While a world of mourners is plaintively asking, "What has become of our
brave dead, where are they? Alas! how dark is the world without them,
how silent the home, how sad the heart"; whilst the mourner is groping
like the blind woman for her lost treasure, the Belgian mother, and the
Belgian widow, and the Belgian orphan are on their knees, praying,
"Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; let a perpetual light shine upon
them," the Christian plea that has echoed down the ages from the day of
the Maccabees till now, exhorting us to pray for the dead that they may
be loosed from their sins. I would remind the broken-hearted mother
beseeching me to tell her where can her brave boy be gone, adding, "His
was such a lonely journey; did he find his way to God?" of the words of
the poet, who finds his answer to her question in the flight of a sea
bird sailing sunward from the winter snows:
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along the pathless coast,
The desert and illimitable air,
Lone, wandering but not lost:
He who from zone to zone
Guides, through the boundless sky, thy certain flight,
In the lone way which thou must tread alone
Will lead thy steps aright.
The brave soldier, who in the discharge of high duty has been suddenly
shot into eternity by the fire of the enemy, will surely, far more
easily than the migrating bird, wing his flight to God, Who, let us
pray, will not long withhold him the happy-making vision of Heaven.
Pilgrims homeward-bound, as you readily understand, at different stages
of their journey will picture Heaven to themselves differently,
according as light or darkness, joy or sorrow encompass them. Some will
picture Heaven as the Everlasting Holiday after the drudgery of school
life, others as Eternal Happiness after a life of suffering and sorrow,
others again as Home after exile, and some others as never-ending
Rapture in the sight of God.
But to-day, when " frightfulness" is the creed of the enemy, and warfare
with atrocities is his gospel, very many amongst us, weary with the
long-drawn battle, sick with its ever-recurring horrors, and broken by
its ghastly revelations, will lift up their eyes to a land beyond the
stars.