastage of years of folly and neglect. Women, forgetting that the only path to beauty lies in a contented mind, and a healthy body, throng beauty parlours to achieve, by a* few external applications, what can come only from a discipline of the soul. There is no royal road to knowledge; (he experience of the centuries has proved that only by industry and by application can the mind be stored with the wisdom of the ages. But never were there so many short ruts to scholarship and knowledge presented for the deluding of the credulous. We see the worth of the goal, but we are not willing to run the only course that will bring us to it. # In religion we find the same tendency. There never was an age that had more religions, and there must have been few ages that had less to show for it all. On every hand we notice the desire to receive the palm without the dust of the a rena.

Small things these, perhaps, luit they show where we are moving, and they point to a great danger. There has been no great advance of mankind on the, weary upward path, while men and women have been seeking (Tfe easier way. Every great age in the world's history has been the outcome of sacrifice, of selfdiscipline. There has never been, and there never will be, a short cut to the heights. Every liberty we enjoy has been won for us in blood and tears. Dr. Mott shows not, only a true insight into human nature, but a sound reading of history when he sees the hope of the future to lie in self-discipline, in the gallant girding of our young manhood and womanhood for a battle against ignorance and poverty and disease and sin. He summons the youth of our day to join the heroic, company of those Who. rowing hard against, the stream. Saw distant fiat-cs of Eden gleam, And did not dream it was a dream. Man the Hero. Here is a sublime faith in human nature, a faith that all the past endeavours of man in his upward struggle prove to be justified. For not in magic formula;, not, in ready-made schemes of social reconstruction, lies the hope of the world, but in the power of heroic seli'saciificing service that is the true badge of manhood and womanhood. Carlyle saw that and expressed it in memorable words some 90 years ago. " Mahomet's religion is not an easy one; with religious fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas, prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not succeed by being an easy religion. As if, indeed, any religion, or cause holding of religion, could suceed by that! It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, sugar-plums in this world or the next. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man that, the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Not by flattering our appetites; no, by awakening the Heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any religion gain followers." There, I take it, is Dr. Mott's prescription for the ills of our present time.