She would go and sit in the corner under the gallery, where John used
to sit. He had sat with her there at his first Communion. The
memories wrapped her round, and she would feel her son near her there.
But the door of the church was locked and barred. With an added ache
in her heart she turned away, and weariness compelled her to sit on the
iron mort-safe, which the parish provided in a former century to
protect their dead from sacrilegious hands. "But the church used to be
open," I said. "Aye," she replied tremulously, gathering up her
handkerchief into a round ball; "but some did-na like it; the boots on
the week-days are na sae clean, and they dirtied the kirk. That must
be why they lockit the door." It was not that she complained. Those
who locked the church were wise men, and no doubt they knew best. So
she sat on the mort-safe.
"I have other sons, and when they are older they will go, too," she
said. "I'll no' keep them back. And if they die it'll be for God's
great cause." Her lips quivered as she spoke. The moist ball in the
right hand was clenched tight--there were no more tears to shed.
And as I looked at the worn, lined face, the bent shoulders, the faded
rusty black mantle with its fringe, and the sunken lips that quivered
now and then, there came a sudden realisation. I saw no longer the one
grief-burdened figure sitting dejectedly on the mort-safe--I saw the
unnumbered host of mothers throughout the world who have given their
sons over to carnage, and who are as Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted because they are not. Millions of men locked
in the death grapple means millions of mothers given tears to drink in
great measure, bound in affliction and iron.
The song of the river went on ceaselessly, the russet-leaves fell
softly, and the sun shone on a world wrapped in peace--all nature
utterly regardless of the millions of Rachels that weep. (Ten million
hearts may break, but nature silences not one note of its joyousness.)
And as she sat there, behind her, under the campanile, showed the
church door, locked and barred. Nature was heedless of her; the church
shut its door upon her. She seemed to me the Mater Dolorosa.
***
As I went up the brae there came the memory of a school lesson long
ago. Out of the subconscious it leaped as a diver might come up from
the depths of the sea with a gleaming coin in his hand. Among the
temples of ancient Rome there was one temple always kept open in time
of war. There the Roman General clashed the shield and the spear,
invoking the god ere he went to the battle-line, and its door was shut
not day or night. And I have no doubt but that the Eternal Ruler heard
that clashing of spear on shield, and marked that open door. But over
wide districts of Great Britain we have left these pagan habits far
behind us. We shut the doors of our temples alike in war and in
peace--excepting two hours on one day of the week, or in many cases one
hour in the week. Nor do I doubt but that the same Ruler marks these
doors now shut on the mothers of sorrow, and these sanctuaries locked
and silent.
The glory was now gone from the day. I could not forget how the iron
mort-safe gave the rest that the Church refused. The shadow lay heavy
over the valley, and the mind tried to give the shadow a name. But it
could not. So up the long flight of stone steps I climbed, and turned
along a tree-shaded road. There, where three roads meet, stands a
little chapel within whose walls a small section of our parishioners
worship. I have passed it times out of mind without so much as
glancing at it. But to-day its open door arrested my eye, and I stood
in the roadway and gazed. And there came to me there a sudden sense of
thankfulness for that there is one open door in our parish which
witnesses to the fact that the power and solace of religion are not
shut in within the confines of only two hours of one day in the week.
While I yet stood in the highway there came forth from the little
chapel an honoured parishioner, who is passing the golden evening of a
useful life in researches regarding Calvin and the Pope. Amazement
possessed me, for he is a power in the parish church, whose door is
locked and barred. We walked together towards the hills. There was a
trace of apology in his explanation. Since this dreadful cataclysm has
burst and the boom of the guns has come drifting from the sea across
the high-perched city, he has felt the need of quiet meditation. Thus
he has often on his walks slipped through the open door of the chapel
that stands by the roadside.
"And you have locked the door of the parish church," I exclaimed, "and
you deny to the poor the privilege you yourself enjoy." He stopped and
faced me in the roadway, blinking at me. "We never locked the Church
door," he said. "It used to be open," I answered; "I remember being
glad to sit in it myself." "Oh! I remember," he exclaimed, "it was
open every day for a few years, but the authorities were never
consulted when it was thrown open--a most lawless proceeding!--and when
a suitable opportunity occurred the beadle locked it up. Law and order
have to be vindicated."
"What you did then," I replied, "was to allow the beadle to deprive the
poor parishioners of a privilege which you and a few others enjoy
elsewhere." At that he started off walking along the road very
quickly, but I kept step with him. "You see," said he, waving a
deprecatory hand, "I am only one among many, and I was so absorbed in
these old Reformation controversies that I never gave it a thought, and
it is only since the war began that I realised...." And as he spoke I
felt that my old friend, learned in many controversies, had experienced
a revolution. The great tide had swept him past all controversies
right up to the fountain head. He had learned that man's high calling
is not to dispute, but to pray.
