What is left to us, too, but a similar trust? We can but commend him to the Father of All that He may overshadow him with His shoulders; that the sun should not burn him by day, nor the moon by night; that he may be guarded from the arrow that flieth by day, from the assault of the evil one in the noontide!
“Happy in England! I could be content To see no other verdure than its own: To feel no other breezes than are blown Through the tall woods with high romances blent; Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment For skies Italian....”
_June 29, 1915._--The feast of Peter and Paul comes round with a new significance. In war time we learn the meaning of so much that has seemed unimportant; of things hidden away at the back of our consciousness--things neglected, unknown, or even despised--and we learn, too, the worthlessness of so much that has seemed paramount and necessary, desirable and precious. War is a stern master. He teaches above all the relative values; how to weigh the greater against the less; how to fling away with one superb gesture the whole sum of human possessions for a single imperishable prize.
“What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?”
He who spoke these words gently to a handful of poor Jews now seems to cry them with a voice of thunder from end to end of the earth.
Thus, this, their festival day, brings the two great champions of the Cross--and it is for Christ and the Cross that every son of England is fighting to-day--before our minds with a singular vividness and nearness: Peter, type of the natural man, untutored; sure of himself and of his own good impulses, of the honest purpose of his guileless heart; impetuous, loving, weak, with all purely human weakness, even to betrayal; and--divinely strengthened--Peter the rock, Peter the fisherman who conquered the world! Paul, the Patrician, the apostle born out of due time, whose ardour is all of the intellect, keen as a blade and burning as a flame; the little man of Tarsus upon whose spirit the teaching of all Christianity reposes as firmly to-day as does the Church upon the stone of Peter; Paul, whom the Captain, Christ Himself, enlisted by the miraculous condescension of a personal appeal. Has not every Christian, whatever his creed, vowed them reverence throughout all the ages? To-day, may not the eyes of the believer look up to them with a new confidence?