ADDRESS AT THE CHURCH PARADE, IN THE NAVE OF THE CATHEDRAL, SEPT. 27, 1914.
“Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me.”—St. John xiv. 1.
“Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me.”—St. John xiv. 1.
My brethren, when your Commanding Officer did me the honour to ask me to address you, I thought I would try to bring before you, in the simplest and briefest form, the special message which is brought by the Gospel of Christ to men in such a position as that in which you now stand—a position of great anxiety and solemn responsibility. You will meet that responsibility, of course, in the manly and cheerful spirit which has marked soldiers of great races at all times, from the Jews, Greeks, and Romans to our own days. But the Gospel of Christ has the characteristic privilege of bringing good news to human nature in all circumstances. It sheds a new and blessed light on life and all its duties, on death and all its fears, and I would fain impress on you, in one sentenceof our Saviour, what is the supreme blessing and guidance which it affords, especially to soldiers.
That blessing is contained in the few words of my text:Ye believe in God; believe also in Me. They are the first words of our Saviour’s address to His disciples, at the moment when they were in great trouble and anxiety, on account of His having told them that He was about to be violently taken from them. It was no ordinary trouble that they were about to encounter, but one of the greatest and bitterest that ever befell human beings. Yet He begins, at once, by bidding them not be troubled.Let not your hearts be troubled, He said. But how were they to avoid it? He gives them a short and sufficient reason:Ye believe in God; believe also in Me. Remember who they were. They were Jews, full of the faith of the old Covenant; familiar with the psalms which we sing every day, believing in God as Abraham did, as David did, as Isaiah did, and as He Himself had taught them to believe. That was and is, a grand faith to live in. But our Lord brought an addition to it, which madeit, and makes it, infinitely better.Ye believe in God, He said;believe also in Me. He uses the same word of belief in Himself which He had used of belief in God. “You put your trust in God,” He seems to say; “You give yourselves up to Him, to obey His will for life and for death. Do the same for Me. Give yourselves up also to Me, to obey Me, to trust Me and to love Me.” The privilege of doing that is the reason He gives them for not letting their heart be troubled. If they would obey and trust Him with the same faith which they gave to God, they would have still surer ground for comfort and strength than if they only believed in the God of their fathers.
This was a great claim for our Lord Jesus Christ to make. But He went on to shed His blood on the Cross in attestation of it; and, according to His promise, He rose again after being put to death, to assure us that He was the living Son of God He claimed to be; and that is our sufficient reason for believing it. For that reason we take His word for it, and trust everything He said. But why does this assurance bring that special comfort toHis disciples, and to ourselves, which He promises? There are many reasons; but on this occasion I will mention only the one which He Himself proceeds to state. He goes on to declare at once what is perhaps the greatest of all the comforts which He brings. He tells us what is our eternal Home, whither He was Himself going, and where we are meant to go. He says at once:In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you; and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am there ye may be also.Every one of us must ask himself, sooner or later, where he is going; what is his eternal Home? More especially must we ask ourselves this question when we are brought face to face, in any way, with the great issues of life and death. When nations are marching in their millions to conflicts which must mean an early death to many of them, we must crave for an answer, more than ever, to the question, What is beyond death? What is the life into which we shall pass from this world?
Now, in these few words, our Saviour gives us an assurance on this question which is more than sufficient. We shall go into a world in which He is ready to meet us, and in which He is preparing mansions for us. Without the Gospel, there is a complete veil over the future life. But to the Christian that veil is lifted by the Saviour and His Apostles in some glorious details, and above all—far above all—in this: that the Lord Jesus Christ, that living Man of whom you read in the Gospels, Whose character stands out so clearly there, in all graciousness, justice, love, and power, is preparing homes for us, and will be there to receive us unto Himself. David was inspired to sing,When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me. It was a great height of inspired faith to be able to utter that prayer of trust in the great God of his fathers, surrounded, as he then was, by clouds and darkness. But what a vastly greater blessing it is to be able to say it of the Lord Jesus Christ, Whom we are privileged to know, not only as God, but as Man inflesh and blood, and to be assured that in death, as in life, we have with us all the sympathy, all the tenderness, as well as all the righteousness and justice, which He showed during His life on earth. Had He not reason to say:Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in Me?
