By the Editor
A Personal Paragraph
I WISH to apologize to my many friends for not answering their letters personally the last few weeks. My daughter has kindly done this for me―she has assisted me in my work for a long time now.
My wife and I have had a pilgrimage of sorrow. We came to Belgium and saw the battlefields, and visited the camps where our soldiers are employed in exhuming and burying the British dead. We then went to France to see the grave of our eldest son, who was killed at La Coulotte, just south of Lens. He is buried in the Cemetery of La Chaudiere, near to Vimy. As we stood by his grave we read together 2 Thessalonians, chapter 4, and we could thank God that we could “comfort one another with these words.” We thanked God as we stood there for the living, ever-present hope of eternal re-union.
“One brief hour of separation,
Then the ‘open vision’ given;
Then the bliss of glad re-union,
God, and Christ, and home, and heaven.”
We have known sorrow, as others have, the deepest sorrow, but we have never sorrowed as those “without hope.” We have bent before the storm of affliction, but have been able to say, “It is the Lord; let Him do what seemeth to Him right.” May others, who have been bereft as we have been, share with us the consolations of “the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.”
I cannot speak too highly of the kindness and courtesy of the Commanding Officer and other officers of the Labor Company where we went to inquire about the grave of our son, and of the Chaplain, who never spared himself any trouble to help us find the place where our boy fell, and where he was buried. His unfailing kindness we shall never forget. God bless him!