THE AWAKENED WORLD.

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3853, 3 December 1917, Page 3

THE AWAKENED WORLD.

TASK OF THE CHURCH.

"A new world is being' borne before our eyes, and the Church, must gird herself afresh for her tasks," writes Dr. H. Maldywn Hughes, in the London Quarterly. "She will speak with authority and command the respect of a democratic age only if she stands before men as spiritually autonomous and free. Christian ministers will not win the ear of the rising generation unless they are delivered from every suspicion (however groundless) of an unworthy economy and reserve. The Church must believe in the immanence of the Spirit of Christ in the present and in.the future as in the past. ■MORAL POWER OF SOCIETY. "The moral power of society canriot be different at last from the i mo: al power in the Church," writes Dr. P. T. Forsyth, 'in the same journal. "We have but one conscience There is really but one ethic ; the supremacy of the Kingdiom of God! me? is that the moral centre of our civilisation and affairs must become identical with the moral centre of our relii.ion. There will be a recurrent war till this domes about.?'* 1

In an article the Facts," in lac Modern. Churchman, the Rev. Alfred Fawkes calls attention to the serious effect of prolonged emotional excitement upon mental balance and noi'inal self-control.

"No revival of religion," he writes, "can be expected under the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The war has produced an acute tension and overstrain. Combatants and non-combatants alike, we are living at so high a pressure that our nerves have been thrown off their balance, the equilibrium of life has been disturbed."

"Hence an epidemic of excess in all directions, normal and abnormal— drink, drags, sex, divorce, speculation; everything is seen out of proportion : the result being- the mental and moral chaos, the recford of which we read in the divorce and police courts, which any man off the world who knows the conditions would have forseen."

"If hitherto international relations have been for the most part of a quasi-barbaric ordter, inter-religious delations of West and East have been of a stall more primitive nature," says Mr G. R. Mead, editor of the Quest. "The densest ignorance and most acute prejudice have generally been exalted into high religious virtues and loyalties on both sides. - A CONFERENCE NEEDED. "Is it not time that a truce be called! to this spiritual barbarism; i» there never to be a meeting together, not occasionally of a few individuals, as has been the case hitherto, who are regarded- by their religious mocpatriots as thaitors of at best unpatriotic pacifists, but of responsible representatives of the great religious complexes who would come together in the spirit of comity, if not of genuine bitotherly love, in the name of the common worship of what is best and highest, and so learn better to understand one another in friendly conference, not as enemies seeking to t;ake every advantage of one another, but as friends and allies in the common cause of helping- to improve the world and deepen the spiritual life of humanity ?"