That is the condition under which the world now exists, and people who talk of abolishing war are like people standing on the crater of a great volcano, and trying to persuade themselves that there will be no more eruptions. As long as there is evil in the world and God’s righteousness in the world, you will have the moral reactions between the two bursting from time to time into some awful conflagration like the present. That is the revelation of the whole Bible, brought to its culmination in the Book of Revelation. But what was manifested to-day, and proclaimed by the Heavenly Hosts, was God’s love and mercy to the individual souls who have been the victims of these convulsions, and who might seem to have been treated as mere passing elements in the temporal scene. At the Birth of Christ, and by means of it, were manifested and assured God’s peace and good will to every soul of man who passes through this brief scene of struggle and, it may be, of death. It proclaims that for each individual soul death may be said to have been in effect abolished, that for every one of them, according to the eternal purpose of God, “life and immortality” have been prepared and assured; and that the struggles and sufferings of this mortal life, terrible as they may be, are not worthy to be compared with the glory that was designed, before the world began, for those who do the will of God. This is the blessed revelation of Christmas, and it is our privilege to fix our eyes and our hearts upon it, amid the sorrows and troubles of the moment; and in proportion as we do so, we shall respond with our whole hearts and souls to the exhortation of the same Apostle. “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” THE THINGS SEEN AND THE THINGS NOT SEEN. PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1915. “_For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal._”--2 Cor. iv. 16.