DOMINION FROM SEA TO SEA
No part of the Empire rendered the cause of the world's soul in the
world war greater service than Canada. When the clouds of chlorine gas
were let loose it was the Canadians who stopped the gap through which
the torrent of destruction was flowing. And the question the wounded
men gasped out of tortured throats and lungs was not 'Shall I live?'
but 'Did the Huns get through?' In the great host that at last swept
the wolves back to their lair, the Canadians were foremost. 'We pledge
ourselves solemnly before God to keep faith with our fallen comrades,'
wrote General Currie to Sir Robert Borden, and nobly did they fulfil
the pledge. To-day when a citizen of the States begins to demonstrate
how his countrymen won the war, a Canadian produces the official
statistics from his pocket and shows how the ten millions of Canada
gave more of their sons over to death and wounds than the total
casualties of the one hundred and ten millions in the States. And it
is not surprising that Canada should have a clear vision of the ideal
of duty. The very name that their country bears lifts that young
nation into the fellowship of the highest ideal. When a name was
discussed for the new confederation an inspiration came to Sir Leonard
Tilley as he read the eighth verse of the seventy-second psalm: 'He
shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the
ends of the earth,' and on his initiative the name Dominion was
adopted. Not for Canada alone but for the whole Empire that name sets
forth the only ideal. The cry of 'World-dominion or death' can only be
overcome at last by the watchword 'God-dominion and Life.'
I
It is difficult for men to learn the lesson of their own most bitter
experience. Only when the Cross stands far back across the years does
its meaning and purpose faintly gleam on the minds of men. It need be
no matter for surprise that men who did not themselves stand in the
breach of death should be unable to articulate the master-word of the
future. That great word will be--Spirit. What the world gazed on for
four years of woe was the triumph of the spirit. To the men who,
footsore and limping, marched back from Mons, defeat was
incredible--their souls knew not the word. And because victory, even
as they retreated, was in their souls, they swept the enemy back from
the gates of Paris. For four years in mud and misery and defeat the
soul endured and triumphed. It was the greatest of all the soldiers of
France who said to his body as it shrank in his first battle:
'Tremblest thou? If thou knewest the dangers into which I shall this
day carry thee, thou wouldest tremble!' Often and often in these four
years the poor worn suffering body said, 'I have had enough--enough of
mud and vermin--I am fed up; I will do no more,' but when the call of
duty came the soul said to the body, 'I will make you face it, make you
go through with it'; and the soul compelled the body to charge into the
very face of death. It was the spark of the Divine in the soul that
enabled our brothers to conquer the shrinking of flesh and blood and so
to conquer the foe. It is in the measure that armies are souls that
armies conquer. And it has been the same at home in castle and
cot-house. We have but to think of the wives and mothers.
'They let them go forth at the wheels
Of the guns and denied not. But then the surprise
When one sits quiet alone! Then one weeps, then one kneels,
God! how the house feels.'
However deeply the iron pierced, there was never a thought of defeat
being even possible. And when the call came the women toiled in the
factories, and the ammunition dumps were their spirit materialised. At
home and in the battle-line the final destiny of every nation depends
upon the soul.
II
Still more is the mastery of this word apparent when we consider the
future destiny of the world. One result of the world's blood-bath is
that all thoughtful men are asking, How can the world be saved in the
future? And multitudes discuss the way of the world's salvation by a
League of Nations or other method. By parchments and signatures the
world is to be saved! All that is but the folly with which men have
deceived themselves in all ages. The folly is apparent when we ask,
Whence do wars spring? They spring from greed and lust and
ambition--from the life surrendered to evil. We speak of the horror of
war; what we should speak of is the horror of wickedness. For war is
only a symptom, not the disease. What all these weary discussions
about 'Leagues to make an end of war,' and the new watchword 'No more
war,' aim at is the doing away with the symptom--leaving the disease to
run its deadly course. To suppress symptoms without removal of the
hidden cause is the way of death. What the nations must face is the
disease and its healing!
