WAR’S LEGACY OF EVIL.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 May 1921, Page 11

WAR’S LEGACY OF EVIL.

“GOD OFF HIS THRONE.” WICKED LONDON. London, Feb. 28. The moral state of the world —and particularly Great Britain—since the war is now often the theme of public men. It is again and again emphasised that the high ideals which sustained the nation during the war, and the great hopes of a new world that followed its conclusion, have alike been betrayed. The latest to condemn the disastrous after-war spirit jin trenchant words is General Booth. Speaking to a Press representative on the legacy of the war, the head o-f the Salvation Army said: — “The world is undoubtedly better for finding out that every selfish plot for supremacy is doomed, so long as there are races with the necessary heroism and energy to work out God’s purposes and supply the right resistance. “The grave question is whether the Master is satisfied that the world is putting the precious blessing of victory to the best uses. To take our own land, for instance, we want not so much a League of Nations as a League of All Classes, in which the rich shall help the poor, and the poor shall teach the wealthy what to learn to do without. “GOD OFF HIS THRONE.” “Statesmen are for ever arguing about the aims for which we waged war, and wrangling about the bill to pay for it. But the war was won by the sacrifice of those who gave up everything, without a though of self—and can we win the peace with anything less? “The Press and the pulpit and the poor law are, without doubt, doing their best, but the fact is that reform and retrenchment, without a renewal of spiritual life, are but a cheating and postponement of death. “The Christian Rationalist, as he calls himself, may tear out Genesis from his Bible, and preach God Almighty off His throne into a sort of highbrow almshouse, but is the worjd any better for that? All it gains is a display of intellectual fireworks, with headache and heartache at the end of it. “One of the churches is resisting a campaign in favor of women preachers. We have always held that the sex which God entrusted with the bearing and rearing of children is just the influence to counsel and bring us back to the virtues we learned at our mother’s knee. I tell you without good women religion would well-nigh perish.”

. LONDON’S WICKEDNESS. Asked what the mission of the Salvation Army would include to remedy the present state of things, General Booth answered: “We will tackle the unemployed rich, for they need salvation most of all. “Wealth and luxury are the last stronghold o-f the devil, and London is its pivot. I ‘kn-.n often been asked whether our experience about the world is useful to us in dealing with London; and so it is; but I would rather say it. the wickedness of London that teaches us to recognise our quarry when we find it, however far afield. “I grieve to have to say it, but the state of London since the war makes one realise what may happen when so many of the best and bravest perish. “Society’s legacy seems little, so far, but a welter of extravagance, frivolity, scandal, sensuality, and worse. The present riot of divorce looks to me like a flood-tide of passion sweeping over the land, where the homes that are unhappily uprooted carry wreckage and destruction to all others in their way. “The poor have no such drug-sots and drunkards as the ‘upper classes’ harbor, nor is it possible for humble folk, familiar with work and privations, to eink as low in the social scale as do some of the idle rich.”