Evening Star Newspaper, December 23, 1934, Page 65

wior | G Sundy SHRC | ron | Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 23, 1934, 16 PAGES. - BRUCE CATTON HREE wise men from the Orient plodded across a plain with their eyes on a blazing star. The dark veil of a Syrian night was rent apart so that wide- eyed shepherds in a quiet sheepfold might have a vision of unearthly glory. A child was born in the stable of an inn, in an out-of-the-way province of the Roman empire . . . and into a world that lived by the sword came the promise that men some day would learn to live in peace. That miraculous Christmas eve in Bethlehem was not only the announcement of man’s eternal kinship with some- thing deathless, something greater and nobler and finer than he had dared dream himself to be. It was also a promise that since man is made in the image of God, this old earth can be remade in the image of God's city. It revealed to men the simple fact that war, with all that it connotes—might’s triumph over wrong, the enthronement of brute strength, reason surrendering to the law of the jungle—is no more a part of the natural order of things than poverty, greed or oppression, and can be abolished when men wish. ; That was an unbelievable promise, in those days, just as it seems to be now. On the one hand were a child in a stable, and a few aging philosophers and unlettered shepherds; on the other, all the glitter and pomp and hard-fisted might of the Roman empire. The tramp of the legions raised the dust on roads all across the known world. The triremes of Rome’s fleet ruled every known sea. Beat those swords into plowshares? Great Caesar,*if he had heard about it, would have laughed. OR does the outlook seem any brighter today. Peace? The dreadnaughts and the tanks make a mockery of the idea, just as Caesar’s legions did. But there is a power in the world that cannot be meas- ured in terms of army divisions or naval squadrons. You cannot weigh it or analyze it in a laboratory, but in the, long run it is only real power. It is that strange and un- fathomable force in the human soul which keeps weary and discouraged men plodding along on the road to the stars. Now the world has lasted a long time, and its history is one long record of blood and suffering, of inhumanity and injustice, of wrong triumphant and of right in the con- Continued on Third Page