STIRRING APPEAL.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 26, 30 December 1925, Page 7

STIRRING APPEAL.

GREAT OPPORTUNITIES. A stirring appeal was made by the Archbishop oi Canterbury in a sermon on Armistice Day that was broadcast from all the stations of the British broadcasting service. “Think of what the conditions were 11 years ago, when the war began,” ho said in the course of it. "Black enough—we now realise it better than we did then—black enough in all conscience. But they were faced with a wholehearted determination, a buoyant enthusiasm of fellowship and resolve, which largely wrought for us the victory we won. Can we recapture, re-enlist, that spirit now for the totally different struggle, the different sort of battlefields which are ours in 1925? Stand back from it and look at the field of 1925 as the man who recounts it a century hence will see it. Ho will toll his readers, our great-grandchildren, liow ours was the generation to whom there were furnished almost suddenly tlireo gifts —first, all sorts of new conditions in material resource. This wireless, this broadcasting, is only one of them. They quadrupled or decupled our roadways of action. Next, a vast unfolding of human knowledge about tho universe and about the wonders of the human mind as the key to all its treasuries. And next, an inrush of new visions and ideals, such as ‘a world without war’ or ‘a society without crushing poverty,’ which were no longer mere theories ‘in the air,’ but were actually crystalising into endeavours of a solid practical kind. These gifts, these thoughts, these ideals, already won by many, wero (as the world will then be told) within the reach of the men and women of 1925. Did they realiso the enrichment, the new-born opportunities, or did they blindly, or callously, _or selfishly neglect them, not knowing the time of their visitation? What will bo the answer? . . . We do well to be dissatisfied, but what we need is dissatisfaction with ourselves, rather than with our surroundings. But dissatisfaction by itself is impotent. It must be transmuted into resolve.”