_A PLEA FOR THE INNOCENTS_
My "spiritual home" is not Berlin, nor even Rome, but Jerusalem.
In heart and mind I am there to-day, and have been there ever since
the eternally memorable day on which our army entered it. What I am
writing will see the light on the Feast of the Holy Innocents;[*]
and my thoughts have been running on a prophetic verse which unites
the place and the festival in a picturesque accord:
"Thus saith the Lord, I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in
the midst of Jerusalem:... and the streets of the city shall be
full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof."
The most brilliant Israelite of our times, Lord Beaconsfield, said
of a brilliant Englishman, Dean Stanley, that his leading feature
was his "picturesque sensibility," and that sensibility was never
more happily expressed than when he instituted the service for
children in Westminster Abbey on Innocents' Day--"Childermas Day,"
as our forefathers called it, in the age when holidays were also
holy days, and the Mass was the centre of social as well as of
spiritual life. On this touching feast a vast congregation of boys
and girls assembles in that Abbey Church which has been rightly
called "the most lovable thing in Christendom"; and, as it moves
in "solemn troops and sweet societies" through aisles grey with
the memories of a thousand years, it seems a living prophecy of
a brighter age already at the door.
[Footnote *: December 28, 1917.]
It seems--rather, it seemed. Who can pierce the "hues of earthquake
and eclipse" which darken the aspect of the present world? Who
can foresee, or even reasonably conjecture, the fate which is in
store for the children who to-day are singing their carols in the
church of the Confessor? Will it be their lot to be "playing in the
streets" of a spiritual Jerusalem--the Holy City of a regenerated
humanity? or are they destined to grow up in a reign of blood and
iron which spurns the "Vision of Peace" as the most contemptible
of dreams?
In some form or another these questions must force themselves on
the mind of anyone who contemplates the boys and girls of to-day,
and tries to forecast what may befall them in the next four or
five years.
It is a gruesome thought that the children of to-day are growing up
in an atmosphere of war. Bloodshed, slaughter, peril and privation,
bereavement and sorrow and anxiety--all the evils from which happy
childhood is most sedulously guarded have become the natural elements
in which they live and move and have their being. For the moment
the cloud rests lightly on them, for not "all that is at enmity
with joy" can depress the Divine merriment of healthy childhood;
but the cloud will become darker and heavier with each succeeding
year of war; and every boy and girl is growing up into a fuller
realization of miseries which four years ago would have been
unimaginable.
But at Christmastide, if ever, we are bound to take the brightest
view which circumstances allow. Let us then assume the best. Let us
assume that before next Innocents' Day the war will have ended in
a glorious peace. God grant it; but, even in that beatific event,
what will become of the children? They cannot be exactly what they
would have been if their lot had been cast in normal times. Unknown
to themselves, their "subconscious intelligence" must have taken a
colour and a tone from the circumstances in which they have been
reared. As to the colour, our task will be to wipe out the tinge
of blood; as to the tone, to restore the note which is associated
with the Angels' Song.
This is my "Plea for the Innocents." What will the State offer
them as they emerge from childhood into boyhood, and from boyhood
into adolescence?
Perhaps it will offer Conscription; and, with no "perhaps" at all,
some strident voices will pronounce that offer the finest boon
ever conferred upon the youth of a nation. Then, if there is any
manliness or fibre left in the adherents of freedom, they will
answer that we adopted Conscription for a definite object, and,
when once that object is attained, we renounce it for ever.
What will the State offer? Obviously it must offer education--but
what sort of education? The curse of militarism may make itself
felt even in the school-room. It would be deplorable indeed if,
as a result of our present experience, children were to be taught
what J. R. Green called a "drum-and-trumpet history," and were made
to believe that the triumphs of war are the highest achievements
of the human spirit.
As long as there is an Established Church, the State, in some sense,
offers religion. Is the religion of the next few years to be what
Ruskin commends: a "religion of pure mercy, which we must learn to
defend by fulfilling"; or is it to be the sort of religion which
Professor Cramb taught, and which Prussian Lutheranism has substituted
for the Gospel?
And, finally, what of home? After all said and done, it is the
home that, in the vast majority of cases, influences the soul and
shapes the life. What will the homes of England be like when the war
is over? Will they be homes in which the moral law reigns supreme;
where social virtue is recognized as the sole foundation of national
prosperity; where the "strange valour of goodwill towards men",
is revered as the highest type of manly resolution?
It is easy enough to ask these questions: it is impossible to answer
them. The Poet is the Prophet, and this is the Poet's vision:
"The days are dark with storm;--
The coming revolutions have to face
Of peace and music, but of blood and fire;
The strife of Races scarce consolidate,
Succeeded by the far more bitter strife
Of Classes--that which nineteen hundred years,
Since Christ spake, have not yet availed to close,
But rather brought to issue only now,
When first the Peoples international
Know their own strength, and know the world is theirs."[*]
_Know their own strength, and know the world is theirs_--a solemn
line, which at this season we may profitably ponder.
[Footnote *: "The Disciples," by H. E. Hamilton King.]