THE FIFTH CHRISTMAS
TF Christmas, and the event in history which it commemorates, 1. have any meaning for the world today it must be for the whole of the world, not for any single nation or association of nations; and the petition which formed part of the Collect for last Sunday, " 0 Lord, raise up, we pray thee, thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us " is not to be regarded as a mere equivalent of the prayer that we (in the .person of the King who represents us) may vanquish and- overcome all our enemies. It is a petition for Christians of all countries, British and Russian, German and American, Italian and French, to take on their lips with the same sincerity in this hour of need. The need may differ in quality and degree. There will be no Christmas in Berlin this year, a Swedish correspondent has written: There will be a Christmas not much less grim for the people of occupied Russia and occupied France. In our comparative security and our com- parative comfort we may well give thanks where we feel thanks to be most due for immunity from the misery in which millions in Europe today lie submerged. If anyone needed to cry to any God they believe in, With great might succour us, it is those enslaved and tortured peoples in Poland and Greece and Norway and Yugoslavia, for whom starvation has been added to homeless- ness and to starvation ruthless and calculated brutality. But the moan of suffering can only be imagined, for all sound of it is drowned and overwhelmed by the clash of arms. Bethlehem itself is in a military zone. Christians in that land, as in this land and in every land, are left to face the mystery of sin and suffering on a scale never even conceived before, and pray with an intensity born of the greatness of the need, Come among us, and with great might succour us.
And then? Is faith equal to expecting any answer to such a petition at such a time? It may be. Many things that are hard are not impossible. The answer, if it comes, will come through human agency. If a miracle is to be wrought it will be in the hearts of men, not among the forces of Nature. But in fact no process to which the word miracle normally applies is called for here, for it is not a miracle for the consciences of men to be quickened, their sympathies enlarged, their capacity for self- sacrifice deepened. Yet if that happens, and emotions find their proper and practical expression in action, the succour so urgently sought and so desperately needed will have become a concrete and vivifying reality. There is nothing visionary about this, though vision is demanded, as well as the highest human capacity and competence available, if sympathy is to be translated into something other than mere impulsive sentiment. And the vision the occasion required has not been lacking. Material succour is being organised today on a scale whose immensity defies clear comprehension. What is the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administra- tion? It can be defined accurately enough in prosaic language as an international organisation for the relief of the necessitous populations of Europe on their liberation is achieved. It is that, no doubt—an enterprise partly political, partly humanitarian. Yet if any body of Christian people, if the Christian Churches in countries like Britain and the United States, had been praying that succour might be sent to the starved and subjugated masses of two continents—for we shall not forget China in all this—could they have hoped for such an answer as the creation of an organisation like U.N.R.R.A. and the disclosure of the programme U.N.R.R.A. has framed, _provide? The subventions expected from the Governments are such as have never been so much as thought of in connexion with any humanitarian undertaking before. This country—in which complaint was once made that Lioo,000 a year for the League of Nations was an excessive burden—will be called on for an initial Doo,000,000 for U.N.R.R.A. The announcement has been made, and evoked not a murmur of protest anywhere. There are not too many heartening reflections to cheer the Christmas of 1943, but this at least is one of them.
But what, it may be asked, have the Churches to do with U.N.R.R.A.? Why should they seek to profit by the prestige it is acquiring? Such a question is misconceived. It is a conception very different that is under examination here. Christmas is a season when all the iiaplications of the tremendous historical fact which gives Christmas its name and its meaning may, and should, be studied afresh by all who seek to relate that historical fact in any way, with outward profession or without it, to their own lives and the world around them. The very problems which at normal times they naturally approach as citizens they may now fitly for a moment approach as Christians. The enduring question of what a Christian society should be, or how the society of today can be Christianised, presents itself afresh for answer. In the contrast between what might be and what is there is enough to justify not merely depression, but something like despair. The more reason, then, that full account should be taken of any events and tendencies anywhere which indicate that mankind is capable of an upward course as well as a downward. Signs of that are in fact not wanting. Religion, the Christian religion or any other, is first and foremost an individual concern ; but ;rue religion implies essentially a religious societyi based on definite tenets and animated by definite ideals,—ideals, Moreover, not for itself alone, but for the larger society in which it lives. To preach the application of Christian ideals by a non-Christian, or not specifically Christian, society is not alto- gether easy, for it means assuming motives which that society does not necessarily profess. But this is a case in which the Christian society may well declare that whoever is not against it is for it, and it is enough if policies are shaped according to its ideals, whether shaped ostensibly in its name or not.
How do things stand regarding that today? How would the Christian society desire to see its ideals applied in various fields? In the greatest field of all, in which a choice must be made between war and peace, the conflict of demands has been faced and the decision made—in the spirit of a remarkable poem written by a serving soldier in the third year of the last war and printed on another page of this issue. Across that gulf hope and faith must reach to a new vision of the fabric of peace, a peace of justice based on power, such as the Atlantic Charter and the resolutions of the Moscow Conference contemplate. The Christian ideal demands not merely an enforced peace, but the growth and persistence of a spirit of peace ; but it realises that the first may be necessary for a time while the latter develops. It demands that the moment a road across the carnage is open the hungry shall be fed, the exiles restored to their own lands, the homeless housed. Pro- vision for all that is actually in train. It demands that somehow unity shall be created in a severed world. Only the beginnings of that process can yet be seen, but they are beginnings, notably the resolves that are animating countries like Russia and China, to inspire strong hopes. How Germany is to be included in a unity based on inward cohesion and not merely outward form is a question to which no answer can yet be seen ; there is no problem to which Christian citizens as Christian citizens are called on more urgently to make both spiritual and intellectual contribution, in the faith that somehow the problem can be solved. Even more important, and less capable of being ignored, are the demands the Christian ideal makes in national lik. It requires. that-the .hungry shall be fed, the needy clothed, and above all that the children shall be made ready in body and mind to bear the responsibilities of good citizenship, and so far as may be of Christian citizenship. Those ideals may be far from full realisation, but they are nearer realisation than ever before in our history. The Beveridge pro- posals or the new Education Bill need not be discussed in detail here—there will be no lack of other opportunities—but that the principles of both represent ideals, not indeed exclusively but specifically, Christian cannot be questioned for a moment. And it is not irrelevant that those accepted ideals can only be realised by a process which means acceptance by the rich of the burdens of the poor. The contrasts between wealth and poverty which have done so-much to impair the essential unity of the nation will impair it no longer in any comparable degree when this war is over. We shall be members one of another in a far fuller sense. Conscious- ness of what remains to be done must not overshadow Consciqusness of what is being done already. The Christmas of 1943 may be dark, but for people that sit in darkness a great light has ,shined before now in history.
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