FLOOD PARALLEL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 January 1942, Page 4

FLOOD PARALLEL

DUTY OF CHRISTIAN CHURCH. “What is the duty of the Christian Church as it faces this great calamity?” asked an American layman, Mr Ralph Flanders, in a recent address. “The Church cannot preach a crusade as though this were a holy war. If a war ever has been unholy, this one surely is. It is cruel, it is destructive to an unprecedented degree of material property, human lives and moral values. There is every reason to believe that, unless it is satisfactorily terminated, whole continents will be reduced to poverty and slavery under victors who will have been brutalised by their very victory. Yet it is a.war which must be fought. It is a natural phenomenon in the moral universe, even as an Ohio River flood is a natural phenomenon in the material universe. A few years ago the city of Cairo, in the State of Illinois, was saved only by the utmost efforts of physical exertion carried to the point.of physical exhaustion on the part of its inhabitants and of volunteers drawn from the country for miles around. When the last sandbag was piled and the river started to recede, the fight had been won by a scant few inches. The effort had to be made; the fight had to be won. There is a necessity after such an emergency for a careful study of the causes and the devising of a programme for preventing a recurrence, so far as that is humanly possible. Reafforestation, flood control, dams, better dykes and levees, all these things are part of the picture. But there was a time when nothing would serve but the filling and piling of sandbags to the limit of physical endurance.”