TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19762, 18 December 1935, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

New Aims at Geneva “ The League of Nations may not be able to order a reduction in tariffs, but it may be the means of bringing all nations to understand both the need and the method of re-opening the channels of international trade and so lessening that pressure for territorial expansion which is the greatest force driving toward war, in order that minor territorial exchanges may suffice. It may not be able to order sanctions, but where enough powerful nations are agreed—and where that essential condition of sanctions is present, that like the policeman they represent irresistible power—they may be taken in the League’s name against a manifest aggressor. Above all, by raising the thoughts of nations out of preoccupation with their own affairs, such a league may awaken them to the dread alternative of the alliance system, with its terrible military time-table and the inevitable consequence of instant world war, and may so persuade them not merely toward its own principles but eventually toward - that organic unity which is the only ending of war.” —The Round Table. Crisis for Christianity “ The modern crisis—not a particular economic, political or social crisis, but the general crisis of which everybody is conscious is probably at bottom religious, if by religious we mean belief in a spiritual world or in spiritual values. In this sense of the great crisis, movements of the last 15 years have been religious. “The proponents of these movements have what is fairly to be called a religious faith in their object which they regard as somothin< T mystical, transcendental, spiritual. The Fascist conception of the Stale and the ‘Nazi’ conception of race must lie regarded as mvslieal religious. Communism, which is faith in material values us ends in themselves and in the pcrCoctibilify of mankind, is a religion. “It must be recognised, accordingly, that the Christian religion has more competitors than it had in Iho nineteenth century. A treatise on comparative religions would have to add these to the number formerly brought into survey. Few people will deny that the Christian religion in most or all of the forms which it has taken has been one of the great civilising agents of history. Hitherto its competitors have practically all been outside the Christian community; but now it is being challenged, and apparently powerfully challenged, from within.” —Professor K. B. Mowatt, in the liibbcrtj jJouxnajL,