Produced by Al Haines
VICTORY OUT OF RUIN
BY
NORMAN MACLEAN
HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD.
LONDON -- NEW YORK -- TORONTO
MCMXXII
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD.
at the Edinburgh University Press
PREFACE
There is a joy in battle; but the greatest of all joys is to take some
part, however humble, in the fight for the triumph of righteousness.
There is a thrill such as can be found nowhere else in facing a mass of
people whose prejudices and social customs are as an unscalable wall,
in compelling their attention and, at last, in winning them to espouse
your cause. To fight your opponent, loving him all the time, is the
essence of Christianity. The excitement of betting on races or
watching football matches is nothing compared to the excitement of
facing an audience not knowing whether you are to be trampled on or to
be applauded. Those who have fought under the banner of the King of
Kings know the indefinable joy there is in it. That is why the young
and the chivalrous give a swift response when the call is to a forlorn
hope in the service of Christ.
And the joy of it is this, that, whatever may happen, you are bound to
win. The Infinite has infinite resources. Those who array themselves
against Him are up against all the forces in the universe. The fight
for the Kingdom of God is the greatest in which man ever fought; it
goes on ceaselessly without any discharge; the big battalions seem
always on the other side; but God always wins. There never has been a
fight for deliverance, a struggle for progress, but the forces of
righteousness conquered at last.
This book is the third of a series. The Great Discovery portrayed the
spiritual emotions of the Great War; Stand up, Ye Dead dealt with the
soul of the nation in the midst of its travail; and this third book
seeks to point out the way of deliverance and renewal. The malady of
the world is spiritual. The fountain of healing is with God.
N. M.
EDINBURGH, _September_ 1922
NOTE
Chapters I, II, III, IV, VIII, IX, XI, XII, and XIII appeared in _The
Glasgow Herald_, and Chapters VI, VII, and X in _The Scotsman_.
Chapter V is based on an article in _The Glasgow Herald_, but it has
been rewritten.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE ONLY HOPE
CHAPTER II
THE SUPREME NEED
CHAPTER III
IN THE SACRED NAME OF LIBERTY!
CHAPTER IV
THE GREATEST OF TYRANNIES
CHAPTER V
THE LAST DELIVERANCE
CHAPTER VI
THE PERIL OF THE CROWD
CHAPTER VII
LET US HAVE PEACE
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAY OF PEACE
CHAPTER IX
NO ROOM
CHAPTER X
DOMINION FROM SEA TO SEA
CHAPTER XI
THERE WERE IN THE SAME COUNTRY SHEPHERDS
CHAPTER XII
THE FULNESS OF THE TIME
CHAPTER XIII
VICTORY OUT OF RUIN
CHAPTER I
THE ONLY HOPE
'To a large extent the working people of this country do not care any
more for the doctrines of Christianity than the upper classes care for
the practice of that religion.'--JOHN BRIGHT in the year 1880.
It is wonderful how quickly, when a peril is past, men forget about it
and straightway compose themselves to slumbrous dreams again. It was
so after the Great War; it is so already regarding the great strikes.
'Don't disturb our repose,' they as good as say; 'we have had an
anxious time; do let us sleep.' But wars and strikes are only symptoms
of the hidden disease; and the allaying of a symptom without the
healing of the disease is of all things the most dangerous. What we
must consider is the disease and set ourselves to find a remedy. Then,
and then only, will the symptoms harass us no more. It was a little
bald man with a straggling beard and one eye that had got a little
tired of the long-continued effort to look at the other, who set me
thinking. The burden of his contention was that this country and the
world at large is sinking back into paganism. Though I endeavour to
keep an open mind and refuse to accept opinions ready-made, however
much inclined I may be to shirk the preliminary fatigue of forming
opinions of my own, yet the opinions of my friend are worth recording.
They are at least gropings after the truth.
I
'What is the test of a Christian?' asked the little man, trying to
bring his vagrant eye to bear on me; 'if we once settle that we shall
be able to judge whether this is now a Christian world. The test is
not beliefs or opinions regarding the Founder of Christianity (for
trifles such as that men used cheerfully to burn their fellows
aforetime, thinking they were doing God service); to find the true test
we must go back to the only test known to those who knew Christ. What
was their test? It was this--'If any man have not the Spirit of
Christ, he is none of His.' That spirit was love enduring even the
Cross--love emptying itself that it might serve. Now, apply that test
to our social organisation to-day. In the one city you find in one
street mansions such as a Roman emperor could only desire in vain; and
a few yards away a street of crowded closes and airless dugouts and
fetid tenements where little children perish. Herod slaughtered a
score of babies and the centuries pour the vials of infamy upon him.
