SHAKEN NATION

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 230, 29 September 1942, Page 5

SHAKEN NATION

FOUNDATION OFFERED STAND BV THN CHUKCHKS (0.c.) wkllington, this day. "Doubts about, the issue of this war are based on divided allegiance. 'I here arc 'rotters' in the community, human vultures battening on the blood of the brave; there are 'gogetters.' decent and selfish, who shed no blood of sacrifice; and there are those who live by the law of love. To multiply these last, is the object of this campaign. If that can be done the future is secure," said the Rev. Dr. J. J. North, of Auckland, at the fourth and final broadcast public meeting in the series organised as part, of the national campaign for Christian order to-night. Something more than temporarv expedients was needed in this world crisis. Dr. North said, and the churches felt they could offer a foundation of rock to the sorely shaken nation. The issue lay between the right we knew and the wrong we did.

No doubt, the principles of the Atlantic Charter were right and the practices and principles of the Axis were false. It was because we gave lip-service to the better while we yielded yeoman service to the worse that the pass was sold. While man saluted God as the eternal right and mocked Him by adhesion to His opposite*, wars in a crescendo of horror would continue.

No emphasis too great could be placed upon the power which moral law exerted over human life, said Dr. North. All history showed this. The presence of the will «f God was betokened in the workings of conscience. »

Acts of obedience to the dictates of conscience shone forth. • When the captain of a Star boat Rave his lifebelt to a shivering Italian prisoner; when another captain steered his armed merchantman against a German battleship to shield his convoy; when Captain Oates went out into the Antarctic Blizzard then the splendour of the moral law to which man owed obcdience was revealed, v here was a power not ourselves tnat made for rihteousness, and those who yielded to its sway were carried far. This was the rock foundation on which the new order must be built.