1922.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 December 1921, Page 10

1922.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEW YEAR. A TIME FOR NEW RESOLUTIONS. (Specially written foF the News.) Hail 1922! We greet the future with a cheer. Heartily do we wish for all our readers “A Happy New Year.” May it come to them burdened with blessing and rich with the promise of success. We are quite prepared to be told there is no such thing as a New Year. It is one of the innocent fictions of life. “Every day is a fresh beginning. Every morn is the world made new.” January lhe first has nothing distinctive about it. The sun waxes and wanes on this, as on any other' day. It contains precisely the same number of hours and minutes as every other of the 364 days. Even the weather is splendidly impartial, and refuses any special privilege to the mystic day on which we bestow an imaginative aureole of glory. Did not the wise man of old settle ,the matter when he said: “That which hath been shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun”? Did not Carlyle say:

•Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour, but no hammer in the horologue of time peals through the universe at midnight "when the old year dies." Have we not Emerson's dictum that “every day is the best day.” and that "no man has learned anything until he knows that every day is a doomsday''? Sir Walter Scott made an entry in his diary, under date January Ist, 1826: “A year has passed; another has commenced. These solemn divisions of time influence our feelings as they recur. Yet there is nothing in it, for every day in the year closes a twelve months as well as the 31st of December. The latter is only a solemn pause, as when a guide, showing a wild and mountainous road, calls on a party to pause and look back on the scene which they have just passed.” That is true, wonderfully and philosophically true. No one disputes it. . Yet for all the truth no one really believes it. OUR OPPORTUNITIES. The cynic who scornfully asks why we make so much fuss over the New Year might easily justify his cynicism by a process of academic reasoning, but he only demonstrates his lack of wisdom, and his ignorance of human nature, for, philosopher and cynic notwithstanding, we st ill cling to our fond fancy, and hail the New Year with a right good will. Wise men know there is nothing so new as time. Every fresh day is absolutely unique, and it comes unstained and unspoiled out of the treasury of time. No two days begin or end alike. The sun never rises or sets twice in the same way. We never feel quite the same two days together. There are incessant minor changes in the most humdrum days and tasks. Life is a series of new beginnings, each one providing oppor-. tunity of correcting past mistakes, of enlarging and ennobling our plans and motives.

Few things are more disheartening and depressing than unbroken continuity and sameness. Oh! those long lanes that have no turning, which stretch their straight and level dustiness mile on mile! Those dull, drab streets with rows of homes, exactly alike in their woeful ugliness! How they sicken and tire us! We could walk twice the distance with half the strain along short lanes with swift and frequent windings, and change of hedgerow and outlook. Dr. Enoch Mellor said that monotony so chafed him and variety so cheered him that if he could find change in nothing else he change*! the style and the ruling of his sermon paper. ’ The illustration was designedly extravagant, but it enshrined a principle and points to the deep necessity of finding new departures and of utilising change in the service of continuity. LIFE WITHOUT CHANGE INTOLERABLE. Life without change would become intolerable. Immortality, which simply meant endless going on, would be a curse and not a blessing. When the pendulum heard the arithmetician say how many times it had to swing in the year it gave up in despair. But whoo the sensible housewife suggested that it would have a fresh second for each tick, ami that it would not be required to tick twice in any one second, the pendulum took heart and grace, and cheerfully completed the appointed task. There is a word of wisdom in the homely parable, and the simple lesson learned would dry many a bitter tear, and soothe a good deal of heartache. Of course the value of these new beginnings depends on the use we make of them. The New Year is more than an arrangement of the calendar, more, than a trick of the almanac. It is a messenger of hope, a call for improvement and progress. The New Yeai’ is a new chance. No-one can live on yesterday's visions. All life tends to exhaustion, and the only way to keep is to add. Hence it is a true instinct that associates the New Year with new resolutions. The hungry past, would swallow up our strength and our ideals were it not for occasions which revive our sense of life’s significance and glory. For these sii<eient reasons we refuse to be laughed, or frightened, out of the good of making the New Year the occasion of a new start. We face the future with holy hope and high humility. We grasp anew the pilgrim’s staff, and resolve to plod and fight on, remembering Matthew Arnold’s fine phrase that: "Thoughts in hours of insight willed, Must be through days of gloom fulfilled.” Remembering, too, what Shelley wrote: "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass. Stains the white radiance of Eternity.”

A North Shore (Auckland) resident, who for many years was connected with the fishing industry in the eastern districts of Scotland, says that he is not at all surprised at the religious revival that has broken out there, reports the Auckland | Star. The war with all its attendant dis- ; asters affected the fisherman’s mind in a j way that left him a different man. There j were pent up feelings that had to find 1 vent somewhere. The fishing folk have an i intense faith in the supernatural, and many of them are what is known as seers and see visions, and their mode of living and I their training foster this spirit. They will ; wrestle with a passage from the Scriptures , and read their own interpretations into it ; according to the light they have, and then they try to influence their fellows regard- j ing it. The revival is a natural outcome ! of the happenings that have taken place : since 1914, and under wise guidance the ' fisherman’s life will be improved by it. j