SHAPING THE FUTURE

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 203, 28 July 1937, Page 13

SHAPING THE FUTURE

SERMON AT ST. ANDREW’S. “Can We Shape the Future?” was the subject of an address delivered in St. Andrew’s Church, on Sunday evening, by Rev. J. Hubbard, ALA., 8.D., to a large congregation. “The power to change the future,” he said, “lies in complete surrender of the will into the hands of the God of history. That may sound like the abdication of freedom ; on the contrary it is its achievement. His service is perfect freedom, because it is alliance with infinite power, wisdom, and love.” A sardonic young French poet had sung recently in rough verse libre: “Our fate is in the hands of six petrol merchants who eat poached eggs and drink vittel water, and discuss over the ’phone the gushing oil wells of Moussoul.”

“Tills biting and gloomy pictyre of the ‘hidden hand’ moulding the policy of Governments reflects the sense of helplessness that infects millions of ns to-day. We feel ourselves _at the mercy of a deliberate conspiracy of our fellows against the individual life. This drives man to despair of the future,” said Air Hubbard. “Has there ever been a generation of men gazing into tho future with such passionate intensity as is ours, and wondering whether* it is charged with tragedy that can be averted? The very earth of our ordered'life shakes under our feet.

“The first conviction of many is that man has no power to alter the trend of circumstances. The most baffling of the slaveries that seem to control man is the tyranny of those despots that man has himself created. The machine is the most astounding of all. The colossal world machine creates in the lives of millions a sense

of each worker being a mere cog, with no voice whatever in modifying the products of that mechanism. The omnicompetent state, again, fills the mind with a mass-producing type of education and makes the individual feel like an ant doing his appointed duty in the ant-heap.”

Science had popularised the idea of irresistible unchanging law in the universe • working toward predestined ends. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” had burned into the minds of multitudes a sense of the tragic outcome of a mechanistic world regimented l>v a soulless science. Into this atmosphere, supercharged with gloom, came the streams of depression associated with the cynic who said that man’s life was the plaything of chance, and those who said that man’s life was controlled by irresistible forces of economic determinism. Alan came to the conclusion that he was a marionette whose gestures were jerked by unseen forces, or as Emerson put it, “things arc in the saddle and ride mankind.” “But looking across the landscape of history,” the speaker continued, “does not the conviction that man is free and t lie decisive factor in modifying the direction of things grow stronger? The clear teaching of history is that tho future is created by a drama of persons in conflict and co-operation, wills clashing and wills working together; and the roots of these antagonisms lie deep in standards of value. “What system ot values must win the right for building a new world order? Well, we want desperately three things in our lives: We want first of all to be delivered from futility; that is. we want power. Second, we want freedom; and third, we must have fellowship. Now 1 am sure, more sure than of anything else in the universe, that in Christ that freedom and fellowship,

that saving power, have come to the world, and are ready to be released with revolutionary effect upon each one of us as individuals. And collectively upon the economic and cultural and international life and all men everywhere. And the first step in this world revolution is each man’s rendezvous with Christ. In Him we can he free in the universe ami unconquerable; revolutionary leaven thrust into the mass, so to speak, of the future and transforming it a.s veast transforms dough. Wherever man is in first-hand contact with God he will rise up and smash the tyrannies that oppress his spirit. He will break them, not by violence, but by such a.n assertion of freedom in tho , inner core of his being that will not I stop short of martyrdom. Eliiah pursued into the mountains bv Aliab, the [ early Christ’ans in the Coliseum and 1 the catacombs, Karl Barth exi'ed and the confessional rmsto-m hunted to prison by Nazi jackals. Kagawa. rep'-'aterl-Iv in prison for bis Christian teaching: these are onlv a few of the heroic ex amn-les in history of those who have refused to bow llie knee to Baal, and ■who by +heir refusal really make the future. The community of the freed servants of God survives and will stand erect when the dicta.tors have proved themselves ‘transient and embarrassed' phantoms,” he concluded.