Totalitarian State

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 42, 19 February 1938, Page 8

Totalitarian State

CHALLENGE TO CHRISTIANITY METHODISTS' VIEWPOINT “We are living in an era in which the people have largely forgotten God, ’' stated the Rev. Percy Paris, in his inaugural address as president of the Methodist Conference in the Taranaki street Church, Wellington. 1 T do not say they have ceased to believe in His existence, but the tendency since the war has been the secularisation of life." It was a state which had come from disillusionment and fear. The Treaty of Versailles had been so dominated by vindictiveness and revenge as to make it utterly unChristian. In the afternoon of the war and with the secularisation of life, men had lost the bond of unity, and freedom of spirit, which religion had provided. This year the churches were to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, that great revival which was the beginning of freedom. The president then dealt with the church's attitude to the totalitarian State. “To-day," he said, “personal liberty and political democracy are challenged by the dictator and the totalitarian state. In some countries liberty and democracy have ceased to exist. The war sapped the foundations of civilisation in those countries whose three hundred and fifty million people are now ruled by dictators. “ There came for them national bankruptcy, unemployment, great suffering, strikes and revolutions. Chaos ensued. Then the strong man armed emerged. He offered them some new form of unity and control, with the promise of recovery of prosperity, and the assurance of a restored national greatness. “And so we have Communism, Fascism and Nazism. The names may differ, but the principle is the same, tt becomes, all in all —the totalitarian State. “Communism and Fascism.are both protests against the unrestrained individualism and capitalist organisation of society which have failed to distribute effectively and justly the results of labour and industry in this new age of machine production. They are protests against a social order which permits poverty to exist in the midst of abundant plenty; and which makes inevitable the struggle between nations for the raw materials and tho buying markets of the world and so leads to military preparations and war Both Communism and Fascism claim to show the way out of the labyrinth. ‘ ‘These two philosophies, which threaten the stability of the world, have to-day made Spain the cockpit of Europe, in which there is being fought to a finish the battle betw r een two opposed conceptions of the totalitarian State.

“In the long run," said the speaker, “I believe Communism will displace Fascism or nationalism. Then the battle will be joined between Communism and Christianity. The contending parties will be Communism, with its philosophy of the totalitarian State: and Christianity, with its doctrines of the sovereignty of God and His Fatherhood, stressing and safeguarding the inalienable rights of the individual soul, the spiritual and ternal worth of human personality. Fundamentally and finally there are only two alternatives —Christianity and the Kingdom of God, or an atheistic Communism.

“No ono has seen this danger and felt this challenge more clearly than Professor Nicolas Berdyaev, the exiled Russian philosopher. He writes: ‘if there is not a Christian revival in the world, a rebirth not only among the intellectuals, but also among the great masses of the people, atheistic Communism will conquer over the wuole world. . . . All depends on what

the spirit of the masses will be, r the future belongs to them. In whose name will they renew life? In the name of God and of Christ, or of the spiritual principle in man, or in the name of anti-Christ, of divinised matter, in the name of divinised human collectivity, in which the very image of man disappears and the human soul expires? The Russian people have stated the problem to the whole world.' “Berdyaev is right. Communism is a religion, and the totalitarian State is its kingdom of anti-God. “If this is so, it can be met only by a religion, which is more real, more spiritual, more righteous, more sacrificial; a religion of the love and grace of God mediated through the lives of genuine and enthusiastic Christians."