the Lord, Who suffered and died upon the Cross, and of those Apostles, whom He commissioned to bring His message to the world. This Heaven, of the present and the future, has been constituted by them the great reality, the greatest of all realities, the supreme reality, of our lives, here and hereafter; and in proportion as we look at everything here in the light of it, the sorrows and sacrifices of this life are reduced to comparatively small proportions, and the hope and the blessings of the eternal life become the great Heaven, the glorious vault of God’s light and love by which we are surrounded. It is thus that Easter Day brings home to us a message which satisfies the deepest cravings and necessities of life, and affords a practical solution of the difficulties which, without such a revelation, are involved in the miseries of war. War itself, indeed, points to some such solution, and compels men in practice to embrace it. It has been said that war is the greatest of educators, and there are various senses in which this is true. It educates, it exercises, it manifests, as nothing else does, some of the highest excellences of human nature: self-sacrifice, endurance, mutual devotion, faith and loyalty, and, in Tennyson’s pregnant phrase, “all that makes a man.” But perhaps its greatest educative influence consists in the fact that it compels men to act, without hesitation, on the instinct, which God has implanted in their hearts, that nothing in this world is of any importance in comparison with the maintenance and the assertion of righteousness, truth, justice, and mercy. The mass of a people may be living in comfort and luxury, with their minds and affections mainly engaged in the energies, the pleasures, and the interests of this life; but as soon as some great challenge is offered to those supreme principles of righteousness and mercy, on which the whole fabric of true human life depends, their hearts spring up with an instinct that everything they value in this world must be sacrificed in defence of those moral and spiritual causes. The moment the note is struck of a great war for righteousness, like the present, that moment men and women feel compelled, by their very nature, to “set their affection on the things above,” not on the things of this world; they realize, that to this world they must become practically dead, and live for those high moral and spiritual causes which are the supreme treasures of mankind, and that, in this sense at all events, their “life is hid with Christ in God.” If, as we may confidently say, we are warring for right and truth, and for the maintenance of the will of God among men, we may then apply even to the war itself, and all the national and individual sacrifices it entails, the thankful conviction of the Apostle that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” It is working out for our