THE CHURCH AND WAR

Waipawa Mail, Volume LXVI, Issue 65, 18 February 1938, Page 3

THE CHURCH AND WAR

“A DEVILISH BUSINESS.” WELLINGTON, This day. “I believe with Tertullian that when Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put up thy sword, for they' that take the sword shall perish with the sword,’ our Lord disarmed every soldier.” So said the Rev. Percy Paris, president of the Methodist Church, in a section of the address to the conference now in session at Wellington, dealing with the Church and war. “Jesus also indicated in those words the utter futility of force as a means of clarifying issues or settling disputes. “Some little time ago Benito Mussolini was reported as declaring: ‘lt is a great olive branch which I hold aloft. This olive branch sprouts from an immense forest, and this forest is one of 8,000,006 bayonets, well sharpened and gripped by young men with intrepid hearts.’ “Let us as a Church proclaim that an olive branch or any. other thing of life and beauty, of peace and goodwill cannot grow from threatening or bloody bayonets. Peace can come only from love anil righteousness. War is the denial and abrogation of these.” Mr Paris referred to the protest of an Auckland army chaplain against week-end Territorial bivouacs, claiming there was something incongruous in using the Lord’s Day to teach youths the use of the deadly machines of modern warfare. “To the Christian, every day is the Lord’s, and every ‘enemy,’ man or woman, is God’s child; and to me there is something blasphemously incongruous in a Christian having anything to do with the devilish business. “There was reproduced in a newspaper the other day the photograph of men and women fastening gas masks on babies. Is it worth while to keep babies alive in a world like this ? Is it worth while to try and save them? Would they not be better dead? Is it worth while to beget and bear them? Can we wonder that the young married women of to-day who naturally and happily should be bearing and rearing children, shrink from the responsibility of bringing new lives into a world where even babies are not exempt from the damnable brutalities and ghastly carnage of modern methods of war, where the order of slaughter seems to be ‘Women and children first’?”