The War and the Gospel: Sermons and Addresses During the Present War

by Henry Wace

The Things Seen and the Things Not Seen.

PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1915.

“For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”—2 Cor. iv. 16.

These touching words of St. Paul are based upon the grand truth to which Easter Day is a standing witness. “Therefore,” he says, or “for which cause, we faint not.” That cause is stated in the verse just before, “Knowing that He Which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also with Jesus, and shall present us with you.” The Apostle had just been giving a vivid description of the extreme strain, and almost mortal struggle, in which the work of his ministry involved him. “We are troubled,” he says, “on every side ... always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.” The Apostle was undergoing a strain which was draining the very life of his body, in order to preach the Gospel which was bringing life to the souls of others; but he endured it in the knowledge that, even if it involved the sacrifice of his life, He Who raised up the Lord Jesus would raise him up also by Jesus, and present him in a new life at the day of the Resurrection. In this knowledge, his experience that his outward man was perishing did not make him faint, for he knew that his inward man was being renewed day by day. If he was daily dying, he was but experiencing the dying of the Lord Jesus; and thus, by entering into closer sympathy with his Lord, he was becoming united also with His life. Christ’s resurrection in glory was an assurance to him of his own resurrection, and the sufferings of the moment were as nothing to him in comparison with that glory. That affliction was, after all, light and momentary, when it was realized that it was working out for him, more and more exceedingly, an eternal weight of glory. The things which he saw and felt at the moment were, after all, but temporary, whereas the things which were not then visible were eternal. If the earthly frame, which was his present tabernacle, were dissolved by death, he knew that there was ready for him “a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.”

Is not this application of the great message of the Resurrection peculiarly opportune and welcome to us at the present moment? We are living through a time when the things that are seen are distressing and painful beyond anything in our experience—we might perhaps say, in the experience of Christian Europe. We seem to have gone back, on a sudden, to the days before the flood, when “the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence”; and we seem to need a re-issue of the Divine proclamation, after that world of violence had been swept away: “Surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man.” The curse of this violence and bloodshed is being inflicted, day by day, upon innumerable homes; and day by day we each apprehend it for our own families. In order to stay the curse, the blood of our own brothers and sons is being poured out like water, and the desolation of our homes is becoming more and more appalling. The blood-stained fields of Belgium, France and Poland, the engulfing of the innocent lives of women and children in the ocean—these are the things that are seen; and we need some supreme assurance—nay we need some Divine revelation—if we are to live through such experiences in faith, and hope, and in Christian charity. We mourn, day by day, the loss of precious lives, and we are appalled at the thought of the further sacrifices of such lives, young and mature, which we fear must be required; and so far as we look only on the things thus seen, our hearts might well fail us. Like St. Paul, as he describes himself in the context, “we are troubled on every side ... we are smitten down, though not destroyed.”

Let us then observe the manner in which the Apostle meets this overwhelming oppression. He looks off from the things which are seen to the things which are not seen; “for,” he says, “the things which are seen are temporal (or temporary), but the things which are not seen are eternal.” Perhaps that is the first condition for our seeing things in their true light. It is very difficult for us not to have our vision almost wholly occupied by the visible things around us, which are also the things of which we are the most immediately sensible, and which naturally absorb our ordinary thoughts, feelings and energies. Yet, as a matter of fact, as St. Paul reminds us, they are a very small part indeed of the realities with which we are surrounded. “The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

Eternal as compared with temporary! Do we often realize sufficiently what that comparison means? What is the longest life here? Call it one hundred years, and what is that compared with life eternal, everlasting, never ending? That is the ultimate reality with which we are all concerned. Our hearts are filled, first, with the thoughts of youth, then with those of manhood, then with those of old age; but there lies before us, before each one of us, an interminable existence, in which we are destined to experience profounder happiness, or profounder unhappiness, than any we have experienced here. All that has exercised our thoughts and feelings here will indeed leave its mark upon us, but it will all pass away; it is essentially temporal, and there lies before us an unending existence for weal or woe.