But this holocaust goes on, year in year out, ceaselessly. Yet the
dwellers in the terraces tolerate that. The causes that produce slums
and keep slums full are manifest. Yet they will not rouse themselves
to remove them. Is that being a Christian? We assemble in church and
recite, "I believe in God the Father," and every fact of the faith we
profess condemns our callous indifference. If we realised that God is
the Father of these babes, we would die to save them; yet we leave them
a prey to vested interests. Is that toleration of evil compatible with
Christianity?'
'You forget,' I objected, 'the law of environment. No man can live
ahead of his own time--at least only the great can--and we are waking
up to social duty as never before.'
'Waking up!' he exclaimed; 'we are going to sleep. A Christian should
never need to waken up to facts like that. He would have them as a
burden ever on his heart until they were for ever banished. He would
be constantly hearing the voice of Him who said of little ones like
these that it was better for those who did them wrong that a millstone
were hanged round their necks and that they were cast into the midst of
the sea.... If only we were Christians, endued with Christ's spirit of
love, we would make an end of that at once.... We are only
semi-pagans.'
II
'It isn't merely what you see outside,' went on the little man,
polishing his shining poll, 'but look inside the churches
themselves--any one of the hundreds in this city--and what do you find?
You find the house of God given over to an unholy merchandise. Every
church is parcelled out into so many square feet, and these are bought
and sold as ecclesiastical allotments. Did you ever think of that
gruesome traffic, and the weirdness of it? That good news of Love
brooding over all, caring even for the grass and the sparrow, has now
become the monopoly of the renter, while the poor are shut out. And it
was at first proclaimed to the poor without money and without price,
committed to the winds of Galilee.'
'Put like that,' I said, 'it is rather weird.'
'Aye,' he went on, 'and every half-year managers and deacons assemble
in the houses of God to traffic in these square feet of pews. There is
a story how One long ago knotted a whip of cords and drove the
traffickers out of His Father's house, His eyes blazing with anger.
Would He not wield the same whip on these deacons and managers, and
drive them out to-day? How astonished they would be, with all the law
and all the vested interest on their side ... and yet that whip!'
The little man fell silent, and his strange eye looked as if he were
seeing it all. And he smiled curiously.
'Did you ever trespass on an ecclesiastical allotment?' he asked
jerkily. 'No! Well, it is a thing not to be done. I once trespassed
on a garden allotment out in Kelvinside, just to admire some wonderful
sweet-peas, and the man who owned it found me and welcomed me like a
brother, and sent me away with a radiant bunch of flowers; but an
ecclesiastical allotment is another story. An old heritor once said to
me that the only thing that really roused the devil in a Scotsman's
heart was trespassing on his ecclesiastical allotment.'
'That only shows,' I retorted, 'how dear to a Scotsman's heart his part
in the Church is.'
'That is only quibbling,' jerked out the bald man.
III
'Last Sunday evening,' went on the bald man, speaking very rapidly and
walking up and down the room in his excitement, 'I went to a church
situated in a mean street, surrounded by closes that each holds the
population of a sparse parish. A tattered bill on the door proclaimed
the traffic in seats. There seemed to be no demand. There were only
eighteen present. A cheap church, with varnished pews, that could hold
a thousand--and only eighteen there--old people and two or three
children--none who could lay hold on life with both hands. To that
handful a discouraged and hopeless preacher proclaimed the evangel of
the love of God ... but his voice died in the disconsolate and empty
spaces.... But when I came out, there in an open space were massed
thousands of men, and the air throbbed with vitality as they listened
to an orator denouncing capital and proclaiming the coming of the new
day when every man could have his heart's desire--money and more
money.... Eighteen at the church where the salt had lost its savour,
and thousands where the chaff of worldliness was the only bread served
to perishing souls.'
'But you must remember that there were some churches quite full in the
city that evening,' I interjected.
'Quite so,' resumed the bald man, 'but who were they that filled them?
