this life.
He is waiting beyond this life and this world of wicked war and
wanton cruelty and slaughter. And we shall come, some day, his mother
and I, to the place where he is waiting for us, and we shall all be
as happy there as we were on this earth in the happy days before the
war.

My eyes will rest again upon his face. I will hear his fresh young
voice again as he sees me and cries out his greeting. I know what he
will say. He will spy me, and his voice will ring out as it used to
do. "Hello, Dad!" he will call, as he sees me. And I will feel the
grip of his young, strong arms about me, just as in the happy days
before that day that is of all the days of my life the most terrible
and the most hateful in my memory--the day when they told me that he
had been killed.

That is my belief. That is the comfort that God has given me in my
grief and my sorrow. There is a God. Ah, yes, there is a God! Times
there are, I know, when some of those who look upon the horrid
slaughter of this war, that is going on, hour by hour, feel that
their faith is being shaken by doubts. They think of the sacrifices,
of the blood that is being poured out, of the sufferings of women and
children. And they see the cause that is wrong and foul prospering,
for a little time, and they cannot understand.

"If there is a God," they whisper to themselves, "why does he permit
a thing so wicked to go on?"

But there is a God--there is! I have seen the stark horror of war. I
know, as none can know until he has seen it at close quarters, what a
thing war is as it is fought to-day. And I believe as I do believe,
and as I shall believe until the end, because I know God's comfort
and His grace. I know that my boy is surely waiting for me. In
America, now, there are mothers and fathers by the scores of
thousands who have bidden their sons good-by; who water their letters
from France with their tears--who turn white at the sight of a telegram
and tremble at the sudden clamor of a telephone. Ah, I know--I know!
I suffered as they are suffering! And I have this to tell them and to
beg them. They must believe as I believe--then shall they find the
peace and the comfort that I have found.

So it was that there, on the Clyde, John's mother and I came out of
the blackness of our first grief. We began to be able to talk to one
another. And every day we talked of John. We have never ceased to do
that, his mother and I. We never shall. We may not have him wi