The Sun THURSDAY, JUNE 7, 1928. CHRISTIANS AND WAR

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 374, 7 June 1928, Page 8

The Sun THURSDAY, JUNE 7, 1928. CHRISTIANS AND WAR

IT is good to observe that New Zealand churchmen are alert to the necessity of promoting the spiritual movement for world peace. The subject was discussed by the Dunedin Presbytery yesterday and a wise stand taken on it. The ministers and elders in session characteristically refused to become hysterical on the question of adopting the tentative peace manifesto of the Presbyterian General Assembly. After some canny discussion, they decided to “express general approval of the manifesto while safeguarding the historical position of our church as expressed in our standards, that Christians may lawfully wage war on just and necessary occasions.” Such was the deliberate conclusion of earnest men, keen spiritual workers, who know quite well in their experience of life and its follies and weaknesses that the millennium is still a mirage, and the Devil not yet in chains. The decision of the Presbytery was in every way a logical one. But, at the same time, its apparently unassailable strength was its most vulnerable weakness. As Viscount Robert Cecil—among statesmen the most resolute, most persistent fighter for world peace-—has said : “It is impossible to condemn wars really undertaken in self-defence. Yet the difficulties of defining aggressive war are great. In the late War every Government professed to be fighting in self-defence.” Quite so; in other words Christian and other nations have no difficulty in proving how lawful it may be for Christians to wage war on just and necessary occasions. So when all has been said that can be said about the justice and necessity of war, honest men, surfeited with argument, must come down to the bedrock truth that the supreme task of civilised nations is to outlaw war and destroy it. This, of course, will not he a simple task. Neither pacts nor covenants will accomplish it at a single stroke. It will take (to quote Lord Cecil again) “all our energies, all our courage, and all our faith” to do it after many years and probably some backsliding. International movement is at least in the right direction. The first step toward the desirable goal was the creation of the League of Nations with a fundamental determination to get rid of the old and very had idea that it is lawful for one nation to make war on another at its own will and pleasure. This is in the League’s covenant, hut it only binds members of the League. It leaves America out of step. Hence the necessity for the proposal of the United States that nations should renounce war as an instrument of national policy, to outlaw war, indeed, and lynch it. The moral principle of this proposition has already been accepted by the League of Nations, hut, without the co-operation of America, the League cannot put it into practice. The proposed pact for an international renunciation of war is hailed by Viscount Grey of Fallodon as something more important and helpful than anything that could have been done within the League itself. It would, in effect, tie America to the more vital pact, while it would strengthen the ties of the League members who could not go to war without breaking both the covenant and the pact. Anything that puts the wealthiest nation in the world into the front line against war is to be welcomed.