IS ADVERSITY GOOD FOR US?

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21506, 22 June 1935, Page 20

IS ADVERSITY GOOD FOR US?

to th» bditob or rn» m»s» Sir,—l must thank the framer of the above question from my previous rather nebulous letter, also your correspondents who have so kindly helped to elucidate it Thinking over their conclusions with my own leads me to the belief that the right answer entirely depends on the origin of the adversity. If adversity is God-given and causes man to suffer, it is then for his own benefit as being the urge to something better; that is to say, it has a divine purpose and is good. If adversity is man-given and acquired by say (as recently expressed by someone) throwing the gifts of God back in His face, or any other device numerous enough and so causes bodily, mental, or spiritual suffering for no divine purpose at all. then it is wholly bad and should be condemned. So far the Church has failed to utter this condemnation. One is tempted to the belief that seeing these things as she must, the Church has adopted the easy expedient of compromise between acquiescence and opposing, and satisfies it by deploring the consequences of adversity generally. Whether as a result of this attitude or not the Christian Church as a world-wide influence is visibly slipping. Within the last 20 years nearly one-third of the total Christian population of the world has renounced the Church bag and baggage. We see things that are untrue—grotesquely untrue, such as the cry of plethora because markets are oversupplied. We do not hear the Church officially asking if no one has an undersupply and the reason why and demanding an answer. The unfortunate human consequences of this undersupply or maldistribution, as it is called, are deplored of course. We see the Church working long and earnestly to remove the shortage of work that men through the mercy of God and their bodies and brains have produced as the fruit of victory over their old age enemy, nature, and. too, the sign of man's intellectual and scientific progress—the ideal for which he has ever been striving. This through finance is decreed as a curse. In very truth it is a blessing as never before that man may be freer to develop his trinity of mind, body, and spirit churchwards and Christwards and deliberately put to frustration. We see the Church with platitude and deploration joining with earnest and good men and women obeying the truculencies of finance by finding work, making work, doling out work, any sort of work, and other humiliations as means of avoiding the penalty of its decree of failure by having the corpses of their fellow citizens stinking to high heaven as a result. Would Christ have stood for this.' I do not believe it. I If we look back over the hfe ol> 1 the Master for Whom the Church deputises to-day, one is struck by the emphasis He laid on the importance of environment in regard to its freedom from adversity, suffering, and sordulness, that is to say a physical wellbeing as an essential before giving His message. He healed the sick, comforted the fatherless, and fed the I hungry, even to the extent on tv/o recorded occasions of feeding a multitude of 4000 and 5000. and there is no record of finance interjposing between the miracle of production on its v/ay to consumption as we have to-day. It would not be difficult for anyone today to imagine with tolerable certainty what Christ would have said, and said with no uncertain voice, had the disciples reported that some person, speaking with apparent authority, had instructed them that as the Pauline law had not been obeyed nor the canons of sound finance complied with, this food, produced by a wonderful but no greater miracle than it is produced by todav, was decreed not to be allowed to reach them. If this speech of our Lord's had not been delivered then, it cannot be denied that it would have been delivered to-day. Why does the Church that aspires to represent the Master refrain from making it? Does she think that He would have complied, deplored, and passed on? Instead of the results of the past ages of God-sent adversity opening the doors to a new era of happiness for mankind, we find the Church with this man-made, this false adversity, standing side by side preventing the people, the flock entrusted to her care, from reaching it. It is this kind of adversity that in my opinion is not good for us.—Yours, "etc., Y. T. SHAND. June 19, 1933. *o tub jsorroa o» ires passa. Sir,—Are not some of the letters under the above heading getting a little bit too Involved over such a simple question, so missing the opportunity of conveying helpful teaching to those in adversity that they may profit thereby. I am not sure if there are other uses, but the Psalmist very clearly stated one use in which he found it of benefit: "It is good for me that I have been afflicted that I might learn Thy statutes." In confirmation of this use let me quote what the Bishop of Chelmsford said in 1931: "I am still convinced that the Bible is not read as it once was and I believe that that is the source of all the disasters and of all the anxieties that are facing us in this country and in the world at large. I am satisfied that the root of the world's trouble is not social, and not economic [Primarily. There are symptoms of I something deeper. It is a spiritual

disease from which wa are suffering to-day. We shall never recover until the spiritual remedy has been applied." And James Douglas, in an inspiriting article, writes: "The whole world today is overwhelmed by adversity. Poverty has submerged the nations; confidence is dead; credit is paralysed. The world is sick, and no man knows the cure for its sickness. This world disaster may be world-salvation. It may lead ali the nations back to the simplicities and realities of Christianity. It'may throw down the idols they worship. It may set them free from the thraldom of false gods. If v/e believe in the Divine governance of things we may see in the world-malady a moral and spiritual tonic and stimulus. We may descry a higher religious hope in the midnight secular pessimism." The foregoing quotations are not given in commendation of individual poverty and distress; they show rather that all the suffering arising out of poverty and unemployment is chiefly the result of so many well-to-do people failing to live up to the teachings of a Bible they do not now read or reverence as the inspired word of God, and so authoritative and commanding respect for the rules it lays down for individual nations.—Yours, etc., P. H. PRITCHETT. June 18, 1935.