Importance Of Knowing Sources Of Democracy

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 10, 20 October 1950, Page 7

Importance Of Knowing Sources Of Democracy

The Rt. Hon. Ernest Brown warned a Wellington Town Hall audience of the need to understand the sources and inspiration of democracy.

Mr Brown, a former British Cabinet Minister, is immediate pastpresident of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland. He was addressing a public meeting organised by the Baptist Union of New Zealand.

Great nations decayed when people did not understand the beginnings of the institutions their fathers built, Mr Brown said. Institutions taken for granted were easily undermined. Democracy was associated with the idea of counting heads, but, more important than that, it was a question of quality. In Britain it began because some men believed that man—every man, everywhere—was a living soul with a special value of his own. Their reckoning was that one soul was worth more than the whole world. The world hadn’t learnt that yet.

This point of view gave the individual rights and responsibilities. Unfortunately there was too much thought of rights—too little of responsibilities. A real understanding of the balance between rights and responsibilities was what would preserve democracy. Mr Brown said: “The test of democracy is how does the democrat shoulder the responsibilities of the ordinary work of the organisations to which he is attached?” If many Christians took more interest in the “little meetings,” some leadership that arose would not arise, and some disasters would not happen. If man—because he was man, because he had a living soul —was priceless in the sight of the Creator, he must be free, and democracy was rooted in freedom.

Mr Brown defined the freedoms of democracy and compared them with what he called the “democratic people’s State,” with a single party, a privileged minority, and no freedom of opinion. He declared: “It’s no use for the Kremlin to talk to the free Anglo-Saxon world about democracy when that is the kind of system that operates.”

There would never be dictatorship, Mr Brown said, if dictators understood the need for forgiveness of sins. Dictators considered themselves infallible, but no man was infallible, all were frail and sinful. The root of democracy lay in the need for forgiveness of sins. That was the Christian view.