Waiapu Church Gazette September Ist, 1945. UNTO US THE VICTORY.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume 36, Issue 6, 1 September 1945, Page 5

Waiapu Church Gazette September Ist, 1945. UNTO US THE VICTORY.

"The fight is o'er, the battle done." The news that the terrible war, with all its slaughter, its suffering and its destruction, is over was moving news to the free peoples of the whole world and the freed peoples alike. From millions of homes rose a prayer of thankfulness' that the forces of evil had at last, by God's mercy, been finally overthrown. For many years have the enemies of the Allied Nations desecrated one country after another with their cruelties and their rapine. Beit remembered that m their prisons' or concentration camps thousands upon thousands of miserable men and women were kept. There m these infamous dens barbaric gaolers starved them and tortured them with iniquitous and nameless barbarities until they died. To-day Germany is m the hands of those whom its maniacal Fuehrer had thought to despise and master. The dreams of Japanese of a Greater East Asia have been shattered. They have learned the capacity of 'their adversaries to endure .heavy losses, to summon up their strength and skill and to "toil on with boundless obstinacy through boundless suf- - fering" to : absolute victory. Let us honour the dead, and help the living, who have fought that we might be saved. Let us give thanks to Almight God, under Whose hand the peoples of the United Nations have reached the calm waters of peace. Many of our men have returned, many are to return,- but there are many, the bravest and the best, who will never return. New Zealand will always be the poorer for their loss and the richer for their sacrifice. Those who mourn them may find some solace m Thomas Hardy's vision: .

I saw a dead man's fin-sr part Shining within each faithful heart Of those bereft. Then said I, "This must be His Immortality."

In nearly six years of war the vitality of the Great Powers that must preserve the peace has been taxed; many nations have been left m ruin and starvation. The period of replenishment that lies ahead presents problems as urgent to the confirmation of victory as those which have been resolved on the far-flung battlefields. They must be met by all people with courage, with resolution and with attack equal to that with which the Allied fighting men have faced and vanquished the aggressors. It is m a mood of rededication, not of vainglory, that we should pay tribute to those who made this glorious triumph of man's sovereign law possible, that we should turn our eyes to the future and its heavy tasks.

What of the future? is a question that countless men are turning over m their hearts. They have learned that the way of Mars 1 m all its blood and hideousness is evil m its worst conception. They have to choose as their way of life between this road of darkness and chaos and that which was given to us by the Prince of Peace over 1900 years ago and which has as its signpost "brotherhood." Warnings that the world which is without God will return to chaos have been given by two great leaders, the architects of victory, Mr Winston Churchill and the late President Roosevelt. Our great military leaders, all men of God who have acknowledged Him as their Master and source of great power, have given the same message. It has been through these God-fearing men that we have been able to express our joy at victory. The Christian way of civilisation ' has been preserved, but its blessings will be enfolded only if men will heed Him, the Giver of all victories.