MISSION IN PAEROA

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 53, Issue 32429, 10 May 1944, Page 5

MISSION IN PAEROA

(To the Editor.)

■Sir, —I regret that the Rev. Mr Thompson calls for further criticism. He has to 'be bluntly informed of several things. Firstly, that I do not “gibe.” As an active Christian worker in view of quite wide dissatisfaction at his Ahzac Day utterance as reported, I provided him with the opportunity of removing the bad impression created. He has only aggravated it. As a Christian I want Mr Thompson to know that manyi of us believe the Christian pulpit to have a far higher office than the distribution of white feathers. He does not seem to appreciate the fact that the day has gone when the Christian pulpit was made the enlistment platform with the cry of “Holy War!” We all note, for it has been well advertised, that the ffiissioner, in. spite of the Sixth Commandment of the Almighty God, “Thou shalt not kill,” hastened overseas to fight the recalcitrant Boer. Is he today still proud of his motives in so doing? Would he have us make “holy war” next against the people of India who so wickedly disapprove of Britist rule? Had he lived in an earlier generation would- he have lauded the volunteers who fought the Chinese in the “Opium War” of 183-9, that most unsavoury episode in our history ? I would point to a better way for the employment of the gifts of the Christian ministry. At the beginning of the present centuryi when the war clouds hung over Chile and Argentina, it was the preaching from the pulpit that prevented the war, an event forever symbolised in the statue of Christ in the Andes. But apparently the Rev. Missioner would not so have used his pulpit. Would he have whipped up the war spirit, urged the men to enlist, and used the whip of his tongue barbed with the unchristian epithet “shirker.”

Better learn of G.B. Shaw who does not voluntarily contribute even to war taxation for, he declares, if his advice had been taken the war would not h'ave occurred. What has the missioner or his colleagues done in the intervening years l to remove the root causes of war ? Have they been brave enough to uncover such things? I think not. As war succeds war they content themselves with following the path of least resistance. Not all, certainly, and those who now speak as does the missioner are fortunately in a dwindling minority. St. Paul justifies the position of the conscript in his injunction in 1 Peter 2: 13', “submit yourselves to every ordinance of man whether it be to the king oi* unto governors, etc.” If the state requires the services of its members in its defence it conscripts them and the Christian submits.

The missioner’s statement that ■Christ has no use for conscripts is a shocking utterance from a Christian minister. Christ, in the record of St. Luke’s Gospel, 14: 23, bids his servants to “go into the highways and hedges' and compel them to come in,” and no alternative' translation of the word ‘compel’ can be given to weaken its full significance.—l am, etc., READER. Paeroa, 3:5:44.