NATION-WIDE EXPRESSION

Taranaki Daily News, 8 July 1929, Page 12

NATION-WIDE EXPRESSION

COMMUNITY CONSCIOUSNESS THE QUALITY OF PATRIOTISM. ADDRESS AT WHITELEY CHURCH. A special service of thanksgiving was held at Whiteley Methodist Church last evening, the preacher being the Rev. Clarence Eaton. The Mayor (Mr. H. V. S. Griffiths) and Councillors Amoore and Pentecost were present as representing the New Plymouth Borough Council. A portion of the service approved by His Majesty the King was used and at the close of the service the National Anthem was sung. Mr. Eaton, preaching from the text: “Fear God; honour the King” (1 Peter, ch. 2, v. 17), said:— ■“There are events and happenings that transcend local interest, and lift us into roomier spheres. Such an event is the happy- recovery of His Majesty King George V. from serious illness, and the nationwide thanksgiving which finds expression to-day. It set us all thinking, not in terms of the community, not in civic terms, but in terms of the nation and the Empire. We are called to-day out of our sectarianisms and segregations into a community consciousness, and into a larger life.

“The Royal mandate which directs the nation to the sanctuary to-day is surely a wise one, for the church fosters the purest form of public-spirited-ness that exists, and it is Christianity which gives to the nation her best citizens and contributes to the State the noblest elements in her life. It is within the province of the Church of Christ to feed the spirit of nationality in the hearts of the English people, for as surely as God trained the Jews apart that they might give Hifl

law unto the world, so He has banded •us together in a community of nations that we may serve the world and dispense justice to distant nations. There is in all of us ‘a dim and distant sense that our nation is a creation of God’s providence in whose great ■story the finger of God has moved.’ THE BEST SERVICE. “It is fashionable in some quarters to. decry the national in the interests of the international, but- it is not within the compass of human nature to be indifferent to the interests of the country that we call our own. To refuse all priority to the land that has nourished us is to seek for an impossible impartiality. We best 'serve the whole by seeking the elevation and purification of the ideals of that nation to which we belong. The national and the international - are both included in the Kingdom of God. “What can be more ennobling than the love of country? It is said that the chief glory of patriotism is that It gives to the strained soul of man an object capable of alluring him to the utmost proof of ■sacrificial affection. Patriotism is the most unselfish of all the virtues, and is ranked among the purest affections of the human spirit. The attachment which leads men to regard the plot of earth on which they were born as something sacred has been a powerful agent in . the shaping of human destiny, and has produced some of the most heroic deeds that have glorified the course of history. “The claim is justly made that no

book on earth tingles with intenser patriotic passion than the Bible. No book recognises more plainly those mysterious bonds by which God has invited men into nations and rooted nations into their own soil and country. A modern preacher has declared there never moved across the earth a truer patriot than the prophet of Nazareth, at whose feet we bow. With all the passion of a Jew he loved the country that gave Him birth. The thought of the doom to Which the heedless nation was drifting filled His heart with poignant grief. '0 Jerusalem! Thou that killest the prophets, how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chicks under her wing but ye w’ould not.’ GREATEST PATRIOTISM. “When we think of the patriotism of the Bible we are reminded of the remarkable fact that the greatest patriotism has been nursed in the smallest countries. Patriotism is never so strong as When the country that inspires it is a little one —Japan, Switzerland, Palestine, England. These are the countries perhaps, above all others, where love of the homeland has been a master passion.

“If patriotism breathed and burned in the breast of a Jew, how much more in that of an Englishman? I am sometimes afraid our young people grow up without any just sense of the immensity of their debt to the Motherland. England, as the Rt. Hon. G. W. E. Russell has reminded us, has helped us ‘by the blood transmitted to us by our forefathers; by the gift of a fertile land which has fortified our bodies "and braced our nerves, by giving us a language and a literature the purest and the noblest the world has ever known. England has helped us by guarding our political freedom and securing for us the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely. She has ■helped us by the steady maintenance Of social order; slhe has helped us, above all, by the reverence in which she has always held religion.’

