Modern Disquiet.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVII, Issue 26, 26 June 1912, Page 58

Modern Disquiet.

Mr. Harold Begbie, in his latest book, “The Ordinary Mind, the Extraordinary Thing,” says that in the present time the pressure of the soul has increased among mankind. “Stand at the corner of Dondon Bridge or Blackfriars Bridge, or in the streets of Oldham when the workers are going home,” writes Mr. Begbie.

“Look in their faces. It is not poverty or coarseness or vulgarity or wickedness which appals you. . . but hardness and absence of joy. Can a people so hard and dispirited, so joyless ami divide!, so little conscious either of immortality or brotherhood, support the strain of its own godless materialism? Can they ever work out those high and splendid destinies of Empire for which enthusiasm and faith are the first essentials? It is my hope that those of my readers who are either in despair about the future or careless as to the fate of humanity may realise that there exists among the multitudes of their fellow creatures a great hope and a great call to personal service in that ‘pressure of the soul’ which is one of the strangest signs of this troubled age, and to guide which is one of the first duties of those who very really and very earnestly have their affiance in Christ. Everywhere, when we penetrate beneath the surface of society, there is this disquiet of the spirit, this pressure of the soul, this dissatisfaction with earthly things, this hunger after satisfaction and peace.”