WIDENING SPHERE OF STATE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22451, 12 July 1938, Page 6

WIDENING SPHERE OF STATE

PROBLEMS CREATED FOR CHURCH ARCHBISHOP OF YORK ON MODERN TRENDS LONDON, June 17. The Archbishop of York (Dr. W. Temple), in his presidential address to the York Diocesan Conference at York yesterday, said that, so far from the advance of scientific knowledge having solved our social and economic problems, it had presented the world with problems guite as enormous and serious as any that it had solved. Therefore there had to be an attempt to think of the intricacies of the interrelated problems of peoples and nations, and it was very nearly beyond the wit of man to compass them. Referring to the new means of rapid transport, he said that a phase that was prominent in most people’s minds was undoubtedly connected with aircraft. This new means of communication, which could be, and undoubtedly some day would be, mainly the means of promoting friendly intercourse, was now in fact presenting the world with a new threat to the very stability of civilisation. The use Of this instrument of warfare had brought in the possibility of wholesale destruction beyond anything that had been dreamed of. Pressure of Secularism Along with all this new organisation of life there, had come an. inevitable

change in men’s outlook, and all over ihe world those who held any form of religious belief were confronted with the pressure of secularism--# frame of mind which was concerned about the conduct of human life with* out any reference to any form of spiritual power. One effect of this capacity for organising life on a vast scale was that the State, as being the central organising factor in any community, perpetually extended its activities and had undertaken to play a part in human life which was never contemplated untU very recent times. One main problem with which the Church was confronted on every side was the adjustment' of its own activities to the new activities of the State. It was all over the world, and in some countries had bitten so deeply that the State tried to undertake the complete supervision of the whole area of life, "Problems of First Magnitude” When it did that it was inevitably non-religious, and if a non-religious agency endeavoured to control the whole of human life the effect was anti-religious. We had seen in other countries abroad the whole training of young people taken away from the Church—not. in the sense of forbidding a Church organisation, but merely of claiming so much of their time that they could not be present at the Church organisation. The Church had to decide what its attitude was to be in the steadily increased activity of the State. It had before it a novel set of problems of the first magnitude. There was surely need for deliberate cooperation between all Christian peoples as against the non-Christian forces in the world. It was a very big piece of work, which would require a very great deal of co-opera-tive thinking.