hat sought
life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of
self-sacrifice. What is it that sustains the men who go down to the
earthly hell of ruthless war? It is just this--the consciousness,
newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and
country, for home and kindred. They are content to be blotted out if
only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be
exalted. Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once
more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure. Men charge
across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes. They are
raised into the fellowship of the Cross. And we are raised with them.

If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the
glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again
lift up her face to the light. He has died that we may live. Greater
love hath no man than this--nor yet greater glory. But she needs not
to be told; she knows it already. She knows it far better than you or
I do, for she feels it. In the deep places of life where words are
meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the
glory of self-sacrifice.

By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the
soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of
lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine
wisdom which is hid from the wise. She knows that the road that goes
by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can
come to God. She knows that her son has walked along that road, and
that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying
while bearing it, God has brought him into that joy which all the
cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe. And because
she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has
felt the touch of God, she is ready to greet the day of still greater
sacrifice.

***

In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and
read an article. It was a bitter invective against Christianity and
the Church. Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross--and this
holocaust as the fruit. It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced
eye. It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity
for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the
wicked have continued to crucify Him. These things are so