need.  They have a vague feeling of unworthiness, although no clear sense of sin.  Yet they also have an inarticulate belief or intuition that they have tried, however brokenly or unsuccessfully, to live up to such light as they had or to some standard of their own.  They feel that somehow, though they have often failed, at bottom they are not so very bad, and that God is very, very good.  Their vague feeling would probably find its most accurate expression in Faber’s hymn, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.”

They revere God from afar off and in one compartment of their being, but they have never opened their lives to Him.  They have a reverence for Him in the face of death, in the hour of need, and in the great crises of life.  Most of them like to sing the Christian hymns on Sunday evening and have thoughts of home and of loved ones that are sacred.  They do not feel that they have come into close personal relations with God, but neither do they consciously feel that they are out of relation with Him.  They do not think they are altogether right with Him, but neither do they feel in the bottom of their hearts that they are wholly wrong with Him.  The vast majority of them in the hour of death do not feel that they have either consciously accepted or rejected Him.  They have not loved darkness rather than light, nor have they wholly chosen the light and rejected the darkness.

It will depend upon the individual how he classifies these men.  Some will believe that the great love of the Good Shepherd, who laid down His life for the sheep, will somehow in the end not be thwarted in His seeking to save the lost.  Not only will men differ in their judgment, but it is exceedingly difficult to pass judgment upon an individual soldier.  He seems to be a different man under different circumstances.  In the temptations at the base camp, he would perhaps appear to be utterly irreligious and profane.  He can hardly be recognized as the same man as he prays in the hour of battle, or as he lies wounded, chastened, and sobered, in the hospital.  Which situation reveals the true man?

Before us as we write lies the photograph of a young sergeant.  Before the war he was an atheist, an illegitimate child, a member of the criminal class.  But in the trenches he found God.  Blown up by a mine, for sixteen days he lost the power of speech and of memory.  He returned from the front with a deep sense of God, but with no personal, vital relationship to Christ.  He eagerly welcomed the first real message that went straight to his heart, and the personal word of loving sympathy which led him to relate his deep experience of the trenches to the presence of the living Christ.  All this man needed was someone to interpret to him his own experience, and bring him into the relationship with God which his own heart craved and longed for.