YOUTH'S SOLUTION
By THE MARCHIONESS OF LOTHIAN ON every side enlightened people are offering their solutions for a brave New World. May I, having reached the age of twenty- one, presume to try to express a point of view which I know I share with many of my generation. It is this : that the war-tried youth of every nation is getting tired of man-made solutions. For four weary years now it has been dying of the inevitable excesses of politics and policies. As a reward of its sacrifices, it asks of its post-war leaders something more concrete than a party name. It asks for an international basis for international life.
We have only to look back through history to find that since the beginning, different national or sectional " isms " have first fired, then tired and then sacrificed humanity. They failed, not because they were wholly wrong, but because they only moved one class or one nation, and brought it into inevitable conflict with another. We have not fought this war in separate factions, and we will only live the peace in separate factions as a last resort. However cynical our ideas on the subject may be, we none of us want another war.
In the presence of death we seem to have found the secret of life, and a common aim seems to have given us a common character. Humanity has given of its best from every side, and none of us can point at any one class and say it has shirked the sacrifices. I suggest that after the war we can still all have one aim in common, and then not only nationally but internationally. That one aim can be Christianity, Bred in the mystery of death, most of us believe in God and a life to come. The fact that not one of us is allowed much more than seventy years in this world touches us all, in every class and every nation. In war-time our fundamental faith in good against bad and in reunion beyond death, which is the essential belief of Christianity, has been our greatest strength. After the war we can all find in it the strength to live in peace.
When I say that as a generation we do believe in God, and that we found our hopes on a Christian post-war world, I meet two sets of critics ; on one side a group of pseudo-intellectuals who deny man his greatest dignity, Eternal life, and on the other Christians of the last generation who say this generation is not Christian at all. I will try and answer the former first. Nineteen centuries ago Christ revealed the only clue to a lasting peace: the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. The pain and misery of this war has forced the co-operative spirit of Christian brotherhood on
our nation, and it seems to me that we have responded better to it than to the intellectuals' man-made politics. If we can be good national Christians in war-time why should we not remain good international Christians in peace-time? After the last war the intellectuals chose to idolise man. They ignored God's laws and crowded them out of our daily lives. They followed the will o' the wisp ideal of free thought and free behaviour, and were allowed to insinuate it into their fellow-countrymen. In short, they paved the way to a falling birthrate, a C3 nation and another war in which their bewildered youth could die. It seems quite clear to me that they failed, and that they are sadly responsible for the part they played in governing this and other countries.
We know now where man-made policies can lead us, and what the lack of Christian behaviour can mean. In this bitter struggle we have learnt that if the whole world had followed the Christian moral code in the wholehearted way separate countries followed the Nazi and the Communist and the democratic moral codes; there would never have been a war. Rational behaviour is not wholly born in men. Moral codes are instilled, and can be deviated from, and, unfortunately, it was only these different political movements which bothered to educate youth in them, and realised the im- portance of doing so. But make no mistake, so long as governments continue to ignore the divine plan they will fail, and their people will be punished with them. In Christianity alone lies an inter- national foundation for a lasting peace. Its laws are divine, not human, and being divine they include the best of all man's ideals and eliminate the worst ; and being based on eternal life, they strike • at the root of every class and every race in the world, and unite humanity, as no other laws can hope to.
On behalf of my generation I will try and answer our Christian critics next. Because we are accused I will accuse. After the last war, where Christian teaching was concerned, ours was the for- gotten generation. If some of my contemporaries do not pray it is because they were not all taught to pray. If they do not all go to church it is because their churches did not tell them firmly enough that they owed it as a duty to God to go more often. If they do not all discriminate between moral issues it is because they were not all reminded that God had definitely revealed to us which ones to follow. Our leaders compromised with the fundamental conceit of human nature, which believes that in spiritual things man is only answerable to himself. They enforced education, but did not enforce religious education. It was left to the fathers and mothers to pay the price of sending their children to special schools if they wanted them taught that way. Other things were drummed into them, but not religion. They saw international prayer for peace ridiculed, although they have now seen national prayer in- , yoked to win the war.
My generation was educated on a dizzy succession of false doctrines, and it was left to discover on its own that where man will not reveal the true moral law, God will. Most of us realise now that all the essential ideals are in Christ's teaching, and the only universal justice in His laws, and that only on. universal Christian belief and behaviour can we found a lasting peace. We ask the leaders of all the post-war nations, therefore, first to lead us in Christianity, and then to re-educate the world in it. We have to say to them this: " Realising that faith and intelligence are latent in all human beings, but that both need to be educated, starve neither of their revelation, lest on the road to a personal discovery they take the wrong turning. Bring back religious teaching to the school of every child in the world. Start every human in- tellect on the right moral lines. Remind humanity of Christian philosophy in all universities and all workrooms. Encourage useful Christian family life, and help each man to serve in his appointed place in mutual help and charity, mindful of his inevitable end. Do not exclude our spiritual leaders from the Peace Conference. Let social and moral issues combine, as they obviously depend upon each other. Do not let compromise and complacency undermine the fundamental Christian laws again. Above all, never let the next generation forget as we did that, in the words of Pius XI:
' Any order will fail which does not unite man's activities to imitate as far as is humanly possible, the wonderful tinty of the Divine plan.' "
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