A Day at a Time

been disobedient again and again, he struck him, and sent him with hard words and unkissed to bed⁠—“his mother, who was patient, being dead.” And when, later, he went upstairs to see him, he found him asleep, his lashes still wet with tears, and⁠—what touched him most⁠—on a table beside his bed all his little treasures heaped together to comfort his sad heart⁠—a box of counters, and a red-veined stone, a piece of glass abraded by the beach, and six or seven shells, a bottle with blue bells, and two French copper coins⁠—all his little store of precious things.

So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept and said⁠—
“Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I, whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath and say:
‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’ ”

One word more about our Father’s silence. Our fathers here on earth had their silences when we were children. We asked him for something that we wanted very much. And he gave no reply. We went on asking. We expected to get what we had set our hearts on. He heard us hoping and believing that this good thing would come to us, and he held his peace. But we knew that silence, and we trusted it. We were quite sure that he would have told us if we were deceiving ourselves, that his gift, when it came, would, at least, not be a mere mockery of our hopes.

And I often think of these words of Christ’s, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?” when I stand by a graveside, and speak the words of radiant hope with which we lay our beloved to rest. Our Father hears us speak that hope. He has heard hearts in an agony through all the generations wish that it might be true⁠—that this bleak fact of Death is not the end, but only the beginning of a better thing. But He keeps silence. We have no sure proof, only the blessed hope of the Christian evangel.

He keeps silence. But, my brethren, can we not trust that silence since it is our Father’s? We have asked this bread in our pain and through our tears. We have asked it because it seems to us we need it so. And whatever gift His silence hides, this at least is certain, it is not, it cannot be, only a stone.

Prayer

Almighty God, who through Jesus Christ has taught us to call Thee our Father, we thank Thee that Thou hast chosen a name so dear to us to reveal Thy care and Love. When our way is dark and our burden is heavy and our hearts are perplexed, grant us the grace to know that Thou who art directing every step of our journey art a God of Love, and Thy true and perfect Name is Our Father in Heaven. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

XXIX

The Unreturning Brave

(Easter Day, 1915)

2

“Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

Matthew 16:25

Christmas in war time was like an evil dream. Easter is like a breath from Heaven itself, a wind from the pure and blessed heights of God blowing the clouds of battle-smoke apart for a brief space so that we all may see again that beyond the smoke and beyond grim death itself there is the Life Enduring, a Divine Love compared to which ours at the best is untender and hard, a Fatherly welcome beside which welcomes here are faint and cold. This is the strangest Easter Day the world has ever known, yet never have the thousands and thousands of stricken homes and sore hearts needed more the living hope that is begotten anew in the Christian Church this day by our Lord’s rising again from the dead. It is assuredly of God’s mercy that Easter should fall in these days, when so many fathers and mothers, wives and sisters and lovers need its hope and comfort so.

We cannot but think today of the many, many homes in our own and other lands from which strong and brave men marched away weeks or months ago, because they had heard the call, and were willing to make the supreme sacrifice for righteousness’ sake, who will never come back again, who have died a soldier’s death and sleep in a soldier’s grave⁠—fathers, husbands, sons, lovers, gallant men, dear lads, cheerful, willing, dauntless. You find their names by the hundred and the thousand in the casualty lists, but the loss you cannot measure unless you could see all the shadowed homes. How many such homes there are in our own land alone, How many such in our own little circle!

Try to realise that, and then ask if a more gracious message could fall upon all these hearts today than the Easter message of the Christian Church⁠—that there is no death and that its seeming victory is not a victory. The old, old question, If a man die shall he live again? is answered today by the triumphant Yes! of Christendom. Yes, he never ceases to live. From the inferno of the battlefield the mortally stricken do but pass across the bridge and stream of death to God’s Other Side. When they fall in battle, they fall into His everlasting Arms. They do not die. They are not dead. It is only their poor mortal bodies that the shrieking shells can maim or destroy. They themselves, the real self and spirit of them, no material force can hurt, for that belongs to a higher kingdom than the visible, and its true goal and home are not here at all.

To all who are sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death in these days, to all who have