Fighting Without Faith
T will be a pity if any reader of this issue misses the remarkable talk on page 3 by Herbert Agar, editor of the Courier Journal (Louisville, U.S.A.). While it would be foolish to suggest that any talk is for everybody, it is safe enough to say that most Americans are worth listening to when their subject is victory over Hitler. And Mr. Agar’s subject is more than victory over Hitler. It is victory over ourselves-over all the slackness, cowardice, selfishness, and laziness that have enabled Hitler to threaten the world. He of course does not charge us with these sins. He charges his own countrymen. But our complacency is very deep and very dangerous if his words pass over our heads. Nor does he make the mistake of those untimely moralists who forget that to-day comes before to-morrow. Hitler has arrived. He is hammering at our door now. If he gets through we shall not merely be too late to put the house in order: we shall have no house at all-no shelter for democracy, no place for the free man to rest his head. As Mr. Agar himself puts it, "We shall descend into the long night which follows the death of every great civilisation." So it is the struggle itself that counts most at the present hour, We have to beat the Germans. Even to think of anything else is folly unless we are all the time thinking first of victory, and working for it. But Mr. Agar’s real point is that too many of us are fighting without faith. The war came because the democracies were sheltering behind "big words that were not associated with big deeds." It has gone against us so far largely because we were socially and politically sick when it started, and have not yet overcome our lassitude. We still shirk what Mr. Agar Calls "the bold simple truth" that our democracy is largely "wind and promises." In other words our cynicism i& fighting Hitler’s fanaticism-and that will remain an unequal struggle | until we are reinforced by faith,
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 115, 5 September 1941, Page 4
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349Fighting Without Faith New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 115, 5 September 1941, Page 4
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