THE SOCIAL PROBLEM.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 174, 10 December 1912, Page 5

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM.

A POWERFUL SERMON. By Telegraph—Press Association. Masterton, Monday. The Rev. A. T. Thompson, Presbyterian minister of Masterton, in a powerful and outspoken sermon last night, challenged, and condemned the silence of the pulpit on the social problem and sexual vice, supporting his contention by the plain, blunt treatment of these facts by the prophets, Jesus, St. Paul, and the Bible generally. The most.hopeful beginning of a reformation was the plain recognition of the blunt facts. The Church ami religion ought to bring the impact of their life and power upon the evils of society in order to secure j;hcir healing. The Church needed to come to a lew valuation of human life in its totality, and as a unity, with a new sense of the regeneration of the race. Ignorance, silence, mock modesty and genteel humbug in reference to human life and its divinely created functions are the body-devouring and souldevouring devils of our age, leading to the corruption and abnormality of one of the most important and most fundamental impulses placed by God in us. The care of the adolescent is one of the most crying obligations of parenthood and society. The neglect of the adolescent spells the physical, mental and moral ruin of the individual and society. The medical inspection of schools by wise men who are also proper adolescent specialists should be compulsory, with individual instruction to adolescents to supplement the work of parents, which is primary, but hopelessly neglected or inefficiently done. The capture of our scholars and the parents of the next generation are assured. What is needed throughout New Zealand most to-day is a new ethic of the sexes, a raising of the moral tone, of the creation of a wholesome atmosphere charged with scientific knowledge of human life.