Eternal as compared with temporary! Do we often realize sufficiently what that comparison means? What is the longest life here? Call it one hundred years, and what is that compared with life eternal, everlasting, never ending? That is the ultimate reality with which we are all concerned. Our hearts are filled, first, with the thoughts of youth, then with those of manhood, then with those of old age; but there lies before us, before each one of us, an interminable existence, in which we are destined to experience profounder happiness, or profounder unhappiness, than any we have experienced here. All that has exercised our thoughts and feelings here will indeed leave its mark upon us, but it will all pass away; it is essentially temporal, and there lies before us an unending existence for weal or woe. So far, therefore, as any individual life is concerned, so far as those young lives are concerned, whose premature loss is so bitter to their nearest and dearest, and seems so sad to all of us, it is well we should clearly realize that to the individual life itself, a few years more or less--nay, half a life-time more or less--is practically insignificant. Are there fifty, or forty, or thirty years behind it? There is all eternity in front of it. There is a fulness of life and joy, and even glory, before it, which can never end. To one who has lived, and who dies, in the true faith and love of Christ, all the gracious and glorious promises of our Lord and His Apostles are fully assured; and even if, in any particular case, we may not have the full evidence of that entire Christian devotion, we may surely apply to every life which is willingly sacrificed at the call of duty, for a righteous cause, and with a generous self-surrender, the assurance of St. Paul, that God will render “to every man according to his deeds. To them who by patience in well-doing seek for glory, honour, and immortality, eternal life”; or, as he says again, “Glory, honour, and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.” Or, as we may surely paraphrase it, to the Christian first, and also to every human soul. If, in fact, our vision were merely confined to this world, and we did but catch a doubtful glimpse of what is beyond it, the spectacle of the sacrifice of human life, and particularly of young human life in a war like this, would be scarcely endurable. But let us have, not merely that “gleam beyond it,” of which the Christian poet speaks, but that clear vision beyond it, of an eternal life of which our Saviour assures us, and of “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost,” in the peace of which that eternal life will be spent, and we may be able to feel, like St. Paul, that the affliction of the moment is light, in comparison with the eternal abundance of glory which awaits the soul in the future.