NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22200, 29 August 1935, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM Spiritual freedom was not soon or easily reached, wrote the Bishop of Durham, in the Listener. A long and gradual process of development lies behind it. Among the ancients, as among non-Christian* peoples still, individual responsibility was submerged in a rigid conformity to external authority. The tribe, the nation, the State, "called the tune" of religion for the individual. Conformity to the public requirement was the Alpha and Omega of his religious duty. Philosophers might see beyond the reigning assumption, but for the mass of men the notion of religion as a matter of personal conviction, and as the dynamic of a congruous morality, of which the hroad requirements were disclosed in the private conscience, was unknown. Christianity effected a revolution. The external impersonal yoke of custom and law was broken, and men moved in the largo franchise of divine worship. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," runs the terse summary of St. Paul. UNNECESSARY NECESSITIES "Why are the clergy to be regarded as so very much poorer than in 1910?" asked Dr. Pollock, Bishop of Norwich, at a recent diocesan conference. Actually, he noted, the average of stipends was higher than 25 years ago. "Perhaps it is partly to he accounted for," he said, "by the fact that the clergy feel that they must keep up and keep in step with the growing expenditure and the scale of living, which has risen on all sides. Lay folk in various styles of home spend no less on amusements, entertaining is often overdone, girls are brought out as expensively, children have more pocket money, the etceteras and amenities of the domestic establishments are as costly. Luxuries have become indispensable. We rejoice in any advance of comfort which offers real advantages. This is all to the good, but 1 think we have carried too far the unnecessary necessities of living, if I may so call them. We all have an acute sympathy for those who are desperately poor, and I for one intensely admire the courage, industry and self-sacrifice of the clergy and their wives, who are poor to themselves and rich toward God. Certainly the simple joys of life are the greatest, and on all sides we see that artificial amusements, which in the end are costly, are encroaching upon the means of pleasure and refreshment which are open to us all." PAINTING GREY ON GREY "Surely the rejection of all the old canons of beauty and seemliness has produced monstrous and grotesque results in art and letters, and in conduct has left us with no standard at all except a kind of utilitarianism," said Dr. Inge, late Dean of St. Paul's, in addressing Oxford undergraduates. "The most popular writers of our day compare badly with the Victorians, because few of them have any grasp of the nobility of human nature at its best. They paint grey on grey—a drab and unworthy picture of human life. Most of them simply ignore religion, and grotesquely exaggerate the importance of sex in a decent, well-ordered life. It is bad art because it distorts reality, and I fear it must make many readers picture life as a much poorer thing than it really is. The remedy is in our hands. We can read and re-read the old books. No nation has a more glorious literature than our own, and it Christian may thank God for most of our poetry, and most of our fiction, too. Our young people should not be in such a hurry to throw all their parents' household gods on to the scrap-heap." "REPRESSION IS CIVILISATION"

In spite of the modern craze for selfexpression. a certain degree of repression is necessary in any civilised being, according to a medical psychologist, writing in the Listener. He says psychological development means, among other things, that primitive instinctive tendencies are modified, controlled, organised and directed by the growth of intellect and self-consciousness, the pressure of social opinion, and the development of deliberate purposes and ideals. A good deal of recent psychological work has been concerned with the ways in which from earliest childhood that development takes place, and the difficulties which are encountered before the individual is able to adapt himself comfortably to social life in a civilised world. One essential factor in that development is the process called repression, which means that certain impulses or feelings or memories are kept out of consciousness, refused recognition, because it would-be painful to the ego, the conscious, socialised, civilised self even to recognise these things as part of itself, and still more so to give them direct expression. The ego ignores them, and it does not know that it is doing so. Repression is an unconscious process. It is also, of course, an inevitable process; repression in a sense is civilisation. WILLING TO BE SLAVES It is already the case in Europe that Governments control nearly everything. Trade, finance, consciences, morals, culture, are all in varying degrees the subject of governmental control, writes Mr. George Glasgow, in the Contemporary Review. In addition, the British J people submit to a government which j prescribes tie hours at which they may j eat and drink, Freedom has been crushed out of Europe. For two years Mr. Roosevelt has been engaged in an attempt to crush freedom out of tho United States, but is meeting more opposition from a people who have more spirit left in them than appar- j ently have the peoples of Europe. Herr | Hitler is the very symbol of the modern slave-driver of whole peoples. He demands, and apparently is willingly given, full control over, the lives, minds and spirits of the German people. Any normally healthy person will gasp at so grotesque a conception. But the number of normally healthy persons in Europe to-day is so small that the gasp will not be heard above the massed cheers of Europe's slaves. Herr Hitler was cheered to the echo by the German people for his speech" of May 21. Yet no despot in the history of the world has ever demanded from his subjects a greater degree of slavery than Herr Hitler has demanded from the German people.