PRACTICE BEFORE PRECEPT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 September 1941, Page 6

PRACTICE BEFORE PRECEPT

FREEDOM & RIGHTEOUSNESS. “We British have a great Christian tradition, our laws and institutions rest ultimately upon a Christian basis, and the things about which we have a fundamental concern and for which we are now engaged in a life and death struggle—freedom and justice, good faith and goodwill, all the decencies, as we call them, between man and man and nation and nation —all these things derive ultimately from a deep belief in the divine government of the world and all men’s value in God’s sight,” said the Bishop of Lichfield, Dr Woods, in an address to undergraduates of Cambridge University. “None would surely deny that our main object in this titanic struggle is to establish for Europe and the world an order very different from Hitler’s, in which freedom and righteousness on an international scale could at last have some chance to grow and flourish; but I am persuaded that the best hope of our showing to men what kind of new world we desire to establish is not in the first instance by sketching out blue prints of a federal union, a revised League of Nations and so on, but by actually putting into practice here and now in our own community life a sample of the contented human society which we would fain see established everywhere. When we only talk about these things, other nations will continue to think us rather hypocritical; when they sec us actually doing them, reconstructing our own national life on these better lines, then and then only will they really take notice and perhaps feel impelled to work with us for a new order in the world.”