“With my spirit within me I will seek Thee early; for when Thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” Isaiah XXVI, 9.

It needs a shock or break in all our easy taking of things for granted….  We have realised it in our own times.  A great disaster befalls us.  It may be the sudden loss of a great ship, the Birkenhead or the Eurydice, an awful mine accident like the accident at the Hartley coal pit, or in the Rhondda Valley or at Wigan, a fire in a theatre where hundreds of children perish in a few moments, the giving way of a vast bridge while a train is passing over as at the Tay Bridge, or a terrible reverse to British arms such as happened in the Boer War at Colenso, and then the nation begins to turn its mind inward, is pulled up sharp and made to think.  Always, at these times, a judgment throne is set and the books are opened and we feel that this life is not all, and that there are better things for the souls of all of us than complacency and self-satisfaction and a callous want of sympathy which has become second nature, because in our selfish taking of things for granted we have forgotten to exercise that diviner gift of thought for others day by day. (p. 21)….

This power of the earthquake to make men feel their helplessness and their need of a helper was known to Jesus Christ, or He never would have foretold that before the coming of the end the beginning of sorrows should be heralded by earthquakes in divers places, nor have suggested that as prelude to the appearance of the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, there should not be earthquake only, but heavenquake also, “the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.” (p. 21)….

One hundred thousand, some say one hundred and fifty thousand, men, women and children, quietly asleep and in their beds ten minutes ago, are suddenly buried alive or broken to fragments out of all human recognition by the earthquake, which is the angel of the Lord. And clear above all the horror, God has spoken, God has come near, and men see and know at such a moment, that awful as is the method, there is deep purpose in the power of calamity to make us hear the voice of the Almighty. What says the voice to us here to-day? It says, Learn sympathy with suffering all the world over. “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one toward another.” It tells us that the brotherhood of men is a reality, and we must realise it; and that if one part of humanity suffer, the whole body corporate, for whom Christ died, must feel for it and share its sufferings. It tells us more. It speaks of the need of men to live a little more loosely than most of us habituate ourselves to do to this life; that “here we have no abiding city, but seek one to come”; that though we eat and drink, and marry, and are given in marriage, and build up cities to dwell in, and lay land to land, our true citizenship is in heaven; that all our hopes, if they are only centred on the earth, are as unstable as sand; that all those things perish in the using; but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever. It bids us set our affection on things above, not on the earth, not n money and possession, but on the heavenly treasures—love, joy, peace. And it calls upon us to see behind the calamity some deep purpose of the Divine, and to understand the words of the inspired writer: “With my spirit within me will I seek Thee early; for when Thy judgments are in the earth the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.” (p. 22)

(Christian World Pulpit, 75 (13 January 1909), 20-22)

Hits: 4493

A plea for the extension of the benefits of the Geneva Convention to those relieving wounded horses on the battlefield.

Here long unhelped and helpless have I lain,
    In agony that quite forbids me swoon;
Thro’ the cold night’s intolerable pain,
    Thro’ thirst and torture of the burning noon.

Shot in the spine, I cannot move nor rise,
    Dumb, shattered jaws are filled with blood and sand,
And fettered by a girth that none unties,
    My poor swoll’n body feels the tightening band.

I have no God to pray to,—He, the man
    Who was to me as God, reeled back stone dead,
I fell when charging foremost in the van,
    My comrades past me like a whirlwind fled.

At early dawn a cock-crow from afar,   
    With momentary solace seemed to come;
For I remembered fields unplagued by war—
    Those pleasant pastures of my native home.

The cock-crow ceased, but voice to voice replied
    (Voices of unimaginable woe),
And here a brother raised his neck and cried,
    There pawed the pitiless earth in dying throe;

“I could not die.”  Ah, friends with tender heart,
    Think of the horse, that wounded and in fear,
Lies still undying in his long death smart,
    And only asks a ball behind the ear.

Shall not the Christ, Who came with Saviour hands
    To bid the travail of creation cease;
Send forth to fields of war His Red-Cross bands,
    And give the dying charger painless peace? 

(Ballads of the War, p. 184)

Hits: 4643

Was Nature ever crueller undone!
Yon bird, whose eyes were fashioned for the light,
The crystal chambers of whose world of sight
Were framed for close communion with the sun,
Sits in eclipse, and evermore will shun
Man, and the friends of his first eagle flight;
A king brought down unto a captive’s plight!
And here he frets, his feathers all awry,
His wings unplumbed, his talons grey with dust,
The golden beak enscaled with idle rust,
His heart unmindful of his home and sky;
One friend he has, in all this world beneath,
To break his bonds, and end his being,—Death!

(A Book of Bristol Sonnets, p. 83)

Hits: 4738

To All Whom It May Concern

Surely, beyond the nethermost pit of hell
    Some darker, deeper halls of doom await
    The rogues, who did for gain this deed of hate!
The slaves to Mammon’s lust who dared to sell
Death to the crews they catered for—so well!
    —So smilingly! then sent them to their fate
    Poisoned by garbage, while their horses ate
Mildew for hay, and sickened, starved, and fell

Oh, England! has the madness of the mart
    So demonised thy merchants? can our land
        Nurse such dark traitors, rear such serpent
            brood—
As stings unseen, numbs brotherhood at the heart,
    Slays honour, and unnerves the soldier’s hand
        By sense of treacherous vile ingratitude? 

(Ballads of the War, p. 27)

Hits: 4941