GRAVE ISSUES ARE AT STAKE ARCHBISHOP SAYS

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 October 1948, Page 5

GRAVE ISSUES ARE AT STAKE ARCHBISHOP SAYS

LONDON, October 14

Berlin was a symbol of a cold war being waged with deadly, ruthless determination by an aggressive police state against democracy, said the Archbishop of York (Dr Garbett) in his presidential address to the Convocation of York. The cold war must be defeated by the cold and steady nerves of a people convinced of the justice of their cause, he said. “Grave moral issues are at stake. If the Allies withdraw from Berlin they will betray the people who trusted them. Their retreat would lead to further demands and surrenders until all Europe would be under the power of militant Communism. The hour of our doom then could not be long postponed.” Dr Garbett defined the four duties of a Christian in the face of what he called “the horrible and disastrous possibility of a third world war,” as being to do the utmost to remove the causes of war; to support the United Nations in an attempt to limit the disasters of nationalism; to support all proposals for reducing the disasters of war, and this meant the abolition of the atomic bomb; and to recognise that war is not the worst of all evils. The removal of all righteousness and truth was worse than war, he said. In an armed world a democratic State must also be armed. That was why the British Government was getting ready to resist aggression.