"HOPE FOR BEST"

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 19827, 3 January 1939, Page 6

"HOPE FOR BEST"

BUT PREPARE FOR WORST AUGHBISHOP'S MESSAGE TRIAL OF CIVILISATION SPIRITUAL HELP NEEDED (Kino, Tel. Copyright—United Press Assn.) (British Official Wireless.) Reed. noon. RUGBY, Jan. 2. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Cosmo Lang, in a new year's broadcast, said that in the confused situation in which, at times, it seemed that the whole world was going mad and thankfulness for deliverance in the past gives way to fear of new dangers which may be coming in the future. the way of sanity and strength was to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

To prepare for the worst was, indeed, a bounden duty. h\ a world full cf threats and dangers we dare not neglect the defence of the lives, homes, and liberties of our people, and of all that men care to live for.

"But all the while we must hope for the best," he said. "To .speak and thmk as if it were sure to come may even help to make it come. We must go forward as one people in a spirit of national unity. Parties there wiil be and must be, but uniting them all is the value we all set on our tradition and liberties, the way of common life embodied in our democracy. We must go forward in pursuit of peace.

••In (he present condition of this disordered world we are hcholdwig a judgment day. It is our once-vaunted civilisation that is being judged. Think of the millions in China, driven homeless and helpless before the ruthless armies of a civilised Power. Think of the thousands turned adrift into the world by the relentless persecution perpetrated by a highly-civilised State.

"In spite of all hopes of progress, arc these not signs of a return to the dark ages. Surely it is being made plain that civilisation cannot save itself. Its salvation, its redemption from the downward tendencies always at work within it, must not come from itsel! but from another world—an eternal spiritual world."