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!