The message has come! “Death on the field of battle.” The gray-haired father and mother are together. The father sits with despair, upon his face, stunned and helpless; the wife, true to the instincts of her woman’s heart, tries to forget her grief and comfort her stricken husband. Their boy is dead—loved and gone. Never again will he light the home with the glory of his presence; never again will the music of his voice, and the sunshine of his smile, gladden the dear ones he has left forever. Oh! the desolating horrors of these awful days! The lamentation of breaking hearts goes up to God unceasingly. The manhood of the world is lying upon these blood-stained battlefields. They leave us in the strength of their young manhood; they go and the angel of death goes with them. His shadow falls upon their pathway—they see it not in the exulting radiance of their young ambitions. They go—and they never return. Oh God, many a heart cries, “Why should my boy be killed? What has he ever done—so good a Son, so dearly loved—that he should lie dead upon a field of death?”
God help us in these extremities of pain and sorrow. Amid the wreck and ruin of thousands of homes made desolate, we can only look to God. “The Man of Sorrows” lives. The pity of the heart of God remains. The Comforter is in the world today. The solace of a thousand promises still ring true, and the power of prayer still brings our broken hearts into submission to His will, and teaches us to say; “It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him right.”
God never makes mistakes, and the mystery of eternal purpose will be manifest in a day to come, for what we know not now, we shall know hereafter. As parents, did we teach our boys how to live and how to die? Did they when lying wounded and face to face with death, hear the mother’s prayers and the father’s exhortations? Did the dying lips frame the sinner’s prayer, and did the last breath thank God for the Saviour whose love Was told them at their mother’s knee? God help those parents who have left Christ out of their children’s lives—and what shall be the judgment of those who with Christian credentials, told these dying boys that the manner of their death would win them heaven “without the Saviour “? Oh! Christ crucified for sin and sinners. Thy blessed footsteps are on the battlefield today, and tens of thousands of dying men have heard Thee say: “Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” And they have come to Thee, and Thou hast taken them from amid the storm and fury of unceasing war, to Thy home of peace and rest in heaven. And we can, and do say: —
“Dear, dying Lamb, Thy precious blood,
Will never lose its power,
Till all the ransomed Church of God
Be saved to sin no more.”
And the Word of God says: — “Neither is there salvation in any Other; for there is none other Name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:1212Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. (Acts 4:12).).