TWO SINS

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXXI, Issue 8840, 6 November 1942, Page 3

TWO SINS

(By E.L.8.G.) This present war has set us all thinking. It has us remembering. Remembering, that is, the first “Great War” and the thoughts we had then and the plans we said we would make when that was over. And to-day we are confronted with the*same old challenge—a denial of all that Jesus Christ stands for in the life of the world. The Antichrist of a century ago was wordliness and indifference. Thp Antichrist of the present century is the repudiation—the aggressive repudiation—of all those spiritual values of which the Lord Christ is the supreme Master. We in the past have ignored the Christian ideal. That is our sin and shame. Others, and, we are forced to admit, with less cowardice than us, have trampled the ideal underfoot. And between the lot of us, we have made .an unholy mess of things. It is of little purpose if we rail at the European bully and his jackal and all they stand for if we do not confess our own disloyalty to the ideal which they have stamped upon. And so the question for every social reformer must be: Do I acknowledge the Christian ideal as the truest and best ideal for all human life? Do I believe that loyalty to Jesus Christ must be the dynamic motive of all efforts for the betterment of mankind? The issue is world-wide. Not only in the so-called ehristian countries, but also in Germany and Italy, in India, China and Japan, among those peoples who tend to distrust our western Christianity. In Soviet Russia, too, that land which, as Dr. A. E. Rawlinson has recently said, “has not hitherto had a good name in the outside world”; but, he hastened to add, “there have been solid reasons for this.”