CAUSE AND EFFECT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 December 1941, Page 8

CAUSE AND EFFECT

EVIL POLITICAL CONDITIONS.

ALLOWED TO WORK THEIR COURSE.

The truth which I am most concerned to make, says Dr. R. Corkey, M.P., writing in the Hibbert Journal, is that the war cannot be held to be a judgment of God upon the multitude of suffering humanity for either moral delinquencies of religious unbelief. If there is abundant reason to believe that the war has been the outcome of one set of evil causes, what right have we to assert that it was the judgment of God upon men for a number of other shortcomings which, so far as we know, had no bearing whatever on the outbreak of the conflict? If it was mainly a product, and, as I believe, an almost inevitable product, of an imperfect international system, what right have we to divert attention from that central fact by suggesting that the holocaust is a judgment of God upon humanity for its repudiation of Him? Do we not run the risk of hiding from ourselves the real lesson in these events by dragging in irrelevances? Our social evils and irreligion are bad enough, God knows, and it may be within the sweep of His far-reaching purpose to stab us wide awake to them in these searching days. But they are not the source of our present woe, nor, if there is any sense in the idea of divine guidance, are they the chief evils to which God is directing our attention today. On the contrary, the evils He is judging, and the evils He would have us condemn, are the evils that actually brought about the war. The “logic of events” has been at work and has set in motion an avalanche. A set of evil political conditions, all perfectly familiar, have been allowed to work out their accustomed evil fruit in their accustomed evil way. Hell has been let loose on us, and the reasons are not so very mysterious. If the judgment of God can be said to be manifest in these events at all, it is a judgment directed primarily not against low morals but against bad politics; not against defects within our society but against folly in our external affairs.