"John Wesley, in a sermon preached not long before he died, after saying what great sinners we were, how we abused our mercies, and what punishment England deserved for her sins, cried out in a familiar tone: ‘But we are the best people in the world for all that.’ LOYALTY AMAZING. " ‘Submit yourselves to the King as supreme,* says St. Peter —an amazing loyalty when we remember it w r as written at a time when a Nero was on the throne, and in an age when the State "was the relentless foe of the Christian Church. ‘Honour the King,’ says the apostle. Truly a hard saying in such circumstances. What could be clearer than the Bible teaching of the '-hP nations of loyalty, and that in the .’an view the State no less than the Church is a divine institution and a chosen agency for the establishment of the Kingdom of God upon earth ?

“But if there is a Christian patriotism, alas, it is true that there is another’ sort. It was Dr. Johnson who declared patriotism to be ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ Like all the noblest passions of mankind it may suffer perversion and degeneration. To flaunt the Union Jack is no necessary proof of patriotism. It is a spurious patriotism that fills the streets with drunkenness, tumult, and vulgar boastfulness. True patriotism has no relation to the vainglorious and jingoistic spirit. Patriotism is a mighty force which runs to waste unless harnessed to noble tasks. “We ought to hear more of the duties of patriotism. ’We have ft right to

look for something more from men than the mere recognition of their countries’ existence. Men to-day need to know the nature of their countries’ claims upon them, and the limitations set to those claims. Robert Aitken, an English clergyman, ejected from his living in 1662, was not less but more a patriot when he said, ‘Let him never be accounted a sound Christian that doth not both fear God and honour the King. I beg that you would not interpret our act of nonconformity to be an act of disloyalty. We will do anything for His Majesty but sin. We will hazard anything for him but our souls. We hope we could die for him, only we dare not be damned for him.’ “Patriotism must be sublimated by the spirit of pure religion. The patriotism of Jesus Christ is said to be distinguished by two notes. There is first the absence of contempt. There is no scorn of other nationalities. It teaches love of country without hatred and enmity of another. ‘Honour all men’ is emblazoned on its standards. The Greek was a patriot, but the other side of his patriotism was the conviction that all the rest of the worldwas barbarian. The Jew was a patriot,’ but he mingled with the passion for his race a lofty scorn of races outside the covenant. Christianity recognises all men are children of the All Father, and each nation has a mission which cannot be relegated to another, or unfulfilled without loss to the whole. HIDDEN ENEMIES OF NATION. “The) second feature of New Testament patriotism is its clear recognition of the real enemies of national stability and progress. Our sins are our most deadly foes, for they are of our own To the Jew the-Arch 1 :.

enemy was Rome and against Rome . Jewish hostility was directed. But turned upon the evil forces within and cried, ‘Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees.’ It is well to remember that the enemies of our country are not those that can be disposed of with powder and shot. There are far more terrible foes to be reckoned with than ever menaced our security from the sea beneath or’ the clouds above. No enemy that ever threatened- the honour of England is half so much to be dreaded as the combined forces of intemperance, immorality and greed. “It is said of Thomas Ohampness, a minister of our Church in the Old Country, ‘’’at when he died the King bad lost a friend and England a devoted citizen. He never forgot to pr a Y for the King and sometimes he felt it his duty to write him a loyal letter of exhortation. He loved his native laud. It was his love that compelled him to speak of the nations sins, kindled his hatred of all things that demoralise and destroy. “It is good to remember that no man’s life is so insignificant or so Circumscribed that it may not make its contribution of service to the land tha bore him and the. causes that he loves. Do not mistake the nature of duty. Whoever sets himself seriously and* steadily to the task of elevating the lives of the people with whom h« is in actual contact is as truly fulfilling the duties of patriotism as if he were leading a charge or directing a fleetWherever men are fighting against evu in their own hearts, in their, own village or town- wherever there is a brav« and steady effort to give us a bet , a purer, a soberer land, there is Chris tian patriotism just as fiUrel y which led men to die on Gallipoli* heights or Flanders’ field*.