JUDGMENT DAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 January 1939, Page 5

JUDGMENT DAY

ARCHBISHOP’S NEW YEAR MESSAGE NATIONS ON TRIAL THE NEED OF PREPARING FOR THE WORST. WHILE HOPING FOR THE BEST. By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright (Received This Day, 10.10 a.m.) RUGBY, January 2. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in a New Year broadcast, said that in a confused situation in which it sometimes 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.

“In a world full of threats and dangers,” he said, "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. To speak and think 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 will be and must be, but uniting them all is the value we all set on the traditional liberties and way of common life embodied in our democracy. We must go forward in the pursuit of peace. In the present condition of this disordered world we are beholding a judgment day. It is our once-vaunted civilisation that is being judged. Think of the millions in China being driven, homeless and helpless, before the ruthless armies of a civilised power. Think of the thousands turned adrift iqto the world by the relentless persecution perpetrated by a highly civilised State. In spite of all hopes of progress, are 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 itself, but from another world—the eternal spiritual world.”