TO REMOVE THE YOKE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 October 1941, Page 7

TO REMOVE THE YOKE

ANTAGONISM TO CHRISTIAN IDEALS . “What are we fighting for?” asked the Rev. Walter A. Armstrong in his inaugural address to the Methodist Conference at Leeds. “One answer to this question is that other peoples of the world know if we do not. Some of them know better than we do, for they have experienced, and are experiencing, all the horrors of an awful tyranny with all its madness and brutality. It is to remove the yoke that hangs around their necks, and to save that yoke being placed around our own necks, that we are fighting. And we are fighting against a doctrine which is in direct antagonism to .Christian ideals, which, if victorious, would strike a deadly blow to our spiritual convictions and social aspirations, and, what perhaps is far worse, we are fighting to save our children from being impregnated with teachings which we utterly and entirely abhor. The doctrine is, to quote a phrase of Burke’s, an ‘armed doctrine,’ and we are meeting force with force. And force, we are told, is not an ultimate solution. But that is true of all evils; yet no one ■proposes to allow these evils to have free course and run riot. Adolf Hitler uses force, brutal force. Abraham Lincoln used force. Are the two to be classified together and come under the same condemnation? Booker T. Washington, the negro leader, born in slavery, said of Lincoln that he found the negro race mere goods and chattels, and he made it a race of free citizens. Adolf Hitler finds peoples free and enslaves them. If we can see no vital difference between them, then surely we defame the dead. It might also be remembered that the opposite to love is not force, but hate.