Waiapu Church Gazette AUGUST, 1940. GREED OR CHAOS.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume 31, Issue 6, 1 August 1940, Page 3

Waiapu Church Gazette AUGUST, 1940. GREED OR CHAOS.

It is strange and unfortunate that for a hundred or more people who ... know and delight m the detective stories of Miss Dorothy Sayers, there is only perhaps one y^ho realises that the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey is also a devout, well-read and intelligent Christian with a message for our age. Here is an extract from The Church Times "report, of an address she gave m England earlier this year. . "The stark fact remains that Christendom and heathendom now stand f ape to face as they have not done ' m Europe since the days of Charlemagne. In spite of the various vague references m sermons and public speeches to the war as a 'crusade,' I think we have scarcely begun to realise the full implications of this. "We still go on scolding Germany for disregarding the standard of European ethics, as though that standard, was something which she still acknowledged. It is 6nly with great difficulty that we can bring ourselves to grasp the fact that there . is no failure m Germany to live up to her own standards of right conduct. It is something much more terrifying and tremendous': it is that what we believed to be evil, Germany believes, to be good. It is a direct repudiation of the basic Chris-, tian dogma on which our Mediterranean civilisation, such, as it is, is grounded." The general feeling of Englishspeaking peoples for the last fifty years or more has been to acknowledge the Christian standard of morals as good, even if men were breaking it as hard as they could. The mistake, and a terrible one it is, has been to believe that Christian morality is quite easy to follow without troubling about the grace of God. ' The late Professor T. H. Huxley, for example, seemed to believe that it was quite possible to maintain a high standard of Christian conduct without the Christian faith. It is not. And everything that has happened for the last two generations goes, to prove it. A^ the Church Catechism so wisely says, after summing up the

Christian duties, "Thou art not able to do these things of thyself. " But the jargon of bur time has been to say that the moral teaching of Jesus is the whole of Christianity and that we want a religion without any dogmas. Which is sheer rubbish. When you have found a code of morals you admire there come two fundamental questions. Where do you get that code? Can you get outside help m following it? The Christian Church answers both questions, and so we come to the fundamental dogmas of the existence of God, the love of God, the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Nazi simply denies that righteousness and peace, mercy and truth are good things. If we value them we must sacrifice ourselves for .them. They don't come easily, and they need an abundance of the grace of God. To quote Miss Sayers again: "that you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ's authority; and as we have seen, the Totalitarian States, having ceased to believe m Christ's authority, are logically quite justified m repudiating Christian principles . If 'the average man' is required to 'believe m Christ,' and accept His authority for 'Christian principles,' it is surely relevant to inquire who or .what Christ is, and why His authority should be accepted. But the, question, 'What think ye of Christ?' lands the average man at once m the very knottiest kind of dogmatic riddle. It is quite useless to say that it doesrtft matter particularly who or what Christ was, or by what authority He did those things, and that even if He was only a man He was a very nice man, and we ought to live by His principles ; for that is merely Humanism, and if the 'average man' m Germany chooses to think that Hitler is a nicer sort of man wi^h still more attractive principles, the Christian Humanist has no answer to make."