(EASTER DAY, 1915)
NOTE.--I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Sir Wm. Robertson
Nicoll's "When the Wounded Go Home," a tender and courageous message.
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 to-day 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 to-day 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 to-day 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 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 to-day 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 to-day.
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
broken-hearted 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.