He who turns rain-mists into rainbows and brings out of mud scarlet poppies and white-petaled daisies without a speck of dirt upon them, is at work in human life. Out of mud He has formed the poppy and out of the dust the body of man. Who then can set Him limits when He works in the finer material of man's soul? Eye hath not seen nor heart conceived the beauty that will come forth when His workmanship is complete. "If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith" who were made for immortality? His ways are past finding out, but they are good. He puts out the sun but brings forth millions of stars in its stead. At His call they come flocking forth as doves to their windows. He blinds Milton but brings into his soul a flood of light such as never shone on sea or land, and in its rays he sees Paradise, lost and regained. He shuts Bunyan in a noisome prison, and closes against him the door to his beloved Bedford, but He opens to him a magic window that looks on heaven, and the years pass swiftly as he watches the progress of the pilgrims towards the Celestial City. In the mud that has been stained and even saturated with the life-blood of our soldiers, He has made poppies to spring to loveliness. It is a parable He is speaking to us, that the heart of man may feel and believe that which it is beyond the power of the mind to grasp, or the tongue to explain.
The wounds of France are deep and deadly but they are not self-inflicted and they will heal. She will blossom again with a glory greater and purer than all her former glories. She is even now finding her soul, and revealing a moral beauty and endurance such as few, even of her dearest friends, could have foreseen or foretold. For ashes, God has given her beauty, and it is worth all her suffering. Not Voltaire, but Joan of Arc is her pride to-day. When I was in Rouen I saw the fresh flowers which the people daily place on the spot where she died. France knows where her strength lies. Over Napoleon she has built a magnificent tomb of marble, but in it, she has not placed a single flower. As I walked through it, some time ago, I felt depressed. It made me shiver. It is magnificent, but dead. One of Joan of Arc's living flowers would be worth the whole pile. It is the most tremendous sermon ever preached on the vanity of military glory and the emptiness of genius when uninspired by moral and spiritual worth. France knows. She gives Joan of Arc a flower, but Napoleon a stone. France was never so great as now, and never of such supreme importance to the world. We could not do without her. On her coins she represents herself as a Sower that goes forth sowing. It is a noble ideal, and truly, where she scatters her seeds of thought the fair flowers of liberty, equality and fraternity spring up as poppies spring, where the blood of our soldiers has watered her fields. France is the fair Sower among the nations, and it will be our eternal glory that when she was suddenly and murderously attacked in her fields by her brutal and envious neighbor--who shamelessly stamps a bird of prey on his coins for his symbol, and a skull and cross-bones on his soldiers' headgear as the expression of his ambition--England came to her rescue, and not in vain. The German sword has gone deeply into the heart of France, but it will leave not a festering wound but a well of water at which mankind will drink and be refreshed. Wound the earth, and there springs forth water; wound France and there springs forth inspiration. Trample France in the mud, and she comes forth pure again, passionate and free as a poppy blown by the summer wind.
Printed in the United States of America
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By CHAPLAIN THOMAS TIPLADY
FIFTH EDITION
The Cross at the Front
Fragments from the Trenches.
12mo. Cloth. Net $1.00.
"'Vivid' is too dim a word to express the living pictures which this chaplain has seen in France. Some of the chapters are among the finest pieces of pathos we have read anywhere. Read the book and you will be a better man for all your tasks."--Chicago Standard.