y watching the end of
an age.

"Jesus had compassion on the multitude"--that had been the short and
simple text. Simple words, the preacher had said, but how when one
realised Who had had compassion, and on what? Almighty God Himself, with
His incarnate Mind set on the working out of immense and agelong plans,
had, as it were, paused for a moment to have compassion on hungry women
and crying babies and folk whose petty confused affairs could have seemed
of no consequence to anyone in the drama of the world. And then, with a
few terse sentences, the preacher swung from that instance to the world
drama of to-day. Did they realise, he asked, that peaceful bright Sunday
morning, that millions of simple men were at that moment being hurled at
each other to maim and kill? At the bidding of powers that even they
could hardly visualise, at the behest of world politics that not one in
a thousand would understand and scarcely any justify, houses were being
broken up, women were weeping, and children playing in the sun before
cottage doors were even now being left fatherless. It was incredible,
colossal, unimaginable, but as one tried to picture it, Hell had opened
her mouth and Death gone forth to slay. It was terrible enough that
battlefields of stupendous size should soon be littered with the dying
and the dead, but the aftermath of such a war as this would be still more
terrible. No one could say how near it would come to them all. No one
could tell what revolution in morals and social order such a war as this
might not bring. That day God Himself looked down on the multitude as
sheep having no shepherd, abandoned to be butchered by the wolves, and
His heart beat with a divine compassion for the infinite sorrows of the
world.

There was little more to it. An exhortation to go home to fear and pray
and set the house in order against the Day of Wrath, and that was all.
"My brethren," said the young man--and the intensity of his thought lent
a certain unusual solemnity to the conventional title--"no one can tell
how the events of this week may affect us. Our feet may even now be going
down into the Valley of the Shadow of temptation, of conflict, of death,
and even now there may be preparing for us a chalice such as we shall
fear to drink. Let us pray that in that hour the compassion of Jesus may
be real to us, and we ourselves find a sure place in that sorrowful
Heart."

And he was gone from the pulpit without another word. I