HUMAN DIGNITY AT STAKE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1941, Page 7

HUMAN DIGNITY AT STAKE

PRAYER FOR CLEAR VISION. “Is there any special prayer which we may offer today and always for ourselves and our fellow-citizens?” asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang, preaching on the National Day of Prayer. “Let it be a prayer that we may see and keep a clear vision of the true greatnes sof our cause. We must see in this termendous conflict nothing less than a struggle between two wholly opposite conceptions of the meaning and purpoes of man’s life. The one is that man is a child of God, created in his Father’s image, responsible to his Creator. To meet this responsibility he must have freedom — freedom of thought, of speech, of worship, freedom of opportunity to develop his whole personality. In his relations with his fellow-men there are certain rights which he is entitled to claim for himself and bound to try to secure for his fellow-men, such as truth, mercy, justice between man and man. The other conception, held by the Nazi rulers in Germany, is that man is the creature of the State, that his first duty is submission to the State, that the State itself is all powerful, acknowledging no law but its own interests, no right but its own right. Between these two conceptions of man’s life there can be no compromise, indeed no neutrality. The defence of the first against the might of the second is a cause for which no sacrifices can be too great. For it is nothing less than the worth and dignity of human life that is at stake.”