NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23818, 20 November 1940, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

SIFTING WHEAT FROM CHAFF An age when great issues demand from men all that they have to give must profoundly affect thoir faith in God, writes the Rev. Sidney M. Berry, secretary of the English Congregational Union. It refines it by sifting the wheat from the chaff. The process is not without a good deal of misgiving and suffering, and it may be that in the very age when men declare that faith is dying in reality it is being built up on strong foundations. When life shows its sterner face to men, and when all the little slogans of a superficial religion ring hollow in men's ears, there are thoso who declare that faith is failing men in the hour of their bitter need. To a deeper insight the reverse may ho the true reading of the facts. Through disappointment and disillusion man may be diggiug deeper to find the bedrock truth of things. NOT A BELEAGUERED FORTRESS "We in Britain should not think of ourselves as a beleaguered fortress. It is a bad, defensive and defeatist metaphor," said Captain Crookshank, Financial Secretary to tho British Treasury, in'a recent speech. "We arc a great lighthouse off the western seaboard of a Europe now plunged in utter darkness. Toward the light of peace and freedom the submerged victims of Hitler aro straining their eyes to catch a glimpse of its rays. They can't see much yet, but those rays are getting stronger every day; and soon so bright will be their light, fuelLed by us and our Allies, that there will be no more dark, no more cruelties, no more oppression, no more Nazis on this continent of Europe. That fuel must be bought by £ s d —letters which stand for two things—pounds, shillings and pence, and Love, Service and Duty."

MANNERS AT SEA "Now I am not a seaman, but I have sailed long enough and far enough to have learned some lessons afloat that I voukl never have learned ashore," said Mr. Thomas "Wood in a recent broadcast talk. "One. is this: The first test of civilisation, among , seagoing nations, is the way in which they look upon the sea. Take • ourselves. We respect it—and so we ought, for ,it made us. We observe its customs and its code of manners, strictly—and so again we ought, for it is the one greait international highway.. But: above' all we have learned, through centuries of seafaring, never to take it for granted. It is the sea —the oldest thing in the world, and the most cruel. We know that, and wo have paid for knowing it. Year after year, for nearly 250 years now, we have sent out ships of the Royal Navy making charts. They have gone out in all weathers, into every ocean, through peaco and war alike. These charts are on salo everywhere—to all nations. Wo haven't kept them selfishty to ourselves. They are -for the use of seamen, no matter what •country _ they belong to, 1 to help them ill' their everlasting fight .against the sea. If we had done nothing else'but that., wo could ask for no .better memorial. And tlio Germans? Their memorial ,is not a set of charts, rbut the tears of seamen's widows. In ppaco they swagger along that international highway flying their colours in a gale, like .soldiers behind a big drum; in war they bomb lighthouse crews and shoot them as they drown. By this test of civilisation they are savages."