TOPICS OF; THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 117, Issue 19596, 7 June 1935, Page 4

TOPICS OF; THE DAY.

On Resenting Criticism “It might do us good to remember that people do not think as much about us as we think about ourselves,” writes the Rev. Professor Eric S. Waterhouse, D.D., in the “Pathfinder.” “We make a mistake, and imagine the whole place is ringing with it. What actually happens is that the critics discuss us for five minutes and soon forget us in pursuit of more recent victims. Yet people continue to make themselves miserable with quite an exaggerated sense of the ’ interest others take in them. “Perhaps this, too, is another example of the foolish tendency to redress our sense of inferiority through an exaggerated sense of our importance. The inferiority sense, however, is not something to be dismissed as a trifle. It is a factor in most personalities, and in some the dominating factor. To shut one’s eyes to it generally leads to aggravating it. “ Tl\6 cure lies in a sense of the worthwhileness of one’s life, a frank recognition of one’s own limitations, and equally the sense of confidence, not of over-confidence, in one’s abilities. If we would compare ourselves with ourselves instead of comparing ourselves with others, we should bo far happier. “ To be able to say, I have honestly done the best I could, I cannot do more, should lead us to realise that under the circumstances it matters not what others say of our best. The only blame we can attach to ourselves is that of not doing our best. When wo have honestly put forth the best in us we need have no inferiority sense.

“It is no fault of ours that it is no better. When we realise that there are many bests better than ours, we shall have no false sense of our own superiority. Wo shall face the judgment of others undisturbed because we know that in the judgment of the one who alone really matters there is no condemnation for those who have done their best.”

Repressed Youth “ There is in modern young people a conllict between the individual and the group. Or rather one might wish there were a more intense conflict, in order that the great problem: I —Thou —Wc — might find a deeper solution in our time. In this direction the age has moved fast. AVe who arc now middle-aged hardly know where we are,” writes Mr James Truslow Adams in the Yale Review. “ Let us wish the young people of this generation wisdom enough not to try to solve the problems of life by taking refuge behind scenes which the storms of history will sweep away like a house of cards. Let us wish them courage to look these problems in the face in a personal and clear casting up of accounts. Then we may ponder what a young English thinker said recently in a circle of students at Cambridge: ‘Young people in our day are weighed down by a fund of earnestness for which they find no use, no outlet, llow is this to be found? Their most crying need is to feel that the universe means something and that their own lives have significance, not only for themselves, but for something beyond and above themselves.’ “The religious problem is beginning to stir the world of young people in a manner that gives rich promise. Over the face of the waters there is a wind blowing which a young Swedish poet has called ‘the wind of joy that rushes through the World.’ Our task is to steer the ship according to this wind and allow it to swell our sails with its lusty strength. Then our will shall find its ruler and our heart its trusted guide.”