Article January 22, 1938 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: Good Citizenship

with contributions from George Hillerman, Edmund Ezra Day, E. M. P., William Temple, J. Price Williams

[From the Birmingham Post and Journal, England]

Is there any real urgency in calling Britain to return to that practice of religion which, so far as outward observance is concerned, has unquestionably fallen into decay with vast numbers of the population? Does it make any real difference to the national life, and to the life of the world, whether or not religion is an essential thing in the life of man, and if essential whether or not it is practiced? And is there a vital relation between religion and that moral decency apart from which politics, commerce, industry, and pleasures must inevitably degenerate? This is no academic question for discussion. ... It is the fundamental condition of healthy national existence, for when high morality is gone, all is gone.

Matthew Arnold, in one of his essays, points out that the nations of antiquity, of great pride and place in their day, "passed, one by one," because of their moral and religious deterioration. Edward Gibbon traced the fall of mighty Rome to a variety of causes, of which the chief was this same deterioration. Whenever a people placed its confidence in its arms alone, or rested upon its laurels, and relaxed in moral earnestness, its end was inevitable. Such striking testimony of history stands as a warning to every people, and not least to our own. Very few in our time would dare to challenge the truth that some kind of morality is fundamental to the life of a people, but many are not at all certain that religion is necessary to the creation and sustenance of a complete morality. Morality, they imagine, is an affair of convention or of geography. What is moral for one people may be immoral for another. Hence there must needs be a clash of moralities. This will not do. ...

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