NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 38, 24 November 1937, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

TASK FOR REALISTS. “Nations may be bled white by the silver bullet as well as by the bullets of lead, and the silver bullets are being fired in sheets by us all to-day,” said Mr Walter Elliott, Secretary of State for Scotland, speaking of the cost of armaments at Geneva. “Without peace and the safeguarding of peace not only our future but our present will be lost. Existence is vital, and it is frankly existence which, for want of adequate defence, we see menaced today., Meanwhile, till we can find a remedy, we work under the spell of those long, dumb cylinders of steel guns or aero engines which have become, for too many the idols of our time—idols which return nothing but death to those who how before them. It is for us realists to break such spells.” SCIENCE INSPIRING RELIGION. “What does science contribute to religion,” asked Professor Charles E. Raven in an address in Liverpool Cathedral. “If the Churches will take the findings of science seriously, a great and valuable development and restatement of then' faith will ensue. They will recover three essentially' Christian convictions that traditional religion is apt to ignore. First, they will gain a sense of the overwhelming majesty of the creation, and therefore, of God, and so a sense of man’s ignorance and creaturehood. Secondly, a recognition of the place of suffering and death in the ordering of the world: ‘There is no resurrection without a crucifixion, and every crucifixion is a potential resurrection.’ Thirdly will come an awareness of the reality and activity of the Spirit of God, an experience of co-operation and communion with that Spirit in the fellowship of human society and a power to welcomes and affirm as of God every effort for the enrichment and enlargement of life.” AGE NEED NOT WITHER. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, in recent address to the students of Columbia University, said: “Try to be youthful, young man” is a sagacious counsel. “Try to keep youthful, old man,” is the word of wise experience. Above all else, do not ever forget that years of bodily life are no measure of intellectual age and capacity. To forge a fixed and arbitrary rule in terms of years as the limit of a man’s usefulness or human service, would only be to behead a large portion of the world’s intellectual and moral leadership and thereby to impoverish mankind.