Is not this application of the great message of the Resurrection peculiarly opportune and welcome to us at the present moment? We are living through a time when the things that are seen are distressing and painful beyond anything in our experience--we might perhaps say, in the experience of Christian Europe. We seem to have gone back, on a sudden, to the days before the flood, when “the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence”; and we seem to need a re-issue of the Divine proclamation, after that world of violence had been swept away: “Surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man.” The curse of this violence and bloodshed is being inflicted, day by day, upon innumerable homes; and day by day we each apprehend it for our own families. In order to stay the curse, the blood of our own brothers and sons is being poured out like water, and the desolation of our homes is becoming more and more appalling. The blood-stained fields of Belgium, France and Poland, the engulfing of the innocent lives of women and children in the ocean--these are the things that are seen; and we need some supreme assurance--nay we need some Divine revelation--if we are to live through such experiences in faith, and hope, and in Christian charity. We mourn, day by day, the loss of precious lives, and we are appalled at the thought of the further sacrifices of such lives, young and mature, which we fear must be required; and so far as we look only on the things thus seen, our hearts might well fail us. Like St. Paul, as he describes himself in the context, “we are troubled on every side ... we are smitten down, though not destroyed.” Let us then observe the manner in which the Apostle meets this overwhelming oppression. He looks off from the things which are seen to the things which are not seen; “for,” he says, “the things which are seen are temporal (or temporary), but the things which are not seen are eternal.” Perhaps that is the first condition for our seeing things in their true light. It is very difficult for us not to have our vision almost wholly occupied by the visible things around us, which are also the things of which we are the most immediately sensible, and which naturally absorb our ordinary thoughts, feelings and energies. Yet, as a matter of fact, as St. Paul reminds us, they are a very small part indeed of the realities with which we are surrounded. “The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”