DISARMING THE WORLD

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 75, 10 March 1933, Page 6

DISARMING THE WORLD

SPIRITUAL FORCE NECESSARY. DEFEAT] NG M ATER lALISM. Most people were of the opinion that the world was in a transition period, said the Rev. Harry Johnson of Cambridge Terrace Congregational Church, Wellington, in his presidential address to the Assembly oi the Congregational Union at Auckland. If the curtain of the world’s stage, said the speaker, was about to rise upon a new era with new values and new ideals, then the church must exert an influence at this critical time. A spiritual backing was essential to any genuine and abiding reform. The world was still perfecting more destructive weapons than were u-<d n the Great War. and so far from mere being a federation of nations they were regarding each other with greater distrust, fear and hatred. Unless the nations called a halt they were heading for ruin with the collapse of civilisation. A great number of thinking men had reached the conclusion that the root cause of the crisis was absolutely moral. As it was, material forces counted, and nations were more concerned with armaments than with God. The nations signed peace pacts with one hand and piled up munitions with the other, and moral forces were set aside. Unless the principles of Chris- , tianity -were embodied in the new social and economic order there was no hope of a permanent solution of the present troubles. The president strenuously asserted that there was a splendid opportunity for the Christian churches to exert an influence which would lead the nations away from those ideals which could afford no relief for the present state of affairs, and the Puritan spirit shou' I be revived to help them through the crisis. The alternative te Puritanism was Paganism, which was prevalent in the world to-day. Personally, the speaker was optimistic enough to believe with John Oxenham. “I see a new earth arising from the ashes of the past. For soon the soul of life will blaze with justice come at last. . . . From these times of self-profit, from these days of unrest, A sweeter life is springing, through the quickening of our best.”-