SPIRITUAL ANAEMIA.

Waikato Times, Volume 106, Issue 17804, 31 August 1929, Page 18 (Supplement)

SPIRITUAL ANAEMIA.

Doubt whether the world is making any moral progress was expressed by Canon Alexander in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He said that floods of sordid novels were poured out daily—not least in countries which, like America, France, and Britain, were supposed to be in the forefront of civilisation; books either intensely vulgar or glaringly indecent, or both; ] and behind (hem was the significant | fact that tliere must be not only hunI dreds of men and, especially, of women, who were willing to write and publish and profit by this decadent stuff, but also thousands of readers who welcomed and apparently enjoyed it. The atlilude to marriage and divorce and the conceptions of life that were said to be prevalent among young people of both sexes, even if they were exaggerated, show how impassable a gulf was fixed between the moral indifference of great sections of the modern world and the teaching of j the Christian Gospel. There were some who said that the moral out- ' look of the New Testament was too narrow and limited, especially on those very matters of Ihe intimate relationships of family life. But those who talked thus seldom, if ever, secured men’s confidence, or justified their authority, by acting with a grave and serious sense of their responsibilities. They did not seem to distinguish between liberty and license. They tried (in the stock phrase) to develop their individuality, but they showed no adequate respect for the Individuality of others, and very often their own art and life and character, to which they referred in such finesounding phrases, did not seem to come to very much. He would trust no exponent of the new morality until he saw him as a burning and a shining light in the dim places of the earth. The present was an age of ethical confusion, of spiritual- anaemia—an age in which many of men’s morf.l instincts formed by the struggle » after righteousness of countless generations, were striving to shake them- > selves free .from the restraints of moral order and discipline. Unless . they could retain the teaching of the j Sermon on ihe Mount as at least a * working ideal, he was convinced that society was moving toward a moral i collapse. “