THE MORALS OF MODERN SOCIETY.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 6217, 13 May 1887, Page 4

THE MORALS OF MODERN SOCIETY.

Preaching the other morning at the Chapel Eoyal, Whitehall, to a congregation including the Archbishop of Canterbury, , the Lord Mayor, and members of both Houses, Dr Magee (Bishop of Peterborough) eloquently advocated the claims of the Special Home for Rescue and Preventive Work, the Bishop pleaded for the rescue of fallen womeD, which, he urged, could be effectually carried on only by Christian workers, and by women of education, culture, and sympathy. He strongly denounced those mothers who received into their houses, and, worse still, gave the hands of their daughters in matrimony to men who had caused and created these victims of fallen humanity. The vice of impurity, the Bishop said, was degrading the nation, by "sapping our manhood and soiling and blasting our womanhood," and was all the harder to deal with as free discussion on it was impossible. In a strain of ironical invective, the preacher contrasted the treatment by •society of erring men and women. He said that the virtuous matron picked up her skirts to prevent even contact with the one, while for the other she is ready to find every excuse in phrases of "delicatecircumlocution/ so long as the culprit is either rich or noble ', that nowadays "the crown of glory is often made of gold," and that "the peer's robe, like_ charity, covers a multitude of sins." In rescue and mission work, however, he thought the Church had less reason to reproach herself, and that more good was now being done in that direction than at any previous stage of Christian history, mainly by the agency of good and holy women, who, armed "with the purity not of ignorance but of innocence," were devoting their lives to the cause. He narrated how an opponent of Christianity had some years ago proposed to test the truth of that religion by taking two wards of a hospital, one for a specified time leaving one -ward to be ministered to by medicine and the other by prayers, The challenge was refused as "making God a party to a scientific experiment." But he would be willing to accept a challenge to test the respective efficacy of the Gospel of Humanity and the Gospel of Christianity on one of the thirty thousand outcast women in London. In a passage of signal eloquence he contrasted the rival teachers addressing themselves to such a one. The Positivist could offer her no redress of the past, no hope for the future. The law of this world is, according to his teaching, the survival of the fittest. She is not of the fittest ; therefore cannot hope to survive. She is but the spray cast back by the advancing wave of humanity ; but a broken, withered bough on the bank past which hurries the flowing stream of the human race, and she must be content with listening to its murmur for a little. The Christian, on the other hand, while pointing out her error, leaves her not without Bupport in the present and hope for the future, leading her to the foot of the Cross, a second Magdalene. He longed for a more Christian state of society, when the stigma which now rested upon the fallen woman would be equally meted out to what society now called the "fast" man.,, While the Church should ever be a peacemaker, yet she was also the Church militant, and would fail in her duty if she didnpt strongly condemn sins either national or in dividual.