CHRISTIANITY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3895, 28 April 1937, Page 4

CHRISTIANITY

SYMPATHY OF THOUGHT. “We are so much in the habit of associating Christendom with prestige that we find it difficult to dissociate them. The Christian as a “dangerous thinker” (as they would say in Japan), a low-class fanatiq, is an ioea foreign to us. At the time when Islam was equal or superior to Christendom in the arts of civilisation, the two were generally bitterly opposed. It is, perhaps, the most interesting aspect of the political rise of Japan that missionaries who have grown up in the belief of the unassailable superiority of Christianity find themselves in a position where the prestige of their religion wanes as rapidly as the material superiority’ ol their countries. It becomes socially impossible to declare that the accepted religions! of the country are based on fraud or error. Indeed, the growth of scholarship and independence ot thought all over Asia brings about a need for ‘sympathy’ and for discovering what is best in other faiths, such as scientific researchers working on opposed hypothesis or even followers of different schools of art never think of according to their opponents.”—Mr A. M. Young in the “Contemporary Review.”