"Cannot Serve God and Mars"

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 41, 18 February 1938, Page 8

"Cannot Serve God and Mars"

The Church’s Attitude to War METHODIST ADDRESS (Special to “Times”) WELLINGTON, Last Night. “I believe with Tertullian that when Jesus said to Peter. ‘Put up thy sword, for they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’ our Loid disarmed every soldier.” So said the Rev. Percy Paris, president of the Methodist Church, in a section of the address to the conference now in session at Wellington, when dealirz with the Churcc and war. “Jesus also indicated in those words the utter futility of force as a means of clarifying issues or settling disputes.’ Mr Paris added. “Some little time ago Eenito Mussnliri was reported as declaring: ‘lt is a great olive branch which I hold aloft This olive branch sc.~outs from an immense forest, anc this forest is one ct 8,000,000 bayonets, veil sharpened and gripped by young men with intrepid hearts* “Let us as a Church proclaim that an olive branch or any other thing of life and beauty, of peace and goodwill cannot grew from threatening or bloody bayc nets. Peace can come only from love and righteousness. War is the denial and abrogation of these.’ Mr Paris referred to the protest of an Auckland army chaplain week-end Territorial bivouacs, claiming there was something incongruous in using the Lord’s Day to teach youths the use of deadly machines of modern warfare. Something Incongruous, **lo the Christian, every day is the Lord’s and every ‘enemy’ man or woman, is God’s child; and to me there is something blasphemously incongruous in a Christian having anything to do with the devilish business. “There was reproduced in a newspaper the other day a photograph ol men and women fastening gas masks on babies. Is it worth while to keep babies alive in a world like this? Ls it worth while to try to save them? Would they not be better dead? Is it worth wnile to beget and bear them? Can we wonder that the young married women of to-day who naturally and happily should be bearing and rearing children shrink from the responsibility of bringing new lives into a world where even babies are not exempt from the damnable brutalities and ghastly carnage of modem methods of war, where the order of slaughter seems to be ‘Women and children first’*” Incidence of Abortion. me speaker claimed that, while the evil of criminal abortion, whose extent had »o greatly shocked the moral sense of the Dominion, must in many cases be the result of selfishness and indulgence, with a number of married women the evil had a dark economic background. With others there were the lowering clouds red with the glare of war. “These women will never forget the awful years of the w r ar, with their horrors and sufferings, and with millions marching like dumb, driven cattle to the slaughter. They will never forget the privations and humiliations of the depression which followed the war. "I resent the way war and militarism have captured pageantry and music, and claimed the finest qualities of life-like courage, self-sacrifice and patriotism. As if one cannot be brave and unselfish, and serve one's King and country ?n other and better ways than tearing people limb from limb. “Just before Christmas, when in all our churches we were singing carols of peace, on earth and goodwill to men, the newspapers published the figures of world expenditure on armaments for 1937. The record total was £2,400,000,000, beating the previous record of 1938 by £384,000,000. There are 8,500,000 men permanently under arms compared w.ta 6,000,000 in 1913. “These figures do not include tl.« huge expenditure on semi-military organisations. All the larger European nations have thousands of war planes ready for instant action; thousands more are in reserve, in process of construction or provided for in budgets. Russia claims to have 7000.

“Across all this I write, ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mars.’ You can serve either, but not both. God is not a nationalist; He is a moralist.”