History is for ever repeating itself, and to-day the process of humanity's deliverance from evil will gather momentum and advance a long way towards the final triumph. For just as men only realised the hatefulness of sin when they saw it laid upon Jesus Christ, so will it be also to-day. A generation that had lost the sense of sin beholds sin laid upon millions of men, working woe unspeakable, and, beholding, learns anew what sin is and the hatefulness of it. For these millions of men grappling with death, what are they but humanity's sin-bearers. On them is laid the burden of the sins of this generation. The selfishness, greed, ambition, lust—all the passions which sweep men to wars of conquest—have poured the vials of misery on their heads. The son of the widow sitting on the mort-safe, who now lies in a nameless grave, he bore it. The bearing of it killed him.
And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that passion for righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust. There will ring round the world the compelling cry that this power of hell must not for ever hold humanity in its grip—that ruthless ambition, militarism, despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth. Once more the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men.
There was another power also that stirred the world under the shadow of the Cross, and that was the power of self-sacrifice. There came to men an overwhelming realisation that at the heart of the universe was the Spirit of self-sacrifice, and that the Cross was but the expression of it. They realised that the greatest thing a man can do with his life is to lay it down. And as men realise to-day that the Cross still abides in the heart of God, so that in all their affliction He is afflicted, there comes to them the feeling that the one way of coming nearest to His heart is the way of self-sacrifice.
Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of self-sacrifice. What is it that sustains the men who go down to the earthly hell of ruthless war? It is just this—the consciousness, newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and country, for home and kindred. They are content to be blotted out if only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be exalted. Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure. Men charge across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes. They are raised into the fellowship of the Cross. And we are raised with them.
If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again lift up her face to the light. He has died that we may live. Greater love hath no man than this—nor yet greater glory. But she needs not to be told; she knows it already. She knows it far better than you or I do, for she feels it. In the deep places of life where words are meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the glory of self-sacrifice.
By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine wisdom which is hid from the wise. She knows that the road that goes by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can come to God. She knows that her son has walked along that road, and that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying while bearing it, God has brought him into that joy which all the cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe. And because she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has felt the touch of God, she is ready to greet the day of still greater sacrifice.
In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and read an article. It was a bitter invective against Christianity and the Church. Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross—and this holocaust as the fruit. It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced eye. It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the wicked have continued to crucify Him. These things are so not because, but in spite, of Christianity.
Grievous as war now is, yet it is not war as in the days before the Cross was erected on Calvary. When Ulysses asked Agamemnon for sanction to bury the body of Ajax, the King was greatly annoyed. "What do you mean?" he answered, "do you feel pity for a dead enemy?" That was the spirit of war in the old heathen world—the spirit which had no mercy on the living and no pity for the dead. Slowly but surely the spirit of Christ fettered the spirit of hate and dethroned the spirit of revenge. We now minister to the wounded and bury the dead enemy with the pity and the honour we render to our own.