INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23436, 26 February 1938, Page 17

INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY

“ If the nation is to be Christian, not only in phrase but in fact, it is only the individual Christians who can make and keep it so,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Lang, in an address broadcast from Lambeth Palace. “This truth of the ultimate responsibility'of the individual is one of those commonplaces which just because they are generally accepted are apt to be generally neglected. Is it not so now? A French thinker has said that the whole tendency of modem life is to depersonalise man. He tends to be absorbed in the vast machine of modern civilisation. In the ever-increasing haste of life he has no time to possess his own soul, to realise his own personality. In some countries to-day his individuality is merged and lost m the all-pervad-ing State. A leading exponent of the

policy of one of them has recently d»> X dared that the view that men are in- .*» dividual beings is false, that ‘there is no liberty of the individual;, there ex- ~ ists only the liberty of peoples, natrons, races-’ Democracy has thus become V much more than one of many forms of government. It has become the guar- - dian of human personality. But even ’> a democracy, let us remember, depends -> for its worth and health on each in- ? dividual citizen recognising his own separate responsibility as one of its rulers and equipping himself to fulfil it. The rule of ..the many is good only in so far as it rests upon the responsible rule of each one of its citizens,”