By:
Edited by Heyman Wreford
I had in my hand the other day a heavy fragment of a German shell that had killed more than ten men on board one of H. M.’s large men-of-war. That inert fragment of iron had taken its toll of human life.
The British had captured a trench and were busy digging themselves in. A young officer passes up and down the line encouraging them. As he talks to them and cheers them with his words, from out the very sky it seems a shell comes — and bursts about him and tears his life away, and then buries itself in a huge hole in the ground.
These real shells have done their cruel and deadly work, where brave men meet their death, but the “ghost shell,” as a writer strikingly puts it, goes on upon its deadly way across the lands, over the wounded and the dead, across the seas to English homes. And there it bursts and shatters human hearts; it tears the happiness of lives and homes to pieces; it leaves a track of desolation as it goes; it is followed by the cries of breaking hearts and the sobs of orphaned children. Oh! the horror of it all. Only faith in God can mitigate the grief.
What did You do in the Great War?
This is a question that will be asked of thousands in the years to come. And many will have an answer in their scarred and maimed bodies; others will be proud to show the medals they have won on many a battlefield. The Roll of Honor, with its pathetic biographies, will tell the tale for others; and in the archives of a great and mighty nation will be kept the records of tens of thousands. But what have you done in the great war? You, a servant of Christ; you, with the knowledge of sins forgiven; you, who have a place prepared for you in heaven through unmerited grace, what have you done in this great war? Your fancied limitations will in no wise lessen your overwhelming responsibility. You will have to answer God when you meet Him in eternity.
You have lived while millions have met their death! You have beheld with your own eyes the daily need of immortal souls! You have seen the widow’s breaking heart, and witnessed the sorrows of the fatherless! You have almost heard the “beating of the wings of the angel of death,” as he passed through your native land! What have you done? What are you doing now?
What can I do? do you say? You can pray, and thus uphold the hands of those who are in the spiritual battlefield for God. You can help to send His Word to thousands lost without it. Think of the men in the trenches with death all around them. Think what a Gospel or a Testament sent by you might do for them. Help us to send them: seek your Saviour’s blest “WELL DONE!”