SERMON AT GENEVA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 289, 6 December 1930, Page 2 (Supplement)

SERMON AT GENEVA.

1 LEAGUE OP NATIONS IDEALS. The annual sermon before the delegates to the Assembly of the League of Nations was preached in the Cathedral of St. Peter, in Geneva, by Dr. Norman Mac Lean, of St. Cuthbert's Edinburgh, ex-Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and Chaplain to His Majesty the King. Subjoined are extracts from the sermon: It was now well-nigh 12 years since the guns ceased to speak in the world's most devastating war, and the time had come to rear a common monument to the ten million of the dead. And the only monument worthy of the agony and sacrifice would be a temple of abiding peace. Peace had been the goal for which men had sought for centuries. But it was easier to get the devil out of a man's heart than liis grandfather out of his bones. Humanity was driven to murder and bloodshed by the long line of ancestors that gloried in battle. It was a common belief in former days that wars sprang from the ambitions of emperors and kings; and that democracies would usher in the reign of peace. There was little ground for such a hope. Uninstructed and unthinking democracies could be a greater peril "than kings or emperors. The* peril was now the crowd with whom the power rests —the crowd that provides the material which, kindled by hatred, could blaze into the fire of universal destruction. And science had placed in the hands of the multitude death-dealing powers which made the heart quail to think of. 3 The Needed Change. "There is, however," said Dr. Mac Lean, "hope of deliverance for humanity from rapine and blood; and that hope lies not in the change of forms of government, but in the change of the heart of man. The progress of humanity upward from the slime is the proof that human nature can be changed. And the power which, above all others, can curb the animal in man and transmute blood-staiasd warriors into apostles of peace is the spirit of Jesus Christ. A tiger remains a tiger and cannot be changed; but mans proud prerogative is tliat lie can be changed. "On the fact that the human brain is plastic, Jesus Christ based His demands." We must not feel discouraged because war had 'not as yet been banished from the world. Christianity is as -yet only in its early days. A Great Advance.

To-day, the preacher added', a change was in sight. Men were girding themselves for a great advance. An impoverished world, bankrupt by war, with the poets and artists and dreamers and leaders in their graves, killed by senseless hatred, was hungering for peace. 6 The earnest prayer of the Church of God was that the League of Nations would bring the end of the insensate folly that too long had devastated the world.