THE “TWO ROCKS.”

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4922, 6 January 1926, Page 4

THE “TWO ROCKS.”

“GOD AND WOMAN.’' CLERGYMAN. “There are two rocks on which a man may become shipwrecked ; those rocks are God and woman.' Unhappy is the mam. who drives his frail barque against a bad woman. He will bring himself to destruction.” Bishop Taylor Smith was addressing a gathering of men in St. Andrew’s 1 Cathedral, Sydney, on “The Dignity of Manhood.” It was a sane, plain, and incisive talk on the things that matter most to young men. He was speaking, lie said, not as a bishop w as, a chap-lain-general of the British Army, but as a man to men. The Bishop said he had studied human nature in hospital, asylum, and convict prison, where there were hundreds of men who had no business to be there,-and would not have been if their father, clergyman, or some other had warned them of .the perils of impurity. Ignorance did not mean innocence, and he charged fathers not to allow their sons to reach the dawn of manhood without telling them in plain words the truth about their physical life, which they had the right to hear from their father’s lips. THE FOUNDATIONS. “It takes a quarter l of a century for God to build a man, and the most important years of his life are from 15 to 25. . During thosei years he is putting down the foundation of his physical, mental, and moral structure. Many a man who cracks! up at 40, if he is traced back, would find that the crack was started when the foundations were being built. You must begin with him before the danger period.”