The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1963, Page 12

EDITORIAL
On earth peace, good will toward men
One man ordered that all the world be taxed, and the world hastened
to obey.
It was a world not too big or complex to be kept under the mortal eye of
a single ruler, aided by instruments of fear and the servile loyalty of a few. It
stretched from an almost legendary Cathay westward to a barbaric Britain not
yet the object of Roman ambition. According to the concepts of the day, the
earth was the floor of this little universe, and heaven its star-studded roof.
Over its primitive roads, the poor and oppressed trudged on foot or were borne
by slow, plodding beasts to the villages of their origins, where they rendered
unto Caesar Augustus what he claimed to be his.
Into this tiny world of simple concepts and primitive brutalities came the
Prince of Peace. The son of a subject people who ended the weary journey of
the tax-payer in the town of Bethlehem, he was born in a stable, wrapped in
swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.
There was no room at the inn.
Simple shepherds who watched their flocks in the hills near Bethlehem
were guided to the lowly cradle by an angel of the Lord; to them was given the
message that has echoed down the centuries to our day:
“ . . . . On earth peace, good will toward men!”
In nineteen centuries and sixty-three years, the physical world has ex-
panded far beyond the wildest dreams of the powerful Caesars, and modern
science has unlocked many complex secrets of the universe. Our concepts are no
longer simple, our problems no longer bounded by the limits of family circles
or national borders.
The magic of modern communications has brought this immensely
widened world under the mind’s eye of every thinking person, dropped its
problems on every doorstep in Christendom. Like the shepherds on the night
the Prince of Peace was born, we are “sore afraid.”
There is a saying in Korea that “winter is for the rich.” This bitter pro-
verb of the people will drive home its truth again this Christmas through tor-
tured flesh in a country where the pangs of hunger are part of life, where babes
are wrapped in potato sacks and laid to sleep on unsheltered ground.
There is still no room at the inn, and men of good will ponder painfully
in their slow and earnest search for a solution of the world’s ills. Not even in
favored countries is there much peace beyond the loving circles of family and
friends.
Yet the miracle of faith endures, defying the proven facts of human history
through the ages. A generation that has suffered two world conflicts and seen