MISS MAUDE ROYDEN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3870, 15 May 1928, Page 35

MISS MAUDE ROYDEN.

LECTURE AT BURNS HALL. A THOUGHTFUL ADDRESS. Miss Maude Hoyden, the famous evangelist, social worker, and ptmantliropist, who arrived iu Uuiieum on inursuay aicernooii, delivered an uuuress in x>urns xiall iI ), llle evening, taking as her suoject: “The World vVe Live in: Can We bet It In Order? ” The hall was crowded to the doors, and the lecturer, who lias a spieiiuiu delivery, grace! ui language, and a pretty wit, received a most attentive hearing, punctuated ireely with hearty iippiauoe.

me .Mayoress (Airs VV, B. Taverner), who nitrouuced the lecturer, said it gate her great pleasure to welcome Alias Hoyden, on benalf of the women of Duneum. •they had all heard oi iier, and were now very glad of the opportunity ox listening to her.— (Applause.) Alias Roy den said that the warmth of her recejition in Dunedin had made her visit exceedingly pleasant, and that in order to give her audience an opportunity of “getting their own back," she always made it a practice to answer any questions at the conclusion of her addresses.

Can we set the world in order?” asked the lecturer, and gave the reply that at first one felt inclined to say it was a rather big job. So it was, she said, but humanity had to tackle it. If things had got into a mess, it was their business to try to put them right. She believed it could be, done, and they should find out how to do it. What kind of a world would it be if we could set it in order? asked the lecturer. Though New Zealand was on the opposite side of the globe from the country from which she came, they had here the same troubles and the same desire to put things right. “ Most of us are people of goodwill,” she said. *’ I suppose there are people who delight in the suffering of other people, but I don’t think they are common. 1 think that really at- the back of our minds we all want the same things. We would all be well, so well that we want to get up in the morniner—that kind of wellness. And we would want to get up in ■a decent house, to get work without feeling we are taking work away from someone else, to be free from grinding anxiety. I am not asking for champagne and caviare. but just bread and butter, and that, after all. is what we all want. But what we are up against is not ill-will, but a sense of helplessness, a lack of power, a feeling that we can’t get what we want. We don’t feel that our leaders don’t want these things, but that they can’t do what is necessary to get them.” The lecturer stated that there was a feeling that there was no one in the world who could take hold of the situation and change it. During the war they had the feeling that the world had been carried away by a flood of anger, hate, and love and heroism, and when the war had ended and their representatives had gone to Paris to make what they called peace, they had just the same feeling of helplessness. The whole thing was so enormous. Nobody wanted war, but passions were too strong for them, and iu polities, in religion, there was a sense of feeble goodwill without the one person to dominate. And yet there was one aspect of all this which was untrue. Indeed, the exact opposite was true. There was one department of human thought which gave them a sense, not of impotence, but of a power so tremendous that it was positively terrifying. She referred to national service. She remembered Sir Oliver Lodge, when speaking at the City Temple, an atomic energy said that scientists did not yet know how to use it, and that “God forbid that they should learn how until a nation was morally fit to use it.”

They had steam, gas, electricity, aeroplanes, radio, telegrams, telephones, and a sense of power in these directions which although it was alarming was also inspiring, and the human race had been adapting itself to the change in their lives. The speaker referred to some of the triumps of the scientist, and spoke of the great natural forces that had been overcome by the cutting of the Panama canal, and the vanquishing of yellow fever in that zone. Those men who had made that canal did not say that because there always had been yellow fever there always would be yellow fever, and no one could stop it. “ They did not say, ‘ Let us be resigned to the will of God.’ They said, ‘ Let us find out the cause of yellow fever/ and they found out that the organism of yellow fever could not complete the cycle of its existence without being for some time in the body of a mosquito; and they destroyed the very breeding places of the mosquitoes, and drove that marvellous canal through the isthmus, and all the history of the world is changed; all the world is a smaller place. Science had set its world in order. It could take the world iu its hand and make it what it chose. Scientists might not be able to do everjthing, but the attitude they took up was: “ We will find out. We have learned to adopt ourselves to the world in which we live, but now we will adapt the worTd to ourselves.”

Miss Royden explained that just as the scientist had come to understand the laws of science and to bring in new factors that altered the result, so must they come to understand the laws of the universe, the laws of God, to gain that spirituni power which they desired. They could not break the laws of God. They could not disregard them, because if they did they would break them. They had read, no doubt, in newspapers of such an occurrence as “ Tragic Death of Dlrs Jones,” where it was reported that Mrs Jones had returned from a shopping expedition, and on entering her home thought thnt she could smell gas. She had lit a match, and it was gas, and Mrs Jones, a respectable married woman, was blown to bits. The gas was there, and if they disregarded the laws of gas, they would not break them, but they would break you. The gas was there to serve her, if she had obeyed the law which governed the gas. Nature was governed by law. There were, she went on, laws iu the spiritual world, and the God who made them was the same God who made the

universe. In the world of science we worshipped a god of law and order that was never broken, but in the human law we worshipped a God we thought was capricious, and in some disaster we reourselves to t!le “ inscrutable will of God! Surely to no generation since the coming of Christ had such a flood of light been given as to ours. “If you , and 1 instead of trying to dodge, break, and defy the spiritual laws,” Miss Royden said, were to set to work to understand, define, and obey them, we should find that in the highest sense of the word the teaching of Christ is scientific. It is not because God is angry that you break yourselves, but because you disregard His la.w9. —(Applause.) On the motion of Bishop Richards a hearty vote of thanks was passed to tho lecturer.