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Hokitika Guardian, 18 September 1928, Page 3

CLERICAL LAWLESSNESS,

“I have never concealed my belief that the lawlessness of the clergy has had the effect of discrediting their spiritual claims, and lessening their moral influence. Lawlessness has developed in the clerical world a casuistic habit which has sometimes grown into a cunning sophistry before which, as by the action of a corrosive acid, legal obligations and even Ordination Vows have been emptied of validity and ill faith has infected the very Sanctuary of Truth. This lawlessness gained plausibility, and even acquired a certain moral respectability, by the partial obsoleteness of the rubrics in the Prayer Book. Where none could obey all the rules, some took the liberty of making choice which rules they would obey, and a state of sheer individualism grew up, in which discipline became wholly impracticable, it was to this situation that the Revision of the Prayer Book was primarily addressed-, and, in rejecting the Revised Book, the House of Commons has perpetuated in a greatly aggravated form the anarchic- confusion from which the Church was .seeking to find a way of escape.’’ —The Bishop ot Durham (Dr Hensley Henson).

QUITE A YOUNG AVORLD.'

“Man may exterminate himself in some folly of war, or, neglecting the armoury of science, may he exterminated by some other order of life. But the augury from the jiortenU in the sky is that man is free to remain master of his fate for some million million years to come. After some such period eternal night will close in, and life must vanish from earth. Terrestrial civilisation, with a mere ten thousand years behind it, and probably a hundred million times this length of life stretching out before it. would seem to he at the very beginning of its existence. Far-off future ages, looking down this immense vista of time from the other end, will think of our times as lying at the first dawn of civilisation ; ours will appear as the heroic age of man’s first occupation of earth, when he still struggled with the primeval wildness of its surface and first learned to utilise the forces of nature in his efforts to estabish society and civilisation.”—Sir J. H. Jeans in the “Observer.”

“No, single geologist can see with his own eyes and competently examine more than a few patches of the earth with, its rock garments.” writes Mr Charleis Johnston in the “Atlantic Monthly.” “The fossils of a single period arc a life study for any man who would know them well. Y r et geology is not a congeries of patches. 11 is a consistent whole. The consciousness of each geologist dovetails into the consciousness of all other geologists, not by happy accident, hut because the one primal consciousness underlies them all. So with every i'rb’.K-e. Tts true home is not in hooks, nor in laboratories, hut in consciousness; not the consciousness of one man hut the larger general consciousness from which all flow, and into which all may enter. AATthont consciousness there might conceivably he rooks and fossils, but there would ho no geology. This, like all sciences, dwells in consciousness l , and lives only in consciousness,”

AVTIEN YOU LOOK ROUSD.

NOISE AND NERVES. “That excessive noise is bad for health would seem to bo certain,” points out the “Morning Post,” “aiul it is little consolation to -learn that statisticians estimate the loss in working efficiency duo to unnecessary noise at a million pounds a week. There, nro laws and regulations foil thousand trivial harmless incidents. A Tod of iron directs our lives from morning till night, and tbo multitude of inspectors is jiast numbering; yet it appears that there is no authority to ordain tranquillity, even when the majority of peaceful 'citizens nro trying to sleep. It was another sense that Mr Baldwin called for peace in our time; bill surely his ideal might be extended.” THE GAMES SAKE

“Games are not an end to life, but a means to an end. They are an equipment, a discipline, a relaxation. 1 would rather that everybody played games for rational amusement nud 10erention without caring twopence for championships than that a few p.oplc should play exquisitely and the rest not at all. In this respect «c still lead the world. But without taking the eclipse of English tennis too seriously, wo cannot lie wholly indifferent to it. However philosophical we may be, we do not like feeling inferior. It it a passing phase, or is it a permanent fact?. TP the latter, it is due to circumstances or to our national temperament? It is not surprising that we should ibe overtaken by the United States. That country has nearly three times the population of this, and, what is even, more important, it is a. population with more abundant resources of wealth and leisure to devote to the pursuit of games than tlio.se of any other people on earth.” THE PULPIT AND POLITICS.

"Since the announcement was made of my possible intention to contest a scat in Parliament, I have head much about party politics. I am told that a minister should he above them. I want to know why,” writes Dr l l ’. W. Norwood, minister of the City Temple in t'ie “Evening News,” of London. “I have nlwavs felt that ‘party politics’ should be spelt ‘parti-politics.’ It is something less than the whole. We have a system which has grown up in cur English history without overmuch prevision, hut has proved itself tolerably effective, and is not likely to 1, 9 radically altered. T cannot understand how a thoughtful man, even if lie be a minister, can hcln inclining to one rather than to another. When three alternative platforms are set before him, it is absorb to expect, him to have no mental preference. Unices lie is to do bis thinking in a vacuum or refrain from ever touching the earth in his speech,, it ought to ho obvious to any attentive listener to which party he inclines.”