Article February 10, 1940 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: The Way Out

with contributions from M. Landon, Ross J. Allen, A. Cohen, John C. Ward

[A Correspondent, in the Times, London, England]

A deep shadow lies over human life in these times. It dose not touch those only who are despondent, or those with special and intimate reasons for anxiety; in a greater or less degree, its reach extends to everyone and everything. There are people who as yet find their normal routine but little altered, but even to them each morning means when they awake a return to consciousness that things are very wrong, that the happy zest with which they looked forward to the day's work and pleasures has departed. That feeling has a source much deeper than merely selfish regrets and worries. It springs from an underlying conviction that things ought not so to be, that Christianity and civilization should not have come to this pass, that science is being hideously misused, that right conduct has proved itself the one path to happiness, and that from this path the human race has wandered far. Whatever from of sensible diversion we try, the shadow still lurks, and we cannot escape from it for long. . . .

In the noble imagery of the Old Testament, God guided His people not only by fire but by a cloud, and "I would not that ye should be ignorant," wrote St. Paul centuries later, "how that all our fathers were under the cloud, . . . and were all baptized ... in the cloud." Perhaps these again are days when our nation and others are being baptized "in the cloud," so that in the shade and darkness of the present some new and vastly better mode of life, some far worthier devotion to God and his truth, may find their source.

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