A Day at a Time

watched their beloved go out where every true man would wish to go, and know only too surely that they shall never return⁠—to these today Jesus Christ has His Word to speak⁠—and would that all might hear it and give it room in their hearts to do its blessed work! It is to Him we owe it, and He is our authority for believing that beyond the darkness and separation of death there is the morning of a new and fairer day. The valley of the Shadow, yea, the valley of battle itself opens out again at its far end to the sun’s rising and the untrammelled life in the light and liberty of God. The happy warrior is borne by gentle hands to God’s own land of peace, where the fret and fury of battle slip from him like a discarded garment, and beside the still waters of that better country he finds healing for his hurt. It is that quiet and blessed hope that is being reborn in our hearts this day as the Church keeps her festival of a Risen and a Living Christ. It is that lively hope the Church offers for comfort to all stricken homes and to every sorrowing heart.

They offered themselves, these gallant lads, not for anything they hoped to gain, but for the sake of honour and liberty, of justice and righteousness. And when a man casts himself on God in that fashion, offering not the words of his lips, nor the homage of his worship, but himself, all that he has, his life and all that life holds for him, think you that upon that poor soul, with his priceless offering borne humbly in his hands, the God and Father of us all is going to turn His back? “He that loseth his life,” said Jesus, “for my sake shall find it.”

There are times when the most gracious doctrine is not gracious enough to represent and embody the Spirit of Christ to us. We want something more, and we often seek it and sometimes find it in poetry, in art, or, best of all, in the silence of our own hearts when God-given instinct whispers what no words or doctrine can ever express. Such a time is now. Such a need is ours today.

I make no defence of it theologically, and I ask no man to accept it who does not feel it clamouring at his heart for entrance, but I confess that for me a couple of lines of John Hay’s in his Pike County Ballads strike a note which all that I know in my heart of the Spirit of Christ leaps up to welcome and approve. It is when he has told the story of Jim Bludso’s sacrifice. Jim was engineer on the Prairie Belle, a river-steamboat, and he was rather a rough, careless man. But when the steamer took fire, it was Jim who held her against the bank till everybody got safely off except himself. With eyes wide open to what he did, he sacrificed his life to save the other souls on board. Hay sums up in these lines:⁠—

“And Christ ain’t going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.”

I leave it there. I trust I am a loyal son of the Church, but I must have a place in my creed somewhere for the hope which these lines express that Christ ain’t going to be too hard on a man that died for men.

But there is something more to be said. Every chaplain at the front tells us that the most careless and irreligious youths and men take up a wonderfully different attitude out there. Men pray in the trenches who have never prayed before. I heard some stories recently that brought tears to my eyes, of brave and simple confessions made at little gatherings for prayer in strange places, by some of those very lads whom we reckoned indifferent and heedless before they left home. And some of then, turning their faces simply and earnestly, and by an old, old instinct of the heart, towards God and His Christ before the battle broke upon them, some of them have fallen on the field!

Many, many more there must be who turned them Godwards even at the eleventh hour in one brief upward glance to ask forgiveness and strength to play the man, about whom no chaplain can report, for no one knows or saw or heard save Christ Himself. But there’s a glorious page in the Gospel to assure us beyond all doubt or question that no one who makes that appeal, though it be the dying thief himself, ever makes it in vain.

And there we leave the issue⁠—with God, who is kinder than our kindest, and whose mercy is from everlasting. It is He who has brought us this blessed hope, through His Son, this Easter Day, and we honour His gift best by taking it in all its breadth and comfort to our hearts. To the brokenhearted wife or mother, to whom the bald War Office report has come, let us take this comfort⁠—“Your beloved is not dead. God has him in His gracious care and keeping till the day break and the shadows flee away.” For that is the Easter message, God be thanked. And this is Easter Day.

Prayer

To Thy merciful care and keeping we commend all the sons and daughters of affliction, and especially those who in this great contest have lost some loved one. Grant that even through their tears they may discern the glory that belongs to those who have given their lives a ransom for many. Be Thou their help and their strength, and may the sympathy of all who know them be for them an earnest and token of Thy great Love and Compassion. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

XXX

The Sacrament of Sunset

“The heavens declare the glory of God.”

Psalm 19:1

“The sky,” says Ruskin,