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Show Kathl een Norris Says: ' Love Is With Us, Even in War (Bell Syndicate WNU Service.) rA hkr CZAIIaV Ar7 I ITc neerf so ZuZe lo fee happy in this world; and there is so much more than that little waiting for us. But it must be based on love, the love that fulfills the law. By KATHLEEN NORRIS WAR means that sane men and sane nations adopt, in a crisis, measures that they know, are fundamentally false and wrong. A sober, God-fearing householder will snatch up a gun when the safety of the woman and children he loves is threatened by some attacking attack-ing maniac; and in the same spirit an invaded nation will first take any steps possible to drive out the intruder, and then settle down to consider the terms that will keep him out. There will be peace again some day; we will all live to see it, (or while wars in the past have straggled strag-gled on lazily from year to year and generation to generation, so that history his-tory speaks of the "Hundred Years' war" and the "Thirty Years' war," war today has been stepped up to a pace that makes it mercifully swift. The most dismal of pessimists give this present conflict something between be-tween three and four years; other authoritative voices speak of peace in 1943. Now, many of us, en,emy nations and allies alike, will have to experience expe-rience a change of heart if this new peace is to be God's peace at last. Unless it is a peace based upon those Christian principles by which we have supposedly ' governed our individual actions in the past, it won't be lasting, and 1964 will see the task to do all over again. Many Try to Forgive. Individually, many of us really struggle to attain the Christian ideal; we do try to forgive our personal per-sonal enemies, do good to them that hate us, and overcome not evil with evil, but overcome evil with good. Those men and women who achieve anything even remotely approaching ap-proaching the law of Christ win to an inner peace that is the true light, and the only hope of the world. We need so little to be happy in this world, and there is so much more than that little waiting for us nil! But that little must be based on the laws that were given us 2,000 years ago in a sermon on a mount. It must be based on love. Love that casts out fear, that fulfills the law. Strange in these days of universal hates to be talking of love. Yet love is with us, even in war time; and every woman who spreads about herself a nucleus of loving and sharing helps to bring about that day when all these little centers cen-ters of forgiveness and love shall join to make a new world. The very boys who go forth to fight are actuated by loyalty, which is a form of love, and duty and obedience they are the only ones among us who have a right to pray for victory, to say, "God of our fathers be on our side!" because they are risking their lives to win it. Tlie rest of us may pray rather for light We must covenant; tell God what we will sacrifice for that same victory. Should Help All. We must promise Him that in the day of peace to come we will not forget that great national injustices and oppressions create these war conditions, and that we will study them, and try to see that they do not crop up again. We must promise that all the children chil-dren of the world will seem to us as much a responsibility as our own individual children, and that starvation starva-tion and hard times and famines and unemployment will not ever exist ex-ist anywhere again. That at some long, green table in Washington our wisest leaders will gather to decide where in the world's great open spaces little crowded nations may find colonial opportunities, and just how much help in colonizing we can give them. And we must promise that here at home no strong man with small children dependent upon him will ever again have to beg, cap in hand, for a job; that America's great wealth and greater opportunities opportuni-ties shall be used in peace, as they are in war, for the fair distribution distribu-tion of enough for everyone. Even then we will have apples and watermelons water-melons and pork and wheat left over! When we promise this, and promise prom-ise that it shall be done in the name of that Son whose Father refuses him nothing, then we shall have the right to ask victory, that we may make it fruitful of a righteous peace. But only then. Only when the grasping grasp-ing pride of empires has been changed into the neighborliness that makes our individual lives so secure and unafraid. Abused Rights. The conviction has grown up among us all that we have "rights" in far dfstant places; rights that might once have been established by honest treaties, but that have been betrayed and abused, and finally final-ly soaked in blood. There are better ways of dealing deal-ing with our neighbors than these, and we must find them. It is my profound belief that those ways will be found. Meanwhile, every one of us may still have the supreme adventure that means finding God, and finding with Him that inner peace that means that nothing can frighten us, nothing can harm us. The woman who walks with her hand in God's walks steadily; she can love and she can serve; she can find a thousand thou-sand little ways of making American Ameri-can life a safer and a better thing for the future. Anyone who likes may accuse me of an inordinate love of my own country and my own people. I admit ad-mit it And I say once and for all that as a great intelligent nation who for a hundred and more years has kept the peace with her own neighbors, unless America has an important voice in the framing of the new peace treaty, it will not be a good one, and in it will be the seeds of the next great war. The peace that follows this war can be a permanent peace. But we must all, nations as well as individuals, individ-uals, work together toward that end. Self-interest on the part of any person per-son or faction can destroy the more generous efforts of all the rest. This war, more than any other, is a challenge to the principles of democracy de-mocracy and Christianity. We must successfully meet that challenge if we hope to enjoy the blessings of a I permanent peace. |