COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25580, 23 August 1948, Page 8

COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANITY

SIMILARITY OF BELIEFS

SERMON BY MR A. BULL Evangelical Christianity was the antidote to Marxian communism, said Mr M. A. Bull, Rector of the Timaru Boys’ High School, speaking at the Woodlands Street Methodist Church, Timaru, last evening, on the subject of Christianity and Communism. Communists were evangelical, he said, with action an essential part of their makeup, and if they faced an inert body in the rest of the world, they would surely triumph. While Marxian communism and Christianity were similar, they must ultimately be opposed. In their views of poverty, as a thing that was holy, but should nevertheless be eliminated, and their judgment of man as a man and not by his works, they were identical, but in other respects such as the Marxian view that change must come by force, they were at variance. Marxian literature should not be read except where persons had already a liberal background and desired to take an intelligent interest in its basis, and since its composition was so extremely attractive and was backed up by hosts of examples, many excellent voung people had been won over by Surveying the Capitalist, Socialist, and Communistic systems, Mr Bull said that each in theory was perfect, but in practice all had failings. A Russian would laugh at the assertion that there was Communism in Russia. They were known as Communists only because they were striving for the eventual goal of a classless society. There had been examples of Communism in the early church of Jerusalem, monastic orders, and in the army system, he said.