The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 1921. A REMINDER OF ORIGINAL SIN

New Zealand Tablet, 10 March 1921, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 1921. A REMINDER OF ORIGINAL SIN

- -*C>l p>| HE world is in a bad way. The recent War MII m which was, according to the pledges of & [I truthful persons like Mr. George and his a? political press liars, to regenerate society and to inaugurate a new. era, has done the Contrar y* It has plunged the world into * y a nioial chaos, and left humanity wallowr ing in the mire of passion. Murder, burglary, peculation, divorce, corruption in public life, brazen lying among statesmen, deliberate^ fomentation of sectarian strife for selfish ends,, are the fine fruits of that War for world-regeneration for which so many men were driven to death. We have sunk ow indeed. Apparently it is the opinion of many people that we can find no lower level, and that humanity is as bad as it is possible for it to become. Only by presupposing that such is the opinion of ..the pressmen

/ and the propagandists of to-day, can we explain why it is that they have left the fact of the Fall out of all their calculations, and set up the' pedagogue and the policeman in the place of the grace of God and the conscience of man. At any rate, the view of tinman nature taken by the average journalist is hopelessly debased; and we must conclude that either despair or denial of Christianity is at the bottom of all the nonsense that is written in these days about reforming children through the schoolmaster and the policeman, apart altogether from any consideration of the .eternal sanction of the Ten Commandments.

The other day with characteristic vaporing and verbosity, the Otar/o Daily Times babbled about teaching children to know themselves through sex-instruction imparted by means of printed leaflets or pamphlets. It had not a word to say concerning the power < f conscience as a means of restraint; not a word about the fact that Original Sin is at the root of the impulse to evil; not a word about the need of religion, and through religion, of God’s grace, for the moral uplifting of the young. God is ignored, religion is ignored, and one might as well try to stay the incoming tide with a pitchfork as to prevent the moral ruin of the people by any means apart from those which the Creator ordained. Do they who know all that is to be known about sexual matters lead perfect lives? Does knowledge of that sort save the majority of those who possess it from immorality Is the knowledge assimilated from a printed leaflet able to carry any boy - or girl safely through the maelstrom of passion ? What printed leaflets • had the purest people in the world for their guidance If England had been able.to drag down to her own level the Irish peasants, and had given them handbooks instead of their prayer-books, who is foolish enough to say that they would be any better than the demoralised John Bulls of our time? Handbooks and leaflets that proceed from the supposition that there is no such thing as Original Sin are as futile and as foolish as the schools from which God has been expelled by our Stateatheists; and as moral platitudes uttered by schoolmasters will never make children good no scheme of sex-instruction that forgets God will ever make them clean. We have forgotten where we ought to begin ; we theorise .about an ideal man who never existed and never can existT instead of the man, prone to evil from his youth and needing God’s Grace to keep him rightwe have invented a creature whom God never made and we have taught the young people to live as if God did not matter. The result of it all is that we are in the mire and that we shall stay there. Devils of lust, devils of pride, devils of hatred, devils of avarice, have seized us, and instead of setting ourselves to drive them out by prayer and fasting we are beating the air and fighting shadows. . Magistrates have declared from the bench that religion alone can save this country; one well-known magistrate told us..recently that every day he sat on the bench he was more and more convinced that the only hope lay in the establishment of schools like the Catholic schools, which put God first and teach children that the most important thing in life is to keep the Ten Commandments. • * Before there can be any sort of reasonable discussion concerning sex-instruction we must begin with God and religion. Common sense tells us that There is no use informing children of the evil results that flow from certain actions unless we are able to inspire them with a desire to do what is right and to avoid what is wrong, not because of consequences painted in terrible colors by leaflets, but because of God’s Eternal Law, and because of Christ who died to redeem us all. Instruction of that sort without a religious foundation is useless* and worse than useless, for it often leads to the very results which its well-meaning but stupid advocates wish to avoid.‘ Here, as in true education of every sort, it is principles that count. A child must be taught to live by principles and only by principles. Religion alone can teach that; sex-instruction without

religion is based on the damnable British doctrine of expediency and selfishness which; is responsible for the present ruin' of the Empire. Unless morality is instilled into children, unless they are taught the difference between doing a thing because to do it is right and doing it ..because evil will come from not doing it, such children will be no more moral than a criminal whose wickedness,.is only suppressed by the presence of a policeman. "Such children will be unmoral however good their exterior conduct may be : their rectitude will spring from the base motive of'cowardice. On the whole, it is not astonishing to find that journalists who defend the crimes of Lloyd George and who conceal the truth about his infamous war on women and children in Ireland reveal their total ignorance of the principles of Christianity when they come to write about such elementary things as true education of children.