A LOST SENSE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 7, 25 February 1925, Page 33

A LOST SENSE

Gladstone said that the most ominous symptom of moral degeneration in his day was “the loss of the sense of sin.” The great Victorian statesman used a startling phrase to express a very old truth. To say that people would, not sin if they possessed a sense of the enormity of sin is to utter a commonplace. Every priest knows that when a person falls from the state of grace by committing a grievous sin the catastrophe does not happen easily or pleasantly, and the commission of the offence will almost certainly he followed by hitter remorse. If the sinner, however, remains in the state of mortal sin, the offence will he repeated more easily on the next occasion upon which temptation comes, and soon it will habitually be perpetrated without a single arresting thought. "We can imagine, then, the plight of those whose childhood and youth have been spent in an environment in which they could not even obtain a sense of sin, much less lose it. It has been noted by close observers in the older English-speaking countries that while illiteracy has decreased year by year, so too has the number of citizens who will admit affiliation with any religious body. At the same time it is notorious that crime has increased rapidly. An American contemporary says that “disorder and crime have grown to such an extent that we Americans can rightly be called the most lawless of all peoples making any claim to be deemed civilised.” A glance through our New Zealand, newspapers will show that we, too, are floating in dangerous waters. These are facts' which appear as boldly as the sun in the heavens on a mid-summer day. They proclaim the ghastly failure of secular education to turn out good citizens;’ they are a strong indictment on the presumption of the State in setting itself up as a teacher when obviously it cannot deliver the goods; and they are a standing reproach to the State that places a penalty upon a section of the community because that section cannot in con-, science send its children to the State schools, in which they cannot acquire the sense of sin. Some day our legislators will wake up to the fact that their absurd system of education has been the ruin of the country; but, from what we know of them, that day will not dawn until they experience difficulty in finding sufficient gaol accommodation for the malefactors produced by their schools. Too late they will learn that it is cheaper and much more respectable to support religious education than to build prisons and maintain r policemen. , y.-