GOOD TEMPLARY PLAYED OUT.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 6, Issue 346, 8 April 1884, Page 5

GOOD TEMPLARY PLAYED OUT.

In fan article on the approaching session of the Grand Lodge, which is to be held at Oamaru during the Easter week, the 'Temperance Herald' says: — "The Order throughout a great part of the jurisdiction is in a languid and depressed condition. The Gr.W.S. will have to report a very serious decrease in numbers and state of things generally which is by no means encouraging, and which will demand the most serious attention of the Grand Lodge. The reason of the present depressed, and we fear, well nigh moribund condition of the Order in New Zealand will have to be discovered and some means devised of infusing new life and vitality throughout . its entire system. The way and wherefore will have to be looked for in the subordinate lodges. The Order is weak and impotent because the subordinate iodges are suffering from collapse and nothing will save the Order but a revival in the subordinate lodges. ... At the present moment the 1.0. G.T. in New Zealand is rapidly approaching, if it has not already reached, a crisis. Subordinate lodges are resigning their charters, or suspending their meetings, or struggling on with an attendance of a dozen or twenty out of membership of fifty or sixty. Lodge meetings have lost their interest and cease to attract. This is specially the case in large centres of population, in Wellington, Chrißtchurcb. and Dunedin, but is also the experience of many country districts. There may have been diverse influence at work to bring about this condition of things in the Order, { but we think it will be found mainly at-*: | tributable to the fact that in many of our subordinate lodges the main purpose of their institution has been lost sight of, and they have been allowed to degenerate into mere social clubs The true woik of temperance reformers has been neglected | and left to be done by others. This : left' the field and the opportunity open to the Bine Ribbon Army. Well and effectively has the Army done its work of propagandism." ;