“A bit of shrapnel.”
Another of your boys, just picked up in the trenches by those tender fellows, the stretcher-bearers, those men with the hands of a woman and with the heart of a mother—God bless them!—called out as they came to him, “Home, John.” And when he was passing the officer and they were carrying him into the Red Cross train, he cried, “Season.” He had two gold stripes already. That’s the spirit of your boys.
There was a dear old Scotchman from Aberdeen. A telegram had come to that granite city to say that his boy was badly wounded, and he ran all the way to the station and jumped into a train without stopping to put on a collar. You don’t think of collars when your boys are dying. I saw him when he landed. It was my job to help him. The dear old fellow was just in time to see his boy die—and afterwards he came and laid his head on my shoulder and he sobbed. And I wept too. He was seventy.
Presently he said, “It will be hard to go home and tell mother that her only boy has gone, but I’ve got a message for her. ‘Father,’ my boy said, ‘tell mother I am not afraid to die. I have found Jesus. Tell mother that.’”
There are some people who think you are not doing Christian work unless you have a hymn-book in one hand and a Bible in the other and are singing, “Come to Jesus.” I am glad I haven’t to live with that kind of people. I call them the Lord’s Awkward Squad.
If you take “firstly,” “secondly,” “thirdly,” out to the front with you, by the time you get to thirdly the boys will be in the trenches. I never take an old sermon out with me to France. I write my prescription after I’ve seen my patients.
I was talking to a thousand boys one day. “Boys,” I said, “how many of you have written to your mother this week?”
Now, that’s a proper question. I wonder what would happen if the preacher stopped in his sermon next Sunday morning and said, “Have you paid your debts this week?” “In what sort of a temper did you come down to breakfast this morning?”
If a man’s religion does not get into every detail of his life he may profess to be a saint, but he’s a fraud. Religion ought to permeate life and make it beautiful—as lovely as a breath of perfume from the garden of the Lord.