Henry Wace

“ The blood-stained fields of Belgium, France and Poland, the engulfing of the innocent lives of women and children in the ocean—these are the things that are seen; and we need some supreme assurance—nay we need some Divine revelation—if we are to live through such experiences in faith, and hope, and in Christian charity. We mourn, day by day, the loss of precious lives, and we are appalled at the thought of the further sacrifices of such lives, young and mature, which we fear must be required; and so far as we look only on the things thus seen, our hearts might well fail us. ”

“ It is still more true now than in the Psalmist’s time that “there is no king that can be saved by the multitude of an host, neither is any mighty man delivered by much strength; an horse is counted but a vain thing to save a man, neither shall he deliver any man by his great strength. Behold the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear Him, and upon them that put their trust in His mercy.” In that spirit we now bow before His throne—in the words of our daily prayer in time of war and tumult—before the throne of “the only Giver of all victory.” ”

“ The knighthood of the Middle Ages, for instance, exhibited the highest qualities of a manly soldiery, elevated, purified, and illuminated by the supreme graces of gentleness, of mercy, of tenderness for the weak, of that impulse to save the suffering and the crushed, which is embodied in our Lord’s character as “the Saviour.” The knight of the Middle Ages was essentially the saviour of the weak, the champion of women, bound by oath to uphold all right and righteousness, to avenge wrong, to maintain, in the midst of his stern duties, the mercies and graces of Christian feeling. ”

“ Everything, we are told, must yield to the demands of a nation which believes that a certain supremacy in the world is necessary for it. The consequence is that the air has to be cleared by this awful outburst of national thunder and lightning. But let us apply the danger and the lesson to ourselves. What is our own ideal as a nation and as an empire? Perhaps we too have been in danger of being fascinated too much by that vision of empire. It is a legitimate ideal when applied to right purposes, and subject to the right control ”

“ We could not have said, with the Apostle, that we know that Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. But now it is no mere prophet or Apostle, but the risen Saviour Himself, Who stands in the midst of human life, as He stood in the midst of His disciples on the morrow of His resurrection, and Who said Himself, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.” ”

“ That is the meaning, no doubt, of a great war like the present. Some evil had been accumulating, some passions of ambition and greed, some failures in duty, some defections from truth, faults of one kind in one nation, and sad failures of duty in another, and, on a sudden, some spark lights an explosion, and the whole world is ablaze with flames of fire. So it is also in our [155] private lives. We may go on for a long time yielding to weaknesses, or even sins, and righteousness may seem to be silent, the voice of conscience may seem to be a mere voice and not to be asserting its supremacy ”

“ It is an awful responsibility for men to have entrusted to them, to be able to declare war and thus to launch many millions of men in their own country, and hundreds of millions of men in the Empire and in other countries, upon a gigantic struggle, of which all we know for certain at the outset is that it will involve a sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives, the devastation of fair countries, and the waste of enormous treasure. But so it is and ever must be. In the freest republics that ever existed the chief rulers have had similarly to act as the brain of the whole people ”

“ If we would understand the blessing of the Gospel, we must begin with the conviction that the one great object for which this whole dispensation of human society exists is that complete righteousness, the glory of the Divine righteousness, may be established in it, and that nothing but this can promote either the glory of God or the happiness of man. Read the Psalms with this consideration in your mind, and I think you will be deeply impressed with the fact that every prayer to God embodies a prayer for the establishment of right against wrong ”

“ After all, in presence of the mysteries of death, and of the condition of those we have lost, what prayer can be more comforting than one which simply commends to our Father’s gracious hands, through our Saviour’s merits and grace, the beloved soul after which we yearn? That is a Prayer for the Dead which may be offered without scruple and without cessation, and in which we may find, day by day, and in every moment of sorrow and distress, our refuge and our consolation. ”

“ That is the condition under which the world now exists, and people who talk of abolishing war are like people standing on the crater of a great volcano, and trying to persuade themselves that there will be no more eruptions. As long as there is evil in the world and God’s righteousness in the world, you will have the moral reactions between the two bursting from time to time into some awful conflagration like the present. That is the revelation of the whole Bible, brought to its culmination in the Book of Revelation. ”

“ Above all other things, God made right and wrong, He made us to realize the difference between right and wrong; He made the truth, and enabled us to love it, and to hate what is false; in a word, He made our consciences and our minds; and He lives and works in them, as much as He does in the world at large. It is very well for us to look up to the heavens, to think of Him as the Creator of all those stars and worlds, or to look into the infinite mysteries of this world’s life, its minute elements and atoms ”

“ All the individuals of which it is composed are grievously imperfect, and some of them are positively vicious. Is it any wonder that it develops antagonistic forces within itself, and that sooner or later it bursts into a great conflagration—the conflagration of a revolution or a war? God, in fact, by this constitution of mankind, has provided that unrighteousness shall punish itself. He does not intervene, as a rule, to inflict a special punishment. He leaves men to work out their own punishment, and to realize from it that there was some corruption at work in their lives. ”

