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Neville Stuart Talbot
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Title: Thoughts on religion at the front
Author: Neville Stuart Talbot
Release Date: October 1, 2006 [EBook #19413]
Language: English
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THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
AT THE FRONT
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THOUGHTS ON
RELIGION AT THE
FRONT
BY
THE REV. NEVILLE S. TALBOT
ASSISTANT CHAPLAIN-GENERAL
LATE RIFLE BRIGADE
FORMERLY FELLOW AND CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL
AUTHOR OF 'THE MIND OF THE DISCIPLES'
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1917
COPYRIGHT
_First Edition January 1917
Reprinted March, April and November 1917_
PREFACE
I send out this little and fragmentary book with the consciousness that it
calls for apology. I have had to write it hastily during a short period of
leave. Yet it touches upon great subjects which deserve the reverence of
leisurely writing. Ought I not, then, to have waited for the leisure of
days after the war? I think not. Such days may never come. And, in any
case, _now_ is the time for the Church to think intently about the war and
its issues, and to learn from them. The Church is far more than a
department of 'the services,' the resources of which it is convenient to
mobilise as so much more munition of war. She is the perpetual protagonist
in the world of the Kingdom of God. War for her, if for nobody else,
should be an apocalypse, that is, a vision of realities for which at all
times she is bound to fight, of which, nevertheless, she is apt to lose
sight during the engrossments of peace. It is as lit up by the cruel light
of war's conflagrations that the things concerning the Kingdom must be
seized anew. If anybody has thoughts which he feels he must share with
others, he should not postpone doing so. He should communicate his
thoughts to others in order that he may learn from their comments and
criticism. I can claim, whilst asking pardon for whatever may offend in
them, that the thoughts represented by the following pages have not been
come by hastily, but have been growing in my mind during the long months
at the front since the beginning of the war. They have, so to say, been
hammered out as metal upon the anvil of war.
They are thoughts about religion. Nothing is so important as religion;
nothing is more potent than true ideas in religion. Deep fountains of real
religion--of simple and unself-prizing faith--have been unsealed by the
convulsion of war. Yet this religion is weak in ideas, and some of the
ideas with which it is bound up are wrong ideas. Men of our race are very
sure that it matters more what a man is than what he thinks. British
religion is deep and rich, but it is, characteristically, deeper and
richer in what it is than in what it knows itself to be. It sorely needs
a mind of strong and compelling conviction. If these pages were to help
ever so few readers towards being possessed anew of the truth of the
Gospel of God in Christ, their appearance would be justified.
I have written, perhaps, as one who dreads saying 'Peace, where there is
no peace.' I would rather err on the side of emphasising criticism and
difficulty than the other way. There is, indeed, little room for
complacency in a Christian, still less in an English Churchman, at the
front. Yet in 'padres' hope and expectation should predominate, and these
as based less upon results achieved than upon the mutual understanding,
respect, and indeed affection which increasingly unite them to the men
whom they would serve. And in them, too, if they are 'C. of E.,' there
should be growing, along with an unevasive discontent, a sanguine loyalty
to their mother Church. For all that she now means so little to so many
she will yet win a more than nominal allegiance from many of her wandering
children. For there is in her, beneath the surface of her sluggish
confusion, a living heart and candid mind, upon which is being written
afresh the good news in Christ. She is being vivified, as perhaps no other
part of Christendom, into readiness for the future.
N.S.T.
B.E.F., _November 1916._
'And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the
haughtiness of men shall be brought low: and the Lord alone
shall be exalted in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass
away. And men shall go into the caves of the rocks, and into
the holes of the earth, from before the terror of the Lord and
from the glory of His majesty, when He ariseth to shake
mightily the earth.'
* * * * *
'Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.'
I
I write this little book in order to help towards an answer to the
question, How is it with the Christian religion at the front? With the
flower of British manhood massed in the Army this and like questions are
bound to arise--How is it with the men? Where are they religiously? What
do they want? What will they need when they return? and so forth. There
never has been such an opportunity of taking a comparative view of British
Christianity and of framing answers to such questions. Perhaps those who
are working as chaplains at the front are especially challenged to attempt
these tasks. Their answer must not be loose or sentimental. There is a
danger of that. The emotions aroused by the war may encourage sentimental
verdicts. That may be the reason why a good many ideas which are current
at home about religion at the front, are a good distance removed from
reality.
II
I can only venture upon a verdict after first acknowledging that it is
inseparably bound up with my own shortcomings. Other men of a truer
devotion and love may well have grounds in a more effective ministry for
challenging and amplifying it.
Further, I have to ask that allowance be made for the fact that men like
myself, who have been working as 'C. of E.' chaplains, are not very well
qualified to speak about the religion of the men. There is something wrong
about the status of chaplains. They belong to what the author of _A
Student in Arms_ calls 'the super-world' of officers, which as such is
separate from the men. As a class we find it hard to penetrate the
surface of the men--that surface which we can almost see thrust out at us
like a shield, in the suddenly assumed rigidity of men as they salute us.
We are in an unchristian position, in the sense that we are in a position
which Christ would not have occupied. He, I am sure, would have been a
regimental stretcher-bearer, truly among and of the men. We are very
unlike Him. We are often liked, and are thought good fellows, but we are
unlike Him and miss what He could discover. Our--my--verdict is not
necessarily His.
Lastly, all verdicts must be rough in war. The nature of war and of its
effects often precludes any one from knowing exactly what is going on in
the souls of men. War is a muddy business, encasing the body in dirt, and
caking over the soul. It forms hard surfaces over the centres of
sensitiveness. It is benumbing to spiritual faculties. That is nature's
way of accommodation with war's environment. To feel things much would
literally be maddening. To brood about danger, to apprehend or anticipate
or philosophise may imperil 'nerve.' Rather the majority of men carry on,
callously, almost gaily, with mental and spiritual faculties if possible
inactive. I have met an entirely devout lover of music (since killed in
action) who told me that he didn't miss music out here because "he wasn't
carrying on with those faculties." I have seen a man of indubitable
Christian conviction come down from the cold clam of the trenches in
mid-winter and take up a religious book which ordinarily would have
excited him and say--"Ah! yes, there is all that." I could almost see the
surface which war had hardened over him. Beneath it in him and all the
rest, who knows what may not be in process, ready to emerge when they can
bathe in the solvent waters of peace?
Meanwhile they 'carry on.' That I think is especially congenial to the
British. There is no doubt that men of our race have an invincibility,
which is due in part to the fact that they do not think about or feel what
is really going on. To be practically and sensually occupied with the
passing moment is the way to carry on in war. It is characteristic of our
men. They are remarkably void of apprehension in every sense of the word.
Had the rank and file who fought the first battle of Ypres--when the whole
of the British forces came to be strung out from Ypres to La Bassée in one
line without a reserve--formed a general apprehension of and as to their
position, they would have been 'rattled' and broken. They were not
beaten, in part because they did not think of being beaten. "You can't,"
as they sing, "beat the boys of the bull-dog breed," but this
invincibility has not altogether the virtue of facts understood, faced,
and triumphed over. In short, British qualities and defects of qualities
are closely interwoven. But my point is, that this being so, any verdict
about what is going on in British souls during a war must be humble and
tentative and patient of qualification.
