We often hear in these days complaints of Christian Churches and Christian people because they do not fling themselves, with sufficient energy to please the censors, into movements which are intended to bring about happier relations in society.  The longest way round is sometimes the shortest way home.  It does not belong to all of us Christians, and I doubt whether it belongs to the Christian Church as such at all, to fling itself into the movements to which I have referred.  But if a man go and carry to men the great message of a reconciled and a reconciling God manifest in Jesus Christ, and bringing peace between men and God, he will have done more to sweeten society and put an end to hostility than I think he will be likely to do by any other method.  Christian men and women, whatever else you and I are here for, we are here mainly that we may preach, by lip and life, the great message that in Christ is our peace, and that God ‘was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.’

We are not to leave out, of course, that which is so often taken as being the sole meaning of the great word of my text.  There is much that we are all bound to do to carry the tranquillising and soothing influences of Gospel principles and of Christ’s example into the littlenesses of daily life.  Any fool can stick a lucifer match into a haystack and make a blaze.  It is easy to promote strife.  There is a malicious love of it in us all; and ill-natured gossip has a great deal to do in bringing it about.  But it takes something more to put the fire out than it did to light it, and there is no nobler office for Christians than to seek to damp down all these devil’s flames of envy and jealousy and mutual animosity.  We have to do it, first, by making very sure that we do not answer scorn with scorn, gibes with gibes, hate with hate, but ‘seek to overcome evil with good.’  It takes two to make a quarrel, and your most hostile antagonist cannot break the peace unless you help him.  If you are resolved to keep it, kept it will be.

May I say another word?  I think that our text, though it goes a good deal deeper, does also very plainly tell us Christian folk what is our duty in relation to literal warfare.  There is no need for me to discuss here the question as to whether actual fighting with armies and swords is ever legitimate or not.  It is a curious kind of Christian duty certainly, if it ever gets to be one.  And when one thinks of the militarism that is crushing Europe and driving her ignorant classes to wild schemes of revolution; and when one thinks of the hell of battlefields, of the miseries of the wounded, of mourning widows, of ruined peaceful peasants, of the devil’s passions that war sets loose, some of us find it extremely hard to believe that all that is ever in accordance with the mind of Christ.  But whether you agree with me in that or no, surely my text points to the duty of the Christian Church to take up a very much more decisive position in reference to the military