CHURCH AND POLITICS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20930, 21 July 1931, Page 9

CHURCH AND POLITICS.

SPIRIT OF THE TIMES. AUSTRALIAN BISHOP'S WARNING. [from our own correspondent.] SYDNEY, July 10. It is not by principles or men my prudent course is steadied, I just find out what pays the best, and go for it bald-headed. This verse, said the Bishop of Bathurst; Dr. Crotty, in his address to the Anglican Synod, epitomises the spirit of the times, an irreligious spirit which he holds responsible for the dilemma in which we find ourselves i to-day. "Strang* would, it be if Marxian Communism shall stand forth among us," the bishop said, "to rob Australians of that vision of God, of those sweet fidelities of home, of those blood-bought human freedoms to work and to have, to keep and to live, to which the human spirit has so laboriously ascended, and the Church be amiably silent, busily pouncing upon bare legs and ankles,"or some equally pressing public dagger, and letting the big things which are really killing us, go by." That is Dr. Crotty's answer to the cry that the Church should keep clear of politics. "Modern politicians must not spread, as more and more they are doing, their sometimes, amateur and pestilential fingers over the. whole, range of human life, and. then tell the Church she must keep out of 'politics,' " he continues. "It is not only Christian morality that to-day is threatened Behind much we are witnessing lies the challenge to a morality of any kind at all. "Men tell us frankly that man is but a super-animal, slave of instinctive impulses—the herd instinct, the sex instinct, the acquisitive instinct. And so you have your non-moral mob psychology. "Our local troubles are but symptoms of a breakdown that, is world-wide* Our troubles started when wo gavo. up religion. We have been shocked of late in our public life by a frank and cynical disavowal of any moral principle at all. And when that has become democracy's deliberate intent and voice, the depths of a final indecency have been sounded. "Although Australia, has been startled by the suggestion of repudiation," Bishop Crotty adds, "the spirit of repudiation has been poisoning our life for years. It is the robber spirit of the man who solves his problems by putting his hands into someone else's pocket."