Throughout the country there are people mourning their loved ones, parents, sons and daughters killed fighting or helping behind the scenes; even babes in arms, children on the high seas, sent away for safety, have met a cruel death. In the streets, once so familiar, are unsightly ruins, houses crumbling, churches, convents, public buildings, the houses of the very poorest, all overwhelmed by the common wanton destruction wrought by an unseen hand. How trite and unconvincing seem our condolences with the afflicted! We hardly know what to say, our tongues stammer and falter, as indeed must always be the case when speaking of the mysteries of faith. For death is a mystery, though an inevitable fact: ‘Who is the man that shall not see death, that shall deliver his soul from the underworld?’ (Ps. lxxxviii, 49). The Saints of God made themselves familiar with the thought of death and the next world, and we may well turn for guidance to one who had lived with such thoughts always before him, to one who had seen Death with his scythe mowing down men, women and children, now by the sword, now by pestilence, now by the creeping onslaught of old age, to one who himself died amid the destruction of all he had loved, the overthrow of all he had so laboriously built up, to St. Augustine of Hippo.

Jesus told us that the night cometh when no man can work. He, the dayspring from on high who came to give light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, who was proclaimed as the light come to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of his people, told us—what?—that the night cometh. Others had told us before of this night. Nox est perpetua una dormienda, ‘ there is one everlasting night in which we must sleep,’ but it was not the same message. Catullus knew not the dayspring from on high, nor of the world where there is no sun, for the Lamb is the light thereof. He knew only of the earthly day with its changeable sun in a cloudy heaven. In his soul there was only the pale light of reason amid the clouds of passion. All that he saw would be swallowed up in that one everlasting night of death, where there would be no loneliness and no fellowship, for there would be nothing. Our last night will not be like that; it will be followed by a day and ‘the Lamb is the light thereof.’ It will not be a night of annihilation, an end of all things, but a night of refreshment, of preparation, of vigil, a night, though, most certainly, dark and when no man can worrk. It will, too, be a night of suffering.

The Communion of Saints is an article of faith recalled daily in the Creed, and its acceptance is implied in most common acts of religion, prayers to the saints in Heaven, prayers for the souls in Purgatory, prayers for one another. These practical and frequent applications of this article of faith, however, seldom seem to rouse curiosity as to the implication of the belief itself. Yet its importance in the ordinary things of Christian life gives meaning, for instance, to the feast of All Saints. The latter is more than a makeweight feast for all the saints who cannot otherwise be fitted into the calendar. It is, in a sense, our own feast; it is a reminder of the capabilities for grace which we all possess; it is a counsel to see more profound possibilities in the familiar sides of our daily life.

The principle of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints is enunciated in the Catechism of the Council of Trent: ‘Every pious and holy action done by one belongs and is profitable to all through charity which seeketh not her own.’

Even in war-time men cannot think only of what they are doing here and now. Their desire goes beyond the immediate job; and when their outer world falls to bits they turn to God, if they believe in Him and seek Him, or to the Future that is always going to be so much better than the past, or to their own souls. Belief that the human soul is somehow, vaguely, ‘divine’ is intensified by the horrors that surround it and to which it seems a stranger even while it directs them. The sense of the strangeness of man’s soul in this world, of its unconformity to the outer madness, causes wonder; and wonder has traditionally found expression, in England, in the individual voice of poets. Yet as a citizen and in public the poet is expected not merely to draw poetry from the situation, but to relate it back to the situation. He must be practical, he must provide propaganda or, in the -widest sense of the word, amusement. If Shakespeare is ever played nowadays, he is expected, officially at least, either to help people to forget the War completely or to make them remember it all the more intensely. Teach us to forget ourselves for a night. Teach us to remember ourselves to-night so that to-morrow we may fight like Englishmen.