POOLING OF RELIGIONS

Taranaki Daily News, 25 September 1928, Page 14

POOLING OF RELIGIONS

EFFORT FOR WORLD PEACE: ADVOCACY OF A MINISTER. ONLY ATONEMENT FOR WAR. The Rev. Thomas Phillips, of Bloomsbury, in a timely book, advocates the resources of the world’s religions being pooled for the services of world peace. He writes in his book: — “The only thing that could atone for the horrors of a world war would be the emergence of a world religion as its result. We should become reconciled to the ills and woes which our generation has suffered if, as a consequence, we had found a religion big enough to prevent their recurrence, and dynamic enough to bind the races of igen into a brotherhood of goodwill and peace. If we are to believe in the goodness of God, in the' purpose of the .world and in the ultimate decency of things, a world war must lead on to a world religion.“No believer in God and lover of man will ever forget the first Sunday in August, . nineteen hundred and fourteen. By a strange irony it. was a.day spilling over with living light: seldom had a brighter morning come across the German Seas. A sunimer of rich promise was passing into an autumn of ripe opulence; there was a gold in the air whic' told o! plenty and a mellowness which .told of peace.

“The d.-y itself was a true picture of our pre-war mentality. We had preached as if our progress was inevitable and our security invulnerable. Most religious people had a nebulous faith that a world war was impossible. Then on this golden Sunday in August we had to bring into the pulpit and into the sanctuary a war which we had always deemed impossible. It seemed as if the day of judgment and the end of the world had come.

“Religion had failed the race in its hour of sore distress; the ideas for which we had all stood went toppling over; our young men were to be marched into the shambles as lambs to 'the slaughter' because the faith of their fathers had let them down, and most of us left our pulpits that day feeling that we never want ed to preach again. It looked as if religion had crashed. “But very soon we learnt that religion refused to crash. What we deemed the end was only a new beginning. As the conflict deepened and spread, many things did crash—standards and conventions, traditions and reputations, hoary organisations and invulnerable empires—but not religion. The world catastrophe produced few atheists. Religion was inconvenient, but no one wanted to give it up. “It challenged us when it could not help us; it haunted us when it could not deliver us; it was when it disappointed us most grievously that it pursued us most tenaciously. At no time did men feel the’need of religion more than at the time when, to all appearances, it had utterly failed them. Nay, the war that ought.to have killed it only made it in some instances flourish with lustier vigour. Some of us were never as religious as when we were under arms, and in the midst of the brutality and the mud there was an extraordinary gaiety, self-forgetfuLess and faith. So utterly impossible is it to suppress religion that the war which ought to have blasted it only revived some of its shoots.

“Moreover, when we were most dissatisfied with its influence, we discovered it was its own standard that : ide us dissatisfied. It was not so much the worldly and the careless, but the sensitive and the devout who were most disappointed at the failure of religion. The dissatisfaction was not a sign of decay, but of germination. It was religion saying, to itself: ‘I am not big enough, but it is in me to become bigger. I have failed to stop the war, and it is time for me to rediscover my strength.’ In thus criticising its achievements it discovered its’ untapped resources. “With the conviction of failur on one plane, there was the assurance of new life and fruitful achievement on a wider and universal plane. So the first Sunday in August was also as the beginning of days —the birthday of a religion big enough to embrace a whole world in its puissant arms.

‘Tor better or for worse, we are wedded to the faith that life is liveable even when it seems intolerable; that the world is dependable even when shaken by war, and that goodness is eternal even when the blood of slaughtered men shriek against it. Man may often slight religion when it is within his reach, but when he is in danger of losing it he holds it with a tenacity that is amazing. “The science of Comparative Religion is showing us that it was religion that started him on his long, uneven way, gave him his first science and architecture, his first tribal institutions and domesticated animals, imparted purpose to his random activities and clasped his little world into some kind of unity. Although, since then, it has crossed his way a thousand times, and disappointed him over and over again, he has the incurable conviction that as he started, so will he end; that what gave him his first glimmer of light will give him his final burst of revelation, and “that what first bound him into a totem tribe will ultimately bind him into a redeemed humanity.

“Religion is the biggest thing about us, and to discover the religion we want we must examine the religions we have. We must address our own lives as Tertullian did his, and say: ‘Soul of mine, stand thou forth, rule, simple and unpolished; I have need of thine experience? I want to know how thou hast been seeking God; I want to know why thou hast failed, and I want to know how thou are effectively to succeed. But not only soul of mine, but. Soul of fetish worshipper, soul of Buddhist monk, of Indian seer and seeking child of the mist, stand forth! We have need of all your experiences. You have succeeded and you have failed, and your failures may be as helpful as your achievements?

“All religions were alike helpless to avert the tragedy of war. So, let all religions pool their experience in the hope that out of groping and seeking together we may discover the vital core of religion, the something in it which meets the needs of the world.”