HAVE “TIMES APART”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 425, 6 August 1928, Page 14

HAVE “TIMES APART”

ARCHBISHOP’S ADVICE AGE OF MATERIALISM “There is just a danger in these days, when the idea of service has been service without vis'ion, imagination, or definite purpose may fall far short of the idea of service preached by Christ,” said the Primate, Archbishop Averill, in the course of a sermon at All Saints’ Church, Ponsonby, last evening. Special services were held throughout the diocese on the occasion of Maori Mission Sunday, and, in the evening. the archbishop dealt with modern materialism, stressing the need for “times apart” in which the material influences of modern life could be met and checked to a proper degree. He contended that it was short-sighted and foolish for human nature to imagine that it could attain the heights without these times apart. “In ordinary life we are immersed in material things,” he said. “Consequently we are likely to become onesided, imperfectly developed, and victims of stunted vision. Most lives lack proportion just because the highest and most important part of this complex nature of ours is starved and stunted. Men express in their lives what they see, but they make a very great mistake in imagining they are expressing all there is to see, which is a very different thing. “As a matter of fact, we see what we are capable of seeing, and without our times apart we do not see very far or very deeply. Where there is no devotion a people will perish. “These times apart may seem to the unthinking and the casual to be outside the scope of real development. But can human nature be sound without religion? It is the times apart that Avill do so much for us in the adjustment and restoration of the equilibrium of true vision.”