CHRISTIAN FRIENDSHIP AFTER WAR

By REV. FRANCIS E. CLARK, D.D.

(Reprinted from The Congregationalist)

A

S a source of possible comfort to the timorous souls who believe that the people of the world are permanently rent in twain by "the greatest war of history," may I relate an incident that occurred in Cape Town at the close of the Boer War?

It was my fortune to be in South Africa shortly before the war began, and to see something of the officials of both sides who soon afterwards were engaged in one of the bitterest, if not one of the greatest, of wars. Feeling ran high among both Boers and British. The Boers felt that they were being pushed to the wall and that there was nothing left for them but to fight. Old President Kruger was so incensed that though (I was told) he knew English perfectly, he would not speak it in the interview with me, but demanded an interpreter to translate what he said into English. This was only an example of the bitterness of feeling on the part of the Boers at that time, which was not to be wondered at.

Within a very few months after the war closed,

I was again in South Africa, and attended a meeting of the Dutch and English Christian Endeavor Unions in the Adderley Street Dutch Church in Cape Town. I was surprised and greatly pleased to see mottoes of welcome and good cheer on the wall, in both the English and Dutch languages. The President of the Dutch Union gave the address of welcome and the President of the English Union presided over the joint meeting.

In the audience were many young Boers who had been imprisoned in St. Helena and Ceylon, where they had formed many Christian Endeavor societies. They had been released from their island prisons but a few weeks before. In the same audience were many young British soldiers who had also belonged to Christian Endeavor societies, in Great Britain or in South Africa. But the utmost good feeling prevailed. The young men of both races and of both languages took part in the meeting and they united in repeating, each in his own language, the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord's Prayer, and in singing, before the meeting was over, the familiar hymn, "Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love."

This was the first meeting of the sort which took place in South Africa after the war when both races met together, and, though the guns were hardly cool and the memories of the war still rankled in many hearts, yet reconciliation had already begun, and it came about through the com

mon principles and common religious aims and methods of the young men in both armies.

This experience and one or two others that are not dissimilar, have given me reason to believe that the enmities of this present war, bitter as they are, and accompanied by nameless cruelties, will not last forever. The average human heart does not cherish grudges so long as we sometimes think. There are many organizations common to the Allies and to the Teutonic forces which will make for friendship, and not the least of these will be the interdenominational religious organizations which have bound together the hearts of so many younger people and older people in the past, and whose ties are not readily broken. These organizations will have a great work to do when the war is over, and I believe that they are preparing to do it to the very best of their ability.

THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH IN THIS HOUR OF NATIONAL NEED

A Message from the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, in Special Session Assembled at Washington, D. C., May 8 and 9, 1917.

A

1. OUR SPIRIT AND PURPOSE

FTER long patience, and with a solemn sense of responsibility, the government

of the United States has been forced to recognize that a state of war exists between this country and Germany, and the President has called upon all the people for their loyal support and their whole-hearted allegiance. As American citizens, members of Christian Churches gathered in Federal Council, we are here to pledge both support and allegiance in unstinted

measure.

We are Christians as well as citizens. Upon us therefore rests a double responsibility. We owe it to our country to maintain intact and to transmit unimpaired to our descendants our heritage of freedom and democracy. Above and beyond this, we must be loyal to our divine Lord, who

gave His life that the world might be redeemed, and whose loving purpose embraces every man and every nation.

As citizens of a peace-loving nation, we abhor war. We have long striven to secure the judicial settlement of all international disputes. But since, in spite of every effort, war has come, we are grateful that the ends to which we are committed are such as we can approve. To vindicate the principles of righteousness and the inviolability of faith as between nation and nation; to safeguard the right of all the peoples, great and small alike, to live their life in freedom and peace; to resist and overcome the forces that would prevent the union of the nations in a commonwealth of free peoples conscious of unity in the pursuit of ideal ends these are aims for which every one of us may lay down our all, even life itself.

We enter the war without haste or passion, not for private or national gain, with no hatred nor bitterness against those with whom we contend.

No man can foresee the issue of the struggle. It will call for all the strength and heroism of which the nation is capable. What now is the mission of the church in this hour of crisis and danger? It is to bring all that is done or planned in the nation's name to the test of the mind of Christ.

That mind upon one point we do not all interpret alike. With sincere conviction some of us believe that it is forbidden the disciple of Christ