THE CHRISTIAN CLAIM

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3830, 6 November 1936, Page 12

THE CHRISTIAN CLAIM

BY THE OXFORD GROUP MOVEMENT. “Against our half-hearted compromises and conventional bargains with Mammon, the Oxford Group Movement stresses the absoluteness of the Christian claim; it renews the challenge of creative life against the bonds in which mechanism of one kind ><r another would confine it, and insists on the supremacy of the Holy Spirit; says the Rev. Dudley Symon, headmaster of Woodbridge School, England. “It is the ‘no surrender’ of faith that has once more become active and resolute against doubt and defeatism. But it brings with it the historic dangers that have always accompanied that type of reaction —the danger of a narrow individualism, of a pre-oe-cupation with our own state of mind which is none the less selfish because our ideals are worthy ones, a cult of the irrational which is all the more dangerous because it coincides with similar tendencies in politics, art and literature, a self-satisfied sense of superiority over the ‘ordinary man,’ and a contempt for the, age-long wisdom and traditions of the Church of Christ. All of this belongs to the spiqit of sectarianism even if no new sect is actually formed; it may once more encourage the notion of ‘the one shape or another has been one elect,’ the ‘chosen people,’ which in of mankind’s most tiresome obsessions.”