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.
PRAYER
To Thy merciful care and keeping we commend all the sons and daughters of affliction, and especially those who in this great contest have lost some loved one. Grant that even through their tears they may discern the glory that belongs to those who have given their lives a ransom for many. Be Thou their help and their strength, and may the sympathy of all who know them be for them an earnest and token of Thy great Love and Compassion. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
"The heavens declare the
glory of God."
(PSALM xix. 1.)
XXX
THE SACRAMENT OF SUNSET
"The sky," says Ruskin, "is the part of Nature in which God has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more from the sole and evident purpose of touching him, than in any other of His works." It looks like the truth. For there is no scene of earth so fair or majestic that man cannot spoil it. Where the "cataract exults among the hills, and wears its crown of rainbows all alone," he will build him a power-house to supply current to some distant town. But he cannot touch the heavens. In the heart of some fairy glen he will placard the virtues of somebody's pills, and plaster the gate-posts in a sweet country lane with the specious claims of some quack doctor, but above it all, it is God, and God alone, who spreadeth out the heavens like a curtain and in them has set a tabernacle for the sun. Even in places where the face of earth wears no suggestion of natural beauty the face of the sky redeems it from evil. For, above the squalor of the city's meanest slum, burn the great fires of the setting sun, and overhead the fleecy white clouds sail silently all night long.