Sport and Amusements.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXV, Issue 245, 14 November 1903, Page 4

Sport and Amusements.

SENSIBLE REMARKS BY THE CLERGY. Bish«p Julius, preaching at the Obristchurch Cathedral on Sunday morning', dealt with the subject of amusements. He said that at present our literature, temper and philosophy were sad, and »ur life betrayed an ever j increasing craving I'ot amusement- The Church- was not called upon to condemn amusement in any way, although it might be wished that our amusements were of a healthier type, that more played and fewer looked on, that amusements were more fairly earned by bard woTk on the part of i some that debts of honour were paid without the sacrifice of debts of justice, and that the totalisator was not maintained at the expense of our grocer. All these things were blots upon our amusements. There was a great deal of healthy, wholesome, and honest amusement that was the direct result of labour, but recreation, as a stimulant for jaded lives, as a superficial disguise of hidden troubles, was worse than useless. A gay people was not necessarily a happy people, for, if what be had said was true, the gayest were probably the unhappiest. The danger of our time was not amusement, not that our people came in from good, hard-working life in the country to enjoy a week even of racing in Ohristchurch, but the danger was lest we should forget God. The modern tendency was to allow amusements to sap gradually our religious life, and the life of a great many of us was just about as devoid of religion as the later life of pagan Rome. Archdeacon Averill, preaching at St. Michael's Church the same evening, from the text, "Endure hardness'," referred to certain "unwholesome developments" of modern sport. He was not quite sure, he said, whether people realised the dangers to character winch accompanied an age of visible progress, There was too much '"back-wash" to* it. Progress made life in some respects much easier than it used to be ; the growth of luxury begot the desire for luxury, and unless we were careful we would sap pur nobility of character, our manliness, even our higher visions of mortality, and leave us weak, effeminate hangers-on and lookers-on, instead of partakers in the hard work of the world, which was one of the best foundations of character. He referred particularly to the young—especially to young- men. "Isn't there a danger of thinking that at twenty we can't do without the c©mforts of life which our fathers knew nothing of till they were forty, and our -grandfathers perhaps till they were sixty ? We want to begin where our grandfathers left off. We want tp become rich without the plodding, the hard work, the self-sacrifice, the self-denials which they experieneed. . We want to spare, ourselves all pa>in amd surround ourselves with the comforts and even luxuries of life. We are not satisfied to-day with the reality of life, so full, so abundant. It palls upon us, we crave for the artificial, we are not content with the fine gold of life, we must needk have the gilded. It has been truly said that 'it is sad when a community grows more and more to abound in young- men who worship wealth, and think that they cannot live without luxury and physical comfort. The choicest of its strength is gone.' " This was what he meant, Archdeacon Averill continued, by the "backwash" of progress. There were too many who were not benefited by the real progress around them, who grasped at wfeat they thought were the prizes or lite, and missed the meaning of life itself, and became poorer, and more disoontented,raising their Httle eddies in the backwash, and saying that there was nothing much in life after all. To such he would say, "Young men, don't be fools, tw manly, endure hardness, be contented to begin at the beginning, and life with all its abundance will open out before you." In sport there had been great progress undoubtedly, but there had been soma very unwholesome developments, and parasites as well. It was a grand sight to see a whole village turn out to play cricket on the village green in England ; when sport meant that everybody was an active player, or wanted to be ; when sport was really recreation. But professionalism had stepped in, and other things had stepped in, and (he majority had stepped out of hard work and left it to the few, and sport with most people nowadays meant looking on, and instead ol the manly hard workers, we had the effeminate loungers, who watched the game, or who had played the game. What had progress done for the hangers-on ? The game was pot exciting enough in itself, they must fall back upon the artificial. There were the little gurgling eddies in the back-wash as they tried to justify their conduct, but there was little manliness except where there was the disposition to endure hardship. if young men played the gams, (nstpad of watching it, they need not whet their appetites with artificial flavourings. Arohdeacon Averill concluded with a quotation from Dr. I'hilHps Brooks on the subject of ganir ljHng : "Money to the simple, healthy human sense," Dr. Brooks st.atejd, "is but the representative of energy and power. It is to pass from man to man only as the symbol of some exertion, some worthy output--1 ing of strength and life. . . The young man ought to have an instinctive dislike and scorn for all transactions which would substitute feeble chance for vigorous desert, and make him either the giver or receiver of that which has not even the show of an equivalent of earning. It has an inherent baseness about it which, not to feel, shows a base soul. To cany in your pockot money which has become yours by no use of your manly powers, which has ceased to be another mans hv no willing acceptance on his part of ita equivalent - that Is a degrading thing."—Truth. b