The Charlotte News

SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 1941

EDITORIAL

Easter

For this, the last Easter of his life, Cash wrote this unusual editorial tribute to "the everlasting return and the eternal resurrection." His references to the pagan origins of Easter could not have appealed to fundamentalist readers in the Charlotte area, but by this time Cash's prestige as author of The Mind of the South seemed to entitle him to a certain toleration.

--Note from W.J. Cash: Southern Prophet, by Joseph L. Morrison
(This article appeared in the Reader section of Prophet)

 

It is perhaps the oldest and the loveliest of man's ceremonial and holy observances—the everlasting return and the eternal resurrection. It was incalculably ancient when t e first of the Beni Israel left their Bedouin brothers behind in the desert. And the name we know it by is that of an old Norse pagan goddess. And that pagan means at last nothing but country. Peasant is from the same root. Wise with hoary wisdom was the old Church when it took over the festival and bound it in with the new story of the greatest Resurrection.

It is the story of the cycle of the earth and of the impenetrable mystery of life upon that earth. First there is the dying of the harvest, and crucifixion of the golden Summer upon the shining and glorious cross of the falling days. And afterward the entombment in the sad and dark vault of brown Winter. And then again the stirring and the bursting of the bands, the breaking of the shell of the silent and weeping tomb and the trumpet voice rich with the promise of the golden Summer's return, "He is Risen!"

The story of the fecund and teeming and mysterious earth, unutterably terrible and unutterably beautiful. And of man—earthbound and terrible and bloody and aspiring man, with his fateful dream within him. The fragile leaf and the white bud and the new-born babe. And the great triumphant chorus and the brooding sadness which sees in the bud the shriveling of the rose, beyond the coming Summer the return again of Death.

But always and forever there is the Resurrection.


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