Thine, O Lord, Is the Victory

We thank thee, O Lord, for the faith which overcometh the world. We thank thee for victory over life with its temptations, its failures, and its separations; that the dominant note of life is joy and its mightiest force is love and its last word is hope. We thank thee that in many a gray morning we have seen the stone rolled away from the heart sepulchres and an angel sitting on it; so that the sorrow and loss which seemed to have closed down upon us was not only rolled back but glorified, and what seemed an irreparable loss has become a guide or genius.

We thank thee for the victory over life. We thank thee, too, for the victory over death; that the tomb cannot hold our dead nor the grave enclose our beloved. We know not how thou dost bring them forth. We know not how thou canst lead these broken lives and severed loves of ours to the fulfillment they demand, but all we know of love in ourselves, all we-see of it in other human hearts, makes us confident that thou willest this fulfillment, and what thou willest thou canst.

Thine, O Lord, is the victory. We thank thee that in the light of Easter even death, that was the king of terrors, has become a hallowed thing, the answer to our prayer for life, more life and fuller. Help us to think of death not as the end of being but as its true beginning; not as a wall against which which we dash our heads but as a door opening to a larger room of the Father’s house, a room prepared for us and made home-like by those who have gone before.

Give us the sure faith that looks beyond the grave and trusts the larger hope. May we trust faith more than sight, for our eyes have deceived us and things are not what they seem. But faith is what thou hast writ into the heart of man.

We thank thee that when thy children die it is into a Father’s hand they commit their spirits, and that in thy hands they are safe. We thank thee for all our great and noble dead who have enriched the world evermore and being dead yet speak to us. We pray that the work they have passed on to us may be taken up and carried forward with a will, and may we walk from day to day as those who are engaged with affairs of eternity.

Strengthen thou, O Lord, the heart of those who weep by new-made graves and by graves that seem opened but yesterday though years have passed over them. Let none linger where they left their dead. May a voice speak to them in the garden and say: “Not here! Risen!

Alive for evermore!” Amen.