The World's Conscience

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 109, 1 February 1941, Page 15

The World's Conscience

“‘The conversion’ of Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson tells us, is a necessity to the future of Europe; and is perhaps going to be an incredibly arduous process. Ideas of right and wrong have been transposed, young consciences malformed, terms debauched. “To some minor extent, feelings outside Germany, too, have been made callous: we have supped on horrors till sin is almost a platitude, and the zest for its punishment and its perpetrator’s conversion becomes faint. We have, all of us alike, to recover that first intensity and simplicity of moral view, the irreducible distinction between good and bad. “The world's conscience has to be sensitized and Christianized again, the moral lines drawn precisely and the higher emotions quickened. Can politicians do this alone? No statesman worth his place would claim it. “If the trampet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle? And morality—in isolation from religion and its sanctions—is a trumpet that gives such an uncertain sound. It lays down laws; but reflective people can only ask, ‘Why?’ And morality, as such, cannot answer. It can only repeat its dogma, with feminine inconsequence. The reason is that it is a fruit, not a root; a result of something, not a cause; a system, not the builder of that system.”—Mr. W. J. Blyton, in a notable article on “The Return of the Law” in the current issue of the “Quarterly Review.”