"...you hear of a death-ray which they have invented in France..."

This from The Guardian, 9 October 1934: 

FLEET STREET MONDAY

Mr. Lloyd George, speaking to-night at the City Temple, where a large gathering welcomed Dr. F.W. Norwood home after his world tour, made a forceful plea for the Churches to unite in the cause of peace.

            Mr. Lloyd George said that he came from a country which owed more to its preachers than it did to its warriors or to its statesmen. It owed everything to them. He was told that there was now a falling-off in attendances at place of worship, but there never was a time when the great preacher did not have his audience.

            I was specially attracted to Dr. Norwood, Mr. Lloyd George continued, but the fact that no man has devoted more time and energy to the preaching of the gospel of peace.” Peace was the message for to-day, just the same as it was nearly twenty centuries ago. He referred to the recent speech in which Mussolini foreshadowed the training of Italian children from the age of seven years upwards in the use of arms. “If that policy is to be followed by every statesman in the world,” he said, “you will have a scroll on the walls of every school in the world, ‘Little children, kill one another.’“

            Nor was Italy the only country.

“You hear of a new poison gas invented in America, you hear of a death-ray which they have discovered in France, you have a conference at Bristol which passes unanimously a resolution in favour of increasing armaments. That is the world to-day. It is a jungle, and the nations are prowling through it, snarling at each other, baring their teeth at each other. At any moment a mistaken gesture or a misunderstood oration and they may spring again at each other’s throats. We want as many preachers of peace as we can collect. They are preparing guns and bombers. Let us mobilise the forces of peace.”

            In the last war the most striking thing had not been the carnage but the absolute indifference with which it was regarded, the acquiescence of the most highly civilised nations in Christendom. “It is a savage race, the race of mankind,” he said, “when it is roused.” War had to be stopped long before it began, and though, in his judgement, there was no immediate prospect of war, nevertheless there was only just enough time to stop it.

            “Who can do so? I think nobody except the Christian churches. Everybody else seems to me to be working for more armaments.” 

Frederick William Norwood was a Baptist minister originally from Melbourne. He was made the pastor of the City Temple church in London in 1919. The tour mentioned in this article took him all through the Commonwealth and America, delivering lectures on the subject of peace -  although he also gave a lecture titled A Frank Talk on Sex and the Cities, which I think had little to do with inspiring the much more recent TV series, which would no doubt have had much to say to an early twentieth-century Methodist minister...

In the year following the publication of this article, Norwood celebrated when he heard that Germany was rearming the Rhineland. This may seem odd at first,  considering his long-held and vociferous pacifist stance. However, it is understandable considering that he thought German objections to Versailles were justifiable as there could be no fair peace whilst it was shackled to unfair terms of peace. This he hoped signified the beginnings of an atmosphere in which a lasting peace could be negotiated. 

The City Temple, which was near the Holborn Viaduct, was destroyed in the Blitz in 1941. Norwood ended up accepting posts in the Baptist church in Canada and the United States.