AUSTRALIAN LIFE.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 8419, 19 January 1899, Page 4

AUSTRALIAN LIFE.

One of the most powerful sermons on the Gatton crime that have been delivered was preached in the Centenary Hull, Sydney, last week, by the Rev. W. G. Taylor, who said ho did not for a moment assert that, we lived in one of the vilest lands on which the sun shone. On the contrary he did not believe a word of it. The pessimism of tod.iy was a very bad thing, and was most injurious in many ways. He believed that for good government in the main, for national righteousness, for the wise education of the young, for the faithful and honest, proclamation of the Gospel, for the opportunities of intellectual development, and for high-toned journalism, the colony had never been surpassed by an3 r country ; and we comparer) very favorably, indeed, with any part of the world. But there were two or three elements in our national life which spoke of decay. In the first, and, perhaps, the chiefest place, was the decay, gradual, but very real, of that, oldfashioncd, high-toned, moral sotting that English and American writers had spoken of as the charm of the youthful, English nation. Around us of late years there had been a loosening of the tone of moral restraint. The marriage tie had been in many directions discounted, and the question was perpetually being asked : " Why did not our young men marry in the proportion that they should marry?" The answer was a very painful one. The conscience had become dulled in the matter of what were falsely called youthful indiscretions. Looso talk among young people, leading in many cases to a slackness of moral restraint, and leading to wrong inuendoes and wrong suggestions, which led in their turn to w.'ong actions, was terribly prevalent to-day. Some of those prominent in our public life indulged in this sin, and the placing of a man of immoral tendencies in a position of responsibility was enabling that man to exercise an enormous influence on the minds of the young around him. In our public schools the indulgence in loose talk by the young of both sexes was leading to results disastrous to the future, and the same statement applied to factories. It was only just to say that this did not apply only to this country. From personal observation he was enabled to say that the evil was very prevalent in the old country. All these things led to the fearful development of youthful immorality amongst us. He declared that an immoral people was a decaying people. One of the most deplorable things which astounded visitors to this city was the wholesale desecration of the Sabbath. Apparently we were in danger of becoming involved in what seemed a downward rush towards the secularising N of the Lord's Day. Shops were open all day — he had even seen a grocer's shop openly carrying on business on Sunday ; newspapers were sold ; ieo-ercam men were vending thc-ir goods at the very doors of the Sunday schools, and inducing the children to spend the pennies which were intended for the home and foreign missions ; 'bus picnics were arranged : dancing saloons were open all day and half tho night, and were invariably crowded. When in Iho Daily Telegraph, not long ngo. they had all read an account of the doings in some of these dancing places, a thrill of horror passed through their brea'ts at the thought that such a desecration of the Sabbath could be going on in their midst.