MORALS OF TO-DAY.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 June 1922, Page 3

MORALS OF TO-DAY.

DEAN INGE’S CENSURE. “HAVING A GOOD TIME.” WIDESPREAD WANT OF FAITH. London, April 21. Dean Inge severely criticised postwar morals in a sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday. The stern choee between good and evil, he said, meant little to-day. We did not think that anybody ought to be punished. Our whole ambition was to give others a good tinfe and to have a good time ourselves. The war had not improved the moral tone of our people; in some ways it had made it worse. We were, threatened with a great outbreak of licentiousness, such as that which disgraced the country in the reign of Charles IL, and again during thfe Regency, after the great war with Napoleon. Authority in morals seemed to have lost its force; men and women did what was right in their own eyes. By a curious contradiction, of which history had seen other examples, there was a widespread want of faith in the Christian revelation, combined with an outbreak of puerile superstition which carried us back to the mentality of primitive barbarians. Some would accept what they took to be the social ethics of Christianity, but they were not at all willing to accept the individual ethics of Christianity. “How many people,” he asked, “now take at all seriously what our religion tells us about repentance, conversion, prayer and moral struggle? How many really understand that the Christian has to live as a soldier on a campaign, or as an athlete training for a race? How many make a practice of self-ex-amination, of meditation, of earnest prayer? We do not see among us the temper of the combatant. Is it any wonder that we do not see the temper of the conqueror?” The call of Christ was individual and its acceptance or rejection would be individual. The sign and seal of redemption was to be admitted to redemptive work. But our business was with our own souls. That was the little bit of the line which God had given us to hold and we had to fight for our own victory as if the whole success of the cause depended on it. Against this statement the Times recalls an article written by Sir Basil Thomson a few weeks ago. Although before the armistice, said the late head of the Special Service Department of Scotland Yard, there were gloomy forebodings that there would be an epidemic of murder and robbery by violence, no such epidemic took place. The statistics of crime wffire a sensitive instrument for recording the fluctuations in the social health of a community and an examination of those statistics was reassuring. It would be a long time, he said, before the disturorng factor of the Great War disappeared from our criminal statistics. In 1913, 3462 persons, or 34 per cent, of the total convicted of serious crime, had incurred six or more previous convictions. In 1918 the number had fallen to 786, or only 17 per cent, of the whole. Grave crimes, such as burglary and housebreaking, showed the greatest fall of 57 per cent., and larcenies GO per cent. On the other hand, there was a large increase in the cases of bigamy. But as a result of liquor control the number of persons convicted of drunkenness fell from 188,877 in 1913 to 29,075 in 1918, a decrease of 85 per cent. The vagrant almost disappeared. Sir Basil ponted out, however, that there is a danger that the present ways of unemployment may leave a legacy of a new vagrant class, such as existed after the Napoleonic wars, and the vagrant may easily’ slide into the career of the professional criminal. In the meantime, however, Sir Basil thinks that the social disease of crime is declining.