III
_On the whole_, I venture to say, there is not a great revival of the
Christian religion at the front. Yet I am eager to acclaim the wonderful
quality of spirit which men of our race display in this war, and to claim
it as Christian and God-inspired. Deep in their hearts is a great trust
and faith in God. It is an inarticulate faith expressed in deeds. The top
levels, as it were, of their consciousness, are much filled with grumbling
and foul language and physical occupations; but beneath lie deep spiritual
springs, whence issue their cheerfulness, stubbornness, patience,
generosity, humility, and willingness to suffer and to die. They declare
by what they are and do that there is a worth-whileness in effort and
sacrifice. Without saying so, they commit themselves to "the Everlasting
Arms."
The metaphor of human nature being hardened or caked over by war must be
modified so as to allow that war lays human nature bare. It is a grand
fibre or grain of British nature which the war has exposed. It is
inwrought with Christian excellences of humility, unselfishness,
fortitude, and all that makes a good comrade. It is precious stuff. Let
there be no talk hereafter of the decadence of the race. Let no one dare
to disparage the masses of our people; nor let any one, through class
ignorance or prejudice or fear, speak of them contemptuously. They are
priceless raw material. As I have hovered in seeming priestly impotence
over miracles of cheerful patience lying on stretchers in
dressing-stations, I have said--I have vowed to myself--"Here are men
worth doing anything for."
There is a great heart in the people. It is not a great mind. In officers
and men there is little intellectual grip upon what we are fighting for.
Every one nearly is without a saving touch of rhetoric. Ideas are under
suspicion. "Padre, what you say is just ideal, it's all in the air." But
the objectors stick it and die for the unformulated and unexpressed ideal.
They are far wiser and better than they know.
IV
I must modify, then, and say that on the whole there is not a great
articulate revival of the Christian religion at the front. But further I
must add that there is religion about, only, very often it is not the
Christian religion. Rather it is natural religion. It is the expression of
a craving for security. Literally it is a looking for salvation. It is a
very unnatural man who does not feel at any rate more inclined to pray
when danger abounds and anxiety presses, than at other times. Naturally,
then, chaplains find a readier response to their efforts right at the
front than farther back. Men come to a service before they go to the
trenches. Communicants increase before a fight. Chaplains are frequently
told of prayer being resorted to under this or that strain of this
terrific war. There is in short a general association of ideas about
religion and, as I have said, it may be called the association of a
craving for security.
I would say nothing disrespectful of it. I would not pretend for a moment
to be void of this very natural craving. I would recognise that
impressions made by strain and anxiety are often the means whereby God
brings men home to Himself. I thought it a hard saying of an ardent
salvationist lad, who told me of a transport sergeant's prayers one night
in a ditch by a shrapnelled roadside, and of the same sergeant's reversion
to apparent irreligion on return to safety. "I call it," said the boy,
"cowardice." But what I do say about it is, firstly, that religion thus
mainly associated with danger, is not the Christian religion, and
secondly, that many of the best men of all ranks have little to do with
it, or what little they do have is intermittent and rather shamefaced.
I leave the first statement for the moment. About the second I hazard the
belief that this has been more or less true of all soldiers in history.
Religion regarded _merely_ as a resort in trouble, as a possible source of
good luck, as a charm or insurance policy is as old as man; but I believe
many of the best soldiers up and down history have had little to do with
it, and the more sporting and soldierly the man, the less he has had to do
with it. After all, the soldier-man's code goes clean the other way. It is
ever insisting on non-calculating and self-regardless service, endurance,
and sacrifice. As such, it lies above the ordinary level of life, calling
out the heroic and honourable in men. But religion associated with anxiety
touches men at a level lower than the highest in them, it has the
morbidity of their weaker moments hanging about it, it wears badly, and,
above all, often it does not seem to work. I have had the case propounded
to me of "Bill who did pray," but yet had had "his head blowed off."
V
I recur, then, to my verdict that on the whole there is not a great
revival of the Christian religion at the front. Why is this?
First, war is war, and, what is more, this war is this war. I will not
attempt to paint the picture. Every one must realise by now that the main
concentration of all military effort is directed at creating in the
trenches an ever-intenser inferno of heavy shells. In a great army there
is every degree of risk to be run or immunity to be enjoyed; but at the
very front, where all is stripped and laid bare, modern warfare is at
times a furnace of horror. Its smoke darkens the heavens, thickening the
"clouds and darkness" round about God, and deepening His silence. Its
white heat scorches out human confidence in Him. He does not seem to
count. There are stars in the darkness of war--stars which are the
achievements of man's indomitable spirit. But God-ward there seems
sometimes to be great darkness.
Further, war, despite all the easy things said in its praise, is a great
iniquity. It is, as others have said, hell. As an environment to the soul
it is, for all the countervailing heroisms of men, a world of evil power
let loose.
And, again, war abounds in a number of trials--mostly associated with the
extremes of heat and cold and damp and fatigue--for which, as the phrase
goes, religion seems not to afford the slightest relief. It is a very
physical business, squeezing out or overlaying the spiritual in men,
though powerless wholly to extinguish it. War being what it is, the
absence of religious revival during its course is not surprising. I have
come to be very doubtful whether there is truth in the prevalent notion
that war as such and automatically makes men better.
Secondly, that element in religion which can survive the weather of war
must be a very hardy growth, something deeply engrained and
habitual--something rock-built. And that is just what is lacking among men
of our race. As an Anglican priest I reach here a glaring fact about the
English Church. The war reveals that there are few men in its loose
membership who are possessed by and instructed in its faith. Religion, as
taught by the Church of England, has a feeble grip on the masses. They
hold it in no familiar embrace. And if reasons are sought, they are
partly found in the want of cutting edge to her sober comprehensive
teaching, partly in the characteristics often theoretically so justifiable
but practically so awkward, of the Prayer Book. There is little in our
Church which corresponds to that elemental regimen or discipline which
possesses simple-minded Roman Catholics. The power of cultus, of
institutional and family religion, is largely absent.
To explain this brings me to a third reason why, under the stress of war,
English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The
Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the
literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective
manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute
dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague
and somewhat insensible way lost its hold on the common mind. It has not
the absolute and simple authority which in religion is a necessity for the
little-educated. Few of the general public have thought very much about
the matter, but all the more they are influenced by that which has
percolated through to them from the more learned, loosening what before
was firm and tight, confusing and complicating what before was starkly
plain. This has been brought home to me as I have sat at sing-songs and
have heard a coon-song sung entitled "The Preacher and the Bear." With
apologies to the easily-shocked I will quote. The hero of the song is a
coloured minister who, against his conscience, went out shooting on a
Sunday, and, after good sport, on returning home was met by a grizzly
bear. Taking refuge up a tree this was his prayer:
O Lord, who delivered Daniel from the lions' den,
Also Jonah from the tummy of the whale--and then
Three Hebrew chilluns from the fiery furnace,
As the good Book do declare--
O Lord, if you can't help me, don't help that grizzly bear!
