NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1934. ARMISTICE DAY

Northern Advocate, 10 November 1934, Page 8

NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1934. ARMISTICE DAY

Registered for transmission through the post as a Newspaper.

Tomorrow will be the sixteenth anniversary of Armistice Day, ar occasion which wo have learned to regard as a call to solemn reflection. At first our great deliverance carried us, as a nation to exultation, as men who knew themselves freed from the possibilities of a defeat which must have brought them bitter humiliation. Now, sixteen years after the War’s ending, it comes with a challenge to render account oi the way in which we have used the freedom so wonderfully preserved to our nation and Empire, The solemnity which invests Armistice Day has its special expression in the Two Minutes 1 Silence. In that short space oi withdrawal from the world, wc should rcquicken our sense of fellowship with those who secured our deliverance by the sacrifice of their lives, or pray in the Divine Presence that we may act worthily of their example. This year’s Armistice Day falls on a Sunday, and it cannot be doubted that many will take more than two minutes to enter into a deeper silence, where memory guided by faith may attain its finest inspiration. As a venerable preacher in London has said, the majority of those to whom Armistice Day is poignant with sacred memories find it something more than sorrow’s acceptance of destiny. They are persuaded that those they have lost still live, and though they cannot tell anything of the nature of that existence which belongs to those who have passed hence, are sure that their relatives and friends are still united with them in the life which is in God. Christianity has no answer to many questions men have always raised about life after death, and if wo confine ourselves to the teachings of the New Testament we must come to the conclusion that Ihe Lord of both the living and the dead does not deem it necessary that we should know the secrets of the other world, except that life here and iioav is a preparation and probation for it, and that, whether living oi 1 departed, we arc in the hands of a God Who is all-merci-ful. In this faith we may believe that those who gave themselves for freedom and righteousness would bid us continue the contest in which they were engaged, so that a larger freedom may be won for the world and all that degrades human life may be

ended. Tins is their message : Take up our quarrel with the joe: fo you with failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.