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Unless we candidly acknowledge, and begin to repair, the shortcomings in our own Christian life, our deeply-pondered schemes for ‘social reconstruction’ are in danger of misfiring. The danger in these war-time social plans of ours is that we over-emphasise the planning element and spend our time talking about how we are going to act in the future without attempting to put our principles into action here and now. Consequently when the time comes for setting our schemes before, a waiting world we shall have nothing more concrete to offer than the distillations of our academic ponderings. Such vagueness will stand little chance of survival against the more practical methods employed by such opponents as the Communist Party. Unless we realise that our plans must ‘be set in motion now and not kept till the end of the war, and unless by the end of the war we have a plan already coping in practice with the problems not only of the intellectual, but of that more influential body, the working class, we are going to be left like dogs baying at the moon while the community falls victim to the tender mercies of the Marxist propagandists. All this because we have talked too much and acted too little.
A second danger lies in regarding our plans as nothing more than ‘emergency measures.’ By definition, such plans fall into disuse the moment they have served their purpose, which in this case is to prevent chaos and disorder after the strain of war. This implies an attitude towards social reform that arises from a misconception of the causes of social injustice. If totalitarianism, and that alone, were the cause of all social evil, then indeed we need only trouble to destroy that and the world would be righted.
