Sermons from Laymen

Two noted laymen spoke their minds on the past and future of Christianity.

> To Quebec to accept the degree of Doctor of Laws from Laval University went lanky Viscount Halifax, British Ambassador to the U.S. The devout Anglo-Catholic peer found one of the war's fundamental causes in "the continuous erosion" of Christianity in the past century. He noted that every attempt to eradicate Christianity has eventually placed the destroyers in the awkward position of cooking up a substitute. The French invented the Goddess of Reason, the Russians substituted "the abstraction of social collectivity," and -- Hitler himself selected the formula of the Nazi faith --"the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being."

Said Lord Halifax: "Small wonder if men & women everywhere are unsatisfied and ill at ease, since in their hour of greatest need they have lost that which was indeed their birthright -- the knowledge of how to pray. Yet, amid all the sorrow and darkness . . . there is consolation. The example alone of heroism . . . as it appears in thousands of lives . . . [shows] that man has renounced the philosophy which paralyzed so much literature and art in the prewar world. Truly, as day by day we see acts of willing self-sacrifice . . . we can . . . turn with firm confidence from the temporary triumphs of the evildoer to the unshaken faith and hope with which the saints have enriched our world."

> In Detroit, speaking before the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly, Wendell L. Willkie added a chapter to his recent book One World (more than 1,000,000 copies to date) on the impressions American missionaries made on him during his world trip.

Episcopalian Willkie found them serving "the cause of good will for America," characterized them as "vital to the future hopes, not alone of other nations, but of our own United States."

Said he: "I asked people in every land whether they were not resentful that these foreigners should invade their country. The answer was universal enthusiasm for what American missionaries have done, and for the lives they lead. . . . [They] have everywhere stimulated a desire for education. . . . When Hitler wanted to prepare his people for war, he burned the books. We who want to prepare for peace must open them. . . .

"China . . . is now going through a kind of educational revolution. . . . It is this process that has made China today no longer a nation of inert masses, but a nation of individuals . . . willing to fight and die for a future of freedom. . . . This kind of work, in which our American missionaries have been so loyal and conscientious, is a fine example of what I mean by leadership.

"The missionaries themselves are leaders --but that is not all the point. They teach the people to provide their own leadership . . . develop . . . a sense of wellbeing, of self-reliance, of self-respect. . . . And that, I believe, is one of the chief causes for the good will toward the United States that now exists in almost every corner of the earth."

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