A child grew in your household, dearly loved and answering your love.  You saw that soul unfold, learning to know the evil from the good, learning to accept duty and to resist selfishness, learning to be brave and true and kind, learning to give you day by day a deeper and a richer sympathy, learning to love God and to pray and to be good.  And then perhaps you saw that young heart being perfected under the higher and holier discipline of suffering, bearing pain patiently, facing trouble and danger like a hero, not shrinking even from the presence of death, but trusting all to your love and to God’s, and taking just what came from day to day, from hour to hour.  And then suddenly the light went out in the shining eyes.  The brave heart stopped.  The soul was gone.  Lost, perished, blotted out forever in the darkness of death?  Ah, no; you know better than that.  That clear, dawning intelligence, that deepening love, that childlike faith in God, that pure innocence of soul, did not come from the dust.  How could they return thither?  The music ceases because the instrument is broken.  But the player is not dead.  He is learning a better music.  He is finding a more perfect instrument.  It is impossible that he should be holden of death.  God wastes nothing so precious.

             “What is excellent
    As God lives is permanent. 
    Hearts are dust; hearts’ loves remain. 
    Hearts’ love will meet thee again.”

But I am sure that we must go further than this in order to understand the full strength and comfort of the text.  The assertion of the impotence of death to end all is based upon something deeper than the prophecy of immortality in the human heart.  It has a stronger foundation than the outreachings of human knowledge and moral effort towards a higher state in which completion may be attained.  It has a more secure ground to rest upon than the deathless affection with which our love clings to its object The impotence of death is revealed to us in the spiritual perfection of Christ.

Here then, in the “power of an endless life,” I find the corner-stone of peace on earth among men of good-will Take this mortal life as a thing of seventy years, more or less, to which death puts a final period, and you have nothing but confusion, chance and futility,—­nothing safe, nothing realized, nothing completed.  Evil often triumphs.  Virtue often is defeated.

                       “The good die young,
    And we whose hearts are dry as summer dust
    Burn to the socket.”

But take death, as Christ teaches us, not as a full stop, but as only a comma in the story of an endless life, and then the whole aspect of our existence is changed.  That which is material, base, evil, drops down.  That which is spiritual, noble, good, rises to lead us on.

The conviction of immortality, the forward-looking faith in a life beyond the grave, the spirit of Easter, is essential to peace on earth for three reasons.