A BELOVED CITIZEN PASSES

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 130, 18 June 1937, Page 4

A BELOVED CITIZEN PASSES

Hastings ljas lost a welLbeloved citizen, It will be hard to |fill the place that Mr. Cecil Dijff held in the life of the community. He was a man who saw life steadily, and combined within his being a wondrous kindliness and an inflexible honegty. Sentiment and sympathy he had in rich store, yet such was the rare quadity of his mind that he moved amid the daily conflicts of life with a liappy serenity, confident that truth and righteousness are invincible. There is= not a department of our community activities that has not benefited from fhe influence that this good citizen has so unconsciously exercised. He has shown tha.t it is possible to fight bard and straight without thought of self or of personal enmjty. AJI men must look inward if personality is to survive, and no doubt Cecil Duff had his hours of inward looking, and the voice of self must have sometimes been just as clamant in his ears as it is in the ears of other men. To his fellows, though, his personality seemed to he bereft of selfish thoughts. From that inward looking he also must have derived that strength with which he xnet the world. Deep within hira werq the austerities and fervid faith of his forefathers. These made the unshakeable bage Of a personality warm and lovable because of its intellectual breadth and merry human understanding, The pity of it is that he is a workman struck down in the midst of his tasks. Two tasks he has, however, completed. He has built himself a shrine in the hearts of those who knew him, and he has set a model of citizenship which, if followed, will give new strength and richness to public life.