MODERN LIFE

Waikato Times, Volume 116, Issue 19456, 21 December 1934, Page 5

MODERN LIFE

SERIOUS DEFECTS. ARCHDEACON'S. VIEWS. In an address in connection with the Wellington College diamond jubilee celebrations, Archdeacon H. W, Monaghan, of Timaru, made some interesting comments on modern life and education. - “ We are being told by some modern thinkers,” he said, “that Western civilisation is cracking up—that the writing Is on the wall and its days are numbered. We are reminded of the Roman Empire, and that the rottenness which accompanied its decline and fall is reappearing in the presentage. If you have read any of the j books by our modern realists such j as v shall .we say, Aidous Huxley’s ‘ Point 'Counterpoint,’ you will kn'ow what the state of life really is to these I young men who are not afraid to strip off all the shams and hyprocrlsies which cover up Its sores. In my mind, I feel that these so-called realists are mistaken. What they call reality is only a Freudian nightrgare. But what I do feel is this: life could very easily slip into rottenness and corruption such as they describe. What prevents its doing so? Is it an innate sense of decency and love of goodness in human nature? Rerhaps so, though there are many who doubt it. 'Human nature, left to itself, -becomes pretty brutish. It must be helped and fostered by wise influences and institutions. Now that is just what this school has been doing in the City of Wellington for the past 60 years. Year by year the sons of this city have entered these 'halls, class-rooms, and playing-'flelds, and have been subjected to the influence of ideals of honour, truth, and goodness. Outwardly the school has been at work pushing the hoys through matriculation and the other examinations, but all the time it has been doing something far more important, making men of them. And the things which are | seen, examination results, athletio trophies, are temporal, hut the tilings which are not seen are eternal.’ A Pitiable Thing. Our modern life, said Archdeacon Monaghan, had got into such a tangle that he thought we were beginning to realise that there was something wrong at the root -of things. He would tell them what he thought it was. He had read a story some days ago of a dog chained to a post on a railway station, and looking thoroughly miserable. A kind-hearted man asked the railway porter what was the matter with the dog. " What s wrong with that dog," said the porter, “is this: I don’t lcdow where ’e’s going and ’e don’t know where ’e’s going; ’e’s chewed the label.” That’s what was wrong-with the world to-day. We had not lost the label; wc had chewed it. We had educated our children to make good instead of to be good; to make money instead of to make character, and the result was what we saw in the world to-day. A dog without a master was a pitiable thing, but more pitiable was the man without- a God.