By the Editor.
January, 1919.
We have entered a solemn and momentous year. A year full of the greatest possibilities and responsibilities for the Christian. The War is over and peace is close at hand. Armies will be demobilized, and we are told that a new world will be ours when peace really comes. But what has the peace cost? It has cost our nation one million British dead. It has robbed the world of well-nigh ten million men, It has made another ten million scarred with war for life. It has taught fifty million men the art of killing one another, and it has wasted about thirty thousand million pounds of the world’s money. This is the cost of the peace that has come to us. I am thinking now, as I write, of the ten million precious souls that have passed into eternity during the progress of the War. The awful city of its dead numbers more than the whole of London — a population greater than our Metropolis wiped out of existence in four years of awful carnage! Oh! what a ghastly hecatomb this poor world is! Millions perishing in the ways of death. The feet of man swift to shed blood-destruction and misery in their ways; the way of peace they have not known, there is no fear of God before, their eyes. These are words of stern condemnation on the ways of man from God Himself. Ten million of the world’s dead, the toll of this horrible war—and each one of these precious souls worth more than the whole world stained with their blood. As I pause and think, the mighty army of the dead seems to pass before me. Rank after rank, battalion after battalion, army after army. I see them with their eager feet pressing onward on their way, the flush of exulting manhood in their cheeks, and the fire of youthful vigor in their eyes. They pass onward proudly to their doom—the earth trembles beneath the thunder of their passing—ten million men! and as they pass I seem to see them salute the war lords of the earth, and cry the old Roman salutation: “Those about to die salute thee.”
And now the earth they trod so proudly has taken them to her bosom, and in their passing they have shadowed the world with a tempest of tears, and sighs. Who shall answer to God for these souls? Oh! thank God for the stories that have come to us from the camps, and dug-outs, and trenches, and hospitals of the work of Christ among these dear men.
Are you not thankful now, dear friends, for what you have done to help those men to Christ? I think of the Testaments you helped to put in their pockets, and think of the knowledge of salvation that came to them through reading them. God be thanked for four years and more of happy service among the forces.
The Day will declare the number of the: saved. But what of the living now? Since the Armistice there has been a cessation of giving for Testaments. Does that mean that our friends think the work is done? It has only just begun. The men are still eager for the Word of God—and they are eager for their wives and sweethearts to have Testaments also. Friends, we must go on with God, and for God. Let the memory of the dead stir your hearts more than ever to work for the living. During the next month I shall know clearly what God would have me do; and I shall know, too what you think I ought to do. I shall be glad to hear from friends.