Baccalaureate Sermon 143
God and man, of wrong scales of value, of wrong ambitions.
Repentance was to be the excavation for a new foundation.
Thoughtful men are realizing that our society is not ready
to make even a beginning in laying the foundation of a new
house for more than two billion people, until it has repented
of its attitudes toward God and man.
Four and one-half years ago Christian men and women
from sixty nations out of every continent assembled in
Madras, India, for a consideration of the mission of Chris-
tianity in our world. In their deliverance on the “Faith by
which the Church lives” they said:
“But first we must come in penitence to the feet of God.
In the presence of these disasters and forebodings, we see the
judgment of God’s righteousness upon our society; but we
see also His judgment upon our churches—so enmeshed in
the world that they dare not speak God’s full word of truth
unafraid, so divided that they cannot speak that word with
full power, so sullied by pettiness and worldliness that the
face of Christ cannot be clearly discerned in them, or His
power go forth through them for redemption.”1
The present war has not weakened this conviction as to
the need of repentance. Doctor Walter Marshall Horton, a
representative theologian of our day, in a recent book asks
whither Jesus is now leading us. His answer is that Jesus
is leading us back to God for judgment in order that He
may lead us forward.
We could get a well-nigh unanimous verdict on the part
of the people of the United Nations that the followers of
Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo ought to repent, but the
evidence of a conviction on the part of the people of the
United Nations that they ought to repent of prejudice and
selfishness and greed and a lack of concern for others, is dis-
tressingly small. Jesus once said to people who were point-
xThe World Mission of the Church, (Madras, 1939), p. 14.