Suchergebnisse

Almost thirty-five years ago the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America meeting in this midwestern city, Pella, Iowa, adopted a resolution "that the President be authorized to appoint a Committee on International Justice and Goodwill of five persons to cooperate with the Commission on International Justice and Goodwill of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America in carrying forward the Christian program for a Warless World." Included in the resolution was an endorsement of a Credo of "International Ideals of the Churches of Christ." We beli eve that nations no less than individuals are subject to God's immutable moral laws. We believe that nations achieve true welfare, greatness and honor only through just dealing and unselfish service. We believe that nations that regard themselves as Christian have special international obligations. We believe that the spirit of Christian brotherliness can remove every unjust barrier of trade, color, creed, and race. We believe that Christian patriotism demands the practice of goodwill between nations. We believe that international policies should secure equal justice forall races. We believe that all nations should associate themselves permanently for world peace and goodwill. We believe in international law, and in the universal use of international courts of justice and boards of arbitration. We believe in a sweeping reducti on of armaments by all nations. We believe in a warless world, and dedicate ourselves to its achievement.

The appalling record of the past year and a half ought to make us, interested in international law, extremely modest. Professing that we expound international law as it is, we have been deluding ourselves and really setting forth international law as we believed that it ought to be. The universal bankruptcy of normal international relationships has shown to us how great a gap there is between that which we had conceived to be and that which really exists. Many of the foundations of international law we now see to have rested upon a conception of international society which did not really obtain. Perhaps, too, although professing contact with the actual, we have been living in an unreal world, a world wherein the ideal was given a much wider range and play than we were justified in believing. Any attempt to reconstruct the formal bases of international law—and such reconstruction must be made—must take account not only of the experiences of the present war, but of the long series of half-submerged elements which led to the present disaster almost with the inexorability of the forces of natural law. Shocked and benumbed as we are by the constant revelations of horror in these past months, there is also the awful realization that, after all, what has taken place has been largely the result of factors seemingly without immediate human direction.