SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21598, 19 March 1932, Page 19

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Written for the Otago Daily Times By tlic Rev. D. Gardner Miller.

It has become a commonplace in conversation to say that we are living in momentous times. Those who have minds that are sensitive are acutely aware that old and venerable standards of living have been dismissed. It might almost be said that a new ethic has arisen as undoubtedly a new orientation is discernible.

The world is now playing and experimenting with forces that will either make or break us. It can justly be said that the upheaval is due very largely, not to failure but to success. Our very success in many fields of exploration and endeavour has upset the general balance of life and brought about the feeling of frustration in many quarters. The scientific achievements in flying and wireless, which are now accepted as commonplace and have brought the four corners of the world together, have played a very important part in breaking down the boundaries of life that not so long ago were deemed as safe for all time. In the realm of astronomy such marvellous and romantic truths have been showered upon us that many people are beginning to think that there is no personal God at all, but only a vast noiseless machine. The shrinkage of frontiers, brought about by the unique discoveries of men and applied to such a mundane, matter of fact affair as transport, has enabled nations almost to stand on one another’s doorstep. And yet, and yet, with all these great achievements, these great successes, we still have to confess, as we look around us, that men are perturbed and that moral standards have become woefully lax. If asked the question whether we had made moral progress to the same extent as we have made scientific progress the answer, I think, would be in the negative. The perils of progress are terribly real. The new knowledge that is ours, and the new democracy springing up here and there throughout the world, seem to me to breathe the very air of lawlessness, and to invent new ways of sinning the old sins.

There are several ways of reading the signs of the times. There is the way taken by many, the way of what I would call Christian fatalism. How any Christian can be a fatalist is a constant source of wonderment—and despair —to me. For any Christian to look around the world, noting its great successes, its awful blunders, and its sheer helplessness and then to say: “It had to be,” is enough to make the angels go on strike. This fatalism is akin to the attitude adopted by many that the world is bound to get worse and worse, that it was foretold, and that the beat we can do is to resign ourselves to the inevitable.

The great ones among the astronomers have been telling us lately that the world is like a clock that is slowly running down, and that a day will come when the clock will stop—and then! It needed the astringent Dean Inge to reply to the effect that whoever wound the clock up at the beginning of time can wind it up again. A great reply and one that must have made the facile astronomical pessimists blink! The attitude of the prophetic fatalist reminds one of a story I read recently. A man went out fishing. He was well fortified with a luncheon basket. He fell asleep, and his boat drifted and finally bumped on the shore under ncath a huge drain pipe. The bump awakened the sleeper, who, seeing an observer on the shore, cried out to him: “ Why is it that with all the width of this great bay for my boat to drift in it should come to this foul spot? ” And the observer said with benign calmness; “ Brother, when you drift, you always drift the wrong way.” Those who read the signs of the times in a fatalistic way are drifters. Not drifters, of course, in a moral sense but most decidedly drifters intellectually. They can see nothing but disaster ahead. They have got hold of, or are held by, the idea that change can only come by catastrophe, whereas change is always a process. There is no such thing as a full stop in history. The drifters intellectually are those who arm themselves with an idea and then, like the man in the boat, fall asleep. There is only one genuine way of reading the signs of the times and that is by recognising that no matter how sleepy we may bo, God neither slumbers nor sleeps.

I do not believe in the coming disaster of the world. I do not believe that the world is steadily becoming worse. I am aware of loose morals, diminishing values, and lawlessness. But I am also aware of an urge in the hearts of men for reality at all costs. I see and hear hundreds of young men and women who are seeking and probing and questioning for the ultimate things. I have never known a time in all my preaching life When men and women, young and old, were so eager to hear how the principles of Jesus can he applied not only to the individual but also to the nation and the world.

I cannot think that the kingdom of God will be delayed and finally snuffed out. But I cannot see that kingdom of God coming through the smoke of a ruined and blasted world. I see it coining as a sunrise after a dark and stormy night. As I read the signs of the times I am conscious of a deep desire on the part of men and women to be done with camouflage in every department of life, including the religious. I see on all sides in New Zealand a new upreaehing for God.

I am not an economist and so 1 cannot speak with even the semblance of authority upon the rise am! fall of markets, of depression and the way out of the slump. But, as a religious man, I say with all the earnestness and gravity at my command that the world of moral values is not drifting to the drain pipe; nay, it is in the grip of a new current that is heading it out to the open sea where, on the horizon, can be seen the first quivering rays of a new era —an era that shall be ushered in soon by a great revival of religion.