NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22724, 10 May 1937, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

THE NATURE OF LOVE Tho drifting sands and the moving waters are a firmer foundation than love is, or will ever be, writes Mrs. Florence Guy Seabury in her book, " Love is a Challenge." Love was not meant to build upon. Its nature is zephyrous as a perfume. It was never intended as our coin of vantage, the thing wo use in barter for happiness. It is no longer ours if wo regard it as a claim, and less so when wo use it to possess another. If you put your faith in'love or what it will do for you, it recedes exceedingly. Ask of it and you receive nothing. Give to it from a security founded upon your own relation to life, and it returns to you, yea, sevenfold. SLAVERY OF MATERIALISM "So many of our troubles to-day seem to me to arise from the growing materialism of the age we live in," said Mr. Baldwin in a recent broadcast from Chequers. "Science has made such advances and brought such material prosperity and knowledge that we have tended, as I once put it, to confuse mere acceleration with civilisation. The higher qualities have sometimes given way to tho lower, the spiritual to the material. Yet materialism means slavery—slavery of the mind to the things of the body, and slavery in the end means destruction. The British peoples have always set before them the ideal of freedom, and more than ever to-day it is their duty to maintain and justify that ideal." PHYSICAL EDUCATION Referring to national physical culture movements in Europe, Mr. R. J. Patten, in his presidential address at tho annual conference of the National Union of Teachers, at Portsmouth, said: " I am not impressed by biceps built on bread without butter. I reject as worthless the tape measure as evidence of the presence of physical fitness and stamina which will survive prolonged effort or strain." Dealing with the Government's physical education scheme, Mr. Patten said the union was entirely sympathetic to measures for the physical wellbeing of the nation—the more so when as in the present instance there was no element of compulsion or insistence upon any one specialised type of exercise or training. Tho President of the Board of Education and the Minister of Health had said that the present proposals were only part of the Government's campaign for a fitter and healthier Britain. " I hope teachers will not be accused of undue precipitancy if they press for the earliest possible publication of the rest of the programme," Mr. Patten continued. "There is no desire to exaggerate the extent of the problem of malnutrition, or to suggest that it is so widespread that physical education cannot be beneficial to or enjoyed by the majority of the children or young people. But the voice of criticism will serve a useful purpose if it reminds us that the authority and the teacher must always be on the look-out for the child who is showing symptoms of under-nourish-ment." PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY The question whether sin matters very much is one which has gained in apparent force since learned men began to speak of relativity, and men less learned to misunderstand their meaning, wiites the Dean of Durban, D. C Alington, in tho Daily Telegraph. In Galsworthy's phrase, "Everything being now relative, there is no longer absolute dependence to be placed on God, free trade, marriage, consols, coal or caste." The modern begins to ask: "Does it matter what I do?" and the mere question is definitely a concession to defeatism. It is needless to remark that to ask such a question is to take tho meaning out of all great literature—tho great tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare, as well as Dante or Goethe, lose all their interest if it "really doesn't matter" what course a man pursues. Carlyle was right when he called upon the man who would mako something of his life to "close thy Byron: open thy Goethe." To the one conduct is fundamentally indifferent; to the other, it is the supreme test. Perhaps few people to-day read Sartor Resartus; but those who are not prepared to acquiesce in the wipi.ng out of all meaning from human endeavour might do well to glance at the passage in which Carlyle passes from the "Centre of Indifference" to the "Everlasting Yea": "There is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness, he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! . . . Love not Pleasure: love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him." DR. INGE'S PROPHECIES There are one or two prophecies which I shall b© rash enough to make, says Dr. W. R. Inge in his new book, "A Rustic Moralist." The opinion on the Continent is that we are approaching a new and terrible European war. I do not believe it. The conditions are quite unlike those of 1914. Then all the great nations were rich; their credit stood high. Although the cost of the war far surpassed all expectations, they found it possible to finance it by borrowing. But most of the war debts were repudiated, so that in future no one will look on war loan as an investment. We are often told that a nation can always pay its soldiers as it goes along. I do not believe it. I do not believo that either Germany or Italy could finance a great war. Germany is in such a plight financially that I have grave doubts whether the Hitler regime can last out the year, and Italy is not in a much better case. Italian militarism seems to be merely a perverted romanticism like that which brought Napoleon to his ruin. A revival of the Mediterranean empire of ancient Rome is a fantastic dream. The condition for its realisation does not exist. Nor could Germany attack Russia, which would be aided by France, with any chance of success. Russia, which is moving cautiously in the direction of an industrial and peasant republic, is more stable, both politically and financially, than Germany, where a declaration of war would release a huge volume of violent discontent against ,the existing regime, The German bayonets are not for use against France, still less against ourselves. Tho Germans are honestly afraid of the immense Russian Army and of a Communist rising within their own border.