Friday, Dec. 19, 1952 University Daily Kansan Pay
Let Us Show What We Believe
In the hurry and scurry of preparing for Christmasbuying gifts, selecting a tree, perhaps planning a vacationwe sometimes become so absorbed in the activities of the holiday season that we give little to its real significance.
This is, after all, a solemn time—a time for rededication to God, to church, to basic moral and spiritual concepts.
What ever our particular faith may be this is the season to reaffirm it—and to realize our eternal need of it. For in this tense and uncertain year of 1952 we need the support of religion more than we have ever needed it before.
Why? Because we are at war in one corner of the world with a power that flately denies God and the validity of his teachings. The Communist philosophy holds the State to be superior to everything else, including God. And to such a sacrilige we of the free world can never subscribe. For we have built our way of living, our way of thinking, our very liberty, on God's laws. What is the American Constitution itself but a new statement of the dignity of man as sanctified in the Bible?
Thus, of the foreign scene, we are this Christmas at death grips with a force that would, if it could, wipe out our most sacred religious beliefs. ALL OF US, . . . Protestants, Catholics, Jews . . . face the threat TOGETHER!
ters, corrupt officials, even narcotic poisoners of our children.
And on the domestic scene we find ourselves beset by other forces of moral disruption—gangs-
IN OUR CHURCHES.
To fight off these enemies of decency at home and abroad we need to call on our utmost moral strength, our firmest spiritual convictions. And where we can find such strength? There is only one enduring source:
No matter what faith we profess, the Pulpit stands as an inexhaustible fount of spiritual power. In the scriptures and sermons of our clergy we can find the answers to all the vilifications of God that flow from Communist mouths.
This can and should be a holiday season in the truest sense of the words—a holy day season.
Let us make it that. Let us affirm its real meaning by going to the church of our preference—not once, not only at Christmas iteself, but again and again. To fill our houses of worship to overflowing, to claim our loyalty to the teachings of God—what greater defence could we hurl at those who scorn and assail those teachings?
Crowded churches would be a true measure of Communism's failure. They would, moreover, be the strongest attestation to prove that American decency has not given way to the onslaughts of domestic evil.
Let us turn to our houses of worship—and let us continue to fill them as long as we believe in man's fight to freedom, integrity, and decency.