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Salient. The Newspaper of Victoria University College. Vol. 20, No. 3. April 12, 1956

New Zealanders fortunate

New Zealanders fortunate

Anyone who spends his early years in New Zealand may count himself fortunate indeed. Perhaps no other country can give such a start to its youth, with every material and recreational blessing. But while everything on the surface is glorious, yet national character and fibre may be collapsing from within, eaten away by the confusion and irresponsibility engendered by impurity and selfishness, pride and complacency.

I can only speak for my own nation and generation, but at least that is the threat facing Britain, whose youth desperately need an answer to this sort of drift. They need a purpose big enough to give everything for. They are beginning to find it in MRA, which clarifies the inevitable connection between moral defeat and national irresponsibility. Confusion comes from compromise. Clarity comes from change. The need is universal and the answer is totally effective on a global scale. To live in the realm of the answer is normal living for our generation.

Is New Zealand to remain a fool's paradise, an outpost of decaying civilization, or will it fulfil its God-given destiny as the prototype and beacon light of a new society? Will there be revolutionary change and a force for purity welling up in the heart of every New Zealander? Clearly her people have the vision to see, the humility to listen and the courage to obey.

Just as Hillary pioneered on Everest, so New Zealand could lead the world to alpine heights in living and thinking.

In the words of Frank Buchman: "Human nature can be changed. That is the root of the answer. National economies can be changed. That is the fruit of the answer. World history can be changed, that is the destiny of our age.

"Why need there be catastrophe again, when, with God, renaissance is inevitable.?"

James Baynard-Smith teas educated at Wanganui Collegiate School and later nerved as Aide-de-Camp to the Governor-General of the Sudan. Since 1952 he has been working in Asia, Africa and America with the world force of Moral Re-Armament.