Consequently, this promise of Christ obliges us to Christen, as it were, or to Christianize, the work of our lives, and every duty or profession in which we are engaged. This is a principle which has innumerable applications; and I will only apply it this morning to one aspect of the profession of a soldier. Men had great ideals before Christ came. Few things are nobler, in the profession of arms, than the examples of self-sacrifice, of bravery, of generosity, exhibited by the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans, and, in our own days, by the Japanese. But the history of the Christian world has shown that it is possible to raise those ideals, if not to a higher, yet to a more gracious, height by adding a Christian touch or colour to them. The knighthood of the Middle Ages, for instance, exhibited the highest qualities of a manly soldiery, elevated, purified, and illuminated by the supreme graces of gentleness, of mercy, of tenderness for the weak, of that impulse to save the suffering and the crushed, which is embodied in our Lord’s character as “the Saviour.” The knight of the Middle Ages was essentially the saviour of the weak, the champion of women, bound by oath to uphold all right and righteousness, to avenge wrong, to maintain, in the midst of his stern duties, the mercies and graces of Christian feeling. One of them, as he stood at the bier of the most famous knight of his day, is described in the old romance as exclaiming: _And now, I daresay, that Sir Lancelot, there thou liest: thou wert never matched of none earthly knight’s hands; and thou wert the courtliest knight that ever bare shield; and thou wert the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou wert the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou wert the kindest man that ever stroke with sword; and thou wert the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou wert the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest_. Can we fail to be sensible that, even in such an imperfect example, something of the grace of Christian tenderness has been shed over the character--an essence of Christian feeling, which would make impossible in such a soldier any brutal violence or wilful injustice? It was, in fact, the conscious example of Christ which controlled them. They all, more or less, resembled the knight of our own noble poet Spenser: For on his breast a bloody cross he bore, The dear remembrance of his dying Lord: For Whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead, as living ever, Him adored; Upon his shield the like was also scored, For sovran hope which in his help he had. That is the true badge not only of Christian service to the wounded, but of Christian warfare itself.