Foe Within America’s Gates

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 20 June 1931, Page 16

Foe Within America’s Gates

T' ERE we threatened by an invading V/V/ foe, the manhood of this country 1/ yj would spring to arms by the thousands and proudly die for defence of hearth and home.” says the Rev. Dr. Henry Howard, an Australian-born minister of a famous New York Fifth Avenue Church. “Put when the foe is within our very gates, when the social fabric is being threatened by those who are grasping at public power that they may turn it to selfish ends, when men of known venality are thronging the thrones and chairs of civil power, when class hatreds arc being fostered for party ends, when officers of the law are themselves breakers of the law, and when the very fountain-head of justice is defiled, when a highly organised underword with millions of dollars at its call can delay and defeat the processes of the courts and laugh to scorn the penalties of wrong, the call is loud and urgent for lovers of this country to come, to its aid. “Familiarity has made us tolerant of what iii self-defence we should long ago have risen up and destroyed. We are sitting down at the present moment to a condition of things and accepting as inevitable what should he insufferable. “I claim no prophetic gift, but as one who loves you I warn you that if our corporate sense

Grasping Public Power For Selfish Ends

of decency does not rise up and end this vicious state of things, then it will surely end us. “No cancerous growth ever worked with more destructive and deadly certainty in the tissues of the human body than do these rapacious parasites in the body corporate. “The Christianity in demand to-day is a manly, virile, robust militant force that will stand down amid all the heat and dust and sweat of the arena against the wild beast of pillage and plunder, of lust and hate, a Christianity that will not fear but will invite contact and conflict, working like purging fire and searching salt throughout the length and breadth of our country's life and of our city’s life. “And so to save it in the only possible way from moral putrefaction and decay, I challenge you to-dav in the high and holy name of Him who came to seek that He might save that you take up your cross with both hands and by the vows of your conservation, by the faith you confess and "by the blessed memory of its martyred sons, by the urgent need of the hour, by the peril that is threatening the entire solical structure which it has taken centuries to build, that you draw the sword of the spirit against the entrenched. the highly organised, well-patronised and richly subsidised vices that are playing havoc with our family, social, industrial and political life.”