EN ROUTE TO ENGLAND, Sunday—We might almost draw an analogy on this Easter Sunday between the position of the early Christians and the position of the peoples of the world today. As the first Easter Sunday dawned so many centuries ago, those who followed Christ and believed in Him as the Saviour of mankind had been through the depths of sorrow and despair since the Crucifixion.

On that Easter Day, however, hope dawned again. The Lord was risen and new understanding of His teaching was opening for His followers. Many of the faithful must have been bewildered, for they had thought of an earthly kingdom and not a spiritual one. They had thought that their battle was to be won at once on earth, but the Resurrection of Christ, and the things He said to the followers with whom He met, pointed to the fact that the battle would be a long one and the victory far off.

Life here on this earth might well seem to be a failure. The reward and the triumph might only exist for the spirit once freed from the trammels of this world.

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The people of our day have thought that with the end of the war they would have peace and security, but they find themselves faced with continuing anxiety and more wars and rumors of wars. They look at the world of nature around them and realize that all things die and live again, and the flow of life in spring emphasizes the Easter lesson.

We, the people, may seem to fail in our efforts to attain a world in which security and peace and brotherly love prevail. If we do not learn in time, we may come to complete destruction, but the Resurrection seems to promise that the spirit of man shall ultimately triumph over the enemies of man—those enemies which lie within man himself and which he must conquer before he can be free.

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St. John, in describing Christ's appearance to the disciples, records His salutation: "Peace Be Unto You," and when He appeared to them again to quiet the unbelief of Thomas the doubting one, He said: "Because thou hast seen me thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen and yet believed."

It is hard for us to believe in peace and to keep our spirit keyed to the assurance that we can achieve the realization of Christ's words. We have not seen peace and yet we must believe in it, for without that belief in the thing which we seek and in our ability to find it, we will be as useless as the doubting disciple.

Easter is the season that emphasizes for all of us the need for faith—faith in our religion, faith in ourselves, faith in our neighbors and in our friends and in the peoples of the world. If the United States has a destiny—and we Americans have believed this ever since the days of the Founding Fathers—then it would look as though the resolving of our difficulties at this time lies in greater faith—to insure greater effort toward the ultimate achievement for all upon earth of Christ's salutation: "Peace Be Unto You."