Folly In a World Built On Hate

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 362, 24 May 1928, Page 11

Folly In a World Built On Hate

SPIRITUAL LAW NEEDED MAUDE ROYDEN’S REMEDY “If we have got the world into a mess, or find it in a mess, we must set about putting it in order. My experience of statesmen, politicians, and social reformers tells me that they all want the world in order. There is no absence of goodwill, but there is absence of power.” With these introductory words, Miss Maude Royden, the English feminist and preacher, set the tenour of the lecture which she deivered in the East Street Hall last evening under ViceRegal patronage. , His Excellency the Governor-General, Sir Charles Fergusson, and Lady Alice Fegusson, were both present.

The Deputy-Mayor, Mr. A. J. Entrican, presided. Miss Royden is one of the outstanding personalities in the English feminist movement, but she has never been a seeker for gain or fame. When feminine franchise was granted, she did not seek election to the House of Commons, preferring to fight on, as she thought best, as a Christian worker. A woman of scholarship, keenwitted, earnest, magnetic, and kindly, she has all the qualities that grace, or should grace, the public speaker. She is vigorous, and faith-inspiring, and | every phrase she utters seems to have been tempered by pure fires in her heart. Here is a woman with enormous faith in the potential goodness of things, and her life has been spent in a noble and brilliant effort to communicate this faith to others. She is passionately sincere—therefore she succeeds. The hall where she spoke last evening was crowded, and there was one of those pushes, betokening expectance, when she came to the front of the platform—a slight, dark figure dressed in black. Her subject was: “How Can We Put the World in Order?” BRAINS AND DREAMS “If we’re going to put the world in order,” she said, “we must all use our brains. We all have our dreams of some kind of ideal world, and the ideas of people are very much in agreement. We would all like a world in which there is health, and we would all like a world in which people showed their value through work. We would all like to live in homes where we are loved.” The speaker then went on to say that there was one aspect of human life to-day in which there was a sense of power, instead of one of helplessness. That was in natural science, where there was a definite mastery over the material world. In science there was a sense of something being done. “For all this,” she said, “I believe that in future times our children’s children will not remember this epoch for its scientific triumphs such as aviation and broadcasting, but, instead, the age will be marked for the revolutionary change in man’s attitude toward life.” Continuing, she said that the genius of the scientist had made men giants because it had taught that water would always find its level—things such as that. There would never be a time when water would run uphill. There were law's of nature that could not be broken, and if people chose to break them they only broke themselves. “At the beginning of the war there were asemblies in churches,” she said, “and we were all told to pray. Yet, for all that, some men were killed in a few weeks, and others came through. People were told to be resigned, for it was said to ‘be the will of God’.” “I could not worship a God so capricious and inscrutable,” she said, “that one could no„t say what he was driving at. A God having life and death, misery and pestilence, at his will. To me, the magic of the law of nature is much more magnificent. “But this God is not the God proclaimed by Christ. The Sermon on the Mount works very well between friends, but who will say that it should not work equally well in international relations?” GOD IS LOVE “God is love,” she said, “and creation is the work of love. To create is the function of love, and destruction is the function of hate. Yet, after the war, we set out to make a new' world based on hate/ “You cannot make that new world from hate,” she said. “It is true that you can ignore the laws of God, but you cannot break them, for in doing that people only break themselves.” Continuing, she said that the mastery of man in the material world was little compared with mastery over the spiritual world. “Let us go forward,” she said, “to the discovery of the spiritual law.” At the conclusion of her lecture. Miss Royden answered a number of questions.