CHURCH AND WAR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 68, 22 March 1935, Page 8

CHURCH AND WAR

"WE WERE ALL WRONG’’ PREACHER'S CONFESSION 1 FUTILITY AND WICKEDNESS. An appeal that the Christian Church must be wholly antagonistic to war was made by the Rev. Dr. Charles W. Gordon, of Winnipeg, at a gathering of fellow-ministers and others, held to welcome him at Auckland. Dr. Gordon, who is most widely known as an author under his pen-name of “Ralph Connor,” made a deep impression by the intensity of his appeal. Everything that the world had that was worth while it owed to the existence and the service of the Christian Church, sai l Dr. Gordon, but that did not alter the fact that in the day of its great testing the Church did not measure up. “I went to the war,” he said. “I knew nothing about war. 1 knew little about the cause of war, but I had a conviction that it was my sacred duty to go to war. Perhaps in that environment it was the only possibility for me. God knows. I do not know. But I will say .this, that if I had been rightly taught I should have spent my strength of mind and body and heart in proclaiming to the world, and especially to my own nation, that war is inevitably wicked and wrong, the negation of the Christian faith and the denial of Almighty God. That is what I would have preached, and 1 would have broken my heart in trying to make people see the futility and the wickedness of war. I did not do it. Those who went before me did not do it.” A Voice: V/e are all in that. “We were a?I wrong,” continued Dr. Gordon. “We ran off the rails long before that. We were all part of the great spiritual delr.fion that war was a gallant and glorious thing, instead of being the meanest, the most cruel, the most tase and the most, useless and futile thing that, man could give his strength to. “As I look back upon the life and teachings of Jesus, with all their sublime simplicity. I am amazed at my stupidity, but I am more ashamed at, my wilful departure from His teachings. There is nothing in religion but one thing and that is love; and if you can knit up love and war together you will do something that Almighty God Himself could not do. “The thing that is keeping peace from the world,” said Dr. Gordon, “is the transference of international strife from the one region of military and naval activity to the other region of economic and trading relation. I have no use for the religion that does not transform a man’s economics, for the religion that is too high to deal with square dealing, that supports and sustains an inequitable division of the fruits of industry. The Christian Church must get back to the championship of the supremacy of love. There is nobody else teaching that except the Christian Church. I congratulate you upon the privilege you have of preaching the glorious Gospel to this generation that so sorely needs it.”’