THE DEMAND FOR INTENSIVE RESEARCH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23108, 6 February 1937, Page 7

THE DEMAND FOR INTENSIVE RESEARCH

TO THE EDITOR

Sir,—The appeal for money to pursue intensive research further would be iustified if every known avenue' of knowledge for the guidance o*. mankind had been fully explored. The cost of living has risen 176 per cent, above the pre-war level in November, 1930, and it does not require scientific research to determine the cause. Large sums of money have been spent every year in scientific research to find the cause of many of the ills from which the people are suffering, and many remedies have been tried. That they have been only palliatives is^shown by the fact that sickness and disease, often in epidemic form, is increasing. We have become so used to assume that physical uses are the decisive tests, or objects, of all the contrivances to be looked for in God's works, forgetting that natural theology is to-day as much at fault as ever when it fails to make plain that moral uses are the last ends of God in everything, and, .as Horace Bushnell has said, "they include even His physical uses themselves." It has been said that no nation of the world has possessed so ■ vast and potentially wealthy territorial possessions as the British Empire, and yet she is burdened with the same kind of economic distress, if not in the same degree, as is common to the rest of the world. Is it, or is it not, a fact that our research is in the wrong direction? If first things were being put first by the shepherds of the people, and a better acquaintance with the first five books of Moses were exercised, it would be seen that the law of the Lord provides for the elimination of every physical and economic ill which afflicts the British people and apart from them, as the servant nation, all

the nations of the earth. This is as clear in the Scriptures as that the sun is in the heavens. Of the men of science there are many who affirm that by the presentday system of working the land, germs, insects, and disease of all kinds are being bred, that food is being poisoned, and the people are not nourished, all because the law of Sabbatic rest for the land, as well as Sabbatic rest for all flesh, is being broken. Arc there any signs that the exercise of moral uses to accomplish the ends of Providence are coming to an end? I think the signs are unmistakable. There are three signs—the sign of history foretold in the Scripture: the sign of prehistoric events fulfilled; and the sign of history foretold in stone. Of the first two signs so much has been written in the columns of the press that there is no need to dwell on them here. The sign of the Great Pyramid is said to be "A Scientific Revelation to a Scientific Age." It is the reaffirmation and confirmation of the truth of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, given by the Great Pyramid's revelation, come at a time when faith is flagging and vision is dim, and when, as in these days of perplexity and falling away and of apathy and unbelief, the essential message of the gospel of salvation and the gospel of the kingdom is sorely needed. It is well said that'the pyramid's menage of salvation is to the in-

dividual. Its message of the kingdom is to the organised community. Here is a field containing goodly pearls. Research here, by so many in the Church whom we love, and are, prejudice apart, so well qualified, would give a quickening of faith and spiritual vigour so much needed. The British race is at a time when it is on the threshold of a constitutional crisis through which only the power of the Lord Jesus Christ can safely bring it. —I am, etc., W. T. Kingston. Temuka, February 5.