"To the Editor of the ""Mobrh-Cbixn Day News"
Sm,—Your editorial on "Christianity and Peace" is most worth reading. May it somehow reach the ear of any one else around the world who desires to see the restoration and (then) preservation of international peace.
There are certain principles of universal peace such as you quote and elaborate in the editorial. What remains to be worked out is the problem (and procedure) of application of the principles. Evidently social law requires social action just as natural law requires natural action. Furthermore, it cannot remain effective without enforcement of some kind, This implies a' world government. Indeed, it calls for a superstate, Such state can come about through two ways.'One is coercion which means imperialism or conquest of a single person or group of persons. "The peace it imposes cannot but be temporary—one or two hundred years at the most. Before it can so result, there must be a series of wars. The other way is cooperation which means union of will and hope and division of labour observed according to the ideal of fraternity and liberty. There can be efficient evolution. There will be voluntary contributions toward progress, There must be democracy—as there is in the American Union, in the British Commonwealth, and in Switzerland. And the peace which is international ana creative shall be permanent.
A creative peace is not an imposed peace. A man like Hitler, for example, cannot accept and will not support it because he does not understand it, He denies the desirability of reason, he confuses one idea with another; he relies on instinct or intuition as a man of the Stone Age does, However keenly he may feel and think, he lives too much as a "one-sided man." It is true that, man has a soul, heart and sentiment; but it is also true that man has reason, too, without which there can be no science, no art, no literature, or, in short, no progressive civilization. Almost daily we speak of soul, spirit, will, mind and body. And so we know our heart, motive, emotion, intellect and physique. Universally and eternally, heart comes from soul and the two are not parallel—obviously not as Hitler seems to assert. We can withes soul suffering and may speak of a poor soul; but we cannot, imagine that soul would commit crimes as we "now witness in Europe and Asia, Soul must be let free and other factors of life also must be active. To create peace, one must understand it—studying its causes and consequences.
One's spirit, will, and mind may \be good or evil; none is "beyond good and evil," none, indeed, as some German teachers tempted us to follow. Unless mind, will and spirit work together to be forces of goodness, beauty and truth, and let soul itself express the love of God through services and sacrifices for mankind as a whole, there can be no {nner way or highway to peace. And unless there is freedom of life, no work for peace can successfully proceed. We must now safeguard or regain our freedom!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.