IS WESTERN CIVILISATION A FAILURE?

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 811, 12 February 1910, Page 3

IS WESTERN CIVILISATION A FAILURE?

THE DRIFT OF TO-DAY. The West, which includes Europe and America, is firmly persuaded that it is progressing satisfactorily. It is proud of its success in industry, science and politics, and claims to have created and to live in an age ol progress. “ Fifty years of everbroadening commerce, fifty years ot ever-brightening science, and fifty years of ever-widening empire,” represent the cry of those who are satisfied with material prosperity, even though its silver lines are set on the background of squalid poverty and lawless schemes of revolution.

Are we really living in an age_ of progress, or is it only a flattering fancy which obstructs a true perspective of life and lulls people to slumber in error, in imminent peril of losing a life’s opportunity ? Industrial arts and commercial supremacy are not commendable if they stand divorced from spirituality. The spread of perishable wares for the convenience and adornment of perishable bodies is vain if the producers and carriers of them do not know how to save their souls from wreck and ruin in the wide seas of sensuousness and mean competition. If the artisans and traders live in the spirit while working hard for the maintenance of the body and tne improvement of the cities, they will be a shining light and perpetual source of joy to their brethren at home and to every one else abroad. How does the West stand in regard to what is called scientific progress ? Ignorant of the absolute existence of the invisible spirit and its capacity to know God during isolation, and to know the world in combination with the senses of the mind, and obliged by the particular methods of enquiry which Western science has imposed upon itself, it disowns the spirit, the most real thing in the universe.

If it would only step out of its narrow sense plane and study under proper guidance the deep-lying truths of the larger soul plane called the kingdom of the spirit, as assiduously as it has studied the secrets of the kingdom of nature, what a change there would be in the heart of all the West! It would pass from carnal mindedness and that bondage of the intellect to the senses which is complacently called rationalism to spiritual mindedness, poise, and love of God. Its cities would be abodes of righteousness and peace, not of selfishness, strife, and gnawing desire. FREEDOM AND BONDAGE. And now of political progress. “ The great characteristic of modern politics is the struggle for liberty in its widest sense, the desire to make the will of the people the basis of the government, the conviction that a nation has a right to alter a government that opposes its sentiment.” But surely the will of the people is not the will of a little more than half its number! Nor can the liberty of the majority which involves the slavery of the minority, be justly called political liberty. It is this strange medley of freedom and bondage which stands proudly in the West for political progress. The saying that we are living in an age of progress simply means we are living in an age which, for want of proper judgment and poise, believes in change of any kind as a sure remedy for the tedium of work and idleness, and whose appetite is, therefore, keenly set on all those mechanical improvements which have been invented from day to day for facilitating business or amusement.

Such an age takes no pains to restrain the senses when they distract the mind, or to abate the play of the imagination as a means of conserving one’s energy. It does not know that sensuousness unfits the mind for its proper work of uplifting the soul.

It claims to make us better than we were yesterday, and to make us better to-morrow than we are to-day. But that is only better in food, raiment, household furniture, equipage, social position, and rank, to be better in all that relates to the glorification of the perishable body, but not in anything that conduces to the purity of the eternal spirit. In this betterment of the body the poor are striving hard to keep pace with the rich, the rich man with the millionaire, and the millionaire with the multi-millionaire. This feverish desire to earn more and spend more on the feeding and dressing of the body, and supplying it and the senses with every object of gratification, is robbing the people from the highest to the lowest of that peace of mind and poise which arc essential to the safety of the body as well as of the spirit. AN AGE OF MATERIALISM,

The nervous restlessness which characterises life in western cities is not the mark of true progress or sound civilisation. This is ielt to be so by the cultured few who are puzzled and amazed at the “up-to-date” craze which is slowly but surely quenching the spirit and so ruining the most valuable asset alike of the individual and the nation.

It is folly to call this wide expansion of sensuousness and worldliness an age of progress. Sages declare that cities get filled with the rural population when love of finery and amusement dominates the minds of the people. The flight of the country into towns, known already to be too full of the unemployed and unemployable is like the rush of insects into a bonfire lit in a tropical night, and affords positive proof that the spread of sensuous ideals in breaking up the foundations of society. The steady backsliding of every class into deeper depths of worldliness, irreligion, and frivolity is utterly inconsistent with true progress or true civilisation, by which is meant the ideas and practices which consciously uplift a nation from the corruptions of sensuousness and unrighteousness to a higher plane of life, where reverence for the spirit and its careful extrication from the mazes of worldliness are the chief aims of human endeavour. When the evils of self-indulgence have been repeatedly felt and much pain caused thereby to the mind it refuses to run promiscuously with the senses. Will the senses deprived of the willing support of the mind remain proportionately undrawn by sense objects. It is at this period of comparative peace that the mind comes to know its separateness from the senses and its capacity for righteous work by control of the senses, formation of sound thoughts, and correlation of them in the way that leads to the discovery of what lies under the surface of things. The beauty of things perceived by the senses turns into ugliness and the joys arising from them change into sorrows.

The more clearly one sees that the attractions of nature, including the human body, and the pleasures which spring from a contemplation of them are as perishable as quicksand heaps in a flowing river, the more urgent to him becomes the solution of a problem whether his life is carrying him to the proper destination or not. For if the mind is convinced that it is folly to be wedded too deeply to things perceivable by the senses, owing to the certainty of their decay and disappearance, it will assuredly turn from such passing shows and look eagerly for something more real in the world to occupy itself and delight in, without the interruptions of sorrow, anger and haste.