p. 12 | False Hopes of Peace

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 12, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 11.

False Hopes of Peace

The Peace and Safety Cry.—It really is man versus the Word. Some are giving one reason as to why we can have no more wars, and some another. Dr. David Starr Jordan believes that finances are against it. Civil wars, he tells us, in a talk to the students of the Murison school in the St. Francis Hotel February 20, will take care of themselves, but "international war is not possible, because every great nation is too heavily in debt. The scepter has passed from the hand of rulers of nations to the great unseen empire of finance. There is no possibility of a war between Germany and Great Britain, because each nation is ruled by the great organization of finance, and war positively can not be made to pay." The United States will not go to war, because of the great, tangled net of commerce, he tells us, and that no nation can possibly get along without our good will. But on the other hand, there are great men who believe that the United States must be prepared for war, because she is paying, according to Dr. Jordan, $10,000 a day for smokeless powder alone, and millions upon millions annually for building new battle-ships. He attributes this partly to vanity and partly to ignorance. Japan, he tells us, is one billion dollars poorer than before the Russo-Japanese War, and can not possibly raise funds to finance an expedition against any other nation. But he calmly tells us that we will have a few more imperial wars, of strong nations against weak ones, but not to any great extent, because they will not pay. But a great many things are done in this world that do not pay. Humanity has been doing them from earth's earliest dawn. It hardly paid Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit, but he did it; and it can be said of many of the nations of history ever since that it has not paid them to go to war, but they have had the wars, just the same. It did not pay America to have the Civil War, but she had it. Nor did it pay England to have the Boer War, but the Boer War was waged. Sometime it may be to the interest of the money power to have the nations go to war. It makes more buyers of bonds. But beyond and above all this, God's Word has declared that all the world will not only prepare for strife, but all the world will be in the great Armageddon at last; and the very cry of "peace and safety" is, after all, a sign of the culmination of all the preparation for strife which the nations are making.

Foreign Missions.—The Rt. Hon. James Bryce, British ambassador at Washington, has been writing in the International Review of Missions, published in Edinburgh, some good things on the influence of foreign missions. He feels that men from so-called Christian nations have had a very deleterious effect on the spread of Christianity. He says, as quoted in the Literary Digest:

"The work of bearing the white man's burden takes the form of filling the white man's pocket. It is no wonder that the behavior of men who are nominally Christians — Christians in profession if not in practise — has checked and still checks the progress of Christianity. Thoughtful men from non-Christian countries sometimes tell us that they and their fellow countrymen have, when drawn toward Christianity, been repelled when seeing what little influence it seems to have over the conduct of its nominal adherents. The missionary comes preaching the Gospel of peace and love; but when the natives see the rapacity and injustice of men professing the religion which the missionary preaches, the preachings lose their power."

And this is true; but another thing is true, also: that missionaries have carried too much of a spirit of patriotism of their own native country with them into foreign lands, too much of their own customs and manners among which they have been born and reared, and have forgotten that they were ambassadors of a heavenly land, with divine laws and divine power to lift men above all things gross and earthly. If they would but bring those before the natives of non-Christian lands, it would help them to get a different view of Christianity. The Jews had this wrong conception. The Gospel preached by the apostle told them that they were all on the same basis as the heathen Gentile. And so it is with the inhabitants of Christian lands (or those who are nominally Christian); they need the Gospel of salvation as truly as the blackest heathen in Africa. The missionaries to foreign lands do not go out as ambassadors of America, or England, or Germany, but as ambassadors of the Lord Jesus Christ.