THE BETTERMENT OF LIFE. Auckland, Dec. 10.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 428, 14 December 1889, Page 4

THE BETTERMENT OF LIFE. Auckland, Dec. 10.

At the Choral Flail Sunday evening the Rev. | E. H. Gulliver delivered his second lecture on this subject to a large audience. r The lecturer having first read an eloquent/ passago from Ruskin, said that he ( had lately been asked several times ' why it was that in his lectures he gave so much prominence to social questions. He explained thab in his view the social question was the great religious question of our day. If we looked back to the time of Christ we found a simple social state, to which the teaching of Christ appealed directly, now we found a hard and complex social state, needing the restraints of religion, and it is with this social state of today that the religion of to-day must deal. We had to choose between Jerusalem and Auckland, or between Jerusalem and Melbourne, as the case might be. It was open to us to let our sympathies waste themselves on the sins and sorrows of a byegone age if we chose to do so, but if Christ were with us now would He be thinking about Jerusalem ? No — he would point to the slums and dens of vice in this Auckland of ours, and say, there lies your field of work to-day — in a word, he would force on our attention the social question before all else. We were all familiar with fossils and knew that those little stony fragments were relics of long-departed life and activity, but many were content to pick up jusb such a fossil and represent it as the religion of to-day. We could, however, accept religion in no such form. Our religion must be alive, growing and expanding naturally under the conditions of to-day, and not the fossilised thoughts of the past. The lecturer then quoted Byron's famous lines on the eve of Waterloo, and alluded to the old habit of thought which used to lead Englishmen to look on the French and other nations as their "natural enemies." Would it not be well to inquire what truth there was in that mode of looking at neighbouring nations. Surely ourtrue enemies were rather poverty, ignorance, cold, and hunger. These were the real "national enemies," the foes to man's happiness and development. It was indeed too true that when they remembered that at the present moment the old world is like a camp, and that some four millions of armed men atand ready at a moment's notice to engage in mutual slaughter, it seemed like an idle dream to hope for a time When the war-drum throbs no longer, ani. tho battle-flags are furled In the parliament of man, the federation of the world. Still it was well to cherish that dream and to hope for the coming of that time. But there was another warfare and another battlefield in which the strife was always going on, and it was to that struggle he wished to direct their attention. There was one word in our language which conveyed to each one of us grim ideas of the results of defeat in that struggle, that word was poverty. It mattered not what rank of life we took among those who had to earn their living, we found that tho enemy against whom all were struggling was simply poverty. We had lately seen long accounts of the poverty of tho East End of London, of the sweaters 1 dens, of the dockyard labourora ; but if we went a step kigher we should find among the middle classes the same terror of poverty facing them, and in many casts reducing them to a Ma very as complete and abject as any described in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Now what did this poverty mean? It meant simply the inability to make ends meet, and it was caused to a great extent by ignorance. There were doubtless many other causes which brought individuals to poverty -drunkenness, for instance — but even there, would ib not in many casts bo true that ignorance lay at the back of, and was indeed the cause of the drunkenness. We were too apt to think only of book-learning when we talked of overcoming ignorance, but there was another sorb of knowledge wanted, ib was the science of well boing, it was the adaptation of means to ends. If our boys and girls were brought up without this practical knowledge the book-learning of the schools would avail them little in the fight against poverty. As an illustration of what had been achieved in ono department of human effort by the intelligent puriuit of improvement, the lecturer instanced the increase in the average weights of oxen "and sheep in England between the years 1700 and 1786. At the former date a writer named Davenant gave the average weight of the ox as 3701b, and the sheep 281b ; while, in 1786, Arthur Young gave them as 8401 band 1041b respectively. What had caused this wonderful change ? Simply the fact bhab people [ had learned to study naturo scientifically. i And so in every" department of life we saw that the same law held good ; that the scientific study of the relation of cause and effect led to the discovery of what we called natural laws, and the intelligent application of thoso laws led us through the whole domain of nature, conquering and fco conquer. Let similar knowledge and intelligence, then, be applied to man, and to the evolution of hia welfare and happiness, and we need nob fear the result. As an instance of the evil results of the neglect of such knowledge, and the defiance of such laws, the lecturer quoted the case of the notorioua Jukes family, in the States, whose pedigree was recorded and traced back through four generations, backinto last century, whenone poor woman who was known as a thief, a drunkard, and an altogether "bod lob," married a kindred spirit, and from that unfortunate couple had descended four generations of criminals, a curse to themselves, a di3gracetohumanity,and a tax of thousands of pounds annually on the American people Surely here was a, case showing our need of greater knowledge. Let this instance of natural law working out its inevitable results be placed fairly before our people and what would their verdict be ? Would nob the whole nation say, " Shut up the unfortunates, restrain them as best you can, such horrors must riot, and shall not be perpetuated." Lob tho absolutely inevitable operation of natural law be brought homo forcibly and unmistakeably to our young people and by degrees we shall form a public opinion which will control these things for good. ' Only some hundred years or so ago' it was a common thing for the most respectable Englishman, aye, cren clergymen, to bo co-

gaged in the slave trade, but publio attention was at length aroused, the public verdict was given against it, and public, opinion rendered ib impossible for the future. Our work to^day was to educate public opinion, to see and recognise the causes that blight the welfare of our race, and to train it to brand as infamous everything that was done against the interests of our common humanity. Thus, and thus only, should we finally conquer our worst and most remorseless enemies — ignorance and poverty.