Moral Rearmament

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 259, 31 July 1939, Page 11

Moral Rearmament

Sir. —The growing movement for moral rearmament expresses clearly the felt need of the great mass of humanity for some form of guidance through the dark forests of greed, selfishness and barbarity which increasingly surround the peoples of the world. But'can that movement satisfy adequately the admitted need for guidance? Is there not a desperate want of something more than mere goodwill, however ecstatically experienced? The very best intentions of the democratic peoples did not save the League of Nations, spare one Abyssinian nor stay from falling one bomb poised above Guernica or Barcelona. And why ? Because those undoubted good intentions lacked tbe direction that could have been given alone by study and the careful acquisition of exact knowledge on matters social, political, economic and international. In fine, the best of good intentions does not replace laborious study and the knowledge obtainable, thereby. “If people could only read —,’’ cried Marx unceasingly. “We must learn, learn, and learn,” said Lenin, “every cook, every common labourer must learn to rule the Slate.” It is immaterial. whether one regards Marx and Lenin as fiends incarnate or as the sole latterday inheritors of apostolic benevolence. They have pointed out the steep and laborious road, but the only true road to the understanding and remedy of ‘the domestic and international ills that afflict us.—l am, etc., H. W. YOUREN, Napier, July 28.