which we call 'War.' A good deal of dross will be burnt up, but the pure
gold will remain. Out of the collision of national ideals which are
right or wrong, heroism and self-sacrifice are born. Out of the
commotion of contending ideals, truth, single-eyed, in clear perspective
and circular, containing every point of view in its comprehensiveness,
will emerge. It is not to the balance of power or the inter-relation of
dynastic connexions that we must look for peace, but to the balance of
the naked truth and the essential solidarity and brotherhood of man.
The Concert of Europe has broken down in discord, the Conductor is
rapping out with His baton the true music of humanity, and He insists
that we should all recognize the Keynote.
The pre-millenarian sees in it all a superhuman interference with the
human will which is the prelude to a forcible application of the Divine
Will and a millennium of peace and perfection. But when we investigate,
we see that there is no mental violence in the coming of the Great War.
We are reaping what we sowed. It arises out of logical and adequate
causes. It will not end until these causes have been removed.
Political excrescences must be sloughed off. Nations will be born or
reborn in a day. So war is working the world-fever out of our blood,
cleansing our hearts, and making us seriously face life's issues.
To get to particulars. We hear much about man-power to-day. It is the
last word of the strategist, the first thought of the statesman, and the
secret of victory. But who bothered about man-power a few years ago?
A Russian peasant in Petrograd, after the Revolution, said to an English
press correspondent: 'We shall have fine times in the church now. There
will not be so many long prayers for the Czar, the Imperial family, and
all the nobility, with a little prayer for the poor peasants at the tail
end.'
Yet it is the great mass of _men_ which Russia possesses which forms the
famous 'steam-roller' upon which so many have placed their hope for the
liberation of Europe. It may be that the God of Battles has ordained
that in saving Russia, and in part Europe, the Russian people are to
save themselves.
How was it with us? How many cubic feet of air have our men had to
breathe in the wretched and monotonous tenements in which they were
compelled to live? Houses must be built that way, I am told, because the
land is dear. Who made the land dear and men cheap?
Men in many callings could not obtain a living wage. Some weird economic
law--'supply and demand' or other phrase—made it impossible to give the
worker more! But, suddenly, a struggle for national life is thrust upon
us, and there is money enough!
I know it is a very complicated question, but it is _there_. We must
face it; we _are_ 'our brothers' keepers.' They are like 'sheep without
a shepherd,' unless they are cared for. It is a national obligation to
provide right conditions of life, proper education for mind and body for
the boy who is going to be the unit in the man-power of the nation.
We must organize our national life to allow of this, for we have no
right to permit our industrial development to outpace our humanitarian
provision of the fair conditions of a full-orbed, manly life. Each
nation contending is 'up against it.' Men are precious in France, but
scarce. The birth-rate has fallen off. Why? We leave it to French
patriots to solve, and turn to our own affairs once more.
We have suffered in this war, and victory has been delayed because we
lacked organization, and yet we prided ourselves upon being organizers.
The victories in war are manufactured in days of peace. We were not
organized in pre-war days. Things _happened_. Under the pressure of war
we have had to organize ourselves in many ways. The railways have been
brought under central control to serve _England_ and not companies
merely. The vested interest of the Drink Traffic has had to be squeezed
into more reasonable proportions, and may have to go altogether to
secure victory. Men and women are being mobilized for national service,
and agitation for women's suffrage is silenced for the present. In the
silence it may be that we shall learn that the claim for suffrage
depends not upon _being_ but upon _doing_. National service is surely a
good claim for suffrage. Representation should not merely depend upon
taxation, but upon a wider qualification—service for the common good in
war and peace.
We are not the only people under the pressure of war and compelled to
listen to the will of the God of Battles.
We have seen an Anglo-Saxon nation, claimed to be the freest in the
world, struggling to grasp at the same time peace and conserve its
liberty, reluctant to grasp the sword even to protect its nationals. Led
by a far-seeing, cautious, and astute President, it made a wonderful
attempt to keep out of war; but the grim circles of battle have with
ever-widening sweep reached this huge nation of peace-lovers, and it is
learning that in citizenship quantity is not everything; quality, racial
purity, counts for something.
Moreover, nations are not permitted, any more than individuals, by the
God of Battles to evade or shirk the great moral issues of life:
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side.
The Church is being tested by war. It had not been prepared by its human
leaders for this test, though history shows clearly War, Revolution,
Crisis, and Persecution are the foster-mothers of Religion.
But we built up the Church for peace and prosperity. Its ordinances,
ceremonials, customs, and solemn pomps; its appeal, apparel, and
ambition, all needed peace for their opportunity and prosperity for
their support. When a nation strips for war, however, it needs a
religion from which everything which is extraneous and superfluous is
eliminated.
