“MORE SENSIBLE.”

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20298, 7 May 1934, Page 5

“MORE SENSIBLE.”

Preacher Defends Modern Youth. PARALYSIS OF PAST. A declaration that young people of to-day are much the same as young people of past generations and that girls nowadays are more sensibly dressed than their grandmothers was made by the Rev J. Lawson Robinson at the seventy-eighth anniversary service of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church yesterday morning. Leading up to his defence of modern youth against the thrusts of elderly people, the preacher referred to a certain class of person who loved to live in the past, to the paralysis of the present, and still clung to bygone ways and bygone fashions. “It is quite a common thing,” said Mr Robinson, “to hear elderly people say, ‘ I don’t know what the present generation is coming to; things were not like this when we were young. Youth was more chivalrous and maidenhood more modest.’ But I am quite certain our present young people when they have left youth behind will talk in just the same way about the young people of their day as we talk about the young people of our day. People in middle life very often forget what their youth was like. “If the customs and manners are freer to-day and conventions are more liberal, our young people at heart are much the same as the young people before them. They will respond to the right ideals. As far as fashions are concerned, I think the average young person to-day is more sensibly dressed than was her grandmother.”