“A DOPED RELIGION.”

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 47, Issue 2666, 6 September 1937, Page 8

“A DOPED RELIGION.”

(To the Editor). Sir,- —In my salad days I heard a good deal about “religious dope.” You

can still hear these mutterings if you like to listen, but the fact is that religion is more often the victim than the offender and the practice of doping* it still goes on. The Bible may, as Queen Victoria once said, be “the secret of England’s greatness.” It certainly was the secret of one of England’s greatest social and political upheavals, but that was because of the dope that had been introduced into its moral or ethical teaching.

According to history the Roman See was selling indulgences and this so annoyed the purist Luther that he, in his attempt to correct the abuse, doped religion once more by eliminating the sacrament of works. English religion has not recovered yet. It is cluttered up with a price complex, plus a worship of trade—“A nation of shopkeepers,” said Napoleon. It is this dope which is hindering the settlement of our industrial and employment questions in New Zealand to-day, and until we get the price bug out, will continue to impede settlement.

Having thus tried first to remove the beam out of our Empire eye. let me turn to Germany, for the simple reason that a religion being the basis of the social organisation, its form must exert a very powerful influence in the national destiny. A German propagandist, Wilhelm Hauer, is telling the German youth that although the racial descent of Jesus of Nazareth may be uncertain, “we protest against his being imposed upon us as a leader and pattern, because if He be thus accepted our native religious life, which grows immediately out of our own genius, will be diverted into foreign tracks.”

. This movement is not very widespread as yet, but it has official sanction. Ah well, “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make blind.”

The conflict in Czechoslovakia between the National church and the Roman See is another illustration of how religion can be doped and it was this infernal dope that caused the Russian revolutionists to turn upon a doped priest-craft who had pruned the tree vine to a stand still state. And was it not ever thus ? During their history the Hebrews trampled upon the ethical and separatist teaching their grout emancipator Moses, to such an extent that civic strife and racial hatred brought them to a point where they had “no dealing with, the Samaritans” who were closely related to them, and finally brought them into collision with the Roman power and their dispersion.

In our time all this political talk about socialism and nationality is only beating about the bush. The young man who came to Jesus on the quiet v. m. a great stickler for law—“ All these hive I kept from my youth up, what lack I yet?” The answer cut deep, go and get rid of the dope of property and live for others as well as yourself. And to Martha He said, “Martha, but one thing is needed, and Mary hath chosen that good part.” Taith and Hope and Charity which spurns legislative compulsion; a com-\W-dori that after all is a very poor rniidote to a doped religion. E.N.D.