It is with nations as with individuals! How can a man protect himself
against a thief. He can do it in three ways. He may (1) use force; or
(2) he may make an agreement with the thief--enter into a treaty with
him; or (3) he may endeavour to reform the thief. The first method is
militarism and, whether in the form of armies or policemen, is costly
and uncertain. The second only protects so long as the thief finds it
convenient or in his own interest to keep it. Neither a burglar nor a
robber-state can be warded off by treaties. The third alone provides a
certain protection; the only safety is that the thief experience a
change of spirit--be, in short, converted. 'Admirable,' said Cardinal
Fleury, when a scheme for 'perpetual peace' was submitted to him;
'admirable, save for one omission--I find no provision for sending
missionaries to convert the hearts of princes.' The day of princes is
over, and the day of democracy has come. The first requisite of
perpetual peace is that the nations of the world experience a change of
heart and spirit--should repent. But in all the schemes for ending war
there is no suggestion of sending missionaries to convert the world's
democracies. France has 'extinguished the lights of heaven which none
shall rekindle'; England, if the number of worshippers in the churches
be any gauge, is rapidly sinking back into paganism; and across the
Atlantic the United States is resolved to live unto itself alone,
separating itself from the perishing nations; while on the Continent of
Europe there is but one ritual: 'We did no wrong: we did not begin the
war.' Missionaries to convert the democracies of the world--they are
needed in legions. But such a need is not in all the thoughts of the
orators. They can only think of forming leagues to abolish the
vultures that swoop down on the carcases. They cannot realise that the
only way to make an end of the swooping vulture is to make an end of
carcases. Unless the world experiences a spiritual and moral renewal,
any league that would secure it peace in the midst of its depravity
would only secure its moral doom. It is manifest then that the only
way to abolish war is to bring the body into subjection to the spirit.
The way of salvation is the way of spiritual renewal. Love does not
kill or poison, and humanity's feet need to be guided into the way of
love. Along that road there is but the one guide: He who said 'I am
the way.... Love as I have loved you.' The measure of that love is
the Cross. And that is why the way to salvation leads through
Calvary.... Peace will only come when the kingdoms of this world shall
submit to that kingdom of the soul whose dominion is from sea to sea.
'I find a hundred little indications to reassure one that God comes,'
writes H. G. Wells. 'The time draws near when mankind will awake ...
and there shall be ... no leader but the one God of mankind.' But
though Mr. Wells writes sentences so vital as that, yet when one asks
him what God is--he is silent. Is He holy and righteous? Though Mr.
Wells' God is but an abstraction, yet the truth remains. The coming of
the Kingdom of God is the one hope of mankind--that Kingdom which Jesus
preached. And the entrance into that Kingdom is by way of repentance
and love and faith. When the soul of the world awakes to that, the day
of deliverance shall have dawned.
III
This, then, must be the goal of human effort, to bring the nations of
the world into such a unity of spirit that war will no longer be
thinkable. But we, as a nation, can only do this if we ourselves bring
our lives into conformity with the laws of righteousness. It is
manifest that no amount of oratory will enable us to raise the world to
any higher level than we have attained ourselves.
The first duty, then, is to see that we base our own lives on
righteousness. The problem is how to bring to bear on the human heart
those motives that will move it irresistibly towards righteousness.
That road is not easy to travel and the choice of it means effort and
travail. It means a battle against selfishness and self-seeking--a
battle long-drawn-out. Why should men choose that conflict rather than
ease and self-indulgence? There can be no reason save this: that God
wills and enjoins righteousness. But does He? We know very little
about God, and the strange thing is that the more knowledge that comes
to us regarding Him, the more mysterious He becomes. But there is one
thing that we do know with absolute certainty regarding God, and it is
this--that all down the thousands of years of recorded history the
power of the Unseen Ruler of the universe can be traced fighting
against iniquity, burying corrupt nations under the avalanche, digging
the grave for tyranny and corruption. The history of the world is the
history of God making an end of crime. The way to destruction has been
the way of iniquity. That God should have so ordered the universe that
the stars in their courses fight against the Siseras, that all its
forces are at last arrayed for the destruction of evil, is the proof
that God is righteous and holy and that the passion in His heart is
that His children should be righteous and holy. The world, as God
means it, is the school for the training of men and women in
goodness--and so in the image of God.... It is only the call of the
Unseen Ruler as He summons His children to bring their lives into
unison with Himself, that can turn the feet into the way of
righteousness. There is no impelling force equal to the choice of good
rather than evil except this--that God wills goodness. No other motive
save that can turn the faces of men towards the heights.
IV
The greatest of all questions then is this--how most efficiently to
bring that motive to bear upon the nation. It is in the early and
plastic years that the destiny of individuals is fixed. If anywhere,
it is in our schools that our children shall learn the things out of
which are the issues of life and death. What atmosphere shall we
surround our children with in our schools? is the supreme question.
'To educate without religion is only to produce clever devils,'
declared the Duke of Wellington in his downright way. And as a nation
we have made sure of everything being taught--except religion. No
government-inspector ever asks about it!
What a waste it all is and what a travesty--this pumping of facts and
figures into the weary, jaded brains of little children. Only five per
cent. or so of the people are capable of benefiting by a long process
of education--yet everybody must be confined in dreary barracks from
five to fifteen years, learning things that will never be of use and
are straightway forgotten. We ordained that all the children should be
taught, but in our usual blundering fashion we never settled what we
should teach them. The child looks out on a world of wonder, and
proves its wisdom by peopling every grove and every hill with fairies.