Here is an epitome of a far-spreading incredulity about the Bible. It is
the higher criticism in its crudest popular form, and men are at the mercy
of it. I have known a mess of officers engage in argument about the Bible
with a sceptical Scots doctor, cleverer than they. As old-fashioned
believers in the Bible they had to admit to being thoroughly "strafed" in
the argument, yet they had no way out, such as an intelligent
understanding of the Bible affords. One at least of them maintained
stoutly that nevertheless he was going to stick to the old view, however
indefensible. Such men are not free intellectually to follow the
movements of religious revival. They are immobilised by the dead weight of
Biblical literalism.
Yet if the main verdict to which I have committed myself is to be
radically accounted for, it is necessary to reach deeper reasons than any
I have mentioned. I sympathise with those who have high hopes of the good
effects of Church and Prayer Book and Bible-teaching reforms. Yet such are
relatively superficial matters. The main reason for the comparative
absence of religious revival among men at the front is that we all have
been overtaken by the cataclysm of war in a condition of great poverty
towards God.
VI
War, when it breaks in on peace, reveals in a fierce light the condition
of men in peace. It would be ungrateful and disloyal not to acclaim the
main sound heart of our country which this war has revealed. It would be
treasonable to the great company of good men and true--not least out of
the school and university world most familiar to the writer--who have
risen to "the day" and have gladly given their all. Yet, after generous
allowance for that, a great poverty of allegiance to God has been laid
bare. Indirectly, in the answers made to the claims of duty, honour,
service, and self-sacrifice, He has been acknowledged, but of direct
devotion to Him as the one and pre-eminent reality there has been little.
After all, can it be denied that the war has found us devoted rather to
the idols of money, pleasure, and appetite than to God and His
righteousness? We have had to be aroused from a great sensual
preoccupation with worldly traffic. "As it was in the days of Noah," so in
a measure it has been to-day: "as we ate and drank, and bought and sold
and planted and builded, the flood has come upon us" and has all but swept
us away. At home, as the thinly-veiled wantonness of some of our weekly
illustrated papers reminds us in the field, it seems that a mass of
self-pleasing and luxurious folk cannot yet find an escape out of the
prison-house of Vanity Fair, though thousands bleed and die by their side.
In the field, the mind and manner of a gross peace-life is kept alive by
pictures of smirking nudities placarded in dug-outs and billets, and the
farther back from the front one travels, as the hot breath of war grows
more tepid, the more heavy grows the atmosphere of materialistic
indulgence. That _God minds_ is hardly thought of, for at home and abroad
we have been carried into war in a peace-condition of great heedlessness
of Him. And the strains and cost and dangers of war will not scare men out
of their forgetfulness. The heart of man is incorrigible by fear. God, if
He is little regarded in peace, is hard to come nigh to in war. If
religion in peace and prosperity has not been full of His praise--of joy
_in Him_, it is something to which adversity must drive men, and they
think it as such a little disreputable, and many of the best men, richly
gifted with manly excellences, tend to leave it on one side.
Yet "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." We can adopt the ringing
note of St. Paul's defiance. For the Christian religion does not spring
primarily out of human anxiety and need. It is not an expedient which may
be left on one side till the hour of need arises. That many men should
think thus of it shows that it has been widely forgotten, misunderstood,
or never known.
VII
The Christian religion is salvation because it starts from what God is.
Everything in it of human benefit and satisfaction is a bye-product
flowing from the fact that it gives to men a focus for their devotion and
attention not in themselves but in God. Its main motive is not self- but
God-regarding. It draws men out of the entanglement into which they fall
through temporising with their own needs, and constrains them to attend to
God's need--His need of them. For the Christian, God is not some shadowy
supreme Being at the back of the universe, or a name given to the sum of
things. God is the Person Who made, and loves, and therefore wants His
children. Hence Christian prayer primarily is grateful and loving
acknowledgment of what God is, and only secondarily the expression of
anxiety, or the "putting in" of this or that claim for what we want.
That is the conclusion which war experience drives home. The special
strain and pressure of war cannot elicit from the majority of men the
religion which is occupied with the saving of self. The spiritual law is
that we find our life by losing it, not by saving it. In a vague and
unexpressed way, as they show again and again by their cheerfulness and
unconcernedness, hosts of men in this war have laid hold on this law. They
have found a purpose to which to cleave, something to give themselves away
for. Only it is hardly acknowledged, but rather lies below the level of
mental apprehension and expression. It is the function of Christianity to
raise this unacknowledging trustfulness and self-giving out of dumb
subconsciousness, and to give to it speech, and to crown it with the glory
of fully human self-devotion. It is its part to declare that it is God
Whom they find in the offering of themselves, His love in which they can
lose themselves, His purpose to which they can cleave, His will to be
done--and that to give Him joy is the supreme end of man.
This is the religion which sustains in war, because possessed in peace.
And it is so little prevalent--that is, so little in any one's _conscious_
possession--in war just because God, and His love, and His desire have
been so little in men's thoughts in peace. Let peace return--let the
strain of war be lifted from a unit as it goes back into rest, or from an
individual as he goes on leave, and the life of indulgence, without an
object except self, threatens to repossess the soul. In the same way it is
peace rather than war, health rather than sickness, youth rather than age,
which really test the reality of our Christianity, when, without the shame
of being driven thereto by need, a man can rejoice in God, and with full
powers be made the instrument of His will.
VIII
There is then little conscious and articulate Christianity at the front,
and yet there are profoundly Christian characteristics in what men are and
do and endure, who have never known or do not understand or have forgotten
the Christian religion. What, then, is this strangely honoured and yet
neglected thing? Does it exist? Is it there for men were they to awake to
it?
This utterly searching war justifies the critical temper which passes
previous allegiances and acceptances under revision and judgment. I may be
forgiven, then, for saying that I do not think that Christianity as at
present expressed and presented to men in the Church (in the widest sense
of the word) is _prima facie_ that which can win and possess them. It
would be a big task and unsuited to the conditions under which I write to
argue this out. What needs discussion is how much of natural religion has
been absorbed into the accumulated deposit from the past which we call
traditional Christianity, with the effect of disguising and overlaying in
it those specifically Christian elements, which make Christianity not only
a salvation from sin or from hell, but from the morbid and even
contemptible in religion. Those elements can never be clearly abstracted
and used by themselves, for Christianity was not a thing rounded and
completed, and deposited upon the world _in vacuo_, but was as a seed
sown, which grows by drawing into itself the nourishment of soil and
atmosphere. There always must be elements of natural religion interfused
with the Christian religion, for though not evolved out of natural
religion, but rather coming to it as a deliverance, Christianity is the
crown and fulfilment and corroboration of the good and the true in natural
religion. It is not a question of clear separation and abstraction, but of
distinction, emphasis, and proportion. I believe that things not
characteristically Christian have acquired a disproportionate place in our
religion as handed down to us.
