that deepening love,
that childlike faith in God, that pure innocence of soul, did not come
from the dust. How could they return thither? The music ceases because
the instrument is broken. But the player is not dead. He is learning a
better music. He is finding a more perfect instrument. It is impossible
that he should be holden of death. God wastes nothing so precious.

"What is excellent
As God lives is permanent.
Hearts are dust; hearts' loves remain.
Hearts' love will meet thee again."

But I am sure that we must go further than this in order to understand
the full strength and comfort of the text. The assertion of the
impotence of death to end all is based upon something deeper than the
prophecy of immortality in the human heart. It has a stronger foundation
than the outreachings of human knowledge and moral effort towards a
higher state in which completion may be attained. It has a more secure
ground to rest upon than the deathless affection with which our love
clings to its object The impotence of death is revealed to us in the
spiritual perfection of Christ.

Here then, in the "power of an endless life," I find the corner-stone of
peace on earth among men of good-will Take this mortal life as a thing
of seventy years, more or less, to which death puts a final period, and
you have nothing but confusion, chance and futility,--nothing safe,
nothing realized, nothing completed. Evil often triumphs. Virtue often
is defeated.

"The good die young,
And we whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket."

But take death, as Christ teaches us, not as a full stop, but as only a
comma in the story of an endless life, and then the whole aspect of our
existence is changed. That which is material, base, evil, drops down.
That which is spiritual, noble, good, rises to lead us on.

The conviction of immortality, the forward-looking faith in a life
beyond the grave, the spirit of Easter, is essential to peace on earth
for three reasons.

I. It is the only faith that lifts man's soul, which is immortal, above
his body, which is perishable. It raises him out of the tyranny of the
flesh to the service of his ideals. It makes him sure that there are
things worth fighting and dying for. The fighting and the dying, for the
cause of justice and liberty, are sacrifices on the Divine altar which
shall never be forgotten.

II. The faith in immortality carries wit