When the soldier, living in the world of elemental passions and away
from all the Church aids and props, free from the suggestiveness of the
church as a sacred place and all the sensuous accessories and aids to
worship, asks for religion, he wants it _neat_. He needs the
fundamental, the essential, the irreducible minimum.
Now the Church has to work in an altogether different atmosphere. It
must not be thought that it is an atmosphere less favourable to
religion. The drama of the soul never has so fitting a setting as in the
red landscape of war, with its alternations of lively death and deadly
life.
The very processes of soul growth and the problems of time and eternity
are, so to speak, 'filmed.' A lifetime is compressed into a campaign.
As the individual soul has its tragic opportunities, so the Church
itself has its great chance. Never was such a setting for the divine
drama since it was first enacted. Never were the truths of religion so
clearly illustrated or the comforts of religion so pathetically needed.
The suitability of the gospel message as a response to man's needs, and
the perfection of Christ as man's Comrade and Saviour, never shine forth
so fully as in the lurid glare of war's terrible perspective.
It is the business of the soldier's preacher to interpret this. He has
abundant mental material to hand, and he works in an atmosphere solemn,
insistent, and impressive.
If he turns aside to talk of lesser things, he wastes his time. He must
not get between the men and God, or put the Church, or its ordinances,
or its rules, so far as they are human, between the men and God.
If this is so when we speak of the Church in the larger sense, how much
more is it so when we speak of the Church as a denomination!--and all
Churches are denominations when we are at war.
The minister, too, has to cut his baggage down. His spiritual equipment
is in his mind and heart. The soldier does not inquire what college his
padre comes from, or what qualifications the titles before or after his
name stand for. Whether he is a bishop, a great evangelist, or a popular
preacher means little to the man. What the man asks is, 'What sort of
chap is he? How is he sticking it? What has he got to say? Does he help
a fellow?'
The chaplain's one object is to lead men in thought and faith to God as
God is revealed in Christ, and to get him _there quickly_.
In regard to the Church as an institution, there is a feeling among the
men, more or less articulate, that it has humbugged them. It has
denounced the sins it does not often commit, but has been too silent
about the sins which are common to its own membership. The Church, in
time of peace, has built up a vast superstructure of respectability. The
sins of the flesh and drunkenness and swearing were not respectable; but
it has not turned the white burning light of truth against the sins of
the spirit—covetousness, selfishness, lying, fraud, greed, and
injustice. The soldier has many things to put up with, but for the time
he is freed from the soul-destroying influence of an industrial system
built upon the basis of competition. He is not afraid of losing his job,
and he need not toady to any one to secure the chance of his
bread-and-butter. Under the pressure of campaigning he begins to exalt
comradeship and self-sacrifice to the first place in the list of
virtues. Battle forges a new and strong bond of brotherhood.
He does not possess this at first. He comes out of a world of
self-seeking, but he gradually discovers that men depend on each other.
In a word, the shells that fly, knocking the parapets about, and the
rough and tumble of campaigning knock a man's creed about fearfully. He
has to re-sort his ideas of religion and the Church, and when he puts
them together again, he finds that they fit his complex needs better
when they are built up the other way. Perhaps an arrangement of topics
which I have found to be dead topics as far as work amongst soldiers is
concerned, and others which seem to be _live_ topics, will help to show
what I mean.
DEAD TOPICS LIVE TOPICS.
Future punishment Personal salvation
Baptismal regeneration Prayer and providence
Apostolic succession Comradeship and Communion
Claims of the Church Christ as Friend and Lord
Sabbath observance Righteousness
Observance of Holy Days and God as a Ruler
Church ordinances
Sectarianism and all Church Here, hereafter, and the
shibboleths soul's destiny
The soldier is particularly interested in spiritual biography, and very
glad to hear about what God did for Paul, Peter, Moses, Joshua, and
David. There are vestiges of superstition lingering in many men, and it
is hard to see where superstition ends and faith begins. I have known
men sample all sorts of religion during the campaign, trying to find out
perhaps what different chaplains have to say about things.
There is a species of fatalism; they value luck, and would sympathize
with the Prayer-Book phrase, 'Good luck in the name of the Lord.'
It is strange that men should turn to the elements of religion in which
the Church is getting slack. They value prayer, and I think most of them
pray in their own way. They believe in providence, but do not expect
that prayer for them means necessarily immunity from wounds or death;
but they know quite well that whatever may be their lot they will be the
better for the prayers which ascend for them and for their own prayers.
An Australian of the real primitive sort was moving across No Man's Land
to the attack on Fromelles, and he stopped amid the hail of bullets and
bursting shells and leaned on his rifle. A comrade rushed up and
inquired, 'What is the matter, mate; are you hit?' 'Hit, no,' he
shouted; 'if you want to know what I am doing, I'll tell you. I am
saying a prayer.' With that he seized his rifle and went forward to the
charge.
