Manawatu Daily Times The Meaning Of The Memorial.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3264, 6 February 1926, Page 8

Manawatu Daily Times The Meaning Of The Memorial.

f To woman alone of all God’s Creatures has been given to know in their fulness the measure and the meaning of sacrifice. Only in self-giving does she find perfect expression. By a noble, paradox she gains her life in losing it and her fiercest joys are born of pain. She understands the secret of sacrificer—its royal prodigality; its jubilant abandon. And she goes to her Golgothas gaily like a bride. In the graces of full-orbed womanhood artists have always found their finest models, and in the recreation of these graces they have given to the world the choicest embodiments, of the spirit of beauty. Thus iri. the form of a woman’s loveliness, made perfect in motherhood, has the artist sought—and found—the most perfect symbol through which to express a people’s thought concerning its heroic dead. There is' a rare grace and dignity in the bronze madonna who is to stand guard through the ages over the names and the memories of these men of ours. And thus not unworthily will she show forth the fulness of their sacrifice. This silent woman enshrines one other-thought. The reverence that is in every line of her is not an accident It was the artist’s deliberate design that while to us she expressed concerning those whs A- she guards the greatness of their giving, for Jus she expresses to them our attitude of reverence. And in this spirit the people will gather to-morrow to do homage to the memory of the four hundred who “ dying made us rarer gifts than gold."