For the child the world is spiritual. And it comes to us and asks how
came it and why came it? But our legislators decreed that, so far as
they were concerned, the child should be taught geography and the names
of rivers and hills, but not about the God who made the rivers and
hills and the world; botany, but not about the God who made the grass
and the flowers; physiology, but not about the God who fashioned man;
dates of kings and of battles, but not about the God whose providence
is written over all history; about laws, but not about the Source of
all law--the divine commands that regulate human action. The only part
of man that the educators considered was the brain. If they
intellectualised the race they deemed that the millennium would come.
They did it. But the millennium is further off than ever. They caused
all the people to go through the mills where knowledge was ground out;
they learned to read and write. The only consequence was that they
became the victims of every charlatan. They turned their arithmetic
into roguery and their literature into lust. They became the victims
of the gamblers and the betting touts. They pursued the missing words
and became the disciples of demagogues. And salvation has tarried
though the brain has been nurtured. Yes! there has come a vast
progress! London in the next war can be completely destroyed by
spraying it with gas bombs--in eight hours! Education, with God left
out, will, then, have come to its fruition!
V
National education will only become a means of deliverance from evil
when our schools shall have been transformed into the nurseries of
goodness. For after all, what we need is good men and women. Clever
men are as common as berries; what the world cries for is men who can
be trusted, men whose motive will be the welfare of others and not
their own. 'His fame was immense,' was the verdict on a Roman patriot;
'his private property was so scanty that there was not enough to pay
the expenses of his funeral. He was buried at the public cost. The
matrons mourned him as they mourned Brutus.' Ah! the terrible thing is
not to die poor but to die with a character no man honours. To train
our children to love and desire goodness is our need. The history of
the ages is the proof that goodness cannot flourish apart from
religion. And the Bible tells the story of the dealing of God with
men--of the evolution of religion. It is that which constitutes the
supreme value of the book.
But no book has suffered more at the hands of its friends than has the
Bible. The Bible is an Eastern book, and it is filled with glowing
metaphors and parables. Dull, unimaginative Western minds said: 'These
are literally true, and unless you believe them so you are lost.' The
writer of the beautiful book of Jonah wrote a story rebuking the narrow
spirit of the Jews, and his book has become the citadel of all the
narrow souls who see nothing in it but the whale. Children should be
taught that science and religion cannot contradict each other, because
they both are revelations of the one God; that the Bible is full of
poetry and parables which the writers never meant that any should
mistake for treatises; that the slaughter of the Canaanites and the
psalms of cursing are no more of the essence of religion, than the
Stuart tyranny the essence of Scotland; that the serpent in the garden
and Jonah in the whale are parables; that religion, in short, is a
flowing and deepening river and not a stagnant pool. But religion as
too often taught in our schools is only the teaching of things which
the growing boy discovers to be untrue. So far from doing good, it is
the destruction of religion.
When the Bible is taught as the record of the evolution of the
revelation of God, it will move the hearts of men towards goodness
while time endures, for it enshrines the figure of Him who based a
Kingdom on love and meekness--a Kingdom that endures for ever, because
no guns can fight against a Spirit, nor any frontiers bar it. The
education that has not this as its base may produce the chlorine
gas--but it will never produce that goodness which alone maketh great.
But the course is so crowded that something must be jettisoned. And as
inspectors take no note of religion--let it be thrown overboard. Its
total omission in Secondary Schools is declared necessary, because the
syllabus is too crowded already! It is as if a man having a ship laden
with dross were offered some nuggets of fine gold and answered, 'My
ship is overloaded already, I cannot take more.' But he wouldn't be
such a fool. He would throw everything overboard, if need be, to make
room!
VI
In the last year of the Great War a new Education Bill was passed for
the Northern Kingdom, and provision was made for everything but the
teaching of religion. At every election the voters who desire that
religion be continued must have another spell of sentry-go to secure
it--all except Roman Catholics and Episcopalians! Truly we are of the
race of the Bourbons. The expense of teaching has been trebled; the
futility of what is taught remains as before. I heard the Chairman of
an Education Authority being asked whether provision was made in the
schools for teaching the children the scientific facts about alcohol.
He replied that the syllabus was too crowded already! Alcohol has
claimed more victims from humanity than all the wars and famines of all
the centuries; and yet our children were not to be taught the truth
about it because the syllabus was so crowded! What is it they teach
that could compare in value with the truths of temperance and
self-discipline? Through a course of training so expensive that the
countryside is well-nigh bankrupt because of its cost, the children
pass and they go forth into the world unwarned of the rocks and shoals
on which the millions have perished.... That, at this time of day, we
should shut the doors of our schools against the knowledge of God, in
whose love alone men can find their healing, and against the teaching
of truth and temperance, which alone can make children grow in
character and goodness, seems possible only on the supposition that we
have been bereft of our judgment. 'If they do abolish God from their
poor bewildered hearts,' said Carlyle, 'all or most of them, there will
be seen for some length of time, perhaps for some centuries, such a
world as few are dreaming of.'