BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 November 1939, Page 8

BASIS OF CHRISTIANITY

CERTAIN PRECIOUS VALUES. "British social institutions express, in their very shape, certain precious values which, in the last resort, can only be justified on the basis of Christianity." said the Rev. Oliver S. Tomkins in. a recent 8.8. C. talk. "Among them are the whole idea of equality before the law, the right of every man to go to law without the verdict being prejudiced against him from the start; the idea that men may not be imprisoned without due trial; the idea that all fully responsible citizens have some sort of a share in government; the idea that the governors may be turned out of power when they cease to represent the people who put them in; the idea that men have a right to voice their opinions freely, even to follow any religion they like, so long as it does not involve lawlessness—and so we might go on. Britain not only owes much in what we call roughly democracy, but much in her national life, which is far older than democracy, to the fact that men were constantly seeking to make public life and political institutions into a framework round which Christian living could be built. But the impulse to inspire social life for Christian ends has weakened and decayed. The story'is a long and complicated one, but we see it most clearly when we look at countries where the Christian ends have been definitely rejected and other ones substituted; where justice is not thought of as the right of all men. but simply as a way of bolstering up a nation or class; where speech and writing have no freedom unless they are in line with official propaganda; where minorities have no rights at all over against the will of dictatorship. We miss the whole difficulty if we simply point a scornful finger at other countries and say, hypocritically: 'That kind of thing can't happen here.’ It can, and it does; only it happens in ways so near our own eyes that we cannot see it."