Only the one class that has still kept its hold on the seriousness and
the duty of life--the middle class--the one layer of health in the
nation.'
'You forget,' I protested, 'that the other two classes have proved that
they know how to die.'
He came to a sudden halt, and his tripping sentences suddenly stopped.
'Yes,' he answered, 'they know how to die; but what is the use of
knowing how to die if they do not know how to live?'
IV
'What is the use of facing death,' went on the bald man, resuming his
walk up and down, and pointing now and again an accusing finger, 'if
death does not teach the way of life? Through death we conquered the
greatest tyranny that ever threatened the world, but the enemy has
really been the victor, for the spirit of the enemy has now conquered
us. That spirit is the covetousness that knows no law but force. It
does not matter whether the goal aimed at be the hegemony of the world
or more and more of gold--the spirit is the same. And now it has
seized us. There is the profiteer living on the results of other men's
industry and fattening on the plunder of the public--his god is
covetousness. There are the millions who are ready to march over the
ruins of the Empire, careless of the sufferings of others if only they
will get their demands on the world. Nobody realises the futility of
gaining the world and losing the life. Eighteen in church and
thousands out for their share of the world.... It is covetousness
triumphant.'
The old man came to a halt and began to speak as one weighing his
words. 'We are just sinking into savagery,' he went on. 'The savage
knows no weapon but force--and Christianity knows no weapon but
love--but we have chosen force. We have, in truth, abolished the
bludgeon of force as between man and man, but pagan Rome did that. We
have never learned that law must rule between class and class, as well
as between man and man. We remained pagan in our jealousy and distrust
as between class and class, and failed to make law supreme. We failed
because we had no brotherliness, no love. If we had been Christians we
would have made the law of love supreme long ago.... What a hollow
mockery our actions are. Our statesmen become rhetorical over a
tribunal of the nations that will make wars cease for ever, while war
reigns in our own midst. Tribunals and treaties are nothing if truth
be not supreme in the heart. But there is never a word about that....
We think we can raise the world to a level higher than we have attained
ourselves, as if water could ever rise higher than its source.... The
law of force is honest paganism, but this covering up of the world's
foulness with scum--that is nauseating pharisaism. Where the spirit of
love and truth is not, there peace cannot be.'
V
Whether the bald man with the one piercing and the other straying eye
was right or wrong I am no great judge. But it is clear that there is
something very far wrong. It is not in our country, the fairest on
God's earth, that the evil lies, nor in the Empire, the greatest and
richest ever reared by man. The evil is not without but within us.
The only hope for us is in a regenerated spirit. And there is none who
can give us that new spirit but the Carpenter of Nazareth. He was
Himself a poor working man toiling for twenty years, wielding heavy,
clumsy tools as he shaped rude ploughs in a village of poor fame. He
can feel for poor toiling working men; it was He who first taught
brotherhood. To a generation that says, 'Let me get all I can, however
much others may suffer,' He says, 'Say not so, but rather say, Let me
serve all I can, however much I may suffer.' If He were here now He
would be talking to men in public-houses and at the street corners and
on the fringes of crowds, and He would say, 'My brothers, why excite
yourselves over the world? Life is not money. Life is love and beauty
and sonship with God. It is not what the hand grasps but what the eye
sees and the heart feels that makes life great. If you want the
fulness of life, lose it.' And to rich men He would say, 'Your riches
are only yours in trust that you may serve: consecrate them or they
will be taken from you.' He would have but one law for all--Love. If
they but loved there could not be any more profiteering, or ca' canny,
or any injustice. For love never says 'Give,' only 'Let me give.' ...
But, alas! we make room for every spirit but that. For forty years we
have taught the children by statute, but they have not been taught
that. They have been taught figures and the records that are mainly
the records of crime, and the explanations that are no explanations.
We must begin again and teach our children what duty is, what the love
of God and man is, what reverence is, and how there is a moral purpose
working out life and death--life if men conform to it and death if they
defy it. We teach everything by statute except that--the one thing
needful. We teach that man is to be saved by the brain; we have
forgotten that salvation is of the soul. There is but one power known
among men that can turn the self-willed and self-centred life into the
self-sacrificing and the God-centred life, and that power is the spirit
of the Carpenter of Nazareth. If we but sought it, then it would fuse
the poor fissiparous sand of our national life into the unity and
potency of steel. It is our only hope.