Muck-Rake Imperialism

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 25, 25 June 1908, Page 19

Muck-Rake Imperialism

The London correspondent of the Dunedin 'Evening Star,' writing under date May 15, says: —

The Right Rev. M. E. Neligaii, Bishop of Auckland, on Sunday evening preached one of a special series of sermons to Oxford undergraduates at the University Church.

The text was taken from St. Paul, ix., 27: "Lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. ' ' Bishop Neligan asked them to think of their life at the University, lest, when they had had every advantage, they should go through life a failure. That was a perfectly right and a perfectly proper thing for any man to feel at any stage of his life; when a man did not feel like that he was on the way to failing in realising what was perhaps the greatest thing to realise in life, a dependence upon God. Looking at the British Empire to-day, what did they find in every single part of it? Not that the national life had been enslaved to religion, but that the aim of religion had been everywhere to elevate the national conscience. That which alone enabled the national conscience to rise above the 'sordid things of trading in pepper and coffee and such like things,' had been the tremendous impinging force of the Christian conscience. That being so, they should think of the responsibilities of Empire.

England had gone out over the length and breadth of the known world, and England's danger to-day was the danger of Empire — they could not know it until they had been out of England — the danger lest, when England had preached the lesson to others, she should be, like empires of the past, a castaway. The danger of the British Empire being a castaway was real. It was the same danger as that of Greece. It was because England was too prosperous, too disgustingly rich, and because England and England's sons wore losing something of their Puritan backbone, were caring more in Church life about non-essentials than about essentials. One came home to England after five years of absence and found the same old silly twaddling quarrel about the number of candles on the altar or the shape and color of the stone; and out in the British Empire there were white men living and dying as pagans. He was not exaggerating. Ho could tell them of a country stocked with the best stock that England ever sent from her shores — for such was the stock of New Zealand, where they had the results of an experiment with which England was threatened, secular education. They had had thirty-one years of it, and to-day there were men in England saying they would like to see secularism in the schools. God forgive their ignorance and their blindness ! As a result of trying the experiment in New Zealand upon England's best stock, they had a nation partly pagan. He could take them into schools in New Zealand where, out of forty children, perhaps not five had even heard of the Lord's Prayer. The parents of to-day in New Zealand were those who had been brought up to believe that God was an ' extra. ' Whether men liked it or not, the fact was that the day they put the religious lesson outside the ordinary school hours, they sounded in every child's heart the note that was going to grow louder and louder as the child developed into a man, the idea that God was an ' extra. ' As soon as they got this, they had the ruin of the Empire. The thing that mattered dn this business was not the attitude of the priest, but it was the religion that the young men of Oxford would take away with them.

The question was how to make the white man Christian, for, wherever they went, it was the white man that mattered. What they wanted to do was to take that word 'imperialism' out of the dirt; it was down in the gutter with Stock

Exchange quotations, which were ever in the mud. It was clown where men were working with the muck-rake, and it depended upon the young manhood of England as much as upon the priest to see that the word was taken up out or, the dirt, cleaned and polished, and to see that from its tacets there should be light iridescent of Him who called the British Empire into being, and who held the British race responsible for its continuance as a blessing to the world.