FREEDOM & DISCIPLINE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 October 1941, Page 7

FREEDOM & DISCIPLINE

WATCHWORD OF HUMANISM. The watchword of humanism has been a rather unintelligent idea of freedom, which lost sight, of human nature’s practical need of discipline. The results have been worked out in the liberal democracies of our time, states the Rev H. J. S. Guntrip, writing in the “Congregational Quarterly.” Having fought for and won a large measure of freedom, we have been discovering, as Walter Lippmann says, that “a man’s worst difficulties begin when he can do as he likes.” Democracy can so easily peter out into a multitude of warring factions that are powerless to do anything. Germany and Italy found democratic freedom too much for them and fled into the arms of dictators. France under democratic government has lost or failed io achieve that unity that means strength. Britain with a longer political experience of democracy has managed better, though that is also due in no small measure to the fact that our democracy has been more consistently informed by Christian aims, and led by Christian men of all parties. Yet here, too, the rot had set in. After the last war our liberty was turned to licence in all the personal aspects of life. All religious and moral convictions were impatiently flung aside as baseless restrictions, and young people with little in them to express went in recklessly for self-expression. Some of the criticisms made by Fascists and Nazis have been all too true. Our democracies have tended to be masses of selfish, easy-going, and complacent people, stressing their rights to pleasure, scornful of plain living and high thinking, avoiding responsibility except when they fought for their own private interests, and throwing up leaders who were timid and indecisive and often loved political power more than their country. Fascism and Nazism, seeing in the democracies the lack of that strength that discipline gives, have rushed to the wrong solution. (They have fallen back on the cast-iron, external, and primitive discipline of brute force, which crushes the personality out of man. Christianity insists on the discipline of the flesh by the spirit, a discipline that works from within by free acceptance.