INFLUENCE OF CHURCH

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 111, 6 November 1935, Page 29

INFLUENCE OF CHURCH

"SHE HAS NOT FAILED"

THE ECONOMIC SITUATION

Addressing himself to the question "Has the Church failed?" the Rev. H. H. Barton, M.A., in his address last night as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, said that, frankly, he did not believe it had. On the contrary, he ventured to hope that the calm judgment of future days would look back on this period as a surpassing evidence of the power of the Christian Church,, and of the ideals for which she stood in moulding and transforming the ideas and ideals of man.

How much would the European world have been concerned a century or two ago by the butchery of some thousands of dark-skinned Abyssinians in a war of territorial expansion? No more significant evidence of the power of the League of Nations and of those essentially Christian ideals which furnished its dynamic could be found than that a great European nation should be arraigned at the bar of international justice, condemned as an aggressor, and, by vigorous and adequate measures, be. forced to release its prey! It was said that the present economic situation was evidence of the Church's failure. But the responsibility of the Church was not to devise plans for economic recovery. That was the task of the men of affairs and the experts in the economic realm. He believed that men would one day look back and see that the Church had contributed the essential element to the solution.

Mr. Barton said he was persuaded that what they needed was a consecrated ministry, a consecrated eldership, and a consecrated membership. The history of the past had shown that a handful of devoted men and women were worth whole armies of the half-hearted, the careless, and the indifferent. There was only one safe move for the Church of Christ, as for the individual, and that was a forward movement.