An Empire Prays

A month ago England's Archbishop of Canterbury declined to set aside a special day of prayer, on the grounds that it would be "misunderstood or rather misrepresented by the enemy." But last Sunday, in Westminster Abbey, the Archbishop gravely led just such a special day. In the Empire's dark hour, the King himself had proclaimed a Day of National Prayer throughout the Empire.

BBC broadcast three services, one of them conducted by the Archbishop of York, to Britain's soldiers and sailors. In Westminster Cathedral, Cardinal Kinsley celebrated High Mass. The King's chaplain, the Reverend Pat McCormick, preached to tense crowds at the Coliseum, famed London vaudeville house. To his munitions workers, now on a seven-day week. Lord Nuffield declared that every man should take for his text on Sunday: "Work and pray."

In Egyptian mosques preachers exhorted Moslems to prepare for a "Jihad" (a Holy War) to help the Allied cause. On the desert near Cairo, Indian Moslems labored with great care to lay out "prayer grounds" decorated with chromium-plated bottle caps, which for them carried a significance no less solemn than Westminster Abbey's altar.

From lands of palm and pine, from a people whose boast it had once been that the sun never set on it, rose a deeper prayer than Kipling's "Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet." The prayer of tight-lipped men & women throughout Britain's empire was to keep the sun from setting.

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