An Australian non-com., who went right through Gallipoli and was in many
a fight, wrote to me and said that since a certain service at Mena Camp,
in Egypt, he had made prayer the habit of his life, and it helped him to
play the game. 'I have never gone over the bags without prayer first,
and specially commending myself to God, and I find it bucks me up a
lot.'
Another, referring to an address on the text, 'Thy rod and Thy staff
comfort me,' wrote: 'The note of guidance and strengthening helped me a
great deal in the hard business of the attack on the Lone Pine, and it
was constantly with me in the Gallipoli days.'
Whilst so many in pulpit and pew have ceased to ponder and wonder at the
mystery of the Atonement, soldiers have seen a new meaning in it. A man
in our force at Anzac said to me: 'I never could understand before; but
now, when I know I may be blown out, I reckon there isn't much chance
for me unless somebody has made up for my failure and done for me what I
have not been able to do for myself. I guess that is what it means.'
He did not express it very well, but agreed with me when I said that
'Calvary has made up for our failure to come up to the standard of
Sinai.'
That most difficult idea of substitution for us and representation of us
in the death on the cross is forced into men's minds by many an
illustration now. To a soldier dying at Étaples, a chaplain said, 'Do
you understand, and does it help you to know that Christ died for you?'
'Oh, yes,' he said, 'I know He died for me, just as I am dying for those
shirkers at home.' He used the word 'shirkers' without condemnation,
just as the first word which came to him, and passed away at peace and
content.
For so long the Cross, with its extended arms, has spoken to the world
of a redemption of love. But we passed by carelessly, not choosing to
understand; so that we might well ask of the multitude:
All ye that pass by,
To Jesus draw nigh:
To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?
Now we know a little of what it means, for so many of our best have died
for us. So many real if not material crosses have been lifted on the low
hills of Flanders; so many have laid down their lives for the race, that
we are beginning to understand.
There is nothing morbid in these thoughts of Christ dying. The Cross to
the soldier is full of sweet helpfulness, it appeals to him with
comfort.
Everard Owen, in a poem which we are allowed to reprint from _The
Times_, called 'A Kind Hill to Souls in Jeopardy,' gives us the idea of
tender succour which men see in Calvary:
There is a hill in England,
Green fields and a school I know,
Where the balls fly fast in summer,
And the whispering elm-trees grow.
A little hill, a dear hill,
And the playing-fields below.
There is a hill in Flanders
Heaped with a thousand slain,
Where the shells fly night and noontide
And the ghosts that died in vain.
A little hill, a hard hill
To the souls that died in pain.
There is a hill in Jewry,
Three crosses pierce the sky,
On the midmost He is dying
To save all those who die,
A little hill, a kind hill
To souls in jeopardy.
What will the Church do with the men when the God of Battles gives the
remnant back to us? We shall have to make room for them. They will want
a simple and strong religion. Something to call forth and use the heroic
in them. They will not stay in the Church if there is 'nothing doing,'
for they are intensely practical.
To recapitulate. The war has shown the political unimportance of the
Churches in Europe. The Will of God was not expressed clearly enough or
sufficiently by them to prevent the war. The World was stronger than the
Church and imposed its will upon the Church.
Now that we are at war, the Churches are still divided in their witness
for righteousness. Even the Church, which, beyond all others, calls
itself Catholic, is not catholic in the sense of unity, for it speaks
with different voices in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and France. The
Church which calls itself Orthodox has failed to give the people a lead
in Russia. With us the lack of unity in the Christian Church has
weakened its testimony in the nation and marred its work in the Army.
Once more, therefore, in the history of the world, the King of
Righteousness, who is also the Prince of Peace, is recalled in human
life as the God of Battles.
Still, He will make the wrath of men to serve Him, and He will gird the
soldier to execute His purposes, unconsciously, it may be, as He girded
and used Cyrus the Persian: 'I girded thee, though thou hast not known
Me' (Isa. xlv. 5). In spite of the failure of the Churches, He is
setting up His kingdom of Brotherhood and righteousness in the earth.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
He hath sounded out the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant, my feet;
Our God is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom which transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,
While God is marching on.
VII
THE CHIMNEY-POTS OF LONDON
I will not cease from mental fight
Or let the sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
BLAKE.
VII
THE CHIMNEY-POTS OF LONDON
There is some very fine architecture in London, and buildings which
reveal some of the finest workmanship in the world, for the London
craftsmen are famous.
But all this is crowned with the craziest collection of chimney-pots.
Sometimes the brickwork of the chimneys is built from one angle to
another above the roof; like a zigzag, and then surmounted on the same
building with chimney-pots of different designs and heights, pointing,
too, in different directions, and again capped with many weird
contrivances to make them _draw_. They are certainly _out of drawing_,
as any artist will confess.
There are machines that whirl in the wind and by their mad circling
withdraw the smoke, and there are _cowls_ that move with the wind,
swinging in such a direction that the wind cannot blow down the chimney.
