Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 January 1917 — GOD’S HOLY PEACE [ARTICLE]

GOD’S HOLY PEACE

To Achieve It, Better and More Christian State of Life Must Be the Aim of All. I ' | “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.” —Matt. 5:9. A soldier’s epitaph. Do not these wonderful words of blessing ring in our ears as we scan anxiously, wistfully, day by day the list of the fallen on the battlefield. They, we, feel, fire the "true peacemakers in this terrible time, the men who give their all—who give themselves for the cause of peace. They also who make what is’ perhaps the greater sacrifice, who come back maimed or cripplod for life, yet lighthearted, with the happiness of men who have made the greatest surrender. Shall we think together for a few moments of God’s peace and how he giv.-s it? It may help us now, and hereafter when the war is over, and international and' domestic problems come pressing upon us with bewilder- ' ing insistence—help us to playthe part which each of us must play toward the achievement of a better and more Christian state of life. The peace which preceded this war, judged by bur standard, was a false peace. The mighty forces of human nature, of racial tendency, of national self-assertiveness - were there, but there was no complete harmony, - no real co-operation. Individuals, classes, groups, nations, were either en—gaged in a wild competition of- selfassertion and self-aggfahdlzement, or, in cowardice or cynical sloth, standing aside and-saying, “Let thingy taketheir course? 1 "Detr them fight limit:"-' Hence the growth of an unchristian spirit in commerce and industry, in social life, in politics, national and international.

To Obtain Peace Within. With the individual it is as with the community, for God has made each of us a bundle of mighty forces—forces which if left ungoverned may bring swift, disasteh even as- earthquake or hurricane bring death and destruction where they break forth. "Our passions, desires, all the natural movements and tendencies, of our body and spirit, must needs be corfhe'-. hand of God, if we are to have peace within. The co-operatfon of us all, and of all our best faculties at their best. God-given capacities given back, to God for his control, and all their energy put forth without self-assertion, in harmony with the movement of our fellows—such is and shall be the work of the peacemaker at-home. It is work that can only be effective if, first, we have made our own peace with God. The Beatitudes are our best study In wartime, and in every time, for they give us the portrait of our Master, sketched by his own hand. Here are meekness and mercy, the antidote to self-assertion and brutal truculence; but between the two—at the heart of them as it were?—a flaming passion for righteousness, such as winged the words of shriveling denunciation pronounced against the Pharisees, and nerved the arm that lashed the traffickers out of the temple courts. Gifts Man Must Cultivate. All these gifts we must covet earnestlyifwe would be true peacemakers, for it is the growth-of Christ 4n us, and’ that alone that can make us worthy to be called “Sons of God?’ : —And so we~eomezto him in the holy sacrament of fellowship and peace, craving the gifts that shall most effectually make his likeness to grow In us. Much we have learned anew of this holy sacrament la these troublous times. We have learned to value it more than ever before as a meeting-place of the great—concourse of the faithful, where we can actualize by our communion with him our privilege of communion with all who are in him. Bere we, make gbod our fellowshliiin-tim“Coramunion oF Saints,” living and departed? At God’s altar we feel ourselves most near to those, our lovedones. —atn* heroes, whose bodily presence is rest JM f or a while. learned to value it more as the great foctis of Christian intercession, where in the very presence of our great High Priest and Intercessor we can lay before the Almighty Father the needs of our loved ones in peril.