WAR & PROVIDENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 November 1940, Page 8

WAR & PROVIDENCE

ADDRESS BY PRESBYTERIAN MODERATOR OPPORTUNITY FOR CHRISTIAN PEOPLE. BATTLE WON BY CHURCH. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) PALMERSTON N„ This Day. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand met in St. Andrew’s Church, Palmerston North, last night. Public worship having been conducted by the retiring Moderator, the Right Rev. J. Lawson Robinson, he constituted the Assembly by prayer and pursuant to the nomination of last Assembly moved that the Rev. G. H. Jupp, of Anderson's Bay, Dunedin, be elected Moderator, and this having been agreed to unanimously, Mr Jupp was introduced and set apart to his office by prayer. The subject taken for his Moderatorial address by Mr Jupp was “Some

Thoughts on Divine Providence.” It was, he said, by no means easy to look at the world today, but, in the words of Mr J. Middleton Murry, “the very essence of Christianity consists in looking at a terribly painful truth.” Thomas Hardy had written wisely when he said, “If way to the better there be, it exacts a full sight of the worst.” The man who would buy experience must give all that he had. Truth, in the broadest sense, must be paid for, and no Christian man dared to attempt to evade it and still call himself a follower of Jesus Christ. The almost overwhelming desire of all people in such a time of horror and fear as we were experiencing at present was to escape the truth about the world. Schemes for a millenium were

produced and well-meaning but practically foundationless outlines of the future were given to the world in a natural desire to encourage those whose hearts were breaking. But, said the Moderator, “it is necessary that we should realise how completely our unconscious social being, our habitual! every day behaviour, our unquestioned assumption of the validity of the ends for which we live, have set in motion the process whereby the world is driven to the outrage upon God and man which is being committed today.” No merely ostentatious sin had brought the world to its present pass. Ordinary commonplace evil which most people called good, the impulses to be prosperous, to be secure, to avoid risks, the idea that it was foolish to consider that the disinterestedness of love should be the motive power of the behaviour of men and nations —these were the causes of our agony.

The cry that, unless God intervened in some spectacular way to stop the war, Christian faith would be lost, had been heard by most people. The virtual denial of God could not but result in that despair which urged men to deny Him altogether and to abandon hope completely. This was the opportunity for Christian people to renew their call to all nominal believers to abandon their half-hearted allegiance and give wholehearted obedience to their Master and Lord. The popular conception of God was that of a Supreme Being who gave good things. “The Lord will provide" seemed to be the favourite text of most people. But there was no place given to the purpose of God in history and

in the lives of individuals. Men must admit God as absolute demand as well as - absolute succour. Concluding, the Moderator said that so far from the present catastrophe causing unsettlement of any one’s belief in God, it was rather to be argued that if there had been no such awful happenings men should have wondered if there were a God of righteousness at all. Evil thinking and careless acting must bring a dreadful retribution. If they did not, then they would not be evil; Quoting Dr. P. T. Forsyth, Mr Jupp said: “The Church is the only society on earth whose battle is already won. The Church chiefly exists to certify that the battle was won in what was done by Christ, and that we have but to follow the victory up. . . . The Church is the only society with a fulcrum outside the world: and therefore the only one that can move the world as a whole.”