THE END OF THE AGE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 2051, 6 November 1919, Page 4

THE END OF THE AGE.

DEAN INGLE IN A GLOOMY MOOD. Preaching at tlie annual service of the Churchmen’* Union at St. Mary’s Abbott’s, Kensington, recently, Dean Inge said that in five years of war the world wars poorer by the loss of eight million young and vigorous men,.Wealth and credit had been destroyed to an extent which we still failed to realise. “W« are leaving to our children,” he said, “the inheritance of a bankrupt. Besides the material loss, we have to lament the abolition of all honourable conventions and human restrictions which regulated the intercourse of nations at wav as well as in peace. The internationaliaw.has tor the time being ceased to exist. We have also lost our cherished delusions, our belief in progress and our hope that civilised mail was less cruel and treacherous than the savage.

“We have lost for the time being all examples of one of the great types of Government and strong monarchy. Democracy is everywhere threatened by anarchism operating through strikes. It is hardly possible to paint the prospects of civilisation in too dark a • colour, lu my opinion,’the age of industrialism, which began about 150 years ago, has received its death wound.

If it: goes, the great cities it has dotted over Europe will have to go too, and we cannot guess what will become of the inhabitants.”

The war has given a stimulus to superstition, added the Dean. They heard of superstitious fantasies in the trenches and at home there had been a recrudescence of necromancy which had been marked in the socalled "leisured classes, bill lie thought that was only a transitory, phase, and he saw no reason why the Veal Christitfuily should lose any of its hold on the nation in consequence of the Avar. They had been brought into contact with facts at their very hardest; I key had seen the idol of the market place shattered, and had had an object lesson in what:, unabashed secularism and materialism lead to. The conditions were favourable for a great religions revival in which liberal Churchmen would have an important part to play. At the present time there were hundreds of Nonconformist ministers who were seeking to enter the Ministry of the Church of England, although they were discouraged rather than encouraged by the bishops. Their main wish was to belong to a free church, and it wus ihe establishment and the comparative dependence enjoyed by Anglican incumbents which attracted them.

“Want of character even more than ' want: of intelligence,” said Dean logic, “is the reason ivhy all schemes of human Government refuse to work. Any man living in voluntary poverty does more to recommend Christianity than twenty comfort able rhetoricians ivlio wax eloquent about the iniijiillies oi. the rich and the rights oi (lie pool*. Wc all ought to make it a principle to five more simply than wo are obliged to live, and make our protest against all luxury, idleness, slackness in production, dishonesty, and useless work."