INVISIBLE ALLY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 215, 9 August 1940, Page 6

INVISIBLE ALLY

MORAL VALUES IN WAR. RESENTMENT OF WRONG. It is said that the mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small, So also do the mills of human indignation and contempt (writes L. E. Bennett, master of Wesley College, University of Sydney, in the Sydney Morning Herald). Germany’s invisible foe, which gathers strength every day and against which the Nazis cannot ultimately prevail, is the outraged conscience of humanity. This moral resentment, slow enough to arise in a day full of evil deeds and warring accusations, once aroused becomes at length the grim power which nerves a nation’s arm and fortifies its resolution. In the throes of this conflict we tend to underestimate the cumulative power of invisible things which make for victory. I mean such values as faith and spiritual ideals, moral indignation at cruelty and shame at the wanton oppression of the helpless. Naturally, we rely just now on the might of the British blockade, on the daring of our troops and airmen; but we do not see as clearly as we ought that the moral indignation of the civilised world nourishes their indomitable spirit and strengthens their arm. Mr Duff Cooper recently suggested that perhaps the ultimate factor in victory in the air would be found to lie, not chiefly in machines or in the technical skill of pilots and gunners, but in the spirit of our Air Force. I suppose he meant that at length we must rely on the human factor; for it is in this alone that the call of right and freedom and anger at their violation can be felt. ISOLATION IMPOSSIBLE. If those who wilfully outrage the moral sanctions of mankind, who turn machine-guns on terror-stricken children, crush helpless refugees under their armoured tanks, shell the wounded in the hospitals, and by unprecedented brutality vaunt their contempt of human life and ireedom —if these men, who have written the blackest page in our human history, win this war and extend their full influence in the earth, it will he a standing disgrace to the whole human family. And in that disgrace the free peoples, conscious of their spiritual heritage and yet striking- in this dread hour no blow for freedom, will have to share. No nation by its isolation, whether geographical or political, can wholly bo exempt from this charge. It is difficult to imagine any greater contempt of human life or any more arrogant and monstrous evil than that which we have now to look upon ; and it must he thwarted, not only to save our civilisation, but to preserve our heritage and the decency of our human name. At this hour in our history we cannot be content to see our faith and idealism, won in the long, toilsome struggle of the race, repudiated with such arrogance and paganism. It is not easy in the heat of the conflict to appeal'to the power of imponderable and imperishable things. The prayers of large congregations in the churches on a recent Sunday, the travail of anxious souls longing for peace, spiritual indignation at inhuman cruelty and the light and hope of ideals—all these values seem to count for so little against bombs and brutality. It is so easy to say satirically that God is on the side of the biggest battalions, and to forgot that in every dread moment men and women may lie nourished by their faith and fortified by the vision of their souls, and by this spiritual reinforcement, led on towards victory. STRENGTHENING WILL. AVe arc prone to say that in the long result certain factors will turn the tide of battle in our favour. AA 7 ell, what are these? Probably we should say “The naval blockade, our greater economic resources, the failure of the enemy’s oil supplies, dissension in liis country, and, perhaps, the - hope of American intervention.” These factors may well prove to be decisive. But are they the only factors which time strengthens ? Time is on the side of our moral and spiritual values; it is on the side of the world’s growing indignation at wanton iniquity, and we may expect shame and resentment and grim resolution to be in the ascendant as the war lengthens. This hope is based on the conviction that the race lias not yet lost its sanity and. that average, decent and fairminded people of ad countries will not lightly condone this recrudescence of barbarism in a day which should bo enlightened by the achievements of the past. This hope rests also in the still deeper conviction that our moral and spiritual ideals, with their belief in right and freedom and their hatred of oppression, are organic' to the spiritual universe, in which we draw the breath of life, and have their fount and origin in God.

The blitzkrieg can blast its way through France; it cannot storm its way through the moral sanctions of our souls. There are some indestructible things in our spiritual inheritance, and these things, because they have been so dearly won and are a fount of light in this critical hour, create within us and many others, as we look upon stark cruelty and treachery, a moral resentment which is our invisible ally to-day.