“ Let us strive after this great object, alike in ourselves, in our country, and throughout our Empire, and then we may hope that as a nation we may be, in the Psalmist’s words, “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” and that whatsoever we do may prosper. In a word, as a nation no less than as individuals, let our delight be in the law of the Lord, and in His law let us meditate day and night. ”

“ The heavens are opened; a great illumination bursts upon the world; and an innumerable multitude of the heavenly host are heard singing, in tones of rejoicing and thankfulness, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” They are good tidings of great joy, proclaiming peace and good will from God towards men—good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people, that unto us was born that day in the City of David “a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord!” ”

“ But one thing is plain, that the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ upon earth, the full realization of all its promises of peace and goodwill, the complete manifestation of the glory and power of its King—that these great hopes and blessed promises cannot, according to the Book of Revelation, be realized without the world passing through scenes of fearful struggle and misery, and without the execution of Divine judgment upon the evil and falsehood with which it abounds. ”

“ All their thoughts and interests are engaged in the business and the pleasures and the interests of this life, and they seldom look beyond. But in days like the present we are forced to look beyond them. You, above all, who, at the call of duty, have laid behind you, for the present, all the ordinary interests of life, and are offering yourselves to all the risks of the battlefield—you have reason to ask, with supreme earnestness, what is the reality for which you are making this sacrifice, and what will remain to you if the full sacrifice should be exacted from you. ”

“ These considerations ought to lead to a deeper devotion to those principles of right and wrong, and to that supreme vision of righteousness which the Bible and our Lord and His Apostles impress upon us; but I would add that it is the great message we should take home to ourselves, not merely in our individual lives, but in our national life. We see before us a great nation, endowed with some of the highest capacities of human nature, allowing itself to be absorbed more and more, year by year, by a great passion for power and dominion and supremacy in the world. ”

“ If the new embodiment of the rule of force in human affairs is to be effectually overcome, it can only be by the same means. It cannot be done by our arms alone. Force alone is no remedy for force. The Spirit of Christ as it lives in the Books of the New Testament, must again make its appeal to the minds and consciences of the nations of Europe; and the Spirit of God, acting through those examples and exhortations, must bring home to us, once more, the life and love of Christ, must open men’s hearts to receive His image, and so enable them once more to have a right judgment in all things. ”

“ Whether they will or not, great masses of people and great nations cannot do without a Government; and when they have established one, that Government must necessarily act in many critical emergencies without waiting to consult the people whom it governs. A nation and its King, with his Ministers, constitute as much one body, to use St. Paul’s image, as the various elements and limbs of the human body and its brain. ”

“ Sooner or later those sins and evils gather to a head, in some great corruption of society and political life, in some enormous [26] crime of ambition or pride; and the righteousness and justice of God, working through the ordinary laws of human nature, evokes some tremendous reaction against them; and we behold the overthrow of a great Empire, or a European Revolution, or a world-wide clash of the forces of right and wrong. That is the course of history, as determined before the world began by the inscrutable righteousness and wisdom of God. ”

“ Do not let us suppose that there is any other object whatever in God’s dispensations. The manifestation of God in Christ, and the bringing of all human souls, all human life, into harmony with it, into the full enjoyment of it, and consequently into perfect obedience to His will—this is the end of all the struggles, of all the wars, of all the sufferings of mankind, mysterious as they are, and utterly baffling to our feeble apprehension. ”

“ War is justifiable for the same reason that it is lawful to put men to death for great crimes, like murder and treason. The conscience of mankind at large, the conscience of Christian States at large, has uniformly wielded the sword of justice in avenging and averting, by the punishment of death, such crimes of violence and treachery as destroy the very frame of Society. ”

“ To each individual soul, young or old, the question of chief importance is not what happens to them in this world, whether their life be short or long, whether it be a happy life or a sad one, but what happens to them afterwards, in that eternal career, which opens to them all at death. The only true Christian attitude, as the Apostle says elsewhere, is to “look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” ”

“ Here lies the only hope for ourselves, the only hope for our people at large, for our nation and empire. Let us henceforth join with a new earnestness in the prayer of the Collect: “Graft in our hearts the love of Thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of Thy great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” ”

“ There is no reality in the world which can be compared, in its momentous importance, to this. It must be brought home to us, by the experience which is thrust upon us by the Great War, that everything else with which we have to do, everything else in the world, passes away from us. So it does indeed from everybody, [244] at all times, whether times of war or of peace. There comes a time to every soul when it has to leave the body, and, with the body, everything else with which it has been associated in this world. We all know it when we think seriously about it ”

“ That is [47] the character of the future world, the future society, to which we have the privilege of being admitted at death: a world in which all the graces and glories of the Christian character exist, without any of the imperfections by which even the holiest lives are clouded here; a world of perpetual thanksgiving to God the Father for the love with which He has loved us; a world in short which is ablaze with the light and warmth of all love and truth. ”