But if it is to be a comfort to us to know that we shall be received by the Lord Jesus Christ when we pass from this world, and that, whether we pass suddenly or slowly, we shall find ourselves in His hands, we cannot fail to realize that one condition on our own part is essential. We must come to Him with a character, and in a condition, which He can approve. He will meet us in two capacities; first, as our Saviour and friend, but also as our Judge. Without waiting for that ultimate judgment which He has announced, the thought of our closer approach to Him at death must make us deeply apprehensive of His personal judgment on our character and our lives. If we desire to meet Him in happiness, we must be preparing ourselves, while we are here, so as to be at least in general harmony with His will and His character. In consequence ofthose inveterate sins of mankind, which bring about wars and all other such miseries, He Himself, with His own deliberate consent, was brought to death, and sacrificed His life as an atonement for our evil; and by that sacrifice He has won from God the Father, His Father and our Father, the right to forgive us and to judge us mercifully. We may be sure accordingly that He will receive us into the arms of His mercy, and pardon our innumerable failures and offences, if we truly repent of them. But if we are to be at peace with Him hereafter, in His mansions, He must needs expect us, while we are here, to be trying to grow like Him, and to be doing His will. This accordingly is the second main point which follows from this assurance of our Lord. It places us under the strongest possible obligation to live here as Christ would have us, in order that we may look forward with full hope to living with Him hereafter.
Consequently, this promise of Christ obliges us to Christen, as it were, or to Christianize, the work of our lives, and every duty or profession in which we areengaged. This is a principle which has innumerable applications; and I will only apply it this morning to one aspect of the profession of a soldier. Men had great ideals before Christ came. Few things are nobler, in the profession of arms, than the examples of self-sacrifice, of bravery, of generosity, exhibited by the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans, and, in our own days, by the Japanese. But the history of the Christian world has shown that it is possible to raise those ideals, if not to a higher, yet to a more gracious, height by adding a Christian touch or colour to them. 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.One of them, as he stood at the bier of the most famous knight of his day, is described in the old romance as exclaiming:And now, I daresay, that Sir Lancelot, there thou liest: thou wert never matched of none earthly knight’s hands; and thou wert the courtliest knight that ever bare shield; and thou wert the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou wert the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou wert the kindest man that ever stroke with sword; and thou wert the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou wert the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest. Can we fail to be sensible that, even in such an imperfect example, something of the grace of Christian tenderness has been shed over the character—an essence of Christian feeling, which would make impossible in such a soldier any brutal violence or wilful injustice? It was, in fact, the conscious example of Christ which controlled them. They all, more or less, resembled the knight of our own noble poet Spenser:
For on his breast a bloody cross he bore,The dear remembrance of his dying Lord:For Whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,And dead, as living ever, Him adored;Upon his shield the like was also scored,For sovran hope which in his help he had.
For on his breast a bloody cross he bore,The dear remembrance of his dying Lord:For Whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,And dead, as living ever, Him adored;Upon his shield the like was also scored,For sovran hope which in his help he had.
For on his breast a bloody cross he bore,The dear remembrance of his dying Lord:For Whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,And dead, as living ever, Him adored;Upon his shield the like was also scored,For sovran hope which in his help he had.
For on his breast a bloody cross he bore,
The dear remembrance of his dying Lord:
For Whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living ever, Him adored;
Upon his shield the like was also scored,
For sovran hope which in his help he had.
That is the true badge not only of Christian service to the wounded, but of Christian warfare itself.
Such, my brethren, is the spirit in which you can apply to your present duties the exhortation of our Saviour in this gracious and cardinal text. It bids you to add the belief in the presence of Christ, the obligation of obedience to Christ, trust in Christ and love towards Him, to all the other principles by which you are animated. The fact that you are here, that you are making great sacrifices, that you are ready to make the greatest sacrifice of all, for your country, is proof enough that you are animated by high and generous motives, that you wish to live and die for the greatest of all causes, for righteousness and justice, for your King and your country. But if you would do the best you can, do one thing more. Take care to add the spirit of Christ to these motives and impulses; strive to enter more deeply,day by day, into His heart and will, to realize more and more, even in the midst of war, that “new commandment” which He gave us,that we should love one another; and so prepare yourselves to meet Him whenever you have to do so, as we all have, soon or late, in such a character that He may be able to say to you:Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. In a word: You believe in God, and in all that the Name of God stands for—righteousness, truth, goodness of all kinds: believe also in Christ, and let His love, His mercy, His purity, His absolute self-sacrifice, add His own peculiar grace to all your words and deeds, and then you may cherish the confident hope thatwhere He is there you will be also.