NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23394, 10 July 1939, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

CHOOSING REPRESENTATIVES There is no more important consideration before the people of the United States than the choice of good representatives, from the highest to the lowest political positions, says the Christian Science Monitor. Upon the character and capabilities of our representatives depend the future of democracy. The people elect. Were we to choose our course with greater deliberation and prayer, we should have less to complain of in matters of great and small moment to the welfare oi the whole. SEARCH AFTER TRUTH One of the principal aims of education was to train the young to search for truth, but she often wondered whether the multiplication of subjects in the curriculum and school activities did not militate against it, said Miss E. M. Tanner, headmistress of Iloedcan, in her presidential address to the English Association of Headmistresses. School life at present encouraged approximation rather than exactness, and yet it was accurate perception that was always the basis of sound conclusion. She did not suggest putting the clock back and returning to the simplicities of an early age, but much could be learned from the days when life was less complicated. AMERICAN ENGLISH

"The language of America is English. 1 say tliis advisedly, because there is a not uncommon belief in Britain and. indeed, in other parts of the world, that it is not," said Professor A. Lloyd James, secretary of the 8.8.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English, in a recent broadcast talk. "It is not British English: it's one of the great world dialects of English that have grown up in various parts of the world in the last few centuries since the British have been careering over the face of the globe. This American English—this great dialect —is now spoken by over a hundred million people; and beside it —at any rate, numerically speaking—British English is rather insignificant. The popular opinion that American English is a debased form of standard English is an opinion that no intelligent man should hold for five seconds. Measure for measure there is as much bad English spoken in these islands as there is in America; and there is one thing to bo said for America —in their schools and their colleges and their universities they take the trouble to teach the spoken form of their language a little better than we do in Britain."

SPIRITUAL HEALING "What wo have to make tho religious public, and also the scientific public, realise, is that the body is not the enemy of the spirit, but its necessary vehicle, and that, so far as we are dealing with this present world, the spirit cannot be normally healthy unless the body, which is its expression, so far as this world is concerned, is also kept in a healthy condition," said Canon Harold Anson, Master of the Temple, in an address to English medical men. "If what I have said is true, then we ought to mean, by 'spiritual healing' that kind of healing which aims at the healing of the whole personality, and this healing is none the less spiritual because it may avail itself in certain cases of purely physical modes of treatment. May I suggest that the education of medical students, allowing as it does, especially in our newer universities, little opportunity for any education whatever in religion, philosophy or psychology,- leaves them a prey to the great evils which beset tho specialisation which is so marked in our own day ? A hard-working panel doctor said to me the other day that a large proportion of his patients are suffering from neuroses. How can he possibly feel that the bottlo of medicine, which is all that he has time to offer, considering that ho is a poor man, and that they arc paying him less than 10s a year, is an adequate and scientific treatment of their ills? He knows perfectly well that he cannot hope for very much to happen as the result of so casual a treatment on both sides, the mental and physical ailments. Surely, then, we need, while recognising tho good which has come about as tho result of tho divorce between theology and medical treatment since tho Middle Ages, to realise that the time is now coming when those two partners, so long divorced, should bo brought together again into co-opera-tion and amity."

THE FIGHTING SERVICES "Tho world exists from week to week under the menace of tho possibility of general war," said the Archbishop of York, Dr. Temple, in a recent address. "I sometimes ask those who imagine that there can bo no place for tho use of forco in Christ's conception of the world what they think would happen if tho navies of tho world were abolished. Is it not quite certain that piracy would revive at once, and until there arc no people who will bo icady for their own gain to play upon tho lawful commerce of nations it is better that peaceful trade should be maintained by the existence of armed navies than that the seas should bo loft open to any scoundrel who likes to take advantage of tho freedom offered him. Wo are feeling the necessity in our country greatly to increase our armed forces, and everyone knows that this is not that wo may attack any of our neighbours. It is that wo may prevent a great setback of those things which history has bequeathed to us and which wo have learned to treasure, and to do that is, I am convinced, a primary duty. And so more clearly to-day than at some other time we see how rightly, the forces of tho Crown aro spoken of as services. Tho dignity of the armed, forces is not that tlioy are armed, but that they aro' services. They are organised for service, not for'any advantage for themselves, not for snatching anything that belongs to other peoples, but for the service of safeguarding thoso treasures of civilisation that wo havo. inherited from the past. It is, indeed, a most solemn duty that we should pledgo ourselves to seo that they-, aro used for this purpose and this purpose *mly. For that purpose wo must bo ready to employ ■ them and to honour thoso who have offered their lives for sorvico of this kind. And so we dedicate those forces which wo aro bound to maintain to tho cause of Jesus and of peace."