THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 50, 22 November 1941, Page 8

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Comments—Reflections Intercession.

Compassionate Father, while we with justification condemn the ■sins of the enemy against Thee and' humanity, grant to us knowledge of our own failures and true penitence for our offences private and national. Deliver us from hypocrisy. And while we burn with righteous indignation because of cruelty and treachery, deliver us from all bitterness and hatred that harm us more than the enemy. As we know that after strife friend and foe must live together and rebuild the wastes, we pray that Thou wilt open the eyes of men to the way of just reconciliation and peace. While the conflict lasts give us readiness for sacrifice, courage in hardship, patience in sorrow and suspense, and purification by the discipline of war. Help us to be truly grateful for Thy wondrdus deliverances: through Jesus Christ our Lord. * * * The great secret of success in life Is to be ready when your opportunity comes.—Lord Beaconsfield. * * # “This is the time for each one of us, whether engaged in production or in the management of production, to think of his own job, to examine his own heart and conscience, and to ensure that at least he is doing all that a man can do to support and sustain the cause which is common to us all, to give to those who are fighting our battles the weapons which alone will bring victory."—Mr. Anthony Eden. » ♦ * “I think most veterans of the last war remember their padres, but how many civilians can remember the clergy who ministered to them twentyfive years ago? I think fifty per cent, of the chaplains in the last war made their impress on their men, thirty-five per cent, achieved mediocrity, and fifteen per cent, were failures—as chaplains. I think that in our churches at home some fifteen per cent, make any lasting impression on their parishioners, fifty per cent, are mediocre, and thirty-five per cent, are failures when it comes to making Christ real to the man on the street, or his teaching of any value to the world in which we live. And as for those padres whose names are household words, they rest not on their laurels, but are known and loved because, in the quarter century between wars they continued to take an interest in the welfare of ‘their boys.’ Others we have forgotten because, when they threw off their uniforms, they also threw off that comradeship, and returned to a life where parson and people are, in the main, farther apart than privates and field officers.” —“A ■Sergeant,” writing in the “United Church Observer” of Canada.

“Post-war problems will require all our old qualities, if they are to be solved with any degree of success. We shall need to hear all sides, to argue and debate, to give ourselves the benefits of difference and competition, to pit wit against wit and thus minimize the risk of error. We simply cannot afford to leave our ears in the grip of a small class or section of theorists or planners. We dare not allow every detail of our lives to be at the mercy of any member of the intelligentsia who can get to the • microphone with a new egg •scheme. If that is to be our fate, we are much nearer to final ruin than is commonly appreciated. Peoples living under totalitarian rule are admittedly doped by the official wireless and while that cannot yet be said of us, the difference is one of degree rather than of principle. We live in imminent fear of the seizure of power by some government which would t&ke full advantage of the antiliberty laws registered on the Statute Book during a state of emergency. If, therefore, we mean what we say when we talk of freedom, we must, immediately on the cessation of hostilities, declare the freedom of the air, cease to imitate the dictators, and give ourselves the ‘liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience.’ ” —Sir Ernest Benn.

“What are we fighting for? One answer to this question is that other peoples of the world know if we do not. Some of them know better than we do, for they have experienced, and are experiencing, all the horrors of an awful tyranny with . all its madness and brutality. It is to remove the yoke that hangs arpund their necks, and to save that yoke being placed around our own necks, that we are fighting. And we are fighting against a doctrine which is in direct antagonism to Christian ideals, which, if victorious, would strike a deadly blow to our spiritual convictions and social aspirations, and what perhaps is far worse, we. are fighting to save our children from being impregnated with teachings which we utterly and entirely abhor. The doctrine is, to quote a phrase of Burke’s an ‘armed doctrine’ and we are meeting force with force. And force, we are told, is not an ultimate solution. But that is true of all evils; yet no one proposes to allow those evils to have free course and run riot. Adolf Hitler uses force, brutal force. Abraham Lincoln used force. Are the two to lie classified •together and come under the same condemnation? Booker T. Washington, the'negro leader, born in slavery, said of Lincoln, that he found the negro race mere goods and chattels ami he made it a race of free citizens. Adolf Hitler finds peoples free and enslaves them. If we can see no vital difference between them, then surely we defame the dead. It might also be remembered that the opposite to love is not. force, but iilite.”—Rev. W. A. Armstrong, President, of the British Methodist Conference.

* * * 'Last Flight. They did not 'die for England, no, They died as One died long ago, Though not upon a cross of wood, Straight through steel-pierced winds they rode— For you, for me, their lives they gave. They do not 'die for country, no, These men who face a common foe. Though tortured not by nail and thorn From sky's inferno broken, torn, They fall and die mankind to save. They are not dead, no more than He Who died, yet lives eternally, And greets with eyes compassion-dim Their souls in their last flight to Him. —Teresa McClintic in the “New York Times.”