What Peace Means by Henry Van Dyke
page 23 of 26 (88%)
page 23 of 26 (88%)
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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 |
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