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Howtolive
off friends
after
retirement.
It's not often the taxman makes generous
concessions that help your clients to build
up capital out of income and encourage
personal savings for retirement. So the
arrangements for private pensions is one
opportunity that shouldn't be missed.
Our new booklet has been specifically
written to help you show your clients the
tax advantages they might be missing.
Contact us for your copy of "Personal
Tax Planning for Retirement."
FRIENDS' PROVIDENT
LIFE OFFICE
78 South Mall, Cork. 16 Suffolk Street, Dublin 2.
11 Eyre Square, Galway. 95 O'Connell Street, Limerick.
Established 1832. Life sums assured in force exceed £1,500,000,000.
Friends'forlife
Church. It is all too apparent to be cloaked or wished
away.
The Churches are caught in the trap-gate of public
structure and private function. The hidden ideology
of the present age cannot allow them to challenge
the system but in order to cope with man's hidden
fears and to prevent a breakdown from stress, the
clerical profession is allowed to function in the private
sphere, in the area of man's deepest uncertainty:
those relating to death, suffering, disease and misery.
But it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theo-
logian, who was executed in the last war in a German
concentration camp, who first expressed concern for
the
relevance
of
a Church
which
functioned
exclusively within the sphere of human suffering,
weakness and uncertainty.
4. The challenge to the Professions
The Professions, as knowledge workers, cannot
shrug off their responsibilities to man by calling on
Institutions or the Professional Priest to deal with
the victims of a system within which they earn a
reasonable living. They, all of us, must now ask if
ethical considerations demand that we question our
role as "hired guns" in making smooth the path of
the machine by furnishing drugs for the casualties
and imposing uniform and bureaucratic rationality on
the obstructive irrationalities of Nation, Culture and
Community. If it is legal, is it right? The question
need only be asked to remind us of Nazi Germany
and to receive the ready answer.
In the world of growing organisation which the
contemporary industrial civilisation has ushered in,
freedom can no longer be adequately defined in the
traditional terms of economic, political and intellectual
liberties. To-day we are face-to-face with the age-old
question of individual meaning, individual purpose
and individual freedom. In a free society it can be
said the individual must have the right to opt out but
this is not sufficient. The individual to-day has a
greater responsibility in freedom: he must take
responsibility for his society and its institutions.
There are great opportunities and great perils but the
responsibility cannot be passed to somebody else,
priest, politician or bureaucrat. If the Professions
collectively do not assume the responsibility which
this challenge imposes, individualsof heroic dimen-
sion must be willing to do so. The machine tem-
porarily has been slowed down by the will of Allah
and the followers of Mohammed. The shock has been
salutary and opportune for Western man. We have
been given time to draw our breath and think; to ask
where the machine is leading us and having thought
and asked, to re-programme the computer so that it
too will understand and respond in a qualitative and
essential mode to the first and final question
What
is Man, and What is his Goal?
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