It was not a Bishop--it was one of our leading Admirals--who wrote: "Until England is taken out of her self-satisfaction and complacency, just so long will the War continue. When she looks out with humbler eyes and prayer on her lips, then she can begin to count the days towards the end."
It is to bring the country back to GOD, _because_ it has a righteous cause, which is the object and aim of the National Mission, and I bespeak for it your co-operation in Birmingham, as well as your earnest prayers.
What we aim at is a new England, a new British Empire after the War, with all its old characteristics, with its old humour, and its love of life, its vigour and its brightness, but sober, pure, GOD-fearing; and beyond the Empire we look for a new Heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
Why for ever shall we have bitterness between class and class? Why for ever, when this accursed Prussian spirit of militarism is laid in the dust for ever, shall we have the constant menace of War? Why should there not grow to be a spirit of brotherhood in the world, when not only class and class, but nation and nation, shall agree to share the good things with which GOD filled the kindly earth which He has provided as a home for His children?
(4) But it would be impossible to leave the subject of the War and Religion without alluding to the part religion plays in throwing _a bright light on Death_. I have no doubt that I am speaking to many to-day who have given their best and brightest in this greatest cause ever fought on earth, who, to paraphrase the famous words of Ruskin, "will never see the sun rise without thinking of those graves it first gilds in Gallipoli, and who will never see the flowers bloom in spring without thinking over whose dear bodies bloom to-day the wild flowers of Flanders." When I, an unmarried man, think to-day of my own spiritual sons, dear to me as if they were my own boys, who have month by month gone to their death, or come home maimed for life, it is almost more than I can bear, and I can do something more than merely sympathize with the father and mother who have given one, two, three, and I have known even four sons in the same cause. I do more than sympathize: I feel with them; I suffer with them.