Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 225, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1917 — SELF-SACRIFICE [ARTICLE]

SELF-SACRIFICE

Call of the Present Is for a Giving of Self to the Uttermost, Even as Did Christ. We, who in the providence of God, are not called to the battle line, cannot sit idly by while our young men are preparing themselves to risk everything that life seemed to have W store for them. Surely the cross of Christ must mean little to men who can live selfishly in such a crisis! Our sons and brothers in camp and on battlefield must feel our strength behind them! If they show their manhood not by high thinking only, but by high action, surely by plain living and heroic giving, we can let them know that the race is worth the great sacrifice we are asking of them. St. Paul bade men labor, not that we may live in comfort, but “that we may have to give." Not only in the innumerable small ways in which we waste so much, not only in the easy luxury in which we delight to live, not only in the costly apparel of which we are so proud, but in the ordinary comforts and conveniences of life must tve learn the meaning of sacrifice. If we are to feed and equip our young men for battle, if we are to supply the faminestricken people of the world, above all if we are to get out of this war some return for the sacrifice of our sons, we must learn ourselves and thus teach others that “man’s life doth not consist in the abundance of the things that he possesseth,” that “man doth not live by bread alone,” we must learn ourselves and must practically teach others that idealism and not materialism is the wealth and the glory of our race. We ought to have learned this long ago, for the basis of our religion is the fact that the Eternal Son, who “thought it not robbery to be equal with God,” taking upon himself human nature, lived among men a life of strenuousi labor and self-denial. We ought to have learned kneeling before the altar, where Christ’s great sacrifice is a mystery offered morning by morning to the Eternal Father, that our chief value consists in giving even to the uffenaost heroes ihefi should be who cling for salvation to the cross of Christ! But we have not learned it., The Eternal Father who spared not his only begotten Son must teach it to us. I wonder if the fundamental meaning of this war is that “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins ’"—From Address by Bishop of Fond du Lac.