SPIRITUAL EFFECT OF WAR

Southland Times, Issue 25835, 21 November 1945, Page 5

SPIRITUAL EFFECT OF WAR

Belief In Progress Of Mankind The belief that the faith in ultimate good, the hope and the charity of the common man, no matter what his brand of politics or his nationality, was the one thing in the world that could make and keep the peace was expressed, by Mr R. C. Abernethy, S.M., in an address to the Invercargill Rotary Club yesterday. That would take time, much time, stated Mr Abernethy. The millennium was not just round the corner. The speaker emphasized the importance of seeing our own age in proportion in the vastness of time and of looking back sometimes in the midst of our scientific achievements to consider our nearness to primitive man. He believed that in time history would record that notwithstanding the atom bomb, the wai’ had brought mankind a little further on his mysteriously spiritual way. The common man was emerging and was on his way as never before.

Great experiments in freedom and in ways of life were being made, he said. Men throughout the world would need honesty; suspicion must give way to knowledge, contempt to fair appreciation, hate to charity. We should remember, he continued,® that war was no haphazard thing, but a creation of the mind; it began, continued and only ended in thought. What then, did we think today? He did not believe that the' hearts of wicked men were as yet so appalled by the waste and destruction of war that, unless prevented, they would not use the atom bomb, and worse, on a next offensive war. Science must go on and it seemed to him the essence of futility to dream that anything less than the major nations together and the international police guard of the world could hope to hold the atom bomb in trust against the fears of a care-ridden world inevitably spelling out the forbidden secrets of the bomb. Yet in the sombre picture conjured up by six years of war there was something of hope if life still held some spiritual meaning. Had things of the spirit been blotted out? Was all good thought dead or gone to ground? History, he believed, would show that mankind, even through war had moved a little further on his spiritual journey. .