NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22685, 24 March 1937, Page 12

NOTES AND COMMENTS

ENGLISH IDEALISM "The most important thing to know about a man is what he takes for granted." said Sir Josiah Stamp in a recent address. "And that is true of nations, too. In England we have curious strains of idealism, mixed with our economic materialism and opportunism. They make others think us cynical or hypocritical. But that idealism is fundamental, too. It has had in the past year its shocks of defeat and its amazing successes —'persistencies,' perhaps I should rather call them. It includes a hold on the stability of trier! institutions, and on the gradualness of change. In its institutions are the home and the family as the true unit of society, despite all the acids of modernity, and these are foundation stones of British idealism. NOT BY BREAD ALONE " I think one of the tragic results of our present revolt against tradition is the tendency to identify life with fullness of animal expression," writes the Rev. Dr. Harris K. Kirk, in his hook "The Glory of Common Things." "That is what our young people mean, or think they mean, when they say they have a right to live their own life. I accept that as a fundamental principle. But instead of searching for a right conception of life, it is easier to obey the immediate urges that clamour within us, and to identify life with thrills and excitements of one kind and another. The philosophers and religious men — and this is a very profound thing in history—have all agreed in saying that man's primary peril is the peril or tyranny of the flesh; that unless we are prepared to recognise that lile means more than food and drink, more than anything tangible, we can never deliver ourselves from the tyranny of the flesh." COMMUNISM IN BRITAIN

Sir Henry Page Croft, M.P., opening iin anti-Communist exhibition in London, accused British Communism of promoting disaffection in the Services, dockyards and munition factories, and Sir Stafford Cripps of having formed "an alliance with Communism." "Do you realise," asked Sir Henry, "that the plutocrat Sir Stafford Cripps, who draws his huge proletarian income from capitalist clients, declared recently for revolution through the class war, and has formed an alliance with Communism, which creed is in direct conflict with his oath of allegiance?'' Britain. Sir Henry said, had always been an asylum for the persecuted of other lands. They had even been allowed to grow rich at the expense of British competitors, but when sons or descendants of these alien guests started to bite the hand that had ted them, he warned them that there wero limits. By mobilising public opinion they must show that they would not tolerate these poison germs in their midst. CAUSES OF MALNUTRITION Much malnutrition undoubtedly exists in Britain, and undoubtedly some of this malnutrition is due to poverty, says the Morning Post in comment on the recent debate in the House of Commons on the subject. Poverty, however, is not the sole cause. There is statistical evidence that the British people to-day are eating more and better food per hen'd than fat any previous period of their history. There is evidence in the prosperity of innumerable forms of entertainment, that the British people as a whole are rich enough to afford good food. What, then, is the cause of malnutrition among them ? The answer is to be sought partly in recent extensions of knowledge, partly in the new conditions of domestic life. Scientific study of nutrition is a new development. The knowledge of food values which science has given us was before only empirically available; the standards of diet which science lays down have probably never been attained since thp British man was divorced from the soil. On the domestic side, industrial life has all but killed the old art that lay in the preparation of food. Food is not generally so well cooked as it was. it is rarely well balanced. Because of the combination of acquired tastes and processing of foods, food once universally acceptable is not necessarily acceptable to-day. As a Government spokesman said in the House of Commons, many children do not take the cheap milk provided for them at the schools for the elementary reason that they do not like milk. THE FUNDAMENTAL VERB When we lift our eyes from the crowded roads to the eternal hills, then, how much the personal and practical things with which we have to deal are enriched. What meaning and coherence come into our scattered lives, writes .Miss Kvelyn I'nderhill in her new book, "The Spiritual Life." We mostly spend those lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual—even on the religious—plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to be: and that being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life. But now, with this widening of the horizon, our personal 11ps and downs, desires, cravings, efforts, are seen in scale; as small and transitory spiritual facts, within a vast, abiding, spiritual world, and lit by a steady spiritual light. And at once a new coherence comes into our existence, a new tranquillity and release. Like a chalet in the AI ps, that homely existence gains atmosphere, dignity, significance -from the greatness of the sky above it and the background of the everlasting hills. The people of our time are helpless, distracted and rebellious, unable to interpret that which is happening, and full of apprehension about that which is to come, largely because they have lost this sure hold on the eternal, which gives to each life meaning and direction, and with meaning and direction gives steadiness. I do not mean by this a mere escape from our problems and dangers, a slinking awa.v from the actual to enjoy the eternal. I mean an acceptance and living out of the actual, in its homeliest details and its utmost demands, in the light of the eternal; and with that peculiar sense of ultimate security which only a hold on the eternal brings.