CHURCH AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

Manawatu Times, Volume 60, Issue 277, 23 November 1935, Page 15

CHURCH AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

Professor Walter M. Horton, widely Known as a great thinker, asserts in his book “Realistic Theology” that while the’ Church may not be able to cure the social evils the reformers will also be helpless without the Church. He says that it is important in these days to realise that the Church and the community cannot merely supplement the work of each other, but that this co-operation is essential to success.

“The proper sphere of the Church,” says Dr. Horton, “is precisely the sphere of the mind and will, collective as well as individual; and she'is as competent, in a crisis, to convert a nation’s soul as to convert an individual’s. The task of straightening the perverted mind and will lies in her peculiar province; the. inertia of the public mind and the paralysis of the public will are the basic cause of our steady drift towards social chaos.

“Without social science and political agitati'on, the Church alone cannot check this drift; still less can they check it without the Church. She cannot herself discover the precise economic mechanism by which our present absurd state of poverty-in-plenty is to be overcome; that is the task of social scientists; but she can demand of the isocial scientists the sort of scheme which really answers to the requirements of social justice, and she can create public interest in every scheme that seems to meet these specifications. “She cannot herself directly engage in the work of transforming the blueprints of the social scientists into political programmes and legislative enactments; that is the function of political parties and movements, but she can create a public passion for reform, a public intolerance of selfish and dishonest politicians, and a willingness, more important in ' peace-time than in war-time, to sacrifice sectional interests for the general good.

“She may rightly stigmatise as a * slacker’ any supposed Christian who js indifferent to politics in such a time as this, and demand that everyone relate his private activities to the public iservice in some fashion, direct or indirect—whether as part of the scientific *air force’ which soars above the battle and maps the path of advance, or as a humble participant in the many-sided drive for a saner and juster society, which ploughs from trench to trench land eventually smashes through to the next great objective in the endless march toward social salvation.

Co-operation Essential

“Let us be less rhetorical and more concrete; the urgency of the times requires plain speaking. The situation in which we find ourselves in the world to-day is simply grotesque. If Dean Swift had had sufficient prescience to divine in advance the kind of tangle we have got into and had sent his Gulliver to our world to report upon it in another chapter of the immortal “Travels,” our forefathers would have shaken their heads and averred that this time the Dean had gone too far.

“That there should be nations of pygmies and giants and human-liko horses is plausiblo enough, if you let your imagination run on a holiday; but that men should mourn over a bumper crop and sigh with relief over a drought that they should produce so many goods, with the aid of marvellous mechanical slaves, that they all became impoverished together, that they should . . , but why go on? . . . the story is obviously beyond the bounds of verisimilitude!

Yet that incredibly irrational world is the world wo have; and it is the Church’s first business, obviously, to make plain, to all parties concerned—that is, to everybody—that in thd name of the God of reason and of righteousness, this nightmare must not be allowed to last. Inability to better the situation may be excusable; but the willingness to continue it and. defend it, because a few people profit by it, is inexcusable; and the Church must make this very plain. “And this brings us back finally to a point which cannot be too often emphasised: The primary duty of the Church is not to do good to individuals, nor to exert pressure upon groups, as if she herself were man’s chief hope and stay. Man’s chief hope and stay is the Providence of God. The great quality to be demanded of the leaders of the Church is not Herculean willpower, or TJlyssean shrewdness of wit, nor even humanitarian compassion, but a capacity to discern and communicate the Word and Will of God. On this primary prophetic function of the Church, all her other functions depend; without it, they all fail.

“We shall be delivered from our social ills only if we first learn how to discern behind the surface of human events the constant action of divine Providence, and then learn how to align ourselves with the great thrust of that holy Will, and serve as instruments in that mighty Hand.”