CONDEMNATION OF WAR

Southland Times, Issue 23437, 18 February 1938, Page 15

CONDEMNATION OF WAR

ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH ADDRESS AT METHODIST CONFERENCE (Special to The Times) . WELLINGTON, February 17. “I believe with Tertullian that when Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put up thy sword, for they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,’ our Lord disarmed every soldier," said the Rev. Percy Paris, president of the Methodist Church in his address to the conference now in session at Wellington. “Jesus also indicated in those words the utter futility of force as a means of clarifying issues or settling disputes,” said Mr Paris. “Some little time ago Benito Mussolini was reported as declaring: ‘lt is a great olive branch which I hold aloft. This olive branch sprouts from an immense forest, and this forest is one of 8,000,000 bayonets, well sharpened and gripped by young men with intrepid hearts.’ “Let us as a Church proclaim that an olive branch or any other tiling of life and beauty, of peace and goodwill cannot grow from threatening or bloody bayonets. Peace can come only from love and righteousness. War is the denial and abrogation of these.” Mr Paris referred to the protest of an Auckland army chaplain against week-end territorial bivouacs, claiming there was something incongruous in using the Lord’s Day to teach youths the use of the deadly machines of modern warfare. “To the Christian, every day is the Lord’s, and every ‘enemy,’ man or woman, is God’s child; and to me there is something blasphemously incongruous in a Christian having anything to do with the devilish business,” he said. “There was reproduced in a newspaper the other day a photograph of men and women fastening gas masks on babies. Is it worth while to keep babies alive in the world like this? Is it worth while to try to save them? Would they not be better dead? Is it worth while to beget and bear them? Can we wonder that the young married women of today who naturally and happily should be bearing and rearing children, shrink from the responsibility of bringing new lives into a world where even babies are not exempt from the damnable brutalities and ghastly carnage of modem methods of war, where the order of slaughter seems to be women and children first?” INCIDENCE OF ABORTION Mr Paris claimed that, while the evil of criminal abortion, whose extent had so greatly shocked the moral'sense of the Dominion, must in many, cases be the result of selfishness and indulgence, with a number of married women the evil had a dark economic background. With others there were the lowering clouds red with the glare of war.

“These women will never forget the awful years of the war, with their horrors and sufferings, and with millions marching like dumb, driven cattle to the slaughter,” he said. “They will never forget the privations and humiliations of the depression which followed the war.

“I resent the way war and militarism have captured pageantry and music, and claimed the finest qualities of lifelike courage, self-sacrifice and patriotism. . As if one cannot be brave and unselfish, and serve one’s King and country in other and better ways than tearing people limb from limb. “Just before Christmas, when in all our churches we were singing carols of peace on earth and goodwill to men, the newspapers published fhe figures of world expenditure on armaments for 1937. The record total was £2,400,000,000, beating the previous record of 1936 by £384,000,000. There are 8,500,000 men permanently under arms compared with 6,000,000 in 1913. “These figures do not include the huge expenditure on semi-military organizations. All the larger European nations have thousands of war planes ready for instant action; thousands more are in reserve, in process of construction or provided for in budgets. Russia claims to have 7000. “Across all this I write, ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mars.’ You can serve either, but not both. God is not a nationalist; He is a moralist.”