NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23840, 16 December 1940, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS

THE SPIRIT OF LONDON When the time comes for compiling the intimate history of London through its days as a salient in the Battle of Britain, writes a correspondent of the Times,' the churches, missions and settlements of all denominations in East and South-east London will be indispensable sources for the historians. They are in the front line themselves, sharing all the daily and nightly risks of the populations among whom their work lies. When you talk with the clergvmen, ministers and mission workers you learn that their own experiences have been as strange, and often every bit as terrifying, as those of their people. Nevertheless, it is ol these people that they speak chiefly—of the wonderhil spirit and fortitude with which they face Hitler's and Goering's worst —and of the great work that men and women belonging to creeds not their own arc doing. The warden of a Free Church settlement praises an indomitable elderly vicar living near; a rural dean on the other side of the river receives the same deserved tributes from the superintendent of a Methodist mission. The work of the Nonconformists evokes similar tributes from the Anglicans. Those are just examples. Common humanity is in these days everywhere recognised as the first and closest of the ties binding the community together.