FROM THE ARCHIVES:A Christmas review of the state of the world a century ago is surprising for the number of once-again familiar themes.
IT IS easy, in these tumultuous times, to be cynical about Christmas. At home the constitution struggle has filled men’s mind with bitterness, and we are promised a renewal of that strife as soon as the Unionist Party comes back to power. The great forces of Capital and Labour have been at one another’s throats throughout the year. Settlements, when they have been made, have been at the public expense, so that in the last twelve months the instinct of living has been gratified at a steadily increasing cost.
We shall celebrate the coming Christmas under the shadow of a coal strike. This social unrest pervades the whole Christian world. We have seen food riots in France and Germany . . . The peace of earth has been broken in some places, and seriously threatened in others.
Christianity, in its latest adventure against Islam, has paid little honour to first principles. Nobody can say that Italy has vindicated the Sermon on the Mount against the teachings of the Koran. In China we see the beginnings of portentous movements – the birth of a World Power. Is our civilisation ready to utilise this immense opportunity?
Christmas finds us rejoicing over the postponement – it is all that we can safely assert – of war with Germany. Four months ago the two greatest Powers in the world, the great Protestant Powers, all but precipitated an Armageddon .
Science, industry, education, all the aspects of social and economic progress, would have received a possible death-blow from the passion of the two nations to which the world is most deeply indebted for the arts of peace. Calamity is only averted by the maintenance of huge armaments. The cost of naval and military competition becomes so crushing that men may yet be driven to accept the disease as a cure for the remedy. It is in these circumstances that we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the Saviour of mankind.
Yet we are not discouraged. On Monday [Christmas Day, 1911] the message of Christmas will be as fresh and hopeful as ever. For the oldest, as for the youngest, of us the Christmas bells will “ring in the new”. The heirs of a very ancient heritage of trouble, we shall still turn expectant faces to the dawn. The fact is, in spite of all discouragements, all contradictions, and all sad experience, the world is becoming a better place for the people who occupy it.
Badly as the 20th century has opened, it will be a better century than the 19th. Human progress may not be calculated within the limits of the longest human life. To contemporary thinkers the invasion of the Huns, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, were unmixed and irreparable calamities. To us they are conspicuous milestones in the path of progress. Things that are painful anachronisms to us take for God their due place in the evolution of the world.
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