I suggest (but will not work it out here) that many of the hymns in use
are evidence of this, and that is why so often they do not ring true. I
also believe that an unhistorical use of the Bible has proved a distorting
influence. From early Christian days Scripture, which is a story of a
process and growth containing many stages and imperfections, has been
treated as something timeless and absolute. In particular, the partial
answers to the problem of suffering to which the Jews in their development
were led, have been made to bear weights heavier than they can sustain.
Some of the Psalms, for instance, over-emphasise the connection between
righteousness and immunity from misfortune. They can be used to justify a
calculating and self-saving religion which is below the level of Christ's
religion. A soldier, recently wounded on the Somme, handed to me at a
dressing-station a small copy of the 91st Psalm as his religious handbook.
Yet by itself the 91st Psalm, though a wonderful expression of trust in
God, promises a security to which our Lord, and others akin to Him in
spirit, have not put their seal. He did not ask--He resisted the
temptation to ask--that no evil should happen unto Him, nor that angels
should bear Him in their hands lest He should hurt His foot against a
stone. He would not have men set their face in the day of battle in the
assurance that, though a thousand should fall beside them and ten thousand
at their right hand, the same lot would not come nigh them.
I think, too, that Christianity fails to make its characteristic appeal
through the Church, owing to two prevalent "isms"--ecclesiasticism and
subjectivism--both of which may be said to be the being primarily occupied
in religion with something other than God. I doubt whether any
Church-party advantage can be scored by any one in this matter. Roughly
speaking, the weakness of Catholic Christianity is to get involved in the
little things of "mint and anise and cummin"; whilst the weakness of
Protestantism is to become absorbed in the luxuries of one's own religious
experiences. The upshot of either is the same, namely, to be very
religious, and yet to forget the living God. I remember being very much
startled by an eminently pious Anglo-Catholic undergraduate at Oxford
saying to me, "The fact is, I am not interested in God the Father." It is
unwise to argue from one instance, but I seem to see there a symptom of a
widespread and tragic estrangement of institutional Christianity from the
mind of Christ. But I doubt whether things are much better on the other
side of the ecclesiastical street, where so often the worship of God has
downgraded into sitting and listening to sentimental music on Pleasant
Sunday Afternoons. Single instances are misleading, but I can never
dismiss the belief that there is something radically wrong with the world
of religion of which the representative was a Chapel, in my old parish at
Leeds, that indulged in a "fruit-banquet" on Good Friday. Right through
organised Christianity of all kinds there is, I think, a great absence of
the real Christian thing.
IX
But this brings round again the question, "What is this Christian thing?"
What are the characteristic and specific elements which, though they
cannot be nakedly abstracted from other elements, yet have to be kept
salient amid everything else? What is the Christianity which is generally
not in the conscious possession of men at the front, and yet receives the
seal of their glorious excellences? What is the Christianity which lies
hidden by traditional disguise and contemporary practice? Where is it to
be found?
X
At any rate, in the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. We are blessed by the
privilege, given to us by the work of realistic historians, of going to
Him as our real Brother. We can study the religion of this Man. It was
rooted first and last in one dominant reality--the Father and His will.
From the first sight given to us of Him as a boy and onwards He was rich
in one thing--He was rich towards God. He looked at the world without
insensibility to its pain, without evasion of its evil--rather with
uniquely sensitive insight into both--as God's world and the scene of
God's sovereign activity. And He expected others to share His view. He
was repeatedly astonished to find those around Him heedless of the air
which He drew in with open mouth, blind to what He saw, deaf to what He
heard, unelated by His joy. He was surprised to find them strangely and
otherwise absorbed, with hearts elsewhere centred than in God. He expected
to find them united to God in a loving loyalty. He found them in a
spiritual adultery.
This unshared absorption of Jesus was not the fruit of adversity nor a
resort in disappointment. He was not driven to it by anxiety. It came
first for Him in peace, in full health, and youth and powers. His was a
house which was built in fine weather upon a rock, so that when the storms
of adversity beat on it, it stood firm. His religion stood the severest
test, namely, the quiet of normal and uneventful days. It was ready for
the strain of a campaign. He emerged out of the peace of Nazareth
prepared for enterprise. For the Father to Him was not only the object of
immobile worship and delight--not only a Name to be hallowed, but was He
Who called Him out to a venture for His kingdom and the doing of His will.
That was how Jesus came among men. He came calling men to a great
adventure, to non-calculating and self-regardless co-operation with the
active energy and will of the Father. How much He knew beforehand of
whither that will would lead Him can never be known. To suppose that He
knew all and saw the end in the beginning and had no steps in the dark to
take, would be to deny to Him the essential element of human faith and
trust, which is that it has to step out beyond the light of knowledge into
the darkness of uncertainty. On the other hand, to suppose that He knew
nothing, is to deny to Him that humanly heroic resolution with which He
set His face to tread the path which led Him to suffering. In our
ignorance let us grip this certainty, that for Him the one sufficient
thing was that the Father knew all things--the times and the seasons, the
cup to be drunk, the will to be done and the final outcome. That was
enough for Him and must be enough for us.
This religion of Jesus then is that to which all can turn, as their
hearts are full beyond expression with proud and thankful sorrow for the
great company of those who have trustfully given themselves to death for
others. Jesus is the Word, that is, the full and crowning expression of
that which is hardly articulate in others. His open-eyed self-consecration
to do the will of the Father seals and ratifies their confused yet
steadfast devotion. He is first among many brethren, giving full
utterance to their dumb trustfulness. In a world of mixed and partial
motives He is the absolute and unmitigated lover of God--loving with all
His mind and soul and strength, freely hazarding all upon the Father.
XI
Is not that enough? This simple element--this religion of Jesus--is it not
the one thing needful, possessed of which men may slough off all else in
the traditional deposits of Christianity? Yes, would certainly be the
answer if the men of His day had in fact been so possessed, and if men
were so possessed to-day. What was actual in Him was, is, in fact,
unrealised in them. He did find, of old, fellow-adventurers to share His
enterprise. But they could not share it to the end. He could love God
wholly, they only partially. He had to leave them, and they Him; He to do
the will of the Father, they to fail to do it. He alone could not only
announce but fulfil the first and great commandment; they in the end could
only be defied and broken by it.
So it was proved. And it is a result which any honest man can verify for
himself. As I have tried to show elsewhere,[1] the most rigorously human
and non-miraculous view of Jesus and the Gospels leads to this point, to
what may be called the porch where Peter wept, where the silence of God
broods over the tragedy of human failure.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The Mind of the Disciples_ (Macmillan).
XII
"But the third day He rose again." Peter was not left in the porch, nor
are we. His broken hope was remade by the One fully trusted in by Jesus
only--by the "God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ."[2]
The Christian thing which we look for is the Good News of _God_ in Christ.
It is not only the religion _of_ Jesus our Brother, but religion _in_
Jesus, in Him revealing God to men. It is not only His human richness
towards God, but in Him the richness of God towards men. It is the Cross
not only as the climax of free loving self-offering to the Father, but as
itself the laying bare of the Father's heart--it is _God_ reconciling the
world unto Himself.
