Dinsdale Young's comments on Armistice Day 1933 came towards the end of a year in which the leaders of the newly united Methodist Church had laboured to avoid a damaging division between its pacifists and those who opposed that position. As we shall see, proponents of both causes had at the first united conference in the July of that year ensured that no resolution was proposed which would exacerbate those divisions. Inevitably, Dinsdale Young's pithy put-down had the opposite effect, fuelling a familiar exchange of robustly phrased letters in both the Methodist Times and the Methodist Recorder. Pacifists were appalled and enraged, but a minority of correspondents rallied to Dinsdale Young's defence. His phrase, ‘white-blooded Christians’, caused particular offence, ‘rather savouring of the old “white-feathered” conscientious objectors’, as the students’ secretary of the denomination's college in Manchester put it. Another writer complained, ‘Such teaching would be reprehensible anywhere, but in the central shrine of Methodism, in the heart of the metropolis, it is calculated to give the world a false impression of the Methodist Church.’

Dinsdale Young, the superintendent minister of Westminster Central Hall, was a highly conservative fundamentalist who eschewed all the insights of modern biblical scholarship and, by then in his early seventies, was widely regarded as a relic of the Victorian era. His supporters variously argued that ‘“Trust in God and keep your powder dry” really meant “God will help those who help themselves”’; or ‘If there had been no such stalwarts as Cromwell and his ironsides there would never have existed the Methodist Church’; or ‘Some of us have no desire to attain the heights of our pacifists. We should not be willing to stand by while our country is devastated and our kindred killed.’