Tárogató, 1941-1942 (4. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1941-0 -01 / 3. szám
TÁROGATÓ IS thought for his neighbours, and the Christian world is becoming uneasily conscious that it may have been just too careful about its own salvation and not sufficiently anxious concerning the salvation of the world around it. One’s own education is important, but the education of one’s community is even more important. To develop one’s own individuality is well worth while, but it is even better to develop the individuality of the community in which we live. To know how others live, to realize what burdens they are carrying, to enter into their sorrows and appreciate their joys, is a task which God lays upon each member of the community. Are we meeting it as we should? It begins in youth. from “Onward.” CHRISTIANITY AND THE WORTH OF THE INDIVIDUAL “The freedom and dignity of each single person is a vital concern of our religion. We are by the will of God responsible individuals, but how many shrink from the implications of their liberty! To have to think, to decide, and to act as responsible persons — these are stern demands, and from them many draw back. It is more comfortable to accept their colour and their ideas from their company. Mechanised opinion was never more widespread than in our time—and not in totalitarian states alone. “The organisation of mass propaganda, with its appeals to superficial emotion and its ‘slogans’ serving as substitutes for thought, has become a specialised science. It rests upon a devaluation of humanity, indeed upon contempt for the common man, and a rejection of the Christian estimate of the worth of the soul. “To Jesus Christ the human soul has an infinite and external worth.' Call no man your Master on the earth, for One is your Master, even Christ.’ That is freedom, not the assertion of a claim for each of us to do what he pleases, but to act from an inward governing principle, ‘the Spirit of God which dwelleth in you.’ Take the astonishing word of the Apostle: ‘So then each one of us must give account of himself to God.’ Does not that saying bring home the solemnity and the immense dignity of our lives? Yes, the Gospel is vitally concerned for the single person ; it never overlooks him. ‘What man of you having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them ... ’ “But a totalitarian system that regards a human being as a cog in a machine, annulling his freedom and therefore his responsibility, simply destroys manhood in its God-given potentialities; and against any such system and its governing principles we must, if we would be ' full men and women, for ever stand in radical and unswerving hostility. I grant that democracies may go sadly astray. The perfect democracy requires perfect citizens. All this we admit and empasise; but precisely for this reason it is our concern to stand for the freedom of the individual. Perfection may be far off; but governments and systems which deny the elementary liberties of man thereby destroy the possibility of moving a single step towards the ideal. “I am pleading then passionately for freedom—without it a man cannot be a man. The right to self-expression, the development of the gifts that God has bestowed upon you: hold to that. At the same time, do not lose sight of the fact that there is no right which is not linked with a correlative duty. The free man must concede to others the consideration and reverence for their personal freedom which he claims for his own.”—Dr. J. H. Rushbrooke, (President, Baptist World Alliance.) From a London Doorstep. Sitting on a doorstep in London was a middle-aged man; the doorstep was all he had left of the house which had been his home for twenty years, and this is what he wrote to a friend. I felt that everything had gone. I felt that the future was hopeless. My books and pictures were lost for ever. The cabinet in which my wife and I had kept a score of treasured bits of china could not be found. The nursery where my children had played when small was a pile of charred wood and rubble. My garden, the pleasant retreat where so often I had walked on golden summer evenings, was littered with
