Lack of Character the Curse of the Age.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 5100, 9 October 1891, Page 4

Lack of Character the Curse of the Age.

Parents have largely overlooked the solemn responsibility of character building -which devolved upon tlieni. They supposed that the school and the Church would cultivate the brain and the soul. The school taught the brain along purely intellectual lines, leaving the Church and home to develop the ethical side of life, and the Church, forgetting her loftiest mission in profitless strife and contention over dogma, rite, and ritual, has largely failed in the work she might have wrought; hence the greatest need of the hour is a persistent ethical agitation, to quicken the dormant energies in the heart <f the people. If this great work is faithfully pursued, while the neces sity for liberty, toleration, and justice shaping our every act is strenuously insisted upon, I believe that measures will be devised for reducing uninvited poverty to the minimum and fostering all that is best, noblest, and grandest in the soul of man. In the sunlight of liberty I see a growing world. In the radiance of her smile man triumphs over error and superstition. But in the shadow of Paternalism, progress has ever withered, science has been a fugitive, and the vanguard of civilisation has suffered ignominious death. No lesson is more impressively taught by the ages than that science, progress, and human unfoldment move in the wake of liberty.—B. O. Flower, in the Arnea.