CLERGY AND WAR

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3895, 28 April 1937, Page 3

CLERGY AND WAR

ARCHBISHOP ON “DANGER OF PACIFISM.” THE CHRISTIAN DUTY. “It can be a Christian duty to kill,” declared the Archbishop of York, Dr Temple, at the English Church Assembly recently. He maintained that Christians were not bound to the condition that in no circumstances whatsoever might they take the life of a brother. At the same time the conditions must be w-atched with the utmost vigilance. “Pacifist agitation is increasing the danger of war,” Dr Temple went on. "We have not yet in the international sphere reached the stage of the establishment of law' and order. “Our first duty is to establish law, and only where it is established will it be possible to go forward to the still higher claims of the Gospel. “In a Christian world war would not occur, but we are not in that position.” The Bishop of London, Dr Winnington Ingram, described pacifists as “the real danger to the peace of the world to-day.” "There is no great danger of war,” he said, “if we are strong enough policemen with a truncheon to keep order, but the policeman must have his truncheon —otherwise he is no good. "If we had taken the view of the pacifists in 1914, either the German Emperor or Hitler would now be in Whitehall. This little island in the silver sea would be a German province.” Abyssinia, he thought, w'ould have cured every pacifist in the world. "If we have no force at our disposal the dictators of the world will triumph over the democracies of the world. “I would rather die than see bombs oropping on the children and burning

their flesh while we stand by doing nothing. “If the Bishop of Birmingham saw a little child being ill-treated he would be the first to go and hit out and defend the child. “I always think myself of what would have happened if the Good Samaritan had turned up two hours earlier and laid about him. He would have stopped the ill-treatment.” Canon “Dick” Sheppard made a moving appeal for pacifism. “War is the ultimate expression of man’s futility and wickedness,” he said. “We believe that a bomb with a label on it, ‘With love from Geneva,’ is no less devastating, and no more Christian than one that is dropped by this or that dictator. “War is now so stripped of romance that in a modern gas attack St. George himself would not see a dragon.” Mr Herbert Upward, of St. Albans, said he was sure that the vast majority of the younger educated people today were opposed to war tooth and nail. “They are prepared to go to a concentration camp if war is declared again."