EVENTFUL YEARS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 112, 14 May 1935, Page 11

EVENTFUL YEARS

KING GEORGE'S REIGN

PRESBYTERIAN TRIBUTE

A striking tribute to the qualities of leadership displayed by the King during the twenty-five years of his reign was paid by the Rev. J. R. Blanchard in a sermon at St. John's Church on Sunday. "It was a troubled inheritance to which our King succeeded in 1910," said Mr. Blanchard. "Perhaps no quarter-century in our history has been so eventful with change and so crowded with crises of the first order as have been the twenty-five years of his reign. At home there was constant agitation in which the partition between order and anarchy sometimes wore thin. Abroad, dark clouds were banking beyond the horizon, filling the air with a sense of something awful impending. Swiftly the storm broke in a war the like of which had never been and in which our spirit as a people was tested to its last shred and our resources to their final point. When it ended further troubles were ushered in, the sharpness of which is still with us. "We thank God today for the leadership and example of our King during these testing years. Conscious of the troubled inheritance upon which he was entering, he concluded his first message to the people with the words: 'I take courage, and hopefully look into the future; strong in my faith in God, trusting my people, and cherishing the laws and Constitution .of my beloved country.' With unaffected earnestness our King has been true to that resolve amid all the trials of his reign. Unswerving obedience to the Constitution has marked his every act, even when faced with a graver problem than any monarch had had to face for 200 years. Never has a sovereign more perfectly used his powers and observed his limitations. We as a people owe much to the wisdom and courage which he has thus exercised. The King has trusted his people. In speeches and messages he has revealed himself to them with that simplicity which makes no effort at self-concealment. A PERSONAL CONCERN. "Relying less on pomp and ceremonial to uphold the prestige of the kingly office, he has made it singularly his form of royal progress to go about getting into touch with the varied activities of the people and never to fail of a warm and personal concern in the work and anxieties of all. People feel that when he comes among them, he comes not merely as monarch but as comrade and friend. By the life he has lived among them the artificial barriers separating King and subject have silently crumbled. Throughout his troubled reign, the King has hopefully looked into the future. Times there were not a few when the words might well have been applied to him: 'Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.' .Nevertheless, he has moved among his people as a man of quiet calm and disciplined serenity, doing more thereby than his own generation will ever be able to assess, to steady the popular temper and to heal internal strife. The King has maintained his faith in God. His own words are: 'I am fortified by the belief that the ends which we pursue .. . will be achieved only: while we.seek, in faith and humility that perfect standard of conduct and sacrifice which has been revealed to Christian men.' Such words are not the mere conviction of his office. They are the sincere expression of himself. So today we thank God Who has so wrought with His wisdom and grace in the mind and heart of our King, that his leadership and example during the past twenty-five .years has worked so signally for our common good. NEW CONCEPTION OF EMPIRE. "The King's person and throne have given us a new conception of Empire. No longer is the. Empire knit together by bonds merely legal and political. Because of what King George has made kingship among us to be, his Empire has become his household, his subjects his friends, and his people his family. A "spiritual bond •of Empire has taken the place of a legal bond. It is a bond which'unites not by the statutes of political machinery but by the eternal simplicities of the spirit; a bond which 'is yet the stuff to hold fast when a steel chain snaps.' The King rules his Empire by his grace rather than by his majesty. "Problems and difficulties are still before us. There are. social problems. Frequently has the King referred to these and urged the , need for farreaching changes. He has spoken under the potent compulsion of facts, which is the historic motive for reform among the British people, rather than the deductions of political theories and social creeds. Problems of Empire are still before us. This newly-created spiritual bond of Empire has yet to be worked out, which task will require resolute patience and good will if it is to be established against the incessant attacks of the material. World problems and the responsibility of leadership therein confront us, in which it is our task to maintain that type of leadership which the King has demonstrated among us; the leadership which consists not in the strong imposing their will upon others, but in the good evoking-what is best in others and, in a spirit of co-operation, enabling them to give practical ex"pression to it. These tasks, social, imperial, and international, are far beyond our mere human wisdom and strength. To compass them we are dependent upon the goodness, power and wisdom of God. Thus in prayer today we seek to gather spiritual resources for the days through which we have yet to live, for the .work we have yet to do, and for the adventures we have yet to make."