PROPHETIC CRUSADERS

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 151, 27 June 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

PROPHETIC CRUSADERS

JOURNALISTS AND CLERGY.

(By S.)—Xo. 111. I singled out last week thiec- as typical of the better known prophets of later years —Savonarola, Mazzini and Ruskin. What about the men who wear the prophetic mantle to-day? It might be invidious to mention names, but I have 110 hesitation in suggesting two classes in which they may be found. One of them is the class who serve their generation as journalists. There is 110 question that there are among the editors and writers of our best papers and magazines men who possess t lie prophetic sense, and who exercise the prophetic function. No other men mount such commanding pulpits. Xo other men have the ear of so many of their fellows. And no other men choose their texts and their subjects to such an extent from the open volume of Ihe world. And what an ideal they keep before them —the Canaan of a" better and truer social order. They discuss politics, religion and science. They preach liberty and freedom, justice and brotherhood. They endeavour to promote the comfort, the recreation and the refinement of their fellows, to help them to secure a deeper interest iu their own lives and in the lives of others, and to make their outlook on the world, and on their fellowmen, and their measuring of the motives that animate them, wider, more tolerant and more sympathetic. In a word, they stand for, "and they try to get their readers to stand for, the best, things in life and to have larger and juster views of life. It may be that there are more men who are speaking for God, though not in conventional phraseology, among those editors and writers than they themselves, and we, even in our more thoughtful moments, realise.

The other class is the clergy. There are many clergymen who are students of their country, and of their age, as well as of their Bible. They feel, and feel deeply, the challenge of the evil, the injustice, the sorrow and the suffering they see around them. They feci no less deeply the indifference to moral ideals of so many of their neighbours and the distress and the perplexity of others, and they make it their endeavour to speak for God wisely and temperately, yet fearlessly. They do not trouble themselves, or their hearers, so much with the mystery, with the origin, or the nature of evil, as with the exposure of it and the overcoming of it. They try to speak to men and women in the spirit of their Master. They try to lift them out of darkness and sin by preaching the Gospel to them, and they aim at educating their conscience by teaching them what Jesus taught, and getting them to act it out in their lives. They find two difficulties confronting them. The one is unbelief. The other is selfishness. And these two things have a great deal to do with our troubles and our evils. They are the two things that confronted the prophets of Judah and Israel, that confronted Savonarola, Mazzini and Ruskin. But they carry 011, undismayed, invincibly optimistic, to get their hearers to love and follow Christ and to hasten the Kingdom of God, stedfast in faith, charitable in speech, | just in action and merciful in deed.