It is this--the revelation of God in Christ--of which the experience of
the war shows we are above all else in the world in need. God, not merely
assented to as a mysterious "One above," at the back of things, but God,
known and delighted in, in terms of Jesus Christ. It is one great light
which we need to walk in--the light of the knowledge of what God is, as it
shines upon the face of Jesus Christ. The specific Christian thing that
makes Christianity salvation is not--as so many men in the army
think--just goodness nor negative and kill-joy propriety, but the fact
that _in the ardent, venturesome, and self-regardless sacrifice of Jesus,
we see the Love of God Himself coming out to win the souls of men_.
Everything else follows from that, and comes second to it as first--all
that follows from God's love being holy, and from men being unholy, all
that is meant by Christian experience, all that is involved in the
activities of prayer and service. Men have to begin from, and ever keep
rallying round, the truth of what God is as made known in Christ--treating
the truth as no matter of course, but as the disclosure which in this
strange world seems nearly too good to be true.
For there is no reconciliation between the facts of the world and the
Absolute of philosophy or the highly attributed Supreme Being of natural
religion. One thing alone can meet the passion of men--whether imposed
upon them or self-inflicted--it is the passion of God in Christ whereby
His Love works out its victory. That alone can harness to itself the
vitality and heroism of men, which else will riot away in waste or flag
in disillusion. That alone can be the constraining object of their joy and
praise, and the satisfaction of their adventurous devotion.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] 1 Peter i. 3.
XIII
There has been in this war a wonderful display of the heroism of men. But
their thoughts about God and religion are for the most part at a level
below the highest in themselves. They have come to themselves in giving
themselves away. But they think that religion is mostly concerned with
self-saving. They tend to recognise most easily the signs of God's favour
in this or that instance of safety or escape. This means that they do not
think of God in terms of Christ, but that they think of Him as outside the
trouble and pain and cost of life, and in the immunity of heaven. They do
not think of Him as involved in the risks and agonies of the world.
Though they do not formulate it to themselves, the glories of human nature
go beyond anything they know of the divine. For them God is less wonderful
than man. A fine soldier protested to me lately about the service which
was read at the funeral of a very brave officer, "Why say more than 'here
is a very gallant soldier'?" as though there were nothing in the Author of
our being akin to the gallantry in man. Not that such a man would deny the
idea, but that he and the rest are not possessed by joy in its truth. Men
of our race do not deny greatly, but then neither do they joyfully assert.
They have not received the good news of God in Christ.
XIV
We all need to be so possessed before peace comes back. For peace, as I
have said, is the real test of our religion, not war. We have been plunged
into war, rejoicing little in God. We have got to put Him and His will and
desire first before peace returns. Or else the thought of Him will sink
out of our attention, and we shall return to the getting of gain and to
self-service in a mood of perpetual postponement. God will come last
again. He did so in the minds of soldiers at the beginning of the war.
Often they looked upon chaplains as no more than preliminary undertakers.
At the beginning of the war, officers in my old regiment, in the
friendliest way, asked me what there was to do as a chaplain except burial
duties. Clearly they thought of _life_ as something apart from God.
What is needed is a new joy in God as Love and Purpose, here and now.
Need, whether the pressure of sickness or danger or anxiety or age or
guilt, will often operate in turning the heart God-ward. The sense of
being thrown in entire dependence upon God can be the God-given
turning-point in a man's life and an end to his godlessness. But need will
never provide the lasting religious motive which sets the chord of what is
noblest in men vibrating within them. The peculiar glory of the Christian
religion is that it provides that motive--it is the motive of God's need.
He wants us, for He loves us. He is love.
I have found myself at the front pressed to ask men why they should have
to do with religion. Is it because they are on active service and exposed
to danger and liable to death? Is that to be the constraining motive? And,
in particular, why pray? Is it to express their natural sense of need,
their desire for security and support? Is that to be the main impulse? I
try to answer these questions by asking them another question: 'Why do
they write home?' What keeps them at it in the damp dug-outs with the
indelible pencil running smudgily over the paper? Why do some men write
every day? Is it for what they can get--the cakes, the fags? Does the
constraining motive lie in their own need? It does not. It lies in the joy
which letters bring to loving hearts at home. Likewise there is joy in
Heaven when one forgetful wayward son turns in heart thither homewards.
For God loves us and therefore wants us and desires to use us. It is what
He is which is the saving motive of our religion. Every other motive,
however natural, is tainted with morbidity, and can never long possess the
eager hearts of men nor be their glory in the full tide of life. But in
God they can glory as they see what He is, at work with purposes of holy
love in the venture of creation; and this they can see in Christ, living,
suffering, dying, rising, and alive for evermore; or else Christianity is
nothing in the world. That is the pure metal of our glorious religion,
which the fierce fires of war must refine out of its traditional alloy.
That is the great golden secret uttered in Christ--God, all-suffering and
all-faithful love, calling out into active alliance the like qualities in
His children for the accomplishment of His will on earth as in heaven.
XV
We need in peace the free and conscious realisation of that of which men
are perforce, and dumbly, aware in war. It is that there is something
going on in the world which demands primary allegiance, and the putting
second of every self-interest. At the front men hardly know what it is.
They are suspicious of rhetoric and unreality in talk about liberty and
international equity, and right against might. They only know--a wonderful
majority of them--that something great and righteous wants them and
requires of them their help. So, reluctantly, with grumblings and
insistent longing for it all to be over, and yet with the inalienable joy
of doing the right thing, they obstinately endure. We can say, without
apportioning right wholesale to the Allies or wrong wholesale to Germany,
that, however dimly aware of it, they are 'seeking first the Kingdom of
God and His Righteousness.'
Can they maintain this allegiance in peace despite every seduction which
will rush to recapture their souls? That is the great question which all
who call themselves Christians should be considering on their knees while
the war is still raging.
The answer lies in a great measure with the Church. She has to enlist in
her warfare for the kingdom of God--the war which is never over--that
capacity in men for service and suffering which the war has disclosed. How
can this be? Would that I had no uncertain answer to utter! I fling these
cries out to comrades in the Lord that we may provoke one another to find
the answer. The answer cannot be merely an intellectual solution. It must
be spelt out in terms of costly devotion.
Some things are clear. First, the Church has to acknowledge that she is
not the kingdom of God but the means to it as an end. There are, I think,
a great many carts and horses to be changed round into their right
relations. Religious observances and organisations--all the whole
apparatus of religion--have come to be looked upon as ends in themselves,
whereas they are means to an end beyond themselves. People think that the
clergy's one concern is the success of ecclesiastical activities and
institutions. We clergy think so ourselves! It is not for her own
interests, which are by themselves incurably too small to evoke the heroic
in men, that the Church is in the world. She is in the world to change
the world, so that its whole extent may be filled with the glory of God,
and may become worthy of the eternal destiny of the souls of men. Hers is
a high and costly venture. She has strongholds to storm--the entrenchments
where the forces of private-mindedness and apathy and money-worship are
dug in. In the attempt she can exhaust to its depths the capacity which is
in men for dauntless sacrifice.
