LUST OF PLEASURE.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 June 1922, Page 8

LUST OF PLEASURE.

AUSTRALIA’S PERIL. THE GOVERNOR’S FEARS. Is Nature, in the prodigal scattering of her gifts in this sunny, care-free land, fostering in the people a lust of pleasure, which may imperil the consideration of their more serious tasks? asks a Sydney paper. Along such line His Excellency the Governor, Sir Walter Davidson, made an impressive speech, under the auspices of the Congregational Union of Australia and New Zealand. His Excellency prefaced his address with an expression of pleasure at being able to join with them that night in the good fight for God, both in his capacity as constitutional head of the State, and in his individual capacity, for the one thing that he most greatly desired was that this happy land of Australia should follow the traditions of our race and fear God and ensure His commands. “I sometimes fear,” proceeded His Excellency, “that possibly Nature is too kind to us in this favored land, and that we may, owing to the ease of life, and favorable conditions, fall away and concentrate rather on pleasures and thoughts in just the world’s delights, and hardly anything more. That is possibly because it is a very favored land. The climate is perfect, and the conditions of life are so very easy.” His Excellency took his mind back to Newfoundland. He had, he said, lived m a land where the climate was rigorous, where the summer was brief and the winter long and dark, where people, with an unfertile soil, sought their living on the sea. There, people had to earn their difficult and precarious living amidst the surge and the thunder of the great storms of the North Atlantic —hardy men and stout-hearted women. And pre-eminently there, amidst the hardships of their surroundings. the people were close to God. They worshipped God with a fervor and sincerity which one could hardly ' expect to duplicate under conditions such as we enjoyed in Now South Wales. There, in Newfoundland, during the very dark, long winter, the Church was the social as well as the religious centre of the people. It was so almost of necessity, . because the Church was there representative of ■ those generations of people who had lived the same life.