THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 139, 8 March 1941, Page 10

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Comments —Reflections Intercession. Almighty God, Who has created man in Thine own image, grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil, and to make no peace with oppression; and, that we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the maintenance of justice among men and nations, to the glory of Thy Holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. • ♦ * "Patience and determination will win for most of us nine battles out of ten. A man without patience is a lamp without oil.” —de Musset. » * » “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that It continue until ail the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequitted toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in. . . .” —Abraham Lincoln. “The Euglishman knows that human nature is not fitted for absolute power. Such power with the mechanized adulation which is its fuel leads infallibly to madness, but while it lasts it is capable of bringing sorrows and miseries upon the world, the results of which may be felt for generations and the memories of which will never die. It is as though the active spirit of evil that had been kept in chains had been once more loosed over great areas of the world, raging undisputed and snarling on our very threshold. With us, internal differences, political, religious, have disappeared before what seemed a challenge by the powers of darkness for the dominion of mankind. For the Englishman, everything for which he has struggled throughout his history is threatened: his political progress, his spiritual ideals.”—Earl Baldwin. ♦ ♦ * We need not take the German trumpetings of dominance in the Balkans, or of the New Order in Europe, too seriously. They said very much the same thing in 1916, and it all came to nothing In 1918. The German cannot help boasting of his power, but experience shows that although he is a good soldier he is a poor statesman —largely because he is incapable of seeing the other man’s point of view —and consequently his military successes are dissipated by his political failures. It has been so since Barbarossa and the German-Roman Empire which weakened both Germany and Italy in the Middle Ages. Neither Hapsburg nor Hohenzollern was able to overcome the political incapacity of the German mind, and there is no indication that Hitler will succeed where they failed. —United Empire Journal. * * * “Watts’ picture of Hope has its vital lesson for this New Year. There is the blinded figure bending over the harp and every string save one snapped. Yet whilst that one string remains, music is still possible for a stricken world to hear, above the din and discord of earth’s toil. We put our trust in chariots and horses; we swore by guns and armaments; by man-made treaties and pacts; by economic schemes and slogans; by highsounding Ideologies and loudly heralded man-manufactured panaceas guaranteed to cure the world in our generation, but all to no purpose. All have proved inadequate to bear the strain and stress of a world at war with its Maker and indifferent to His ethical and spiritual principles. There is but one string left in man’s harp. It is of Divine origin. It links man with his Maker and man playing upon It—the string of Hope—may yet evoke a music to warm and cheer his soul as bowed down with grief and woe, be awaits the unknown future, believing that eye hath not seen nor hath ear heard nor hath it entered into the mind of man to conceive what the Lord God hath prepared for them that unfeignedly love Him. In this spirit of an uncon querable Hope let us face what the New Year may hold In store for each one of us.” —Professor M. Relton, in the “Church of England Newspaper.” 4 4- 4 “Already reports agree that so far from joy in Hitler’s victories there is in Germany apathy and the apprehension of disaster. Not content with incorporating Germans in the Reich, Hitler has enslaved Czechs and Poles, Norwegians, Danes, Belgians and Frenchmen. He has millions of enemies within the Reich —a Fifth Column far larger than any that can be bought or cajoled in a pluto-democracy. Hitler has gone far beyond the boundaries that every German felt to be just. When Hitler occupied Austria and the Rhineland, even when he took the Sudeten areas —ho imposed no spiritual or physical load on Germany. So far all Germans believed he was restoring Germany to her rightful place in the world. But Hitler did not stop there and millions of Germans must be asking in their hearts whether the Fuehrer can stop anywhere. War with Britain few Germans desired, while the mastery of Europe is a dictator’s dream which brings to common people, not joy but rather fear of disaster; a presage of the coming twilight.”—“New Statesman” (London). V * • The Unknown Soldier. Let the arched silence of these brooding walls, Pensive with memories <>f a thousand years. Shrine all our nameless dead—-and all our tears— Since England was. I hear a voice that falls From the carved roof and echoes through these halls, — “Join them with him, here buried, as his peers, All my dead sons who knew no funeral biers.” — So the undying soul of England calls. —William Bliss, in an Apostrophe to tbe Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey.