What Peace Means by Henry van Dyke
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Henry van Dyke >> What Peace Means
The wisest, the strongest, the best of mankind, have felt this most
deeply. The faith in immortality belongs to the childhood of the race,
and the greatest of the sages have always returned to it and taken
refuge in it. Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Plutarch, Montesquieu and
Franklin, Kant and Emerson, Tennyson and Browning,--how do they all bear
witness to the incompleteness of life and reach out to a completion
beyond the grave.
"No great Thinker ever lived and taught you
All the wonder that his soul received;
No great Painter ever set on canvas
All the glorious vision he conceived.
"No Musician ever held your spirit
Charmed and bound in his melodious chains;
But, be sure, he heard, and strove to render,
Feeble echoes of celestial strains.
"No real Poet ever wove in numbers
All his dream, but the diviner part,
Hidden from all the world, spake to him only
In the voiceless silence of his heart.
"So with Love: for Love and Art united
Are twin mysteries: different yet the same;
Poor indeed would be the love of any
Who could find its full and perfect name.
"Love may strive; but vain is its endeavour
All its boundless riches to unfold;
Still its tenderest, truest secret lingers
Ever in its deepest depths untold.
"Things of Time have voices: speak and perish.
Art and Love speak; but their words must be
Like sighings of illimitable forests
And waves of an unfathomable sea."
And can it be that death shall put the final seal of irretrievable ruin
on all this uncompleted effort? Can it be that the grave shall whelm all
this unuttered love in endless silence? Ah, what a wild waste of
precious treasure, what a mad destruction of fair designs, what an
utter failure, life would be if death must end all!
The very reasonableness of our nature, our sense of order, declare the
impotence of Death to create such a wreck. And most of all our deep
affections cry out against the conclusion of despair. They will not hear
of dissolution. They reach out their hands into the darkness. They
demand and they promise an unending fellowship, a deepening communion, a
more perfect satisfaction. Do you remember what Thackeray wrote? "If
love lives through all life, and survives through all sorrow; and
remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of
spirit burns brightly; and if we die, deplores us forever, and still
loves us equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the
faithful bosom, whence it passes with the pure soul beyond death, surely
it shall be immortal. Though we who remain are separated from it, is it
not ours in heaven? If we love still those whom we lose, can we
altogether lose those whom we love?"
To deny this instinct is to deny that which lies at the very root of our
life. If love perishes with death, then our affections are our worst
curses, the world is the cruellest torture-house, and "all things work
together for evil to those who love." Do you believe it? Is it possible?
Nay, all that is best and noblest and purest within us rejects such a
faith in Absolute Evil as the power that has created and rules the
world. In the presence of love we feel that we behold that which must
belong to a good God and therefore cannot die. Destruction cannot touch
it. The grave cannot hold it. Loving and being loved, we dare to stand
in the very doorway of the tomb, and assert the power of an endless
life.
And it seems to me that this courage never comes to us so fully as when
we are brought in closest contact with death, when we are brought face
to face with that dread shadow and forced either to deny its power, once
and forever, or to give up everything and die with our hopes. I wish
that I could make this clear to you as it lies in my own experience.
Perhaps in trying to do it I should speak closer to your own heart than
in any other way. For surely
"There is no flock, however watched and tended
But one dead lamb is there.
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended
But has a vacant chair."
A flower grew in your garden. You delighted in its beauty and fragrance.
It gave you all it had to give, but it did not love you. It could not.
When the time came for it to die, you were sorry. But it did not seem to
you strange or unnatural. There was no waste. Its mission was fulfilled.
You understood why its petals should fall, its leaf wither, its root
and branch decay. And even if a storm came and snapped it, still there
was nothing lost that was indispensable, nothing that could not be
restored.
A child grew in your household, dearly loved and answering your love.
You saw that soul unfold, learning to know the evil from the good,
learning to accept duty and to resist selfishness, learning to be brave
and true and kind, learning to give you day by day a deeper and a richer
sympathy, learning to love God and to pray and to be good. And then
perhaps you saw that young heart being perfected under the higher and
holier discipline of suffering, bearing pain patiently, facing trouble
and danger like a hero, not shrinking even from the presence of death,
but trusting all to your love and to God's, and taking just what came
from day to day, from hour to hour. And then suddenly the light went out
in the shining eyes. The brave heart stopped. The soul was gone. Lost,
perished, blotted out forever in the darkness of death? Ah, no; you know
better than that. That clear, dawning intelligence, that deepening love,
that childlike faith in God, that pure innocence of soul, did not come
from the dust. How could they return thither? The music ceases because
the instrument is broken. But the player is not dead. He is learning a
better music. He is finding a more perfect instrument. It is impossible
that he should be holden of death. God wastes nothing so precious.
"What is excellent
As God lives is permanent.
Hearts are dust; hearts' loves remain.
Hearts' love will meet thee again."
But I am sure that we must go further than this in order to understand
the full strength and comfort of the text. The assertion of the
impotence of death to end all is based upon something deeper than the
prophecy of immortality in the human heart. It has a stronger foundation
than the outreachings of human knowledge and moral effort towards a
higher state in which completion may be attained. It has a more secure
ground to rest upon than the deathless affection with which our love
clings to its object The impotence of death is revealed to us in the
spiritual perfection of Christ.
Here then, in the "power of an endless life," I find the corner-stone of
peace on earth among men of good-will Take this mortal life as a thing
of seventy years, more or less, to which death puts a final period, and
you have nothing but confusion, chance and futility,--nothing safe,
nothing realized, nothing completed. Evil often triumphs. Virtue often
is defeated.
"The good die young,
And we whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket."
But take death, as Christ teaches us, not as a full stop, but as only a
comma in the story of an endless life, and then the whole aspect of our
existence is changed. That which is material, base, evil, drops down.
That which is spiritual, noble, good, rises to lead us on.
The conviction of immortality, the forward-looking faith in a life
beyond the grave, the spirit of Easter, is essential to peace on earth
for three reasons.
I. It is the only faith that lifts man's soul, which is immortal, above
his body, which is perishable. It raises him out of the tyranny of the
flesh to the service of his ideals. It makes him sure that there are
things worth fighting and dying for. The fighting and the dying, for the
cause of justice and liberty, are sacrifices on the Divine altar which
shall never be forgotten.
II. The faith in immortality carries with it the assurance of a Divine
reassessment of earth's inequalities. Those who have suffered unjustly
here will be recompensed in the future. Those who have acted wickedly
and unjustly here will be punished. Whether that punishment will be
final or remedial we do not know. Perhaps it may lead to the extinction
of the soul of evil, perhaps to its purifying and deliverance. On these
questions I fall back on the word of God: "The wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
III. The faith in immortality brings with it the sense of order,
tranquillity, steadiness and courage in the present life. It sets us
free from mean and cowardly temptations, makes it easier to resist the
wild animal passions of lust and greed and cruelty, brings us into
eternal relations and fellowships, makes us partners with the wise and
good of all the ages, ennobles our earthly patriotism by giving us a
heavenly citizenship. Yea, it knits us in bonds of love with the coming
generation. It is better than the fountain of youth. We shall know and
see them as they go on their way, long after we have left the path. The
faith in immortality sets a touch of the imperishable on every generous
impulse and unselfish deed. It inspires to sublime and heroic
virtues,--spiritual splendours,--deeds of sacrifice and suffering for
which earth has no adequate recompense, but whose reward is great in
heaven. Here is the patience of the saints, the glorious courage of
patriots, martyrs, and confessors, something more bright and shining
than secular morality can bring forth,--a flashing of the inward light
which fails not, but grows clearer as death draws near. What noble
evidences of this come to us out of the great war.
"Are you in great distress?" asked a nurse of an American soldier whose
legs had been shot away on the battle-field. "I am in as great peace,"
said he, "through Jesus my Lord, as a man can possibly be, out of
Paradise."
A secretary of the Y.M.C.A., the night before he was killed, wrote to
his father: "I have not been sent here to die: I am to fight: I offer my
life for future generations; I shall not die, I shall merely change my
direction. He who walks before us is so great that we cannot lose Him
from sight."
A simple French boy, grievously wounded, is dying in the ambulance. He
is a Protestant The nurse who bends over him is a Catholic sister. She
writes down his words as they fall slowly from his lips: "O my God, let
Thy will be done and not mine. O my God, Thou knowest that I never
wished war, but that I have fought because it was Thy will; I offered my
life so that peace might prevail. O my God, I pray for all my dear
ones, ... father, mother, brothers, sisters. Give a hundredfold to
those nurses for all they have done for me. I pray for them one and
all."
Here, in the midst of carnage and confusion, horror and death, was
perfect peace, the triumph of immortality.
What then shall we say of the new teachers and masters, the cynical
lords of materialism and misrule, who tell us that they are going to
banish this outworn superstition and all others like it from the mind of
man? They are going to make a new world in which men shall walk by
sight, and not by faith; a world in which universal happiness shall be
produced by the forcible division of material goods, and brotherhood
promoted by the simple expedient of killing those whom they dislike; a
world in which there shall be neither nation, God, nor Church, nor
anywhere a thought of any life but this which ends in the grave. It is a
mad dream of wild and reckless men. But it threatens evil to all the
world. Do you remember what happened when the French Revolution took
that course, abolished the Sabbath, defiled the Churches, broke down the
altars, and enthroned a harlot as the Goddess of Reason? The Reign of
Terror followed. Something like that has happened, recently, in many
parts of Europe. And if these new tyrants of ignorance, unbelief, and
unmorality have their way, the madness and the darkness will spread
until the black cloud charged with death covers the face of the earth
for a season with shame and anguish and destruction. A sane world, an
orderly world, a peaceful world, can never be founded on materialism.
That foundation is a quicksand in which all that is dearest to man goes
down in death.
Religion is essential to true peace in the soul and to peace on earth
through righteousness. Immortality is essential to true religion.
Thanks be to God who hath given us Jesus Christ, who was dead and is
alive again and liveth forevermore, to touch and ennoble, to inspire and
console, to pacify and uplift our earthly existence with the power of an
endless life.