CHURCH & LABOUR

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 204, 12 August 1932, Page 5

CHURCH & LABOUR

RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM ADDRESS BY BEV. J. K. ARCHER. THE DESTINY OF RUSSIA. An address on the relationships between the Christian religion and the Labour movement was given by the Rev. J. K. Archer, of Christchurch, to an audience in the Hastings Trades Hall last evening. Mr Arch. Lowe presided. Opening his address, Mr Archer said he was speaking from the inside of the Labour Party as well as from the inside of the Church. In this great crisis the Church had one of its finest opportunities to bring about in a constitutional way some of the changes that would and must take place. The people were hungry for religious leadership—not wowserism, but the Christianity of Jesus. The action of the churches in oennection with the tramway strike in Christchurch, for example, had had a tremendous influence in arousing increased religious interest and loyalty among the people. That action of the churches had been induced only by Christian and humanitarian interests, and had been a great example to the people. Why did not the churches to-day come out fearlessly and unequivocally and take part in helping to solve the troubles of to-day? The answer was that both the ministry and the laity were woefully ignorant of the teachings of the Bible, which contained the solution of every one of to-day’s social and economic troubles.

George Whitfield, a great preacher and student of the Bible, bought and kept slaves, and when asked how he could reconcile the keeping of slaves with the teaching of the Bible, answered that he had been so busy in preaching the Gospels that he had not had time to consider the rights and wrongs of slavery. That attitude, said Mr Archer, was the attitude of many Christian people towards to-day’s problems. Many were too busy or too lazy to study them from the Scriptural point of view. EVIL OF APATHY. There was a sort of illusion that the clergy were meant to deal only with th spiritual things of life, and not with material things. On the contrary, the Bible dealt with man in all his aspects; and actually the word “soul” in the Bible meant “personality,” and not a purely spiritual entity. From the first ■word of Matthew to the last word of John, Jesus mentioned the Church only twice; but He mentioned the Kingdom of God—God’s Dominion over man—one hundred and twelve times. The emphasis on Christ’s preaching of the Kingdom of God was as one hundred and twelve to two as against his preaching of the Church as a Church. It was the teaching and preaching of the Kingdom of God that was needed today. Another evil to-day was apathy; it was an evil that we were concerned too much with making money or with losing it, and not enough with the real and spiritual meaning of life and of Christ's teaching. If “we would set about this business,” we should see in a quarter of a century a transformed world—not the millenium, but a happier world in which more emphasis would be laid on the things of real value, and not on the things of purely worldly and material worth. The modern Labour movement was the child of the Methodist Revival. A great deal of the preaching that John Wesley did was among the miners, and thousands of them—tens of thousands of them—had become Christians under the influence of Wesley’s evangelism. So far as the speaker knew, Wesley did not preach teetotalism or prohibition, but he did preach sobriety. And when he had preached the thirsty miners into sobriety, the miners woke up and asked themselves why they should not be allowed social and economic equality with others of mankind; thus it was that the trades union movement, which had been created, but had languished before Wesley’s time, was revived. KEIR HARDIE)—“A HERO.” Men could go a long way in religion, and be really seriously religious, and yet intellectually and religiously in opposition to the movements of to-day. Mr Archer went on to say that one of the greatest men that the Labour movement in Britain had produced was Keir Hardie. They had not many heroes, but Keir Hardie was one of them. He heard him speak in Grimsby Town Hall forty years ago, and had been silently converted; “and I have remained there ever since,’’ Mr Archer added. Hardie had been on the side of social justice, and of economic liberty and progress. Why could we not get those things today ? There were plenty of earnest social teachers and preachers in the church.

There were land-laws in the Bible; one was that the whole universe be longed to God; another was that the land was lent by God to mankind, and not to a few men called landlords, for the use of mankind and for the production of necessaries. There was to be no land speculation, no land gambling, and no land monopoly. Those were some of the Bible’s land-laws, and the adoption of those laws would solve the problems of the farmers to-day. The farmers in New Zealand lived and farmed under more humiliating conditions than prevailing in any other country in the world. None of them could buy or sell a horse or a cow, or carry out any financial! transaction, without permission. Not one of. them was not tied to “those abominable financial and commercial houses.” After saying that “Forbes and Coates had fooled the people,” Mr Archer went on to say that mortgages and interests, and war debts and war loans, were responsible for most of our burdens to-day. Usury was condemned by the Bible. v THE SINS OF THE PRESS. “Most of us are fooled by the newspaper press about what Communism is,” Mr Archer said in reference to Communists and their philosophy. He did not uphold the philosophy of violence, but he held that the “old reactionaries” and “stagnationists” of the press drew a red herring across the trail by writing of the (Communists’

“machinery clause’’ and ignoring the Communists’ philosophy of sharing wealth and resources. What had the parsons done? The Tory-ised parsons had sacrificed the Scriptures to their own Toryism. They were sacrificing the Christian faith to Conservatism in politics. We had strayed from the spirit of early Christian teaching, and were living according to the ideals of individualism and not of communal good.

The speaker went on to condemn the system of competition, and then dealt with what he described as the public misconceptions regarding Socialism. A lot of nonsense was uttered with regard to the principles and theories of Socialism. Actually, Socialism was in a way conservative in principle, for it meant conserving the world’s wealth and resources fox' the use of the whole of mankind. “Those fools who ruu down Socialism do it through ignorance or prejudice,” Mr Archer said. The only man that the Labour Party was up against was the men who tried to take a rise out of his fellows. Socialism meant each for all, and all for each; it meant Christian brotherhood and brotherly love. Labour was not against Capitalism; it wanted universal capitalism. Labour was not against the capitalist; it wanted everyone to be a capitalist Private Capitalism, however, had to go, and there was no justification for continuing it. Mr Archer concluded with some remarks on Russia and the revolution of 1917 and its consequences. Russia, he said, would ultimately become the most Christian Empire of the world. for the Russians were introducing Christian principles not only into sermons and services and into matters of purely Sunday use, but into land-ownership and the practical affairs of life.