ABSTRACT

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity. This is especially true of international politics in the twentieth century, which began as ‘the Century of Hope’, but faces the possibility of going down to history as ‘the Century of Hate’. It opened with a bitter colonial conflict which is still responsible for the national and racial turmoil that smoulders in South Africa, throwing psychological tentacles of animosity across a turbulent world. The advance of science in the twentieth century has made hatred not merely a form of moral degradation, but a threat to the survival of mankind. A main contribution to international hatreds has come from militant nationalism and the national sovereignties created by it. The founders of the Fellowship sought individually and corporately to practice a ministry of reconciliation between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, believing all true reconciliation between men to be based on reconciliation between man and God.