Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

"Now, take any section, say, any five chapters of the Gospel story, about what He said and did. Read them anew, trying, as you read, to destroy or do without the basis and background of that other larger life, and you will find the account, I do not hesitate to say, simply unintelligible as words of truth. The belief, the knowledge as to that larger life underlies and colours the whole, and makes it literally true to say that if we are Christians, if we are believers in Him at all, that certitude which He gives us is and must be ours. Without it you cannot advance a yard in the understanding of what His Gospel meant. On that last evening He told them He was going away. But why? 'I go to prepare a place for you ... that where I am there ye may be also.' That is to say, 'You are to live on and to work on.' What meaning else for some of the most uplifting and inspiring of the parables which He had given them? 'Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.' What meaning for the story of the rich man and Lazarus? What meaning for the words of definite and uplifting promise to the thief upon the cross? 'To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.' And so we might run on. Brothers, to us Christians it is not a hope only, it is a sure and certain hope.

"It is well to remember that this is so when in the cloudy and dark day we are fretting and wondering and seem only to stretch lame hands and grope. But we perhaps ask: 'Why, why, this absence of some clear exposition of it all?' Well, what if, to our present faculties, such knowledge would be literally unconveyable in terms that we could understand? Many here are familiar with—some perhaps have ere now quoted—a certain picture-parable which belongs specially to this Cathedral. Just two centuries ago, the Christian philosopher, George Berkeley, a singularly clear thinker, was standing, as he tells us, in St. Paul's Cathedral, where he noticed a little fly crawling on one of those great pillars. He had been uplifted in thought by the overwhelming grandeur of symmetry and design in pier and arch and dome and gallery, and the relation of each part to each and to the whole. And then he watched the little crawling fly, to whom no understanding of the whole was possible, who could see nothing of its harmonies, and to whom, as he puts it, 'nothing could appear but the small inequalities in the surface of the hewn stone, which in the view of the insect seemed so many deformed rocks and precipices.' Here, he thought, is the likeness of each human being as he creeps along. The sorrow which, like some dreadful precipice, interrupts our life, may turn out to be nothing but the joining or cement which binds the portions and sections of the greater life into one beautiful and harmonious whole. The dark path may be but the curve which, in the full daylight of a brighter world, will be seen to be the inevitable span of some majestic arch. 'Now I know in part,' and what a very little part it is, 'but then shall I know even as also I am known.'

"Does all that seem poor and vague and cheerless to the young wife across whose sunny home the dark shadow has fallen, to the mother who, through all her brave faith, looks out dazed and dry-eyed upon the shattering of the hopes which had been her daily happiness and strength? The message is not—or it will not always be—vague and cheerless if the firm and even glad courage with which a few months ago she offered willingly what she loved best on earth, be transmuted now into trustful prayer and into loyal proud thankfulness for duty nobly done, and into quiet awaiting of the ampler life beyond, with the answer it must bring in His good time to the questions of the aching heart. Which of us but has been inspired already by what Our Father has shown us to be possible—nay, rather to be actually attained—in the ennobled lives of those whom He 'out of weakness has made strong.' There is, for we are seeing it every day, as real a heroism of the stricken home as the heroism of the shell-swept trench, or of the quivering deck. For that, too, for those brave women in England, or in the Southern Seas, we are upon our knees to-night, thanking 'the God of all comfort Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.'

"But in this great gathering to-night we want another note besides that. We must have the triumph-note for those whose self-sacrifice has meant so much to their country and to those who honour them. It has been theirs, in enthusiastic eager self-surrender, to reach what Christ marks as the highest grade of human love. 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' Gratefully and reverently we remember that heroism now. That is what brings us here for thanksgiving and for prayer. Among the lives laid down could be found, as always, bright examples of the young leadership to which we had looked for upholding among their fellows the spirit which sets manliness upon the surest basis, the basis of personal loyalty to Christ. For those lives and for the footprints which they have left upon the sands of time we give praise to God to-day.

"But it would be unnatural, untrue, to claim for all who thus gave their lives in their country's cause, the character of stainless purity, or of the saintliness which we sing of in our hymns. Some of them, perhaps many of them, were not 'saints' at all. They were manly sons of the greatest Empire in the world. They were brave and buoyant, with plenty of the faults and failures which go so often with high spirit. They need, as we shall need, forgiveness and cleansing and new opportunity, and they are in their Father's keeping, and He knows and cares. Be it theirs—shall we not pray it with all our hearts?—be it theirs, under His good hand, to pass onward in the new and larger life from strength to strength.

Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow!

For never shall their aureoled presence lack:

I see them muster in a gleaming row,

With ever-youthful brows that nobler show:

We find in our dull road their shining track;