Conferences

Bland and beneficent, the Commission on International Justice and Good Will of the Federal Council of Churches assembled last week at Chautauqua, N. Y., to talk about the brotherhood of nations, broader visions, service, sympathy, etc., etc. Among the addresses was that of the Rev. Dr. Edward Shillito of England. His most widely discussed point was:

"Unless the Church is to surrender to the pagan deities, Venus, Mammon and Mars, it must use the international road provided by the press."

Dr. Shillito is religion's outstanding British journalist, the U. S. Christian Century's English correspondent, a regular contributor to the London Times. None knew better than he how busy the "international road," the press, is kept by the pagan deities in question. None knew better how Venus, having maddened or blessed some hot Italian poet, some Indian rajah or swart Turk, makes her swift progress from the harem or a Paris divorce court to U. S. breakfast tables. None knew better how religion might be jostled by Mammon, despatches from an ecumenical council vying for space with the details of a petroleum coup or soap king's testament. Mars, the god who more than any other has the power to forge huge newspaper circulations (the Spanish-American war "made" the New York Journal--TIME, Aug. 16), is revered and propitiated by editors everywhere. Nevertheless, Dr. Shillito pressed his point. "What is needed," he said, "is not propaganda for peace so much as a reasonable and continuous interpretation of the nations to each other. They ought to know the best in each other--not the worst."

At Berne, Switzerland, met an International Conference for Life and Work. Its delegates were distinguished. There was Dr. Arthur Judson Brown, Manhattan Presbyterian foreign missions secretary, who declared: "Internationally the world is still under the law of the jungle. . . . There are no Christian nations." There was the Bishop of Winchester, warning solemnly that warlike mechanisms may overpower man's morality, asking the Church to create a "new human race." There was Dr. S. Parkes Cadman of Brooklyn, eloquent and diplomatic, who praised the Swiss for their peaceful history, the placidity of their religion, their tolerance of all creeds. Upon the resignation of Dr. Brown as one of the Conference's four presidents, the delegates elected Dr. Cadman in his stead.