BISHOP ON PACIFICISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21600, 22 March 1932, Page 10

BISHOP ON PACIFICISM

NEED FOR SECURITY THE ENGLISHMAN’S DUTY. (From Due Own Cobbespondent.) LONDON, February 4. The Bishop of Gloucester writes on the subject of disarmament in the Gloucester Diocesan Gazette. He is not in sympathy with those who are too urgent in their pacificism. He considers that if they would be less militant they would be more intelligent in controversy. “ I do not know why the advocacy of peace should justify such violent misrepresentations as I have been reading recently in the local papers,” he writes. “I should like to make it clear that it is not because I dislike peace that I fear unwise disarmament; but because I desire peace and because I am convinced that if the British Empire wero inadequately armed it would mean an outbreak of war on a very disastrous scale.”

An examination of certain passages in the New Testament leads him to the conclusion that the sword must not bo drawn in the cause of Christianity. But that, he points out, has nothing to do with the civil power. He finds implied in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans “ the right of the civil authority to use the power of the sword, whether in internal affairs or for external protection 1 .” “The upkeep of a sufficient force to protect our Empire and our country is part of the duty which is imposed upon every Englishman, not for his own sake merely, but for the sake of everyone who is affected—-the 400,000,000 of the British Empire —and we must be prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. A SOLDIER’S VISION. “The soldier, however imperfect his character may be, who is ready to lay down his life for his duty, has understood the teaching of Christianity much better than those who are so anxious to relieve themselves of the obligation of supporting the forces of the country.” Peace is looked upon by the Church as something which should be prayed for, Dr Hedlam declares, and the Disarmament Conference should be a source of earnest prayer. “ But,” he adds, “ we must not cither ourselves be ready to give up the force necessary for the protection of our own people or expect others to do so.” “I believe that by mutual arrangement a considerable diminution of armaments might be effected,” he adds, “ but the League of Nations itself would be powerless unless it could have recourse to, and had behind it, the forces of its constituents.”