Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 1943. FAITH THAT ENDURES.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 April 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 1943. FAITH THAT ENDURES.

COINCIDING this year with Easter Sunday, Anzac Day is given an unusual setting, but one by no means inappropriate. It may be felt, indeed, that there could hardly be a more har-' monious eon,junction. The time-honoured Christian festival of the Resurrection is an affirmation of undying faith. So, too, is the observance of Anzac Day in this country and in Australia. The day is one on which we not only pay a national tribute of grateful and proud memory to those who ventured or gave their lives in all theatres of the world war of 1914-18, but reaffirm our faith in the ideals for which that war was. fought.

Between the last world war and that now raging, decades intervened during a great part of which ideals of secure peace, of liberty for individual nations, and of just dealings between nation and nation under a reign of law, appeared to fade and dwindle. In these years of frustration and disappointment there was much that seemed at times to make vain the heroic deeds and sacrifices, and all the services rendered ungrudgingly in a noble cause, that are honoured on Anzac Day, and to make vain also the hope that on the foundation thus laid a better world order would be built. For want of vision, statesmanship and moral resolution, the nations which should have united to establish peace, security and justice fell apart, so unleashing once again the forces of evil aggression and inviting the dire calamity of the war in which victory has yet to be won.

But if faith ebbed low in these terrible years, it did not die, and in the midst of mortal conflict with forces of evil still immensely formidable it is being demonstrated once again that brave peoples set no limits to the efforts and sacrifices .they are prepared to make, on the battlefield and behind the fighting fronts, in order that peace and justice may be re-established in the .world.

To a magnificent demonstration of the spirit and will of peoples who are free or aspire to be free, there is added an exercise of forethought and a genuine desire to reach understanding and agreement on which far-reaching hopes for the future of humanity may be based. In the fourth year of a more ter-, rible and desolating war than that of a quarter of a century ago, more than thirty nations, great and small, are drawing together in the early stages at least of a combined effort, to establish and uphold a world order worthy of all that is being endured and accomplished by those who are maintaining so splendidly the standards of valiant service and sacrifice set by their kinsmen a quarter of a century ago and more. Added meaning and force are thus given to the observance of Anzac Day as an expression of national gratitude and of faith in national and international ideals.