WAR AND CHRISTIANITY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 9 November 1925, Page 10

WAR AND CHRISTIANITY.

IDEALS OF THE LEAGUE. \ DR. FOSDICK’S ADDRESS AT GENEVA. Dr. Fosdick, of New York, preaching in the cathedral at Geneva on Sunday during the meeting of the League on the text: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” said that ■ll these words we had one of those surprising insights where, far ahead of the event, a seer perceived an obscure truth which only long afterward would emerge clear, unmistakable, imperative, so that all men must believe it. To day that insight, came into its own. Upon the arousing of the conscience of Christendom about war the destinies of humankind depended.

It has been said again and again (said Mr. Fosdick) that if another war befalls us and shakes civilisation to its foundations, the Christians of the world will be to blame. The continuance of war will advertise that the 576,000,000 professed Christians on earth have net had an earnest conscience about their Master’s view of life. There may have been times when war could serve good ends, when armed conflict was a means of social progress, but the conviction now growing strong in this generation's mind is that whatever may have been true about war in times past, modern war is futile to achieve any good or Christian thing. “Would you not go to war to protect the weak?” men ask. That is a grim jest. See how modern war protects the weak: 10,000,000 known dead soldiers; 3,000,000 presumed dead -soldiers; 13,000,000 dead civilians; 20,000,000 wounded; 3,000,000 prisoners; 9,000,000 war orphans; 5,000,000 war widows; 10,000,000 refugees. A World Court would protect the weak. A League of Nations would protect the weak. An international mind, backed by a Christian conscience, that would stop the race for armaments, provide co-operative substitutes for violence, forbid the nations to resort to force, and finally outlaw war altogether—that would protect the weak. But war will not do it.

The war system as a recognised method of international action is one thing; Christianity, with all its purposes and hopes is another, and not all the dialectic of the apologists can make the two lie down in peace together. We may have one or we may have the other, but we cannot permanently have both. Within the last four hundred years nationalism has taken a new and startling form in our Western world. Our economic life has become nationalised; our education, even our religion, has been nationalised. Let Protestantism acknowledge its large responsibility for this in Western Christendom! At the same time another movement has been gathering headway. The enlarging fellowship of human life upon this planet, which began with the clan and tribe, has been moved out through ever-widening circles of communication and contact, has now become explicitly and overwhelmingly international, and it can never* be crotvded back .again. Wherever we have civilised any social group, the essential thing which has happened is that in that group not force, but co-operation, has become the arbiter.

On the one side, our life has been organised as never before in history on a nationalistic basis. On the other hand, the one hope of humanity to-day if it is to escape devastating ruin, lies in rising above and beyond this nationalism, and organising the world for peace. In unforgettable;, -words the world has been told by a great patriot: “Patriotism is not enough.“

War is the most colossal and ruinous social sin that afflicts mankind (Dr. Fosdick concluded); it is utterly and irremediably un-Christian; in its total method and effect it means everything that Jesus did not mean; it is a moreblatant denial of every Christian doctrine about God and man than all the theoretical atheists on earth ever could devise. Here, to-day, as an American, I cannot speak for my Government, but both as an American f and as a Christian I do speak for millions of my fellow-citizens in wishing your great work, in which -we believe, for which wc pray, our absence from which we painfully regret, the eminent success which it deserves.