YOUTH AND A COMPROMISE RELIGION [To the Editor of THE
SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Mr. Castle in his article in last week's Spectator states that the young people of today " see the world in the grip of two great evils—poverty and war." He may be, and very probably is, right in asserting that they are disgusted with the Church because she will not concentrate all her energies on their abolition.
Poverty and War are admittedly great evils, but they are neither of them primary, and it is quite certain that if the Church were to concentrate on these she would be guilty of compromising with the radical religion of Jesus Christ.
Poverty and War are both symptoms of deeper evils, and it has always been the temptation of the short-sighted to attack symptoms instead of causes.
Poverty is a real evil, and as such the Church has always and consistently tried to remedy it. Long before the State had her Poor Law the Church had her system of relief ; the Ordination Service lays down that the relief of the poor is still one of the tasks of the Christian minister : and true to her traditions the Church today is pioneering in new methods of meeting, through occupational centres and the like, the graver evils which poverty and unemployment bring with them : but all experience teaches that when this necessary duty is treated as primary the Church loses her influence in realms that matter more.
War is an evil, admittedly, but those pacifist clergy and others who today would have us treat it as primary, seem to ignore the greater evil of injustice, and it is largely due to them that our country has found itself in the humiliating position of having, in Abyssinia, to condone one of the greatest wrongs in history.
Every minister of Christ must long to meet the needs of idealistic modern youth, but when we are asked to do it by concentrating on secondary things we can but remember that Our Lord Himself consistently refused " to put the remedy for suffering before the remedy for sin."—Yours,
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