TRUE PROGRESS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 December 1941, Page 6

TRUE PROGRESS

AN OXFORD DON REFLECTS. As a member of a church, although possibly a flying-buttress rather than a pillar of the Anglican Establishment, I find that I can read into its ritual forms the meaning that suits me; and indeed the Church of England seems to meal! the better, rather than the worse, for being ready to tolerate a considerable latitude within its communion as regards both theory and practice, writes Dr. R. R. Morett, rector of Exeter College, in his autobiography, “A Jerseyman at Oxford.” But I would insist on the voluntary nature of all religious association; and hate the very notion of a theocracy as a peculiarly vicious type of despotism. The moment that society ventures to interpose its arbitrary decrees between me and my intellectual and moral conscience, I am ready to become a rebel, and to take the consequences. Free service for the sake of the good is, as I see it, the one and only condition of true progress—in religion, in morals, and in politics alike. Meditating on these lines, then, 'I hold our cause in the present war to be just, and can put up ■ with my personal sufferings so long as British liberty eventually wins the day. Nay, evenshould we go down fighting, it were better than to acquiesce in spiritual bondage. For as a philosopher and an anthropologist I am bound to take a long view of man’s mental and historical development, and have come to believe that no terrorism resting on brute force will permanently hold the hero back from standing up to the world until he can make it fit for a free lifeone that entcourages individual effort in the pursuit of the ideal.