Good Friday Fellowship

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 171, 15 April 1933, Page 16

Good Friday Fellowship

“It would not be surprising if the turn of world events should have helped people this year to appreciate better the practical significance of Good Friday. For of late the Gospel ethic, at the heart of which stands the Good Friday Sacrifice, has justified itself in unexpected ways. It had been venerated always as a superb ideal, towards which some tentative approach might be ventured in private life, but to adopt its principles when dealing with international or civic affairs seemed outside practical politics. The conception that nations form a family, no member of which can ignore the welfare of others without self-injury, is essentially a New Testament view. But it is also a view now recognized as offering the only hope of a tranquil and orderly world. Among our own citizens, again, the value of self-sacrifice, that doctrine made pre-eminent for ever on Good Friday, has been verified by personal experience. We may be sure that among those who practised selfdenial with alacrity under the stress of public need many were startled to find what new happiness and new vision it brought them, how many sentences of the Gospels passed from bewildering paradox into verified truth, how completely the means surrendered were outvalued by the meaning gained. Tn a world that often seems ugly enough, a glimpse such as we have been given lately of this fellowship of self-sacri-fice revives our faith in human nature. It is this readiness to answer the call for sacrifice which redeems mankind from ignominy and. in another than the theological sense, goes far to take away the sin of the world.” —‘‘The Times,” London. In an Easter editorial.