CHRISTIANITY AND COMMUNISM

Lake County Mail, Issue 33, 21 January 1948, Page 2

CHRISTIANITY AND COMMUNISM

In the world to-day there are two great blocs of people, the Christians and the Communists, who, while believing things which are in many ways opposed, yet share one thing in common, not possessed by other identifiable groups of people. This is serenity and a fixity of purpose. And yet while saying that, it does not mean that every member of each group possesses this quality, in fact no Christian can have it unless he is honestly meaning business by his religion. However widely their ultimate beliefs differ there must be, therefore, a core of a certain subsidiary but important convictions. To find and to hold serenity in a complex world in a state of violent flux, one must have two convictions, which in fact both Communists and Christians do hold and hold equally. First, then, one must be utterly convinced that the cause for which they live and die is bound to be ultimately triumphant. Serve it well and the triumph is accelerated; serve it ill—or not at all, and the triumph is retarded, but no man or no group of men can ever do more than hasten or postpone the day, for it is foreordained in the scheme of things, in the mind of God or the dialectic of history. Secondly, both Communists and Christians have found the right relationship between obscurity and insignificance. It is that while one may be obscure, it is quite impossible for one to be Ansignificant. If every single thing one does is held to matter to the cause to be served, and if conversely nothing can be done which does not affect the cause for good or ill, then it is impossible for anyone serving the cause to be insignificant. These two convictions of the final triumph of the cause, and the- significance of every adherent to the cause promote that serenity held by Christians and Communists alike. From there onwards their ways part company. They are divided over the value of the individual personality. Ask the question: Where do Communists and Christians respectively draw their common serenity? Not from the same place. A Communist draws it from the cause lie serves, a Christian from his relationship to a person, the person of Jesus Christ. For the Communist the cause comes before all else. For the Christian his relationship to our Lord comes even before the cause of the Kingdom of God, for our Lord’s teaching is final and complete, and the Kingdom He wins for us, it is not what we create by our own efforts. It is, therefore, a division between devotion and faith. Both devotion to a cause and faith in a person demand sacrifice but the differences are great and have been outlined by the Bishop of Southampton in his book, Continued on page G.