DUTY OF THE CHURCH

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4558, 10 April 1942, Page 3

DUTY OF THE CHURCH

THIS UNHOLY WAR “What is the duty of the Christian Church as it faces this great calamity? The Church cannot preach a crusade as though this were a holy war. If a war ever has been unholy, this one surely is. It is cruel, it is destructive to an unprecedented degree of material property, human lives and moral values. There is every reason to believe that unless it is satisfactorily terminated whole continents will be reduced to poverty and slavery under victors who will have been brutalised by their very victory. Yet it is a war which must be fought. It is a natural phenomenon in the moral universe, even as an Ohio Rivei’ flood is a natural phenomenon in the material universe. A few years ago the city of Cairo, 111., was saved only by the utmost efforts of physical exertion carried to the point of physical exhaustion on the part of its inhabitants and of volunteers drawn from the country for miles around. When the last sandbag was piled and the river started to recede, the fight had been won by a scant few inches. The effort had to be made; the fight had to be won. There is a necessity after such an emergency for a careful study of the causes and the devising of a programme for preventing a recurrence, so far as that is humanly possible. Reafforestation, flood control, dams, better dykes and levees, all these things are a part of the picture. 'But there was a time when nothing would serve but the filling and piling of sandbags to the limit of physical endurance.”— Mr Ralph Flanders, an American layman, in an address on the duty of the Church in wartime, is reported in “Advance” of New York.