The Friend, Vol 92 A Religious and Literary Journal Fifth Day, Seventh Month 4, 1918 Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Friend, Vol. 92: A Religious and Literary Journal; Fifth Day, Seventh Month 4, 1918

The Clerk remarked that when we held our first war Yearly Meeting in 1915 we should have been aghast had anyone ventured to say that in 1918 we should still gather under the same dark shadow. But the long drawn agony continued, and there seemed hardly a break in the dark clouds. We knew not what lay before us. The dread sometimes came over us, a sense certainly of weariness, but perhaps also a sense almost of despair, and a wonder whether, after all, what we were striving to do was not more or less in vain. He had remembered the words of the Master, speaking of a period of great tribulation, He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved, and the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with patience the race that 18 set before us, looking unto Jesus We needed to-day especially this grace of endurance, not a mere holding on and bearing up as best we might, but a holding on with faith and hope, and love, looking beyond the present, and seeing the future victory even though it might be very far removed from us. And if, in our hearts, we must say, Who is sufficient for these things? Can we rise to such a spirit as this? Might we remember two great facts of our faith: (1) that our great Leader was described to us in the Old Testament as One who shall not fail nor be discouraged, till He have set judgment in the earth; and the isles shall wait for His law. And (2) that in the New Testa ment we read that He, when He had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; from henceforth expecting till His enemies be made His footstool. Undismayed, untroubled, ex cept by the trouble of sorrow and of rebellion, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, our Master, patiently waits for the consummation which He knows to be sure and certain; and at the right hand of God He is expectant. Pi nally, our weapons of warfare were not carnal. History told us something of the power of spiritual forces. What a movement was that represented by the Crusades! Think of the enthusiasm evoked, until the whole of Europe was full of what we described to-day as fanaticism, the desire to rescue the Holy City from the domination of the infidel. Think also of the Renaissance, and, later on, of the work of George Fox To day likewise our strength lay in spiritual power and energy, in hope, in faith, in love, the greatest of the three. Striving to wield these great spiritual forces let us go forward unwearied, undismayed and undeterred; not ours to rescue a material Jerusalem from the domination of the irifidel, so called, but to extend the outposts of the Kingdom of our Master amongst men, to bring in the New Jerusalem here and now in the hearts of indi viduals and in the lives of nations.

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