Secondly, if the Church's conception of her own interests must be changed,
so must the individual's conception of personal religion.
Self-preoccupation is as fatal to the latter as to the former. Personal
piety is travestied by being thought to be a respectable prudence here for
the sake of a reward hereafter. It is not a careful self-salvation at all.
Rather it is a salvation from self. It is the being lost to self in
devotion and service to God and one's fellow-men.
Lastly, if these changes are to be they depend on one thing--a new vision
of God in Christ, such as shall be for Church and individual the
over-mastering counter-attraction to self. What the world needs is
theocracy. That is, not the imposition of ecclesiastical shackles upon
secular life, but the consecration of all life, with all its
ever-multiplying treasures of knowledge and power, to one object--the
glory of God. If so, then God, as the centre and magnet of consecration,
must be all vitally apprehended. He must fill the horizon of the soul. He
must be the delight of men, to draw them out of themselves into childlike
selflessness, so that as children they may enter into the Kingdom.
XVI
There are objections, I know, which arise in the mind to this insistence
on God and the will or kingdom on which He is at work in the world, and
they must be faced. It is easy, I feel, to speak of the will of God in
general terms. But what does it mean in particular? Can it be known or
defined? Is it practicable?
I remember being puzzled by a great religious teacher to whom I owe
much--Father Kelly of the Society of the Sacred Mission, Kelham. It was
almost comic to me that in the same breath he would urge (1) that the one
thing needful was faith in God and in the will which He is accomplishing
in His world, and--with equal energy--(2) that no one could say what in
the world that will is. It reminded me of those philosophers who liken the
meta-physical pursuit of the Absolute to Lewis Carroll's _Hunting of the
Snark_.
But there is something essential here. Christian faith in God and in His
will is not sight, else it were no venture. It does not bring with it a
particularised programme to meet all the changing and complex
circumstances of life. It does not carry with it anticipatory knowledge.
Yet it is not an agnostic gazing into the mist of heaven. It is the
looking unto Jesus. There is light--light on His Cross, telling of the
love and will and desire of God Who is marching on.
Given the attitude of faith in God and the belief that He is at work in
human affairs, the practical corollaries have to be worked out by the
exertion of our faculties. If God and His will be the end of our
endeavour and the object of our co-operation, then the means towards the
end and the ways of co-operation must be arrived at, step by step, by
effort and experiment, by science and common sense. The endeavour to do
God's will, will disclose what that will is.
After all, in every sphere of human relationships, whether in home or
neighbourhood or business or municipality or commonwealth, what is lacking
is not the knowledge of what the kingdom of God requires, but the will and
motive and power to accomplish it. We are not short of knowledge; rather
we are weighed down by the power derived from new knowledge, for want of
an end other than our own selves to which to consecrate it. The means for
transforming life and suffusing it with new radiance abound as never
before. It is the will which is lacking. If we will lift up any department
of life to God in the faith that He cares about it and has desires for it,
the next step to be taken will be apparent to conscience and reason.
XVII
Akin to the difficulty that the will of God is inscrutable and hard to
know, is the protest that to speak of Him as at work in the world to bring
in His kingdom, is remote from the actualities of daily life. As I have
walked about in Flanders, turning over thoughts about the onward movement
of God's purposes in the world, I have met those matchless monuments of
patient and unchanging daily toil, the peasants working in the fields.
Harnessed into the perpetual cycle of seed time and harvest, what can this
talk of movements and purposes in the great world be to them? Is
enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God possible only for those who are so
removed from the drudgery of existence that they can sit in the exhausted
air of committee rooms and talk about it? Or is it that under God's heaven
and close to the soil men know better? Is there no room for great
expectations in those pressed down into the thick of things?
There is telling truth here, but it is not the last word. The old man in
the fields--or is it the old wrinkled woman doing more than one man's
work?--knows that. They know that life cannot fully be measured by the
gauge of the individual's daily round. A word will bring pride and light
to their eyes. It is 'Vive la France!' They are citizens of a world wider
than their fields. They belong to 'La Patrie.' Their common tasks
count--only a little--but they do count in the world of great events. Life
is monotonous and cyclical, and yet it is more than that. Great changes
do arrive in days of crisis and convulsion--yes, in days of judgment, and
the victims of changelessness are caught up by movement. They are awakened
out of the sleep of humdrum existence, and are asked to give proof, and
proudly do give proof, that, plodders though they be, they belong to no
mean city.
This is true in the sphere of patriotism. It is true in the wider sphere
of the Kingdom of God. The difficulty here considered is one of the
products of our incorrigible individualism in religion. Christianity is
not narrow preoccupation with 'my soul.' It is an entrance into a sphere
as wide as the world. It is membership in a universal society which is
concerned with great causes and astir with deep movements. And be the
individual never so anchored in the daily and local necessities of
existence, he can nevertheless share with loyalty and pride and prayer
and service in the fortunes and onward march of the commonwealth of
Christ.
XVIII
There is also the objection to an insistence upon the will of God in
accomplishment in this world, that there is so much in the New Testament
which declares (and, as we have seen in the last paragraph, experience
seems largely to corroborate the view) that the Kingdom of God does not
come in this world but in the next. I refer (only I dislike using a word
which few soldiers at the front will understand) to New Testament
"apocalyptic," which seems to present a vision of this world as
immediately to pass away in catastrophe and of the arrival of another
order of things.
It is certainly very perplexing that there seems to be so little in the
New Testament outside of the Gospels which is plainly on all fours with
the first part of the Lord's Prayer. At the front the Lord's Prayer--as
the one island of religious ground, amid marshes of ignorance, common to
Englishmen--is the padres' great stand-by. It declares better than any
words which we can frame what distinguishes the Christian religion from
others--that it begins with and glories in what God is Whose Name is to be
hallowed, and Whose kingdom is in arrival and Whose will is in
accomplishment not only in heaven but _on earth_. But elsewhere in the New
Testament the _terrain_, as it were, of these wonderful happenings seems
to be changed, and to lie in the hereafter.
It is very hard to say anything simply and shortly about this.
At any rate it is no good blinking the fact that the New Testament
expectation of an immediate ending of this world was mistaken.[3]
Yet there remains the reasonable faith--surely burnt into us by the fires
of war, surely revealed to us in apocalyptic vision--that this world is
but a part of another, and that the other gives to this and to its
concerns their supreme importance.
We need to be two-eyed here. It is a one-eyed view to hold that because
this life is a pilgrimage to another and this world is passing away,
therefore nothing matters here and nothing is happening here. It is
equally one-eyed to shut out the goal whither we all journey, and to
concentrate on the affairs of this life as alone and sufficiently
important.
The whole view is that through the entire order--here and there--the will
of God is at work, and His Kingdom in arrival, but that their full result
and accomplishment lies beyond this world. Here are the partial and
unfinished stages, there the end whither they lead. To fall back on
metaphor, a city is in the building, a whole righteous social order--a
kingdom of souls. The building is going on now,--in Birmingham and
Bermondsey,--and that gives eternal importance to their perishing and
trivial affairs. What whole structure is being built, and how much of
Birmingham and Bermondsey can be built into it, is only partially known
now. It is partially known here, as days of testing and catastrophe break
in on periods of monotony, and lay bare their soul. But full knowledge
lies in the future--the great and final 'Day shall declare it.'
