NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 135, 21 March 1939, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

THE SUPREME NEED. “The real gravity of the continuing crisis is that what- has hitherto been known as the Christian basis of civilisation is in jeopardy,’’ said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang, in his address to Convocation. “It is not that Christian values and standards are imperfectly attained this, alas always has been true but that over a large, part of Europe they are deliberately put aside, if not denied. New idols of race and power and armed force are set up, and multitudes of men are bidden, even compelled, to' worship them. There supreme need is to recover and restore the Christian heritage, or rathei to rediscover in the Christian faith new sources of spiritual strength to regenerate an imperilled civilisation. Without the incoming of such a regenerating strength, civilisation itself may he doomed. Here is an immense task sot before the Church of Christ throughout the world. There must be a far more thorough-going, widespread and sustained study and thought than has yet been given to the problem of Christianising the common life. Not the prophet only, but the thinker and the student are needed. If it he true that in> this continuing crisis of the world we are beholding one of the judgment days of history—a day in which our oncevaunted civilisation is being tried and found wanting—it is equally true that judgment must begin at the House of God. Is the Church of Christ, is our own- Church, merely to look around on the spectacle of the world as a bewildered spectator, or is it to look up aud see the redemption which is nigh at hand in the ever-living Christ, and to strive to bring His saving health to a sick world?”