Maria and Aunt Gerty, carrying respectability to the verge of fashion,
led the way by the path across the green to the village church. Josiah,
walking with his daughters, followed ten paces behind. Wearing the tall
hat of public life he looked imposing, but four and a quarter years
of war had chastened him. The roll and the swagger were not what they
were; four and a quarter years of incessant but fruitful labor for the
common weal had molded his mind, had modified an aggressive personality.
The church, although in excess of the local requirements as a rule, was
very full this morning in November. It was an hour of Thanksgiving. The
goal had been reached. Victory, complete and final, had come almost
like a thief in the night. And its coming had revealed, in a manner
transcending even the awful dramas of old, the omnipotence of the
moral law. Yet again the God of Righteousness had declared Himself in
Sovereign power.
Grim perils had been surmounted by the devotion of the sons and
daughters of the race, but very much remained to do. Behind the humble
gratitude to the Giver of Victory, behind the sense of exultation
so rightly uppermost this Sabbath morning, was in every heart a
desolating sense of the cost in human lives and a deep anxiety for the
future.
The Vicar of the parish, by name the Reverend Corfield Stanning, was a
white-haired man who had given soul and kin freely to the Cause. He was
a son of the soil, a type of the almost extinct squarson who survives
here and there in England, half landowner, half patriarch, less a
scholar than a sportsman and a man of the world. For that reason,
perhaps, he had the practical wisdom that books do not give. He had the
instinct for affairs which men of his type seldom lack.
Victory was with the arms of Right. The people did well to rejoice.
But also it was a time for prayer, for steadfast dedication to the
gigantic tasks ahead. The man-eating tiger was in the net. It now
remained to repair the havoc he had wrought, and to provide security
for generations unborn against his kind.
Having humbly thanked the Giver, the old man prayed for his country and
for those noble races of which it was the foster-mother. He prayed for
all her wide-flung peoples to whom the Keys had been given; he prayed
that the Pioneers of sacred liberties so long in peril, those one in
name and in blood over all the wide seas, who hold Milton's faith, who
speak Shakespeare's tongue may ever stand as now, shoulder to shoulder
in the gate.
He prayed for all those children of men grown old and weak in bondage,
whose chains had at last been cast off. He besought the Divine grace
to guide them.
Finally, he prayed for the Co-trustees of the future and that the
Divine wisdom encompass them in their reckoning with a cruel and
unworthy foe. He asked that mercy be extended to those who had denied
it to others, not that it was in his heart to pity them in their
eclipse or to spare them aught of their desert, but that the name of
the Master be served, in whom lay the ultimate hope of the world, might
be honored in mankind's supreme yet most terrible hour.
When the old man came to his brief and simple sermon the words of his
text pierced every heart. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he
lay down his life for his friends."
It began with commemoration of a humble hero, known to many in that
church, who had given all he had to give without stint or question. And
he read a letter written from the sacred and recovered soil of France
by the officer commanding that Band of Brothers raised in their midst
to the wife of one Sergeant William Hollis, who had died a soldier and
a gentleman that his faith and his friends might live.