DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 106, 26 July 1927, Page 14

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

BIGGER AND BITTER SINS (Copyright. 1957. J A CANVASS of citizens in public and private life in New York the other day revealed the fact that they did not make any New Year resolutions, but that they wanted bigger and better sins. The trouble with sins is that there are too few of them. There is too much of a sameness. There are only IP commandments and when you have broken them all there is nothing to do but go back and break them over. After all, the sinning business seems to run pretty much in a rut and the people whose nerves are most greatly affected and are the most bored are those who make a business of sinning. The problem of being good and doing good is adventurous and unending, whereas the problem of doing wrong is pretty much of a sameness. You often find those who h. e dedicated their lives to wrong-doing full of world-weariness, but it is rare to find a man whose life has been occupied in doing good who is not serenely happy. The human being is like everything else a part of nature. He is just a 3 much a part of nature as a tree is and the way for him to enjoy perfect happiness, as near as possible, is to conform with nature’s laws. And that is what doing good is, merely conforming to the cosmos or the general order of things. When you do wrong it is simply like a loose bolt in a piece of machinery. The whole structure rattles and goes to pieces. Another name for doing right is keeping one's self adjusted always to the scheme of things. In that case the scheme of things will adjust itself to him, and he will be helped along his way. The Bible says that in a certain instance, “the stars in their courses'' fought against a certain person. And the only way to keep the stars in their courses—which is another name or expression for the sum of things—from grinding you to pieces, is properly to adjust yourself to it. People have been trying experiments in wrong-doing since the world i began, and the trouble is they don’t work. But probably so long as human 1 fools are born they will continue experiments and continue to find that they i don’t work. 1