Tárogató, 1944-1945 (7. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1944-09-01 / 3. szám
TÁROGATÓ 13 WALLS OF INTOLERANCE Two great and evil intolerances are today dividing the world into walled camps and are sending forth a poisonous stream of hatred among the peoples of the earth. They are national intolerance and racial intolerance. Both are blinding to the judgment and prevent men and nations from seeing one another as they are and are blocking all attempts at friendly understanding and brotherhood. Nineteen hundred years ago it was said that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth,” but that statement is being denied in cruellest measures in many places on the earth today. In one of the greatest and most intelligent nations of the earth a whole people have been proscribed and persecuted and cruelly oppressed because they do not belong to Aryan stock. It seems as though men will swallow the most fantastic myths if only they minister to their racial and nationalistic feelings of superiority. There is a Nordic myth and those jwho accept it and belong to that allegedly superior race look upon other races as a mistake of the Almighty, something to be put up with only on sufferance and to be kept in place by the whip hand of authority. And so a Nazi will take pride, in beating a Jew and certain Americans will railroad negroes to the scaffold because of an ingrained prejudice against men of a darker skin. These racial distinctions do not abound in white men alone, though the idea that a fairer skin implies racial superiority is ancient and widespread. Black and brown and yellow races have their own color problems. It is a tendency common to all peoples to seize upon differences in color or culture or language as marks of superiority or inferiority, and yet these are but surface differences. In fundamental things all men are alike and can never be treated justly till one has penetrated the disguise of color or language and has seen them as they really are. Most nationalists and racialists have taken the position of the Pharisee who went up into the Temple to pray and began, “God, I thank Thee, that I am not as other men”. They thank a kindly Providence that has made them Englishmen, Frenchmen, German, American, as the case may be- And they have often been helped to that attitude by being taught in their schools thajt their own particular nation and people are God’s own elect. The teaching of history has often been but nationalistic propaganda and the breeding of prejudicial relations toward other races and peoples. There is higher and finer loyalty than loyalty to country and race. It is loyalty to God and the truth. A love of truth condemns those indiscriminate judgments that are visited upon people simply because of race or nationality. And a loyalty to God bows before the fact that He is Father of all and that all men are brothers. It is these loyalties that must ultimately break down the walls of division that intolerant hands are assiduously building over all the wo fid today and that have made the world’s political, religious and economic life one of continual mutual animosity. The cry for equality that is rising from so many nations today is not so much a demand for any formal status as the desire to be treated on the level of a common humanity, to be treated as men of like blood. There are more and more people who are giving heed to that perfectly natural cry and who are beginning to dislike the walls of prejudice that shut one people from another. They are saying, as does Robert Frost r “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that does not love a wall, That wants it down.” —United Churchman. ONE CENTRAL PURPOSE William Carey, who was the real founder of the modern movement for world missions, was first of all a cobbler. He also taught a little school and served as pastor of the Baptist Church in his community. But he kept a map of the world on the wall of his little shop and a world purpose in his heart- When he had finally persuaded his Baptist brethren to send him out to India as a missionary, he was equally dominated by one fixed purpose. That was to preach the gospel for the personal salvation of the Indian people. He became a OUR ENGLISH SECTION.
