Welsh Journals

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DISCIPLINE AND DISCIPLESHIP by George M. Ll. Davies Between a royalty based on divine right and anarchy there is room for a government which may be as strong as the first and a better guar- antee of freedom than the second. The spirit of the older time put God outside the world the sovereignty outside of the people authority outside of the conscience. The spirit of the new times has the contrary tendency. It denies neither God nor sovereignty nor authority, but it sees them where they really are."­(Sabatier, Life of St. Francis.") THE excommunication of Tom Nefyn and his congregation from the Presbyterian Church of Wales has been settled at the cost of a great unsettlement of thought and con- science. Legal discipline has been enforced against Modernist heresies in the case of one of the most remarkable and apostolic ministers of our generation, and at a time when the spiritual discipleship of the churches was never more loose nor more criticised. South Wales, like Belfast, has long been the cockpit of social antagonisms. In industry and in politics extremes have met and have fought, almost to a finish. There the Lords Merthyr, Rhondda and Buckland, the super-capitalists, were face to face with the Keir Hardies, the A. J. Cooks, and the Noah Abletts, whose challenge of their right and authority was fundamental. As in Belfast, extremes had hard- ened into dogmas and dictatorships mutuallv ex- clusive. The bridges between them were only those necessitated by legality and diplomacy. The mentality of this social struggle and chasm could not but affect men's attitude in the churches when the deluge of criticism raised by the war broke upon them and challenged the en- lightenment and authority of the pre-war church leaders. There had been no vision and the people had perished. It was to have been expected that a State Church would follow the flag," but the subservience to the politicians and to crowd passions of Nonconformist bodies, that had prided themselves on being Free Churches, left them also open to the blunt criticism of Karl Marx that the Church would break any of its XXXIX Articles rather than jeopardise its en- dowments." If it were right, men said, to kill for one's Government, it was hardly wrong to strike for one's comrades and a Christianity that only denounced the fruits of wrong without daring to denounce the root causes was open to the charge of being dope for the benefit of Dives but not of Lazarus. Immediately after the agony of the war and with the apprehension of unrest and possible revolution, various Reconstruction Commissions of the Presbyterian and other churches had made sweeping general recommendations on social ques Lions and on the re-statement of the Faith. Prophetic voices in Wales, like those of Studdert Kennedy and Dick Sheppard in England, had pleaded passionately for the bridging of the awiul social and ethical chasms in our Christian discipleship. Movements, too, like C.O.P.E.C. and the Student Christian Movement and Urdd y Deyrnas had done much to make men see these chasms and seek to bridge them. But with the removal of the fear of revolution or probabilities of sudden political change, the conservative and reactionary forces have re-asserted themselves. One of the most eminent of the younger leaders of the Church of England confessed that he was simply a Bolshie in the eyes of many a Rural Dean. Kingdom Christianity, as it had come to be called, with its emphasis on the ethical and social implications of the Gospel, has tended once more to be lost sight of. As before the war, traditionalism, sacramentarianism, Second Adventism and esoteric speculations on Christian metaphysics occupy the interest of high ecclesi- astics as of conservative Free Churchmen who dread, what they would call, the deluge of secularism." But this same secularism has been lately defined by the Master of Balliol as an irreligion, not invented by heretics, but taught to hundreds and thousands of men by bitter personal experience in a world economic movement that was blind, purposeless and relent- less. We have let ourselves be hypnotised by the work of our hands, and have come to think of these great systems and organisations as inde- pendent powers; we bow ourselves before them." In eccelsiastic life, as in industry, the cry that reaches us is so often that of The Man in The Machine." The significance of the case of Tom Nefyn lies not in the enormity of his theological heresies as in his protest against ecclesiastical legalism and the secularism of the system." In 1914 he had left the seclusion and quiet labour of his father's mountain farm in Lleyn to volun- teer for the war. In Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine, Bulgaria and Turkey he had seen a world of "battle murder and sudden death. At Gaza he had lain for two days crippled between the firing lines, amid Turks, Germans, English and Welsh hoys — wounded, dead, or insane. There, his doubt of conventional Christian ethics began. It grew during eight months convalescence to a crisis of conversion. Returning home, he found in his family, death, hardship, poverty, and in