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Indeed we see it change, with surprising ease of adjustment, within
the limits of the New Testament itself. In its first form it was not of
the essence of the new truth.
XIX
There is also the objection that too hard things have been said here about
the turning to God under pressure of anxiety, and the expression in prayer
of the natural desire for safety. After all, as a Jesuit fellow-padre
reminded me at the front, Our Lord at His hour of trial, when "exceeding
sorrowful even unto death," prayed in agony. And further it is plain that
prayer to Him, and as He would have it be to others, was far more than a
trustful harmony of self with the will of the Father. He urged men to take
their _requests_ to God. "Ask and ye shall receive." I can imagine that
the conception of prayer at times of emergency, as suggested in earlier
pages, might be so full of resignation as to be reduced to the fatalism
extraordinarily prevalent at the front--"If it 'its yer, it 'its yer," as
the men say. Are we not to ask not to be hit?
It is nearly enough to recall the Lord's Prayer in regard to this
objection. As I have said, men on service widely associate prayer with the
expression of need or anxiety. To restrict prayer thus is to begin the
Lord's Prayer half-way through, at "Give us this day our daily bread." It
is a question of order and emphasis. Christian prayer begins with God. It
turns away from self to the glory of God. It begins with praise and
acclamation--the glad acknowledgment of what God is and is doing. It is
only in the second place and because of what God is--because He is our
Father and is at work to bring in His kingdom and has a will for us and
for all--that the prayer which expresses our need comes in aright.
Therefore I would say to a man going into battle--"Pray now if never
before. Set God before you as you see Him, as you can clearly apprehend
Him, in Christ. He is your Father, you are His son, however unworthy. Lift
up your heart to Him Who, in and through all the turmoil around you,
presses onward with the business of His kingdom and the fulfilment of His
heart's desire. And commit all to Him. In trustful intimacy give utterance
to your longing to be brought through the perilous hour for service in His
kingdom to the glory of His Name. Commit all to Him, asking forgiveness.
He knows what you have need of in life or in death--and let the rest go!"
For such prayer in the Name of Christ--that is, prayer in accordance with
His mind and founded on the character of God as made known in Him--there
awaits undiscovered and unexhausted resources of power. So Jesus told men.
So Christian experience testifies. We have to pray truly Christ-wise, not
asking for stones to be made bread, not seeking to be hidden from life's
storms, but to be brought through them in faithful endurance.[4]
We have to pray as Christ prayed in Gethsemane in fellowship with His
sufferings. But we have also to pray as knowing the power of His
Resurrection. We have to rise in faith to claim the supernatural power
which neither He used nor we may use merely for self-preservation, which
yet is to be set free in the service of the kingdom.
Prayer in the Name of Christ is not only the prayer of resignation, based
on the self-committal of Jesus our Brother into the hands of the Father.
Such would ever tend, as uttered by our trembling faith, towards fatalism.
But it is also prayer in the Name of Him "Who was declared to be the Son
of God with power by the resurrection of the dead, even Jesus Christ our
Lord." It is the prayer of power--that power which was at Jesus' command,
and was therefore the subject of His temptation, and was drawn upon by the
faith of sufferers and yet was unused by Jesus to save Himself. This power
is the power of God. It is "the exceeding greatness of His power,
according to that working of the strength of His might which He wrought in
Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and made Him to sit at His right
hand in the heavenly places."
Here are heights where the air is charged with potentiality of new life,
hardly dreamt of by our faith on its low stagnant levels. Here are
heights to be stormed by faithful unself-seeking love. This way lies
deliverance and new creation, and the breaking of prison bars and the
turning of our captivity such as shall fill all our mouths with laughter.
A few know that these words are not rhetorical. They know, with St. Paul,
the riches of the glory of Christ's inheritance in the saints. Such was
Mary Slessor, pioneer missionary in West Africa, the leaves of whose
biography I happened to turn over as I was writing these pages. She had
frequently to take journeys through forests with leopards swarming around
her. She wrote: "I did not use to believe the story of Daniel in the
lions' den until I had to take some of these awful marches, and then I
knew it was true and that it was written for my comfort. Many a time I
walked along praying 'O God of Daniel, shut their mouths,' and He
did."[5]
This is the prayer of faith. It is the prayer which asks "not to be hit."
It is more than resignation, it is the prayer of power. It believes that
there are hardly-tapped powers and possibilities in God for those who seek
first His kingdom and righteousness. We do not know much about such prayer
in our present spiritual sickness. But it is there, a weapon to be wielded
by dauntless, simple faith. There is an inheritance to be claimed by
little-loving sons, who yet are sons--"heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ, if so be that we suffer with Him."
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Prayer after the mind of our Lord depends greatly on how we think of
Him. The following lines, written by a barrister, are, I think, a
wholesome corrective of that which is too soft in our conventional thought
about our Saviour. Despite a false or partial note here and there, they
are nearer to Him than the thought underlying the first verse of the
hymn--a great favourite among the men owing to its tune--"Jesu, Lover of
my Soul." At any rate they suggest the right association of ideas in which
our Lord should live in the mind of a young man:
Jesus, Whose lot with us was cast,
Who saw it out, from first to last:
Patient and fearless, tender, true,
Carpenter, vagabond, felon, Jew:
Whose humorous eye took in each phase
Of full rich life this world displays,
Yet evermore kept fast in view
The far-off goal it leads us to:
Who, as your hour neared, did not fail--
The world's fate trembling in the scale--
With your half-hearted band to dine,
And chat across the bread and wine:
Then went out firm to face the end,
Alone, without a single friend:
Who felt, as your last words confessed,
Wrung from a proud unflinching breast
By hours of dull ignoble pain,
Your whole life's fight was fought in vain:
Would I could win and keep and feel
That heart of love, that spirit of steel.
I would not to Thy bosom fly
To slink off till the storms go by.
If you are like the man you were
You'ld turn with scorn from such a prayer,
Unless from some poor workhouse crone,
Too toil-worn to do aught but moan.
Flog me and spur me, set me straight
At some vile job I fear and hate:
Some sickening round of long endeavour,
No light, no rest, no outlet ever:
All at a pace that must not slack,
Tho' heart would burst and sinews crack:
Fog in one's eyes, the brain a-swim,
A weight like lead in every limb,
And a raw pit that hurts like hell
Where once the light breath rose and fell:
Do you but keep me, hope or none,
Cheery and staunch till all is done,
And, at the last gasp, quick to lend
One effort more to serve a friend.
And when--for so I sometimes dream--
I've swum the dark, the silent stream,
So cold, it takes the breath away,
That parts the dead world from the day,
And see upon the further strand
The lazy, listless angels stand,
And with their frank and fearless eyes
The comrades whom I most did prize:
Then, clean, unburdened, careless, cool,
I'll saunter up from that grim pool,
And join my friends: then you'll come by,
The Captain of our Company:
Call me out, look me up and down,
And pass me through without a frown,
With half a smile, but never a word--
And so I shall have met my Lord.
