CLASS STRIFE.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVI, Issue 14922, 14 December 1912, Page 7

CLASS STRIFE.

RELIGION AS A REMEDY. Church leaders in England and America have, been te/ling the public that the gospel of ••mutual consideration" was the only remedy for class hate and class strife. Homo of t.nur contemporaries in Australia are beginning to declare the same view. The Melbourne "i-.pectator' (Mothodist), discussing the question in the last issue, says that religion, rather thnn economic adjustment., holds the key to tho position. Tho advocates of salvation by economics either pour scorn on religion and speak of tho failure of tho Churches, or else they pin faith to legislative force to bring in the golden ago independently of the grace of religion. But the verdict of all history is, that until religion, leavens "■he. moral feelings of a. nation, legislation has no foundation upon which to build its new structure of society. It is not enough to have experts in theology. Tho necessity demands that tho man mind saturate itself with the Word of God. In an illuminating passage, John Richard Green speaks of tho period in English history when the English people definitely and upon a national sealo became Bible Christians:. "England became the people of a hook, and that hook was the Bible." Tho return of such a period would give birth to great souls and great deeds, or history is no witness to the law of recurrence.

Bishop Pain of Gippsland, speaking in Iho recent Synod, said they must recognise tho factors that had produced tlio industrial unrest—the failure of both sides to recognise their responsibilities, and ignoring the welfare of the community. They must remember that the remedy lay in the inculcation of Christian trust, and then in tho application of' it.