OLD HOPES & NEW VISION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 January 1942, Page 4

OLD HOPES & NEW VISION

TRAGEDY—WHICH MEANS WAR.

The churches have felt to the full the tragedy which war means, writes Dr. Sidney M. Berry, secretary of the English Congregational Union.' There is a fundamental incompatibility between war and all its methods and the Christian message. The churches have prayed and toiled for peace in the years preceding the war. They looked for another and a better way of settling disputes between nations. If there is any criticism to be offered it would be that they were not sufficiently realistic in their interpretation of human affairs, that their hopes became caricatured into illusions, and that they imagined that it only needed a strong lead for peace to bring about the desired result. They know better now. Those scales have fallen from their eyes. The old hopes remain, and behind them a grimmer determination. The great majority of Christian people know that there is no chance of a new order until the earth is cleansed of the evil thing which has brought this world-wide tragedy. But they see, too, that it needs more than the material arm to break the power of that evil. The religion of the pleasant ways and the soft persuasions has gone. Religion novz faces the hard reality of sin, I and its message is the glorious reality of redemption. How is the world to be cleansed unless it be cleansed by the grace and power of God?