But the women—theirs is the harder task, the fiercer trial, of keeping up the brave appearance, the show of cheerfulness, whilst all the time the load of apprehension and fear lies heavy on their hearts. None will ever know the crushing reality of the offering the women are making to their country, in one great stream of self-sacrifice.
Nor can we forecast the end, nor estimate the claims that are yet to be made in the cause of patriotism. The nations engaged, at least the chief of them, are fixed irrevocably in their determination that peace, when it comes, shall be no temporary patching up of hostilities and arranging of indemnities, but a solid, lasting settlement, which shall, as far as possible, place another vast European war out of the range of practical politics.
To tens of thousands there has come the ceaseless yearning for
The touch of a vanished hand,
The sound of a voice that is still.
Now notice how S. Paul deals with the matter. "That ye sorrow not as others which have no hope." There is no injunction here not to sorrow at all; that would be contrary to human nature, and would bespeak callousness rather than resignation. Our Blessed Lord wept at the grave of Lazarus, and in so doing sanctified human grief. The keenest faith, to which the other world is an absolute reality; the fullest hope of the sure and certain resurrection for the dear one; the most disciplined and submissive will which accepts unquestioningly the dispensations of the Father; all these are not proof against the natural grief at the removal of a loved one from this sphere of tender intimacies, into another, where we can only commune with him in thought and prayer.
How often this is illustrated at the death of a chronic invalid who has suffered much. With tears streaming down the cheeks, the mourner will say, "I am so thankful he is at rest." No selfish, rebellious side of grief is exhibited by those tears; only human sorrow, blending in loving harmony with perfect resignation.
Now notice carefully the ground on which S. Paul bases the Christian's hope for the departed; first, faith in the death and resurrection of Christ; "if we believe that Jesus died and rose again." It is a mere platitude to say that the whole of S. Paul's teaching is founded on the actuality of the resurrection. "If Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (1 Cor. xv. 17). Then out of this fact of the resurrection flows a consequence: the dead, as we call them, "sleep in Jesus," and will be His immediate companions at the last day. We cannot enter into a discussion as to the exact conditions of what is called "Hades" or the "intermediate state"; suffice it to say that one great feature of it is nearness to Jesus, "having a desire to depart and be with Christ" (Phil. i. 23); "absent from the body, present with the Lord" (2 Cor. v. 8). Herein consists the blessed hope set before us in regard to the faithful departed; the crucified, risen, ascended Jesus has them in His keeping; we and they alike are parts of the one great Church, knit into the "Communion of Saints" by the mystic bond of the sacred bread, linked each to the other by mutual prayer; they for us and we for them.
Very beautifully and tenderly does the Archbishop of Canterbury deal with this thought in one of his late sermons:—
"As with bowed head and quivering lip we commend their souls into the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Saviour we feel how the very passing of those brave and buoyant lives into the world beyond pierces the flimsy barrier between the things which are seen and temporal and the things which are unseen and eternal, and again we can and do give thanks. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living:—