6 APRIL 1929, Page 19

The Jerusalem Conference, of . representatives of all the Churches

last year was hailed as a welcome Sigh of the times. Still more welcome and more. significant, as illustrating men's new sense of 1,-alues,was the gathering in Geneva lark Septem- ber, at which workers for peace, representing fourteen living religions, made common cause to safeguard the future of humanity. In The World's Religions Against War (The Church Peace Union, Paris, 2s.) we have a record of the proceedings of the Preliminary Conference which was charged with the task of making arningernents for a Universal Religious Peace Conference in 1930. One of the speakers quoted Walter Pater's reflection in Marius the Epicurean, when the hero is depicted watching the gladiatorial butcheries in ancient Rome, and saying to himself : " What was wanting was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this, and the future would be with the forces which could beget that heart." It is no less appro- priate to-day. Agencies of international contact increase and multiply every day, but they are of no account unless they are vitalized by the life-giving spirit. Education in the Humanities—in the full sense of the phrase—may do much; but—" religion alone can create that new heart. If it cannot, religitin has no future, for the simple reason that humanity

has no future."