Recently the Christian Labour Association of Canada held its tenth annual convention in Toronto. At the close of the business session, the Rev. E. L. H. Taylor, delivered an inspirational address entitled, "The Cross of Christ and Human Freedom". With the kind permission of The Guide, official organ of the C.L.A.C., we reprint here an excerpt from the Rev. Taylor's, address:
"Nobody is so foolish as to imagine that plants and flowers can live long after their roots have been cut. They soon wilt and die. Yet, precisely that seems to be the great delusion: entertained about political and legal freedom by our secularized, post Christian social scientists, lawyers, politicians and journalists. The greatest threat to liberal democracy today, does not come from Communism, great and deadly as that threat most certainly is. A still greater threat lies in the severance of democracy in Canada today from its spiritual roots in the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is a Western phenomenon as well as a Communist one. Our English Speaking world has plucked the plant of democratic liberty loose from its soil in the belief that man was created in the image and likeness of God and that man was redeemed from slavery to sin by the death of Christ. We have forgotten William Penn's great warning: "If men will not be ruled by God, they will soon be ruled by tyrants".
"Events today in both Eastern and Western lands fully and tragically bear out the truth of Penn's prophecy. They prove that wherever belief in God, and His creation of man in His own image is abandoned, political freedom perishes. The validity of the struggle for freedom in which the Anglo-Saxon democracies are now engaged against Soviet and Chinese Communists rests ultimately upon the Christian evaluation of human personality being true".