MECHANISED AGE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 207, 26 April 1932, Page 7

MECHANISED AGE

THE FAMILY GOD IS NOW ITS MOTOR CAR. LONDON. The Bishop of Ripon, Dr. E. A. Burroughs, in an address to the Leeds University Literary Society, spoke on mechanisation in its many forms. He said that man was in the grip of the machine and was, in fact, himself becoming mechanised. "We see the party machine in politics," he said. "Bureaucracy, with its symbol and fetish 'red tape,' is another obvious bit of machine tyranny — at its worst, perhaps, as it touches education and tends to make what should be a citadel for the human spirit a prison instead. "Man, in effect, has shrunk in his own estimation as he contemplates the forces which the action of his own mind has 'evoked from the universe, and the results of this inferiority complex are as subtle as they are disastrous. "Only in Italy do we see an individual still attempting the role of superman, and there his method is precisely to turn a nation from a responsible self-determining social organism into a meehanism centrally controlled. Even Mussolini is to this extent a witness to the ascendancy of the machine. Fool-proof Machine. "From this 'inferiority complex' it is but a short step to the worship of that which thus looms larger than ourselves. "The Sunday programme of . many a modern family reveals the family motor car sitting in the place of God. The quest for fool-proofness means that the elimination of the. human factor becomes an end in itself. Both brain and eharacter are at a discount — superannuated by the fool-proof machine. "The enemy of progrsss. now is not so much the beast within man as the machine which has him in its grip. The beast, on the whole,- is at a discount nowadays, at least in its traditional jungle forms, except in parts of the U.S.A. and on the films. "Corporations have no conscience. That. is part of the triumph of the machine. "We are pay ing the just penalty of giving. the spirit so small a part in public affairs and so seldom acknowledging its supremacy, so that a good many 'moderns' question whether it exists. " "There is too little love in the modern world to make the world go round, and so the 'fear which doth torment' is not east out, and' that is because human hearts, though they hate hatred and long to love, make too little ropm for God to work the miracle."