That is the true badge not only of Christian service to the wounded, but of Christian warfare itself.
Such, my brethren, is the spirit in which you can apply to your present duties the exhortation of our Saviour in this gracious and cardinal text. It bids you to add the belief in the presence of Christ, the obligation of obedience to Christ, trust in Christ and love towards Him, to all the other principles by which you are animated. The fact that you are here, that you are making great sacrifices, that you are ready to make the greatest sacrifice of all, for your country, is proof enough that you are animated by high and generous motives, that you wish to live and die for the greatest of all causes, for righteousness and justice, for your King and your country. But if you would do the best you can, do one thing more. Take care to add the spirit of Christ to these motives and impulses; strive to enter more deeply, day by day, into His heart and will, to realize more and more, even in the midst of war, that “new commandment” which He gave us, that we should love one another; and so prepare yourselves to meet Him whenever you have to do so, as we all have, soon or late, in such a character that He may be able to say to you: Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. In a word: You believe in God, and in all that the Name of God stands for—righteousness, truth, goodness of all kinds: believe also in Christ, and let His love, His mercy, His purity, His absolute self-sacrifice, add His own peculiar grace to all your words and deeds, and then you may cherish the confident hope that where He is there you will be also.
The Eternal Life of the Soul.
PREACHED IN THE NAVE OF CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, AT THE MILITARY CHURCH PARADE, OCTOBER 15, 1916.
“O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.”—Psalm lxiii. 1.
These words ought to be in the heart and the mouth of every soul in this congregation. They are the first words of a Psalm, which has been used as a morning Psalm by many generations of Christians, and it is the privilege of all of us to echo them. But let us consider carefully what they mean. Who is the God to Whom they speak? We are in the House of God, to worship God; and we open our worship, every Sunday, with a Psalm which tells us who He is. “The Lord,” it says, “is a great God, a great King above all Gods. In His hand are all the corners of the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also. The sea is His, and He made it: and His hands prepared the dry land. O come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.” That is the God to whom the Christian speaks. He is the God Who made heaven and earth, and whose will and power upholds them from hour to hour. He is our maker, “and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.” In other words, “All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.”
The word “God” is too often used lightly in common conversation among us, but without due remembrance that it is the Name of the Most awful and supreme reality that can be thought of. We do not use lightly the name of our King, but God is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Our lives and our souls are in the hollow of His hand every moment; and if we considered only His supreme Majesty and our weak and passing frames, we are perfectly insignificant beings before Him. But it is to this Being that the Psalmist addresses the words “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.” We may all say that, as well as the Psalmist. It is our privilege to speak to the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, as our own; we may call Him our God, our own God, we may tell Him that we seek Him, that we seek Him above all things, and we may say, as the Psalmist goes on to say, “My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh also longeth after Thee: in a barren and dry land where no water is. Thus have I looked for Thee in the sanctuary (in a Cathedral like this) that I might behold Thy power and glory.” How is it that humble and feeble creatures like ourselves can thus call the God of heaven and earth our own, and speak to Him, and tell Him, in this earnest language, that we cannot do without Him? Where, above all, can we find Him and approach Him?
The Psalmist used these words, and we may use them too, because this God is the nearest of all things in the world to us, and because we are in daily contact with Him in our hearts and souls. It is true He is so great and infinite, that He has made the world, and all its marvels and glories; but we are more concerned to realize that He has made our own selves, and our minds and hearts and consciences, and when we look into those hearts, and listen to those consciences, we are only experiencing, in ourselves, the work of His hands, and listening to His voice. Above all other things, God made right and wrong, He made us to realize the difference between right and wrong; He made the truth, and enabled us to love it, and to hate what is false; in a word, He made our consciences and our minds; and He lives and works in them, as much as He does in the world at large. It is very well for us to look up to the heavens, to think of Him as the Creator of all those stars and worlds, or to look into the infinite mysteries of this world’s life, its minute elements and atoms; but it is more important for us to think of Him as the Giver, and Ruler, and Guide of our very souls and bodies, Who determined what we were made for, and what we ought to do, what sort of a life we ought to live, putting into our hearts the knowledge of our duty, warning us of it by the constant voice of our consciences, and bidding us realize that He will judge us, for our obedience or disobedience to His will and His commands. Think of God, by all means, in His greatness and His Majesty, and His awful powers, but then think of Him as actually in contact with you in your own souls, teaching you and speaking to you in your consciences, and calling to you, by your sense of right and wrong, to remember that He is your judge, and that your very life and happiness depend upon your union with Him. That is the thought of God that should be incessantly in our minds. As the Scripture says more than once, you need not go to the heavens to seek Him there, you need not go into the depths of the earth to seek Him there, but He is near you, nearer to you than anything else, in your very souls and consciences; you hear His voice there, you feel the influence of His Spirit; there you can always find Him, you can turn to Him at any moment and say “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.”
There is no reality in the world which can be compared, in its momentous importance, to this. It must be brought home to us, by the experience which is thrust upon us by the Great War, that everything else with which we have to do, everything else in the world, passes away from us. So it does indeed from everybody, at all times, whether times of war or of peace. There comes a time to every soul when it has to leave the body, and, with the body, everything else with which it has been associated in this world. We all know it when we think seriously about it; but the misfortune is that, in ordinary life, men do not think seriously about it. All their thoughts and interests are engaged in the business and the pleasures and the interests of this life, and they seldom look beyond. But in days like the present we are forced to look beyond them. You, above all, who, at the call of duty, have laid behind you, for the present, all the ordinary interests of life, and are offering yourselves to all the risks of the battlefield—you have reason to ask, with supreme earnestness, what is the reality for which you are making this sacrifice, and what will remain to you if the full sacrifice should be exacted from you.