REASON OF SUICIDES

Shannon News, 17 May 1927, Page 4

REASON OF SUICIDES

A LACK OF FAITH. AN AMERICAN CONTENTION. In the course of an interesting contribution to the “New York Times’’ an American writer discusses the causes of suicide, especially among students, and says: “Truly to-day’s younger generation as well as the older, is adrift without faith. “Theories such as those imbibed from mechanism, materialism, behaviorism, positivism, and negativism; have obliterated for far too many the beauty of belief. As you truly staite; ‘the fact remains that having? abandoned faith in God,"the family,, progress, democracy, nation and tradition, they have as yet found no adequate substitute.’ Such bankruptcy iannot be liquidated by the ethics that have been substituted in many instances for the principles which should have been taught at a. mother’s knee. “The lack of adequate early maternal training'is much in evidence. No later course in psychology can take the place of example and guidiance of of a devout religious mother. “What an opportunity has been misscd'by. many mothers —as well as fathers; what a privilege they have failed to recognise; what duties they have shirked in their responsibility to those given into their charge! Modem Education^

“Youth suffers much. Thanks to the method of education now in vogue in too many places, intolerable hours are facing many of the young. They look up to the blue sky and they see no comforting benediction descending from it, as of old. The bright sun of their ‘knowledge,’ acquired in academic halls, proves to be consuming fire, for their souls. The ‘sea of forgetfulness’ offers the only supposed hope to their sick minds —as they have learned to view it in the sensuous and atheistic ‘literature’ of the day—over-run as it is by the ‘ape’ type of novel. Many have found out, to their sorhow that their science is made up of flimsy phantasma of unsupported and unprovab'le assertations, clumsy inconsistencies, of a physics without law, a mathematics without numbers, deductions born of fraud and forgery. So the supposed boon of oblivion has been resorted to by the student sui-' cides in final despair. Are those suicides due to temporary obscessions? What about those persons responsible for such, capital crimes? Who can shift the responsibility from their guilty shohiders? “Looks of suffering and hopelessness are to be seen plainly in the faces o'f many youths with the background of experience which they have acquired in their universities. The student experiences an agony in the scattering of the ideals of his tender years. Some teachers smile grimly, if not complacently, telling him that the theories he has imbibed will give him back his faith in a greater degree than that experienced by him before. Such teachers lie to him knowingly. “Will anyone put out a hand to the student in compassion and gently show him the way? God grant that there may be some left, untouched by the present hoax of pseu-do-knowledge, who can and will give him the necessary help, and arouse public opinion- for the redress of the grievances of youth.”