DIVIDED YOUTH

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 96, 10 May 1937, Page 8

DIVIDED YOUTH

— Own Corregpondent.)

Critical Attitude to Peace ° and Employment IDEAS OF G0D DIFFER

(Bv Telegraph

AUCKLAND, Last Night. Using those remarkably expressive hands of his to enforce his points, Dr. T. Z. Koo, travelling world's secretary of the Student Christian Movement, explained to a crowded audience at a largely attended luncheon of the Optimists' Club in the Y.M.C.A. concert hall, the attitude of youth under present day conditions. "There is a rising interest among youth, he said, in the whole question of economic readjustment in human society. This is a crucial question in every country. The depression of recent years has brought the economic situation vividly into the minds and lives of youth. Many young people leaving school have had to wait, and are waiting year after year, for a job. How it goes to their hearts that there is something wrong with the system. They will not let us forget the economic situation, and the real seriousness of the problem is that so many of these people are living close to the hunger line. "To-day youth is torn on another issue also. After the war there arose in every part of the world a desire to see a new kind of international relationships, to tako the place of the prewar title of relationships, and we have in countries like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Nationalistic Japan political organisations which have given rse to strong nationalist ideas that* are colouring the outlook of mdllions of youths in the modern world." fssues of Peace and War. Continuing, Dr. Koo said the whole question of peace and war was very much in the minds of young people in 4every part of the world. Their greatest interest was to foster peace, and it was very surprising to those not familiar with the outlook of youth to learn what a large part of their interests was directed to the. promotion of peace. Yet with all this love of peace, workers among youths were finding that young people of various countries were taking up apparently contradictory positions. A Nazi yquth had said recently at a big international conference at Mysore, lndia, "We are all for peace in Germany, but I would go hungiry in order that my country might have the strongest army." Also there was a peculiar difficulty in the fact that Nazis refused to recognise the ifiea of brotherhood in their* attitude towards people of . other races. Dealing with the attitude of youth towards Christianity, Dr. Koo said that in the present situation of the world, there were three easily distinguishable' groups. There was -first o'f all the fairly large group of youths who were frankly atheistic. They did not recognise any God. There was another group that took up the position that there was no God except so far as God was a projection of their own minds — just something their minds had created, but not a force that existed outside them and created them. The third gproup was still in contact with the ehurches and came from homes that had a Christian character to some extent, hut their attitude on the subject of God had become very vague. To them the idea of God did not call forth much in their minds. There was a patch of vagueness in their thinking and living. "I have seen these three sections in the countries through which 1 have been travelling," Dr. Koo said. "I have also been struck by the peculiar hunger for want of knowledge about God in the youths of many lands. Somehosr the human heart keeps coming back to . that. The simple reason is that the quality of our lives as individuais or as nations is dependent on .what we know of God When our knowledge becomes vague on this final cause in the nniverse we begin to develop by all sorts of tangents." To remedy the position, he said, was the problem. Some way must be found to communicate the reality of God to young people. It could no longer be done in the old terms, true though they were. The problem was to convey the knowledge of God in such a w*y that youths could "hook on" to it.