Second Lieut. Harold Parry was just turned twenty when he was killed by a shell in Flanders on May 6, 1917. A short while before, he had written to his sister from France, "I have never told any one what I had determined long ago to do after I left Oxford. Today, when there is a possibility of death to be faced, I can tell you all I had decided, no matter how successful I was at Oxford, to go and teach at an ordinary secondary school—best of all at the old, old school itself—for there I should meet the material upon which I could work. I want to teach children what love and beauty are, and how infinitely better goodness is than mere satisfaction—is it satisfaction?—of physical desires." It is for "love and beauty" that the youth of England are fighting today. Love as against hatred, beauty as against ugliness, truth as against falsehood. Viewed in this way certain divine sparks in the struggle dazzle the eyes and make one's very soul glow. The British Empire, in spite of some dark pages in its history and many imperfections in its present life, is the bearer of a tradition so lofty and so precious that duty has called us to enter upon a crusade for Christian ideals versus pagan doctrines.
A special characteristic of the New Testament doctrine of love and justice, as compared with the views current in the Jewish and classical worlds, is the extraordinary enlargement of its sphere. Justice to man as man was a subject of speculation among the Stoics, but in the popular morality it was ignored. The Jew, an early proclaimer of racial superiority, hated the Samaritan and despised the Gentile. The Greek was bound by moral ties to his fellow-citizens, but between him and the bar-parians there was no moral reciprocity; if he was conscious of any obligation, it was the Obligation to do them all the injury he could. Then again there was the slave class, who were regarded as incapable of virtue, and, therefore, like the lower animals, outside the ethical sphere. It was against this background that Jesus spoke His incomparable parable of the Good Samaritan which forms the Church lesson for tomorrow (Luke 10: 29-3). A brilliant lawyer asked: "Who is my neighbour?"
Jesus made answer and said (I will quote from the Gospel), "A man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho fell among robbers who stripped and belaboured him and then went off leaving him half dead. Now it so chanced that a priest was going down the same road, but on seeing him he went past on the opposite side. So did a Levite who came to the spot; he looked at him but passed on the opposite side. However, a Samaritan traveller came to where he way and felt pity when he saw him; he went to him, bound his wounds up, pouring oil and wine into them, mounted him on his own steed, took him to an inn, and attended to him. Next morning he took out a couple of shillings and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, 'Attend to him, and if you are put to any extra expense I will refund you on my way back.' Which of these three men, in your opinion, proved a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?" He said, "The man who took pity on him." Jesus said to him, "Then go and do the same." "The point of the parable is that when a man has love in his heart it tells him who is his neighbour. And this brings to my mind that great utterance of Lord Gort on August 4: "Service to God, service to our country and service to our fellow-men. Without this conception of service, no great nation can endure." Service to our fellow-men is one of the cardinal doctrines of the New Testament.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.