POST-WAR SPIRIT

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 8, 5 October 1943, Page 6

POST-WAR SPIRIT

Retention Of Christian Values

SERVICE AND SACRIFICE Dominion Special Service'. AUCKLAND, October 4.

Service and sacrifice would have to Lw carried on into the pence, and it New Zealand was to sustain her role as a champion of social betterment, democracy and freedom she must go still further and think less of her own coinfort and well-being, learning self-denial iu order that she might give more help to needy ami overcrowded peoples in other lands, said the Bishop of AVaiapu, Rt. Rev. G. V. Gerard, in a sermon delivered iu St. Mary’s Cathedral last night at a service celebrating the 83rd birthday of the parish. The bishop’s address was a P lea for tlle recognition and preservation of Christian values in the community. AVhat was worth preserving in Western civilization had been contributed throughout the ages by men and women who sought to follow the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. The Christian element he had mentioned, said the preacher, consisted of a recognition that there existed a higher power, God, and that men had a relationship and a duty to Him; further, that men in groups could act. rightly or wrongly toward other groups. A Soldier’s Conclusions.

Bishop Gerard referred to himself as one who, in a comparatively short life, had had the privilege or misfortune of, participating as combatant soldier or chaplain in two devastating world wars fought for the maintenance of Christian civilization. It was impossible for one who had visited or passed through some 20 countries under the shadow of war to live any longer in a world of illusion. The bishop recalled an experience of his when he had been put into a prisoners of war camp in the mountains of southern Italy, betweeu the territories now held by the Fifth and Eighth Armies. He said he bad expected to remai-i only a week, but at the end of six weeks he realized that his captors had forgotten him., As he had paid little attention to food and had lost weight, the camp doctor handed him a Red Cross medical comfort parcel, containing a week’s food with double the usual number of calories. This made a difference to his comfort and his future and enabled him to address the men in the camp and give them a message.

AVliat he told them was that the millions of parcels provided by the International Red Cross represented Christian self-denial by people all over the world. He said that the black Maltese cross on one side .of the parcel was symbolic, and that but for the black cross of Calvary there would have been no Red Cross.