AWAITING DELIVERANCE

Evening Star, Issue 23351, 22 August 1939, Page 7

AWAITING DELIVERANCE

“A knowledge of church history is sometimes a help in time of trouble. Let us, take one simple illustration. Christianity in its very infancy was beset by imperial persecution, and before it had time to set about a protective organisation it had to withstand assaults of an officialdom that was both cruel and scornful,” said the Rt. Rev. Professor Archibald Main, D.D., Moderator of the Church of Scotland, in the course of his closing address *at the recent General Assembly. . “TJiat persecution was not a temporary outburst of a, bankrupt paganism; it was not a nightmare of a few decades. Can we realise that it- persisted for nearly 250 years ?' Yet the religion of Jesus Christ was not eradicated, and it will never be eradicated. “ The worship of Caesar, a greater personage than any of our modern dictators, was inflicted upon a suffering church generation after generation, but it was the Galilean who conquered in the end.

“Is it not shameful pessimism; to fear that Christianity is such a weak plant in the soil of the western world that it can be uprooted by mere men and their minions? “T hare taken an illustration from ancient days; I take another from our own. Do not let us forget that there is to-day a wholesome distinction between leaders of a people and the people whom they seek to lead. ,In these totalitarian days dictators hare a precarious _ supremacy, but they cannot always impose their wills Upon even a well-drilled race. • “It is my belief that in Germany to-day there are countless men and women who. despite the vigilance of informer and spy, are leading God-fear-ing and liberty-loving lives, and are waiting for the time of their delirerance from a ruthless regime. Some of them, indeed, are suffering slow martyrdom in concentration camps or in ■preventive arrest, an ironic euphemism of aggression, but surely there are many who are doing lip service in the House of Rimmon—not every ‘ heil ’ is a ‘ Hallelujah!’ “ These are words to give cheer to the faint-hearted, and some cheer is certainly opportune. But for us there must be no cry of ‘ Peace, peace, when there is no peace.’ .Without a doubt Christianity is once more on its trial. “ There are signs of the times which are not to be disregarded,- and these must be scrutinised by Christian people with humility, prayerfulness, and godly resolution. It may help us to-day to remember the brave words which a stalwart Frenchman addressed to his king some centuries ago when he reminded him of the anvil which has broken hammers.”

“ No discerning spectator,” the Moderator also said, “can fail to see that the strength of the creeds which the Communists, the Nazis,' and the Fascists have respectively preached and imposed upon their disciples has been' a passionate i faith. “ Without it, in truth, no kind of society can long survive, and the pioneers of these creeds believe' that they are the interpreters of reality, and that they can properly demand un-' swerving loyalty and complete surrender in the realism of economic forces or the call of nation and kinship.

“ But these brands of faith, however successful they may have been in a disconcerting era. of power politics, are based on human desires and impersonal powers. The foundations are mundane and not divine, and in the end of the day they will crumble and bring down with resounding crash every edifice built upon them.”