FREEDOM A STANDARD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 April 1942, Page 4

FREEDOM A STANDARD

FUNDAMENTAL SIMPLICITIES. •It is the fashion of the hour in certain so-called intellectual or progressive circles to pour clever scorn on the idea that the present struggle is being waged for the defence of liberty, writes Dr. Sidney M. Berry, secretary of the English Congregational Union. There is great need, therefore, for a return to certain fundamental simplicities. Freedom is v still a standard. It is not a mere slogan. As a complete statement of the issues of the age it is, of course, incomplete. It is a conception with an infinite variety of meanings, fro'm the crudest kind of irresponsibility with its cry of “I can do as I like” up to the idea expressed in the classic phrase of “the service which is perfect freedom.” Freedom, therefore, is a condition of the highest life, the air it must breathe if it is to live at all. And equally it is the only atmosphere in which the nobler state of society can possibly arise. Let no one demean it because it does not claim to offer any programme ether than the only possible ground of greatness. The task of all the future years must be first of all by a true education to instil the idea of a disciplined and controlled freedom into the minds of the citizens of the new world, for if we fail there no programmes will be of any use, and no statement of aims will get beyond the | paper on which it is written. But side by side with that task must go another —the workihg out of what freedom means in terms of a society disciplined by planning so as to secure the fullest life not for a few, but for all men. The old Apostolic precept, “Use not your freedom as a cloak for licence,” has as pointed an application to a slovenly society as it has to a crude, self-ex-pressionism in individual life. But apart from freedom as the groundwork for individuals and society alike, every hope would fall to the ground.