‘Don’t abandon hope’

The following editorial appeared in the Toronto Daily Star a century ago on Dec. 23, 1916, when some of the bloodiest battles of the First World War had just been fought:

Recently the New York Post published an article by a writer who was so depressed by the war that he said there was no such thing as Christmas or Christianity this year. We are free to admit that there is ground for discouragement. If we imagine some Martian leaving the planet at the birth of Christianity and revisiting it in 1916 he would be justified in wondering at the slowness of its progress and doubting whether there had been any progress at all.

We must not, however, abandon hope. We may be at the parting of the ways. Periods of transition are often the worst of all. That this war is so much more deadly than the Napoleonic wars is due in part to the progress of science. Improvement in means of communication has made the world smaller, brought the nations closer. The world has been parceled out among the nations, leaving no room for expansion by exploration and discovery. Nations can no longer evade the problem of living together. There must be either cooperation or conflict.

And co-operation is a very modern idea. Some progress had been made before the war broke out, but the new path was only a blazed trail through the woods, and the force of habit and tradition drove men and nations into the old road when the trial came. We may be at the close of one era and the beginning of another.

A Merry Christmas does not mean one in which sober thought is banished. Only a heartless or frivolous man could spend such a Christmas at the close of this year, when hundreds of thousands are passing through the valley of the shadow of death. But if frivolity should not reign, neither should despair. Kindness, cheerfulness, courage, hope, thought that is fruitful in unselfish effort, may shed light upon the third Christmas of the war.