The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1942. CHAOS OR CHRISTIAN ORDER?

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 86, Issue 227, 26 September 1942, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1942. CHAOS OR CHRISTIAN ORDER?

jS the world headed for a condition of complete chaos ? It is not. It will develop into a hotch-potch condition wherein some areas will be well ordered and others will be subjected to disorders. This is as it has always been in historic times. Order depends upon force. There is no order where there is no power to enforce compliance with the law. The general body of the law may be good or it may be imperfect to a degree that it can be called bad: but, if that law is enforced order will prevail, even though that order has little to commend it. In the past this uneven state of human development didn’t matter so much, when viewed from the standpoint of each community. Communities were small and isolated units of population ; they were, to a very considerable degree, self-dependent, and it was not until the Crusades that the wants of Europeans were extended to products which were not of their own production. The Crusaders sought a geographical old Jerusalem and unconsciously established an economic new one. With the last century civilisation lias shifted from a national to an international economic basis, but unfortunately the political thought of the period lagged behind the necessities of the times, resulting in the war of 1914. Since the first Great War efforts were made to advance political thought beyond the boundaries of nationalist thinking by establishing and endeavouring to operate the League of Nations. It was a valiant attempt but it was vain because the peoples of the world were unable to comprehend the kind of world in which they were living. This is a new composite world, where the slightest demand is satisfied by materials produced at the four corners of the, earth, assembled at a distant point for manufacture, and distributed therefrom by power generated by equally diverse sources of activity. This complexity of man’s wants has created a unity of economic activity; the railway train has dissolved frontiers and turned, continents into countries. Man has failed to maintain an effective political control over his environment. He is with rare exceptions—-at the moment unwilling to undertake the task of thinking out, the problems involved in bringing government into the world-order. (The campaign for Christian Order up to now has been singularly efficient in revealing how barren is religious thought on this vital subject), and consequently the individual is bewildered by the prospect of the problems which the future will present to him. It took a second World War to shake him out of his complaisancy, which extended from the Armistice of 1918 to the Munich Conference. What he is wondering is whom he can get to take over the task of doing the essential work of thinking for him. Too many men have lost faith in themselves, they are in consequence calling out for the expert. Sometimes the expert is called the Fuhrer; sometimes he is called II Duce; and sometimes he is called a currency reformer. Each of these has one characteristic in common—they promise to relieve the average man of the task of thinking out his problems.

Despite the high cost of public education in New Zealand ami the long period in which education has been available to all, there are few who are willing to undertake the task of confronting world problems with intensive thought. Just as no city could function if it were inhabited by hermits, so no world environment can be expected to be orderly where the vast number of the citizens thereof are hermit minded.

Can the Christian concept, of life help to unlock this mental constriction? That is the fundamental question of the hour. The world conceptions that are prominent to-day and which are motivating men, are the economic conceptions of a New European and a New Asiatic Order, each new order with its head in a country where the people believe in their own destiny. The third economic fai-tli is Communism, which seeks to be international and is capable of providing its martyrs to the cause. Which is to be preferred of these warring materialisms is an interesting problem which people in democratically-governed countries hope not to have to solve. But democracy has its own problems and its future is by no means certain, because too many men refuse to accept the responsibilities of democrats, which is to be citizens of the world environment of which they form part.

The choice which lies before the democrat is between slavery and manhood. The Romans used to say that something went, out of a man’s soul when he became a slave, and the White Russians found that when they used officers who had been prisoners of war the leadership was defective through want of spirit. If democracy is to survive—if, that is, it is to be capable of operating in a world environment, it is essential that there shall be in each individual

• —or at least in a majority of them in each community—sufficient spiritual force to impel him to his tasks. Where this spiritual force is inadeqautc, then the individual is prepared to resign his freedom. It is natural when he has not the Bread of Life that a man should willingly enter the house of bondage as did the Saxon peasantry in the times of famine. And it was because St. Paul appreciated this fundamental fact that he enjoined his fellow churchmen to “hold fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.” He didn’t do this that they should have peace, that, they should have order, that they should avoid chaos, but, that they should be able to go out into the world and crusade far the widest conception of human relations that has yet been presented to the hearts and minds of men. The World Order ordained of God is an order of Strife, and he who will not strive shall never know the Kingdom of Heaven, much less shall he enter into it.