ACTIONS AND WORDS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3938, 11 August 1937, Page 11

ACTIONS AND WORDS

CHRISTIAN ATTITUDE COMPARED. “There is to-day a very curious reaction against the witness in words,” says Dr Hooft, General Secretary of the World's Student Christian Federation (in his Ibook, “N|one Other Gods.” “The reasons for this reaction are obvious. There has been so much separation of word and action that words by themselves have become utterly unconvincing. “It is felt that, while Christians merely talk about a Kingdom of love and justice, others, largely non-Chris-tians, are actually carrying these into the social reality of our times. “The remedy is considered to lie in the direction of witness by action alone. ‘Let us go out into the world and demonstrate the Christian life,’ it is said. ‘This language of action is more convincing than the language of mere talk.’ “But is this the true remedy? I do not believe it. For the real trouble lies precisely in the divorce of word and action from each other. By mere activism we merely emphasise this evil. There are empty actions as well as empty words .... “We can no more imagine Jesus as a mere man of action than we can imagine Him as a mere preacher. We must, then, rediscover this original unity, and make sure that our actions do not belie our words, and also that they do not remain dumb and meaningless.”