I MET yesterday a dear Christian friend just returned from the Front. He stopped me in High Street to speak about his son who had been dangerously wounded. He said, “I want to encourage you in your work. I have seen men dying at the Front like flies without the Word of God. If I had £100,000 I would spend it all in sending Testaments to the soldiers.”
This is the testimony of an eye-witness of the need we are trying to do our little to meet. It is not an armchair comment, but the heartfelt words of one whose soul has been moved by what he has actually seen and heard. Look out upon the battlefields with me now — see brave men there lying dead by hundreds — and as you gaze upon them try to realize that only twenty-five men out of every hundred has a Testament. “Dying like flies without the Word of God.” Their dead eyes stare upward to the heaven above them as if to call God to witness that no one had given them His Word. Will you give me 100,000 Testaments to send them at once? As you read your Bible to-night in the comfort of your home ask God how many copies of His Word you shall, help to send to the Front. Listen to this letter just received from “somewhere in France”: —
“Dear Sir, ― I was fortunate in finding one of your postcards containing your generous offer of a Testament. I have desi ed one for a long time, and have endeavored to buy one. But we are unable to get into the large towns, and at the villages an English Bible is out of the question. I have the battered remnants of a paper-covered New Testament, but it is now too war-worn to be of further service... I am not enclosing postcard as it is too muddy. My address is Pte. L. McA —, etc.”
A Prison Chaplain writes: ― “Can you let me have about 100 Testaments for the English in prison. I know they would be appreciated and used.”
A Chaplain in the Grenadier Guards asks for postcards to give his men so that they may send for Testaments.