THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 270, 13 August 1942, Page 4

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Comments—Reflections

Cease from anger and forsake wrath; fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.—Ps. 37:8.

Only young Nazis and old soldiers whose morale is generally poor now compose the German Army of occupation in Paris. Tills explains why the daily parade on the Champs Elysees has ibeen abandoned, Officers and soldiers amuse themselves as best they can. The soldiers go preferably to the cinemas, where a number of newsreel items chosen specially for them are shown. All the same, the cinemas remain half-lit during the newsreels for fear of demonstrations. Cabarets appeal more to the officers, where they smile with Teuton stupidity at jokes cracked against them which are too subtle for them to see.—" News from France.’’

“Much of one’s knowledge, I believe, springs from within, It is very often the tapping of an unconscious memory ; voices from ancestral cells of parents beyond our parents dictate our knowledge. I have the instinct for the medieval period. Rarely do I And myself grossly wrong about details of living of those times, however inaccurate I may sometimes be with, dates, even when occasionally I make a guess about some points, for often rather than interrupt work, I write with a query attached to the MS and later seek the truth. It is unusual for me to be far out, if I trust to my first inspiration and don’t confuse myself with thinking. It is not, I feel, my own brain that is working, but the brain of some medieval ancestor, the cells of which have taken strong life In my memory.”—Mr. Philip Lindsay, a well-known writer of 'historical romances, in.his autobiography, "I’d Live the Same Life Over.”

"What depresses us as we look back is .perhaps not even the fact that thousands of evangelical Christians have made the acquaintance of the police, a thing they would, never previously have thought of, or that hundreds of evangelical preachers have been detained for longer or shorter periods in prisons and concentration eamps—though we must say that we have been very much affected by these events and arc still moved by them, because such treatment is an injustice and nothing but an injustice, and because we feel It to be an injustice for which we have given no provocation. No; what really depresses us is rather the irrefutable knowledge that during these years the Church itself has been made prisoner, that the Church itself has lost its freedom to' carry out its mission as it used to do. It would be lying—it would be conscious denial of the truth—were we to attempt to assert that the Evangelical Church is today freely permitted to preach the message which it Iras been ordered to preach.”—Pastor Niemoller, a German victim of Nazi persecution.

The memory of man is sometimes short. We can none of us again afford to forget the lessons we have learned —that co-operation to win the victory is not enough; that there must be even greater co-operation to win the peace, if the peace is to be that kind of a peace which alone can prevent the recurrence of war—a peace which is more than a mere interlude between battles. Without such co-operation we shall have again economic distress, unemployment, poverty and suffering for millions of people; suffering which, while less acute, is longer drawn out and is but little less hard to bear than the miseries of war; suffering which, as surely as night follows day/ is the breeder of wars. In our conduct of the war we are all of us cooperating with confidence in each other, fully, completely—this form of partnership must obtain a momentum that will carry over into the post-war period. We must cultivate the habit. The final terms of the peace should wait, till the immediate, tasks of the transition period after the defeat of the Axis Powers has been completed by the United Nations, and till the final judgments can be coolly and rationally rendered.—From a recent speech by Mr. Sumner Welles.

"It seems to me that there is one obvious delusion about time which needs to be dissipated because it is a cause of grave practical errors and mistakes and disasters—l mean the delusion that time is something positive, that it is a thing or a force which can produce effects in the world or upon ourselves. Unfortunately some religious language fosters this delusion. ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream Bears all its sons away.’ So run the familiar lines of the hymn, but time is not like an ever-rolling stream, it is in fact nothing but a succession of events. If there were no events there would be no time. Time Is not a medium in which things happen. time is the happening. This delusion that time is a positive thing which of itself can produce effects may have, as I said, deadly consequences. ‘Time is on our side.’ said many of us nt the beginning of the war. To some this was a harmless and natural metaphor, but to many others, I fear, it was a deadly narcotic, persuading them that no great effort was needed, that we could wait and see the enemy defeated by the mysterious parvmge of Li.me. But time is on no one’s side. Time is the eternal neutral. It is the friend of none, the enemy of none, because it is nothing positive. It is not a cause. The only significance of time is the significance- of the events which take place within it. All epiritual religion, and not. only the Christian religion, affirms that the events which take place in time can be filled with a meaning which is not temporal but abiding qnd eternal.”—The Very Rev. W. R. Matthews, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's, in a discourse in St. Paul’s Cathedral, ‘‘Time, the Great Neutral.” * « » Return. You shall return to us, O you who lie afar In snowy wastes and seas and plains and islands green ; You shall return to us, O hearts that we have loved, You shall return in ways -mysterious and unseen. You shall return to us when through the gathering dusk And dwindling sounds of twilight comes the evening bell, And you shall walk among a people, peaceful, free— For here, because of you who died, shall freedom dwell. —Max Press, in the “New York Times.”