So far, therefore, as any individual life is concerned, so far as those young lives are concerned, whose premature loss is so bitter to their nearest and dearest, and seems so sad to all of us, it is well we should clearly realize that to the individual life itself, a few years more or less—nay, half a life-time more or less—is practically insignificant. Are there fifty, or forty, or thirty years behind it? There is all eternity in front of it. There is a fulness of life and joy, and even glory, before it, which can never end. To one who has lived, and who dies, in the true faith and love of Christ, all the gracious and glorious promises of our Lord and His Apostles are fully assured; and even if, in any particular case, we may not have the full evidence of that entire Christian devotion, we may surely apply to every life which is willingly sacrificed at the call of duty, for a righteous cause, and with a generous self-surrender, the assurance of St. Paul, that God will render “to every man according to his deeds. To them who by patience in well-doing seek for glory, honour, and immortality, eternal life”; or, as he says again, “Glory, honour, and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.” Or, as we may surely paraphrase it, to the Christian first, and also to every human soul. If, in fact, our vision were merely confined to this world, and we did but catch a doubtful glimpse of what is beyond it, the spectacle of the sacrifice of human life, and particularly of young human life in a war like this, would be scarcely endurable. But let us have, not merely that “gleam beyond it,” of which the Christian poet speaks, but that clear vision beyond it, of an eternal life of which our Saviour assures us, and of “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost,” in the peace of which that eternal life will be spent, and we may be able to feel, like St. Paul, that the affliction of the moment is light, in comparison with the eternal abundance of glory which awaits the soul in the future.

We are too apt, in a word, to take our stand within the horizon of this life, and to judge of all things as they are reflected in this world’s mirror; but if we would see them in their true perspective and so measure their real values, we must take our stand in the life beyond the grave. We must look, not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. In some degree, though not to the same extent, we may apply a similar consideration to the sufferings of nations, and of the world as a whole, in a great war. It is revealed to us in the Book of the Revelation of St. John that, at the consummation of all things, after scenes of carnage which are at least equal in their horror to the dreadful spectacle now before our eyes, a new heaven and a new earth will be created, by Him Who sits upon the throne making all things new. Even so far as the present world is concerned, the sufferings and sacrifices involved in great wars have doubtless won for future generations the greatest blessings of true Christian civilization—liberty, order, peace, and justice. It might, indeed, be thought that the price of such blessings was too high, if we judged of the sacrifices of individual lives in the light only of the things that are seen; but when we can feel that every life thus sacrificed, that every suffering thus unselfishly endured, works out for the sufferer himself an exceeding and eternal reward, we can look to the things which are not seen, and can again realize that, in comparison with them, it is not too much to speak, with St. Paul, of “our light affliction which is but for a moment.” That is the grand comfort, also, of the mourners who are left behind, who may be similarly assured that, in their patient acceptance of their bitter share of these sacrifices, they will be united with those they have loved and lost, in the eternal blessedness to which St. Paul looks forward.

But who does not realize that we need very strong evidence, and the firmest assurances, to sustain flesh and blood amid such bitter trials as men and women are now experiencing—fathers and mothers, wives and sisters, lovers and friends? It is not, perhaps, even a St. Paul whose word alone would be sufficient to bear that strain. If we had only that to depend on we could but speak of hope and trust; we could hardly say, as he goes on to say, that “we know” that if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved we have a building of God, a house eternal in the heavens. But the ground of his knowledge was the reality of our Lord’s resurrection, and the assurances which our Lord, when so raised, had given him. We know, he says, “that He Who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus.” The great certainty from which St. Paul’s Gospel starts is that our Lord, Who had undoubtedly suffered death in its most agonizing form, had not less undoubtedly risen from the dead, and appeared again and again to St. Paul, as to many others, and had given him the personal assurances on which we are invited to rely. That is the cardinal fact of the Christian Faith. Had our Saviour not risen, had He not appeared in such a form as to prove that He had completely overcome death, then we should still, at the best, have been in the region of hopes and imperfect beliefs, and of a yearning trust. We could not have said, with the Apostle, that we know that Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. But now it is no mere prophet or Apostle, but the risen Saviour Himself, Who stands in the midst of human life, as He stood in the midst of His disciples on the morrow of His resurrection, and Who said Himself, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.” Those were His own words; that is the conviction He stamped upon the mind and heart of such men as St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John; and that is the sure foundation on which we stand in believing that, if we suffer and die with Christ, we shall also live with Him.

Let me only add that this blessed revelation can only bring its full blessing and comfort in proportion as we realize, for our own souls, and for all who are dear to us, that union with Christ in spirit which is essential to our union with Him in life, here and hereafter. “If any man,” says St. Paul, “have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His.” There are, no doubt, degrees in which men can possess that spirit of Christ; and even if we possess it in but a feeble degree, we may humbly trust that He will not disown it, and that He will grant us some portion of His grace and of His life. But if this eternal life, this life of abundant glory, is open to us all provided we are in union with Him, which of us will not be moved by the afflictions of the present, and the eternal promise of the future, to seek for ever closer union with that Lord of Life, looking less and less at the things that are seen, and more and more at the things that are not seen, and knowing that our life is hid with Christ in God?