"We think about You kneeling in the Garden—
Ah, God! the agony of that dread Garden—
We know You prayed for us upon the Cross.
If anything could make us glad to bear it,
'Twould be the knowledge that You willed to bear it—
Pain—death—the uttermost of human loss.
"Though we forgot You, You will not forget us—
We feel so sure that You will not forget us—
But stay with us until this dream is past.
And so we ask for courage, strength, and pardon—
Especially, I think, we ask for pardon—
And that You'll stand beside us to the last."
What it comes to is the old truth which we have learnt from Foreign Missions—the centre must be converted by the circumference; it is the self-sacrifice of its Mission work abroad which has saved the Church from "fatty degeneration of the heart" at home; it is the growing change of mind among the defenders of our country which must permeate and ennoble the country itself.
Do I look to God? But I could only see Him in Christ, for He says Himself—and it is either the greatest blasphemy or the greatest truth in the world—"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father but by Me."
Trafalgar Day, 1915, then, should be not only the turning-point of the world's history, but the inauguration of a new Britain. If the war stopped at this moment, should we really be a changed nation?—would not the old miserable internal disputes break out again?—might we not again be as we were in July, 1914, on the verge of civil war in Ireland, of a revolution among women, and of the greatest industrial strike of modern times? I come back at the end of so many months of the war to the picture which I tried to hold up to London in its first week—"Facing the war is drinking the cup"—"The cup which My Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" We have to repeat the very words of our Lord Himself.
Have we drunk the cup, and drunk it to its dregs? Only then will the angels come and strengthen us for victory; we shall deserve victory then, and we shall be ready for it, for the cup which we shall drink will be the cup to which the Son of God Himself put His lips, and the courage and fortitude of Gethsemane leads on to the overwhelming victory of Easter Day.
It is then "Our Day" in an even deeper sense than those mean who so rightly ask our alms to-day for those splendid sister societies of St. John and the Red Cross. Of course we shall pour out into their lap, for the sake of our wounded heroes at the Front, all that we can; but it is "Our Day" because it is the day when the nation is tested to the roots of its being. "If thou hadst known, even thou, in the midst of this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes." They are not hid from our eyes yet; it is still Our Day; but let it pass, and it has gone for ever.