"When you draw up a covenant with a neighbor, you look well at it and then give it to your attorney, who puts it away in the darkness of the safe. But it is taken out at intervals for fresh examination. And the rainbow-covenant was put away behind the clouds, to be brought out again from time to time to bring comfort and strength to man by its appearance. The rainbow is only half seen by man. The lower half of its circle is lost in the earth. It exists, but unseen. And the full circle of God's beautiful covenant with man has never appeared to our eyes. A full half is lost in the unapprehending darkness of man's mind. The full purpose of God is not realized. His plans are too vast and glorious for the intellect or imagination to span; but half the rainbow is seen and it is enough. Seeing half we can take the rest on trust. In the covenant we are assured that we shall never be given darkness without light, winter without summer, seedtime without harvest, death without birth, sorrow without joy, or a thick cloud without a rainbow. He binds Himself not to give evil without good, or to bring tears without laughter. "I do set My bow in the cloud; and it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud."
"A rainbow is made up of rain and sunshine and life is woven of the same stuff--tears and laughter. The most glorious sunshine is incapable of a rainbow without the co-operation of the dark trailing clouds; and it is impossible for the human character to reach its ripest maturity and beauty on joy alone. Sorrow is as beneficent and necessary as joy. There are untutored natives who dread the rainbow. They believe that it is a serpent that rises out of the pools to devour men; and there are unbelieving men in cultured lands who dread adversity no less. They do not believe that God 'brings the cloud.' The rainbow is their refutation and it is written across the sky for all to see. On the other hand, there are unbelieving men who see only the cloud and are blind to the sunshine. To them life is one long tragedy. It is an immense futility. They regard man as a mere cork in the sea, thrown about by blind, deaf, unintelligible natural forces void of purpose; active indeed but ungoverned. Human life to them is a black cloud driven through immensity by the winds of unintelligent fate. It has no meaning and its darkness is the deeper because they cannot call a halt and disperse it into nothingness. Like Job's wife they would say 'Curse God and die,' yet they cannot die. But Job, as he sits on the dunghill, looks up at the rainbow and finds a truer philosophy. 'What?' says he, 'shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?' Under the rainbow's arch there are fruitful fields and beautiful gardens for where the rainbow hangs in air there is sunshine and there is rain--the parents of fruitfulness. And to whom God gives in equal measure joy and sorrow there is beauty and fruitfulness of heart and life. His promise to 'every living creature' is that He will never send the cloud without the sunshine and, what is not less gracious, He will never send the sunshine without the cloud. When by day the Israelites tramped the fiery desert He led them by a pillar of cloud, and they marched in its shade; and in the blackness of night He threw in the sky a pillar of sunshine; and they walked through the gloom in its light.
"In these terrible days of war when our hearts begin to fail us and dark doubts cloud the mind, let us look at the Covenant God has made with us. He has set it in rainbow colors across the sky, that 'he who runs may read' and 'the wayfaring man though a fool may not err.' God has flung his rainbow over the trench and the grave; over the Garden of Gethsemane; over the Cross on Calvary. It is over the tomb in the Arimathean's Garden; and over Olivet, as Christ ascends to heaven. We are born under the rainbow, live under it, die under it. At the last we shall find it over the throne of Judgment. Water and blood flowed from Christ's side; and life and death, joy and pain, light and darkness, summer and winter, peace and war come forth from God.
"Let us take life as it comes with obedient wills and grateful hearts. The bee finds honey in the thistle as well as in the rose, and 'where the bee sucks there suck I,' for He who guides the bee guides me. Only in loving obedience to God shall we find true wisdom. It is not so much what we are given as how we take it that matters. To be humble nothing may be so sweet as sorrow; and to the proud nothing may be so bitter as pleasure. Let us leave God to mix the ingredients of our life, for 'all things work together for good to them that love God.' It is all in the covenant written by God's fingers in the colors of the rainbow, and whenever He brings it from beyond the clouds, let us look at it with reverent eyes, and ponder its promise. Then shall we be able to say, with Wordsworth,
'My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.'"
After I had finished speaking we sang, at the request of one of the sergeants, the hymn commencing
"The Day Thou gavest Lord is ended,
The darkness falls at Thy behest."
And beautiful indeed was the singing of it.
The Benediction followed. Just as I was ending it an impulse came to me, and I yielded to its importunity. "Before we part and before we leave Achicourt which has meant so much to us of joy and sorrow," I said, "let us sing a kiddies' hymn. We still shelter in our hearts a little child. Though we have grown moustaches and some of us gray hairs, the child that we once were, never quite dies. Let us have a hymn for the boy within us who never grows up and never dies." Then I read out verse by verse, for it was not in their books:
"Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh,
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.
"Jesus, give the weary
Calm and sweet repose;
With Thy tenderest blessing
May their eyelids close.
"Grant to little children
Visions bright of Thee;
Guarding the sailors tossing
On the angry sea.
"Comfort every sufferer
Watching late in pain;
Those who plan some evil
From their sin restrain.
"When the morning wakens,
Then may I arise
Pure and fresh, and sinless
In Thy holy eyes."