There are _hoods_, and tin monstrosities that rear their ugliness over
palaces, and there are chimneys that have been built up so much higher
than the original ending, that in their fresh start to the sky they
spoil the sky view as well as the contour of the building. There are
beautiful chimneys, which begin well, but have to be assisted to do
their work by horrible tin extensions soaring into the air.
These hideous makeshifts disfigure the dwellings of the rich and the
poor alike with a deadly equality of utility unrelieved by any beauty.
To see it all stretching out beneath you from the Monument fills you
with disappointment at the wretched discord. I believe there are experts
in chimneys in London, men who _doctor_ them. If one could be found with
an artistic soul, who could make them beautiful, he would deserve well
of his country.
But it would never do to take all these ugly things down, for uniformity
and even beauty may cost too much. A house full of smoke would, added to
the London fog, be intolerable. 'Handsome is as handsome does.'
The housewife says 'Ours is a beautiful chimney. It draws so well.' When
you sit by the bright fire on a winter's night, you do not think of the
ugly chimney aloft except as a plain-featured but dear friend.
But, for all that, these chimney-pots of London are a sad commentary on
our human nature. Our architecture and building goes wrong just where it
comes into contact with rough nature, with its treacherous tempest and
veering winds. The architect plans a beautiful Gothic mansion and
everything goes right. It is a dream, a vision of harmony, until he
comes to the chimneys—then brief and tragic experience demands a
distorted chimney or a tin contrivance, and the plan is spoiled.
So we build our lives up to a point. It is to be a Gothic career for the
noble son. What Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Oxford, or Cambridge can do for him
is done. The Church, the Army—Society (with a big 'S') lend a hand, and
he is turned out true to sample—the right accent, the right dress, the
right manner. But, alas! when he comes into contact with the intricate
promptings of nature and the subtle temptings of the world, some strain,
inherited from the days of the Conqueror, makes him wobble. He marries
the wrong woman, or doesn't marry her at all, misses the bus, or catches
the wrong one. His career is altogether different from plan and
specification, and yet he may be quite a good sort!
Here is another case. We set out to build a really artistic life. She,
the favoured creature, is nurtured amid culture and reared in the
atmosphere of poetry. Listening to smart conversation in epigram and
lightning-sketch style, she goes out into the world without a practical
notion; and because these things 'require money,' drifts into a
business-like marriage with an unpoetic person, who makes glue or blue.
Settles down—a Queen Anne villa with Mary Ann chimneys.
These are mild cases. How few of us live up to our fond parents' hopes
and prayers! How many of us end far otherwise than our education,
advantages, and associations seemed to promise. We have power of choice,
we are not made uniform, and we do wobble a lot when we are turned loose
among the currents and storms of life.
We overseas Britons are apt to expect too much of dear old London.
At first we are foolish enough to think that this mighty capital of our
far-flung Empire should be an epitome of all our British virtues. Coming
to the fountainhead, we expect the water to be pure. We soon learn that
it is not a fountainhead of anything. It is a great bay of human life
and action into which a thousand rivers, of different quality and force,
empty themselves.
London is a magnified expression of the life of the whole Empire. The
currents which we on the frontiers of the Empire set going all come
pulsing towards this mighty mother of cities; but with the boundless
generosity of a mother of nations, mature but still vigorous, she
receives this inflowing life and sends it back again in responsive
floods to the end of the earth.
The jaundiced critic treads this mighty city with the blinded eyes of
ignorance, and seeing faults and sins, identifies her as 'Babylon the
Great, Mother of Harlots'; but to those who look for goodness, London
suggests the city of which it is written: 'And the nations of them which
are saved shall walk in the light of it; and the kings of the earth do
bring their glory and honour into it.'
Let us not hide the truth from ourselves. These chimney-pots of London,
for all their ugliness, mean a lot of kindly comfort. They draw well,
they are comfortable to live with.
You may find the worst in London, but you will always find the best
also.
There is a warm sympathy for sorrow, a motherly helpfulness in need, a
maternal solicitude for the welfare of the humblest, which stretches
down from the throne, and is reflected in the kindness of the poor
towards each other. No good movement will ever lack support here, and no
stauncher friend to freedom is planted four-square upon this earth than
the City of London, which so gallantly fought for its own freedom and so
jealously guards it still.
If all these classic characters planned by fond parents had materialized
right up to the very chimney-pots, they would probably have been less
companionable and kindly. Purity of style does not always mean domestic
harmony. Go into these houses with the distorted chimneys, and you will
often find them 'all beautiful within,' carrying an atmosphere of peace
and well-being which is refreshing to the soul. Think, too, of how many
of them have been turned into hospitals for our wounded soldiers, and of
others which dispense a hospitality to the men from overseas which helps
them to forget or at least to bear their exile.