The Cost of Peace

We Christians are appalled at the tremendous cost of war, but hitherto the churches generally have not considered the cost of peace. We have too often assumed that peace can be had without planning political and economic conditions which will make that peace tolerable to other countries.

With these words Protestantism's Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace served notice last week that the church has now gone beyond the resolution-passing stage and is getting down to serious work on a practical program to count itself in on the next peace.

Head of the commission, which was set up by the Federal Council of Churches with the help of seven other interfaith agencies, is John Foster Dulles, world-renowned lawyer, grandson of a Secretary of State, son of a Presbyterian minister, veteran of almost every peace parley since the 1907 Hague Conference. No churchgoer himself, he never thought to blame the failure of all the peace conferences he attended on lack of Christianity until he set out to draft a practical set of principles on which a peace conference might succeed. To his surprise, he found them an echo of Christianity, so back to the church he went. Said he last week:

" 'Practical' men of the world tell me that all this talk of the Gospels has no place in the world today, but it is only by bringing that Christian point of view to bear on world affairs that something really practical and constructive can be done to make peace last."

The commission is a body of 22 top-notch churchmen deliberately picked to represent every school of thought. Among them are outstanding pacifists and outstanding interventionists, but at their first conference it developed that not one of them is a true isolationist in the sense of believing America can ever again go its own way without considering the effect of its course on other countries. All of them are already agreed that the U. S. must accept its responsibility in world affairs, not scuttle out of them as it did after Versailles. Says Chairman Dulles: "America must realize that isolation is not only stupid, selfish and impossible but positively immoral."

Commission members include Methodist Theologian Georgia Harkness, Union Seminary's Henry Pitney Van Dusen, Harvard's William Ernest Hocking, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, the International Missionary Council's Abbe Livingston Warnshuis, the World Council's Henry Smith Leiper, Industrialist Harold Hatch, ex-President Mary Emma Woolley of Mount Holyoke. Secretary and spark-plug is Dr. Walter Van Kirk, of the Federal Council's Department of International Justice.

Galesburg, Ill. is giving a lead in interdenominationalism. The new pastor of its big First Presbyterian Church is lanky, homespun Christie Swain--who until last month was minister of Galesburg's smaller Emmanuel Methodist Church.

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