[5] _Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary_, p. 106. Hodder &
Stoughton.
XX
There is also the objection that the view implied in the preceding pages
leaves out or passes over too lightly our need as sinners in the sight of
God all Holy. Is not our need for forgiveness to impel us towards God? Is
not our need--our need in anxiety, our need in guiltiness--to be a motive
in our religion?
Yes, a motive, but not the motive. It is a question of order. What must
come first is not our need, whether as anxious or guilty, but God's need,
or else our religion will be at the level of natural religion and below
the Christian level. It is because men are poor towards God and think
coldly and ungenerously of Him that they 'are not worrying about their
sins.' Men are not sorry for sin (except with the seedy remorse of 'the
morning after') until their sin has come into contact with love. The more
vital a young man is, the less will he brood in self-regard over his
wrongdoing. "Anyhow, I have lived," he will say. But if it comes home to
him what his wrongdoing has done to another who loves him, then he begins
to be sorry. "I didn't care," he will say, "for myself. I had my fling.
But now I see that what I did has broken my mother's heart. I wish to God
I hadn't done it."
Our religion must begin from God. It must spring out of love fuller and
more hungry than our desirous hearts. It must spring out of love, not--how
could it?--out of our love for God, but out of His love for us. If God's
love for us, manifested in the utterly real and suffering love of Jesus,
and in no insipid fancy of our sentimental moments, wins its way past our
guard and over the barriers of self, hatred of sin and sorrow for sin will
follow. But it is a question of order: first, what God is; second, what we
are. The more vivid the first is to a man, the more inevitable his candid
consciousness of the second. The more he is taken captive by the assurance
that God is his Father, the more glaring it will be to him that he is an
unworthy son. And the more men set out to give effect to their sonship in
service for the kingdom of God, the more they will realise their strange
impotence. The dreadful hiatus between aspiration and performance, between
acknowledged and realised ideals will widen. The eager impulse to
disregard self and to serve God with love and praise and joy, will be
found horridly at variance with a natural and rooted impulse towards
self-devotion and indulgence. The worship and praise of God, not only in
thought and word but in deed, will stumble and fall short of its goal--and
then the tears of tragic failure will start and the cry of despair ring
out. It was so with Peter in the porch and Paul beaten down in bondage
under the Law. "Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?"
I think there is no fear but that, if we do set out to put into practice
our inheritance as sons of God, we shall come to the Cross of Christ in
genuine "Rock-of-ages" fashion, bringing nothing to it in the end, except
our lovelessness. His, after all and in fact, was the one, free, utterly
loving and obedient offering of self to the Father. He did something
others could not do--He died for them, and in Him and through Him alone
did they come unto the Holy Father. I cannot work it out here, but along
this way I seem to travel home into the great evangel of the Atonement.
Only, I plead, this propitiatory work of Christ must come second in the
imagination, and His Love-of-God-revealing work first. And I think in the
course of the history of Christianity an inversion has come about. In
hymns and liturgies the _prima facie_ and predominant emphasis seems
rather to rest on our sinfulness than on God's goodness. Before they do
anything else the Prayer Book, as it is at present used, asks men to
embark on the overloaded phrases of the General Confession. I know that
this may be justified by arguing that the Prayer Book assumes that the
other parts of the Christian religion are in the minds of 'the faithful'
members of the Church. But this assumption is unwarranted as regards the
mass of soldiers whom we keep on inviting to use the more or less
mutilated forms of Morning and Evening Prayer.
And even when we come to the Eucharist, though everything can be found in
it, I often wonder whether there the Church has not come to lay more
stress upon the Cross as the offering for sin than as the disclosure of
the Divine pity for the sinner. If so, is it that too much has been taken
for granted, namely, the Love of God which alone can evoke sorrow for sin
and be worthy of the offering for sin? Has familiarity tended to disguise
and overlay the wonder-compelling revelation of God? In the Eucharist has
He been thought of rather as the Father sitting back in reception of
placation, than as the Father Who, while we are a great way off, runs out
to fall on our neck and bring us home?
I think that a re-ordering is needed. For Christianity, stressed as it
appears to be at present, will never catch the souls of men. I think of
the flying boys who, more than any one else, are winning our battles (I
have been chaplain to a squadron of them for a little time). They are far
from unsinful, but they will nevertheless, I am sure, not _begin_ with the
avowal "that there is no health in them"; they will not sing "that they
are weary of earth and laden with their sins." For as they live almost
gaily and unconcernedly on the edge of things, they know that that is not
the primary truth about themselves. Yet Christ, if in Him they see the
all-hazarding and all-enduring Love of God, can win the love and worship
of their eager hearts. He can catch those living creatures alive.
There must be a re-ordering and simplification and correction of emphasis.
It is possible, now that historical science is unravelling the Bible and
Church history, and extricating from their many levels and complexities
what is simple and specific in the glorious truths of God and of man in
Christ. Some exaggerations must be sloughed off. I think a little of the
sepia, for instance, that was in the brush of Paul must be washed away.
Has not he, or rather have not the great men of his school, over-obsessed
us with the dogma, derived from Scriptural literalism, of human corruption
flowing from Adam?
There is, by contrast, a more radiant and yet as realistic view of the
world as Christ saw it, to be recovered. Some of His glories, dimmed by
the veil of inadequate conceptions in the minds of His witnesses, will
shine as never before, as the Holy Spirit takes of Him and shows it unto
us.
XXI
Finally, I would say a word about the charge of pessimism which this
report from the front may evoke. Both pessimism and optimism are rather
moods in us than qualities which really belong to the facts of a
situation. The main point is to try to get down to reality and not to
flinch. Anyhow, I do not feel pessimistic about our holy and glorious
religion. Far otherwise. It is coming again. Actualities at the front, as
I try to learn from them, do seem to me to show a very widespread and deep
ignorance of the good news of God in Christ. But that seems only to make
more wonderful and precious those treasures of truth and joy in Christ
which God has ready for those who seek them. They are the more wonderful
because one knows that, in the silence which has fallen on many loud
voices amid the thunderous cataclysm of war, the Word of God in Christ
alone rings out anew. It is the truth of God in Him for this mysteriously
muddled and cruel world, and yet the truth which includes every partial
element of truth or goodness in the world. And there are such elements.
Only second to the wonder of the Gospel of the Cross are the achievements
of the souls of very ordinary men under unparalleled afflictions. Without
knowing it, they are seen to be worthy of Jesus, Who loves them and gave
Himself for them. If there are nearly virgin resources in God, there are
also deep unused treasures of potentiality in men. There are in them
excellences and simple heroisms which make plain that Christianity is no
artificial thing superimposed on human nature, but is the laying bare and
setting free of its inmost native quality. There is everywhere about, over
here, a diffused Christianity in men who are better than they know. It
seems like so much material that needs but a spark to set it ablaze. May
there be a great conflagration--the flaming out of the Light of the world,
to illuminate, to cleanse, to fill it with the heat of love, both human
and divine! AMEN.
THE END
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