WHAT DO YOU VALUE MOST?

Southland Times, Issue 24243, 28 September 1940, Page 13

WHAT DO YOU VALUE MOST?

In our house a few evenings ago a discussion arose around the fire on the question of value. What is valuer What makes anything valuable? Why is gold worth over £7 an ounce today when a few years ago it was worth only half of that? And what is the practical use of the vast deposits of gold lying in the Treasury vaults of the United States and London? What is the value of land in France to its owner today? Before the Nazis came to France he owned, let us say, 200 acres, which represented his whole life’s labour and savings. Land was the most stable value he could think of. It must always be there, he argued, and it must always be worth what it produced. Today, it is worth that —to the Nazis, not to him. Its value to him vanished in one dark day. Such were some of the points around which the talk ranged. It was good. I, as host, was “sitting pretty”—as our younger people say, and whatever it may mean—and egged on my family and the neighbours who were visiting us. Well, it is a live question: what is value?

GOLD OR DIAMONDS It all arose at the tea table. Somehow the talk had gone back to the sinking of the Titanic a good many years ago—about 1912 or 1913, was it not? Someone remarked on the ship that could not be sunk, but had the bottom torn out of her by an iceberg on her maiden voyage. That brought up stories of the heroism displayed on that tragic occasion. Another remembered the band that went down with the ship playing the hymn: “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” Someone else recalled how that great British journalist, W. T. Stead, took off his lifebelt and put it on a woman who had none. She was saved, but he was never heard of again. Then one of the children told a story she had got at high school that was new to all of us. A woman, given three minutes to collect her valuables before taking to the boats, ran to her cabin. She left her costly jewellery and took three oranges that stood on her cabin table! In that dire hour the jewellery was useless and valueless lumber, but three oranges—they might be the means of assuaging suffering or saving lives, and were worth their weight in gold. So the question of value arose. ALL VALUES ARE RELATIVE

I think that that is one of the principles that underlie value. A thing is valuable, not in itself, but because it gives us something that we need, or greatly desire to have, or because it enables us to do something we very much want to do. Our money in New Zealand today is only printed paper, worth nothing in itself. But that printed paper, if we possess it, enables us to maintain our home, provide for those we love, educate our children. Its value for us is not in itself; it is relative to those who are very dear to us. If suddenly they were swept from our side and we were left alone that money would, for us, have lost the greater part of its value. The real value for us is not in the money, but in those we love. This farm of ours is our living—all that our family group has and needs depends upon the farm. But if the British Air Force and the Royal Navy were broken by the Nazis, and the Empire fell, New Zealand might conceivably be handed over to the Japanese. Where would be the value of our farm then? I and mine would still need what the farm enables us to have and to do; but the farm would no longer give it to us. It would give it to some Japanese colonists instead. The value of this farm to us—just like every other acre of land in the country, and all our bank deposits, shares and scrip, ana property of every kind—is thus relative to the continued existence of the British Empire, which is the ultimate security behind all our values. But even the British power is not absolute. Today it is struggling for its very life. That ought to bring home to us how relative all our earthly values are. The truth, of course, is that there is no final and invulnerable security here. Everything in this world is relative. There is a striking story told by Worsley, who was the shipmate and friend of Shackleton on more than one of his exploring expeditions. On the occasion when Shackleton’s ship was caught in the pack-ice and lost, the whole, expedition was marooned on the pack-ice. They had saved three open boats, and were camped on the pack-ice awaiting developments. It was a truly desperate plight. But it was to grow worse. One night the pack began to break tip. Great cracks opened in the ice. They must jettison everything possible and take to the boats. Worsley saw Shackleton standing by an ice-crack, pouring ba«s of golden sovereigns into the sea. They had suddenly become useless lumber. That illustrates what we mean when we say that all our values are relative. They are subject to change in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. WHAT ABIDES, THEN? Is there nothing, then, that abides, changeless? Is there nothing that retains its value? Yes, there is. We need to have resources within ourselves, resources and values of the spirit, that are not subject to these ebbs and flows, these overthrows and sudden changes of the world. I suppose that that was what Jesus meant when He said: “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” A man may possess lands and wealth and in his own inner spirit be a pauper. That would be the Master’s meaning, also in that other saying of His: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” After all our talk I went to bed with that great utterance with which Paul concludes his inspired song of love in my mind: “And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three: but the greatest of these is love.? Yes; these values abide.