THE ROOT OF THE TROUBLE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21576, 22 August 1933, Page 12

THE ROOT OF THE TROUBLE

Sir,—At a meeting held in Scots Hall on Sunday afternoon and advertised under the title "Christianity and the Crisis " an effort was made to diagnose the root cause of the present troubles. It must have been a matter of amazement to many beside myself to hear the Rev. W. Averill announce as the root cause of the ills seen everywhere in the world to-day, "the inability of the world to purchase the great wealth which it produces." As a superficial statement of an economic theory this might have been let pass, but the speaker was professedly going to the root of the matter and from the Christian point of view. Xt was not in such shallow and crudely materialistic terms that the prophets of old and their successors Bince have dealt with the crises of their day. They were prophets and their words have lived only because they pointed with sure vision to the moral and ethical failures of which the material distress was but the outward symptom. The call back to the God whom we have forsaken and the message that man shall not live by bread alone is being sounded out from many pulpits to-day; and surely nothing less than that dare be put forward as the Christian solution of the problem. G.F.I.