SEVEN SOCIAL SINS.
CANON DONALDSON CONDEMNS WEALTH WITHOUT WORK.
Canon Donaldson at St. Ann’s Church, Manchester, yesterday, spoke about seven social sins, approaching them, he explained, from the corporate point of view. The first he named was politics without principle; the second, wealth without work, in the sense of consumption without return, whether committed by one in high or in low life, and to this he attributed that cruel competition which crushed the weak, oppressed the poor, afflicted nations and brought them to the ruin and desolation of war.
The third was pleasure without conscience, and here Canon Donaldson, making clear man’s divine capacity for joy, took for examples of pleasure for its own sake the modern dance halls, night clubs, and music halls. The evil was not simply, for instance, the lightly-dressed woman on the stage; that was much less horrible than the false valuation of life. Knowledge without character was the fourth sin, and one which brought danger, for instance, through readers without discernment, writers without ideals, and mathematicians without souls. The fifth, industry without morality, he compared with Frankenstein, a monster which ruled men instead of being ruled, and had established a wage system which held millions in bondage and which meant to those millions wage slavery and nothing more. Science without humanity, the sixth sin, might achieve a supreme devilry and leave the world “pallid and bleached with horror” at its own deeds.
Worship without sacrifice, the seventh sin, was the key to all the others. The taint in modern worship was that it was selfish; religion had been separated from life.
(Lancashire Evening Post, 2nd April 1925)
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