TRUST IN GOD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 February 1940, Page 5

TRUST IN GOD

CREATING new world order PROBLEM OF FAITH. ADDRESS AT PRESBYTERIAN ASSEMBLY. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. "It is surely with feelings of deep thankfulness and gratitude to God that wo are met tonight as an Assembly of our Church." stated the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, the Right Rev J. Lawson Robinson, speaking at (he Centennial Assembly. "We have reached the 100th milestone in our history. and it is altogether fitting and proper that we should commemorate the fact. Ono hundred years is not a long period in the great expanse of history, but after all the first century in any country’s life is important, because it gives colour and character to all that follows after. If we enjoy any measure of prosperity today it is because our fathers toiled and suffered and endured. If religion holds a preeminent place in our life the credit is due. not so much to any spiritual attainment of our own. but the fact that our fathers trusted God. and served and worshipped him. This present generation is perhaps a little inclined to forget that the security they enjoy, socially, politically and economically is an inheritance from the past. As citizens of this Dominion we owe more than we can pay to the strength and industry and character of those who have gone before us. Other men laboured and we are entered into their labours."

After briefly reviewing the early history of the Church in New Zealand, the Moderator went on to refer to the steadfastness and spirit of the pioneers. ‘•We are face to face with new problems of which our fathers never dreamed.” Mr Robinson proceeded. “The world is at present in travail, and we expect there will come to birth a new order. There can be little doubt that at the present moment thinking men everywhere are conscious of impending change. A new order of society is coming to birth, but what the character, of that new order will be we are not able clearly to discern. But there are many hopeful signs. We are looking on the dissolution of a civilisation whose ideals are frankly material; we are witnessing the disillusionment of men who had come to think, in spite of sacred authority, that they could live by bread alone. It is clearly evident today that the peace of the world does not rest solely or chiefly on economic systems. There were many people who looked hopefully and longingly at the Russian experiment of organising life on a more or less communistic basis. Europe’s successive failures since 1918 to organise peace on a lasting foundation, are not, as believers in the Marxian analysis of history assert, the result of economic conflict, and the wars now in progress the death agonies of decadent capitalism. If Russia’s alliance with National Socialism, and her lapse into predatory imperialism, show anything at all, they show that to remove inequalities of wealth and class divisions from a society, is not thereby to purge that society of error and evil. The chaos into which contemporary Europe has sunk is the result of a moral and spiritual collapse, of an abandonment by the human race of those principles which are the nexus of social and international organisation. ‘Before all else’ says the Pope in his latest encyclical, ‘it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils we deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal form of morality as well for individual and social life as for international rela-

j tions.t It is important there should be ] a reign of law in the international field, 5 but the problem of creating a new world order is, as Mr Roosevelt said a „ few weeks ago, a problem of faith. 5 With the break-up of civilisation into t communities inspired by false doctrines , of race and class and nationality, the t churches have become the principal guardians of the idea of the human ■ race as an organic unity subject to uni- . versal laws; it is the churches which . have been most courageous and suc- • cessful in resisting state absolutism; . and it is in the growing power of the [ churches that lies, as Mr Roosevelt has , seen, the principal hope of re-creating . the basis for a community of nations. It is not through blind reaction that the world will find its way back to peace and sanity, but rather through a balanced understanding of the need | for a common faith to restore coherence to human society, and of the impossibility of finding any such faith in purely materialist or ultilitarian philosophies. “I have quoted those last few sentences almost verbally from a leading article in a metropolitan daily newspaper. It is significant that from many thoughtful sources, which cannot be accused of professional bias, has come the acknowledgment that in the message with which the churches are entrusted lies the one hope of mankind. The Christian gospel of the unity and brotherhood of the human race, and its salvation in Jesus Christ, is being abundantly vindicated in the chaos and confusion into which the world has fallen through its negation of the Christian principle. We can declare that gospel, we can enunciate that principle with even greater confidence than before. Civilisation has for generations past been putting its trust in materialist philosophies, in the worship of mammon; and as a result civilisation is in collapse. We have the only remedy for such conditions —the constant proclamation of the Christian message, and the persistent declaration that in the principles of Jesus Christ the only hope of sanity and peace is found. Fathers and brethren, that is our task in this new century. The responsibility is on us who arc the grateful heirs to all the devotion and earnestness and courage of the past.”