THE NEW ORDER

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 71, 21 February 1940, Page 8

THE NEW ORDER

CIVILISATION’S SEARCH. DUTY OF THE CHURCH. Per Press Association. \\ ELiHaGiUa, l 1 eh. 20. “We are lace to face with new problems of which our fathers never dreamed. The world is at present in travail, and we expect there will come to birth a new order. There can be little doubt that at the present moment thinking men everywhere are conscious of impending change. A new order of society is coming to birth, but what the character of that new order will he we are not able clearly to discern. But there are many hopeful signs,” declared Rt. Rev. J. Lawson Robinson, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, when addressing the Centennial Assembly to-night. “We are looking on the dissolution of a civilisation whose ideals are frankly material; we are witnessing the disillusionment of men who had come to think, in spite of sacred authority, that they could live by bread alone. It is clearly evident to-day that the peace of the world does not rest solely or chiefly oil economic systems. There were many people who looked hopefully and longingly at the Russian experiment of organising life on a more or less communistic basis. Europe’s successive failures since 1918 to organise peace oil a lasting foundation are not, as believers in the Marxian analysis of history assert, the result of economic conflict, and the wars now in progress the death agonies of decadent capitalism. If Russia’s alliance with National Socialism, and her lapse into predatory imperialism, show anything at all, they show that, to remove inequalities of wealth and class divisions from a society is not thereby to purge that society of error and evil. “The chaos into which contemporary Europe lias sunk is the result- of a moral and spiritual collapse, of an abandonment by the human race of those principles which are the nexus of social and international organisation. ‘Before all else,’ says the Pope in his latest encyclical, ‘it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils we deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal form of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations.’ ft is important there should be a reign of law in the international field, but the problem of creating a new world order is, as Mr Roosevelt said a iew weeks ago, a problem of faith. CHURCHES’ TASK. “With the break-up of civilisation into communities inspired by false doctrines of race and class'and nationality, the Churches have become the principal guardians of the idea of the human race as an organic unity subject to universal laws; it is the Churches which have been most courageous and successful in resisting State absolutism; and it is in the growing power of the Churches that lies, as Mr Roosevelt lias seen, the principal hope of re-creating the basis for a community of nations. It is not through blind reaction that the world will find its way back to peace and sanity, hut rather through a balanced understanding of the need for a common faith to restore coherence to human society, and of the impossibility of finding any such faith in purely' materialist or utilitarian philosophies. THE ONE HOPE. “It is significant that from many thoughtful sources, which cannot be accused of professional bias, has come the acknowledgment that in the message with which the Churches are entrusted lies the one hope of mankind. The Christian Gospel of the unity and brotherhood of the human race, and its salvation in Jesus Christ, is being abundantly vindicated in the chaos and confusion into which the world lias fallen through its negation of the Christian principle. IN e can declare that Gospel, we can enunciate that principle with even greater confidence than before. Civilisation lias for generations past been putting its trust in materialist philosophies, in the worship of mammon; and as a result civilisation is in collapse. Wo have the only remedy for such conditions. —the constant proclamation of the Christian message, and the persistent declaration that in the principles of Jesus Christ the only hope of sanity and peace is found. That is our task, in this new century. The responsibility is on ns who are the grateful heirs to all the devotion and earnestness and courage of the past,” concluded Mr Robinson.