BAFFLING INCONGRUITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 January 1940, Page 6

BAFFLING INCONGRUITY

DOCTRINES AND PROCEDURES. Thoughtful Christians in these dark davs must often find themselves asking with the old Pope in Browning's great poem. "And is this little all that was to be?” says Bishop Hensley Henson, writing in the “Sunday Times. the incongruity between the divine machinery for'the world's rescue which Christianity postulates on the one hand, and its actual achievement in history on the other, is extreme, baffling and enigmatic. At the start, the Incarnation: at the encl, the Christendom we seehow shall these be brought into a tolerable harmony? Yet the crudity 01. the shocking contrast may easily be exaggerated. It is not wholly unrelieved. If the latest Christian century discloses a strange recrudescences ol doctrines and procedures which. Io roashly, we had imagined to have been long outpassed by civilised mankind, it is also true that the same century is disclosing a moral sensitiveness in the general conscience, and an eager benevolence among professed Christians which have no parallel in history. Nor is the present situation, when closely examined, finite so grotesque as we are tempted| to think'. There is light in the darkness. From the first. Christ and AntiChrist have been in conflict. The issue is not yet decided. Nor may the fact be reasonably denied, or belittled, that reversion to barbarism, and repudiation of Christian principles and traditions, are significantly and persistently link-