OXFORD GROUP

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 47, 24 January 1939, Page 2

OXFORD GROUP

MORAL REARMAMENT. GATHERING AT MARION. Several residents of Palmerston North spent the week-end in Mar ton, together witli about 40 people from all over the North Island. Readers of the “Standard” are by this time familiar with the term “Moral Kermanient,” and it was to find how the principles of moral and spiritual rearmament could become effective in their own lives and throughout New Zealand that these people met. Three of them had been in Fairopc during the international crisis, and attended the World Assembly of the Oxford Group at Interlaken, and they described tlieir experiences.

Mr C. Athol Williams, of Pukeliou, Hawke’s Bay, showed some moving picture he had taken, particularly of the Hyde Park trenches and of air raid precautions and crisis posters, and told of the business men be had met who had started by putting their homes on a reconstructed moral basis, and had then extended it to their businesses with ever-widening influence.

Miss Enid Middleton, B.H.Sc., of Wellington, gave vivid descriptions of the team-work of the Oxford Group in the East End of London among Labour mayors (several of them women) and councillors, and in the slum homes, and at meetings which were liable to be broken up by the opposition. Her stories proved hcyoml doubt how spiritual revolution in an individual and a home could make a difference to living under terrible economic conditions and have a wide effect on the administration of a town, replacing war with working together for the moral rearmament of a whole district.

Mr lan Macpliail, of Hawke’s Bay. told of liis visit to Denmark, and of the common basis of unity which different peoples of opposing interests— Jew and Arab. Sudetens and Czechs, people from Balkan .States, and from China and Japan—had found at Interlaken, when the barriers of fear and selfishness were down. The state of Europe during the crisis had shown tho urgency of the international situation, and only as people learned to use all their energies and resources under the guidance of God for the moral and spiritual rearmament of the nations could chaos be averted.

On Sunday evening, several Marton residents were.invited to meet the visitors, and some of the New Zealanders showed how the application of the principles of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love in individual lives were leading to the reawakening of national responsibility.

A sheep-run holder told how he had regarded his land as a source of income only, but he had now seen that 05 per cent of the world depended on land, so what the world was like depended largely on what the farmers were like, and he was seeing now his responsibility. A housewife showed how iier life affected the life of the nation beyond her home because of her influence on education through her children, on business through’ her shopping, on employment through her help, and on social life through her friends. All these areas of the nation’s life were affected by the sort of life she lived at home. A lawyer referred to his true vocation as being mending homes rather than taking fees for arranging divorces. The answer to broken homes was to be found in a new sense of spiritual values, and the will to live in the light of these. A newspaperman showed how the "Press influenced people by the quality and manner of presentation of the news .and how newsmen now were realising the need to present a positive answer to the problems they reported. One woman who had been brought up in a revolutionary home, and liad always blamed capitalists _ and warmongers for economic and international war, had found that the answer to these problems was to be rid of the seeds of war in the individual, and all the good laws and pacts could not cope with the problem unless individuals were carrying out in their own lives the principles of peace. Another speaker referred to this as an armaments race, “Chaos against God,” and referred to the letter to tho London Times signed by Lord Baldwin and other national leaders, in which they said: “If we were to put the energv and resourcefulness into the task of moral rearmament that we now find ourselves forced to expend on national defence, tho peace of the world would be assured.” Last year the nations (excluding Germany) had spent £'J,400,000 000 on armaments, hut the cost of the World Assembly for Moral Rearmament at InTcrlaken had cost onlv the price of a single shell. The meeting was concluded by stressing the fact that national rebirth must begin with personal rebirth, and could lead to a world remade.