LIBERTY AND LAW

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 19915, 18 April 1939, Page 6

LIBERTY AND LAW

ENGLAND’S GREATNESS . WORTH PRESERVING ARCHDEACON’S VIEWS “Men are prone to criticise England for they call her love of compromise. Yet that very compromise may be a higher wisdom after all,” said Archdeacon Bullock in proposing the toast of “The Royal Society of St. George’’ at a dinner in Wellington.

“Extremists do not flourish within England’s borders,” he said, “for she knows her task, which is to make as one the names of liberty and law. For us, life is worth living that is not ordered and yet no life is free and happy where its totality is fettered and enslaved.” “Let me say that to speak with pride of one’s own country and people by no means implies scorn or criticism of others. I know there is a method beloved of the weak-minded of exhalting those we are inclined to by damning others we have no mind to. I wish to eschew that method now. For there are few thinking Englishmen who have not admired and even envied the qualities of those others who make up our British stock, and it is as true as ever that he little knows of England who only England icnows.

Extremes in Deadly Combat

“I have long held that the appointed task of England and her people was to bring practical truth out of a paradox—that is out of the marriage of Liberty and Law,” added Archdeacon Bullock. Logically, those two terms seem to contradict one another. But we have witnessed what liberty interpreted as license may bring upon a people, and we see today the pains and misery of iron law that knows.no liberty. These two extreme ideas are to-day in deadly combat.

“He was a great man who spoke first of the perfect law of liberty—sounding like foolishness to some and a stumbling block to others —and He knew as we know how difficult it is of attainment. But there lies the lodestar of our spirit and therein appears the secret of England’s greatness.”