As we walked under the darkling hills I told him of that shadow which
had so suddenly fallen upon me that day, and he at once gave it a name.
"It is the shadow of the Cross," said he. And thereupon he began to
explain out of the wisdom and ripened experience of seventy years how
across nineteen centuries the shadow of the Cross lies still over all
the world. One thinks so seldom of these things, and if occasionally
one hears them spoken of, familiarity with the words has deadened the
hearer to their significance. It was because I listened to him talking
in the lane that his words gripped me. They might have made no
impression if he were in a pulpit.
***
We are accustomed to think of the greatest of all tragedies as an event
consummated in six hours. It is, however, far from consummated, for it
is an age-long tragedy. Its roots lay in self-interest. A degenerate
priesthood in an obscure Syrian town saw nothing in the Greatest of
Teachers but an unbalanced enthusiast, who struck at their ill-gotten
gains, and whose triumph would make an end of them and their system.
So self-interest cried "Crucify." And though the Roman Governor saw
through them and wanted to save Him, self-interest again was brought
into play, and when threatened with an awkward complaint to Rome, he
said "Crucify." And ever since then self-interest on innumerable lips
has cried Crucify, Crucify. Not only cried, but did it.
For this Teacher identified Himself with His followers, saying that He
was the Vine and they the branches. It follows that whatever is done
to the branch is done to the vine. A branch cannot be cut and severed
from the vine without the vine bleeding. He declared it to be so.
"Whosoever receiveth you receiveth Me," and it follows that whosoever
crucifies you crucifies Me. And the history of the centuries is the
history of how the poor and unlearned and the toiling have been
persecuted, harried by war, driven to death and crucified.
Generation after generation have raised the Cross anew, and in the
crucifying of the dumb multitudes have crucified Him. Along with His
own He fought with wild beasts, went through the flames, and suffered
many bloody and diverse persecutions, and He was with His people now.
He confronted to-day the mighty of the earth as He did that blinded
priesthood of old, and He declared that there is only one way of
conquering, and that by love; that gaining the whole world was a
miserable bargain if in exchange a man parted with truth and
righteousness and purity--those things that constitute the soul's very
breath.
But self-interest answered with cold disdain: "What sickly
sentimentalist is this? Let Him be crucified." He faced to-day the
lust of conquest, and declared that the conquering of men's bodies was
nothing; that the only way of attaining power was to conquer men's
hearts and minds and wills, thus clasping them to us with hooks of
steel; that the will of God for His children was that they should love
their enemies and not pour upon them the vials of wrath, trampling them
under foot; but the arrogance of man answered with the hoarse cry,
"Crucify."
And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the
holocaust of war--ten millions of men consigned to the hell of reeking
trenches. In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before,
bearing its awful woe. In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal
Love is crucified. It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips
trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred
door of the House of God.
***
The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done
shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there
should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power. And yet there
must be some explanation of it. Why should a passion for righteousness
be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified
by a petty Roman official? There can be no explanation but this--that
that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which
wrought so evil a deed. That power was self-interest--selfishness.
The eyes of men turned to Jesus Christ, and they saw one holy,
harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, whose journeying was the
journeys of healing among the sons of men, whose words were words of
blessedness, declaring that God loved and pardoned His children, and
yet men reviled, scorned, scourged and at last crucified Him. The
power that moved men to this dread crime was sin, and thus the word sin
became a word of horror. (For the selfishness that crucified was only
one fruit of sin.) Out of that realisation of the horror of sin there
sprang an ethical passion--a passion which in the heart and in the
world waged ceaseless war on selfishness and all the devices of evil.
Thus humanity was lifted out of the mire. They girded themselves to
fight that dread and hateful power which crucified the Holy One.
Like the wind blowing in from the sea that sweeps before it the foul
miasma that lies over the valleys, so that men look up and see the
heavens and feel a new vigour moving in their blood, so a breath from
the living God came stirring the foul places of humanity, and the eyes,
no longer blinded by the exhalations of evil passions, saw the ideal of
purity arise before their eyes, and they turned to climb towards the
clearer vision. Through the revelation of purity in the face of Jesus
Christ and the realisation of the awfulness of that power which crowned
that purity with thorns, there came to humanity the dawning of
deliverance from sin--a deliverance still going on to its fruition.
***
History is for ever repeating itself, and to-day the process of
humanity's deliverance from evil will gather momentum and advance a
long way towards the final triumph. For just as men only realised the
hatefulness of sin when they saw it laid upon Jesus Christ, so will it
be also to-day. A generation that had lost the sense of sin beholds
sin laid upon millions of men, working woe unspeakable, and, beholding,
learns anew what sin is and the hatefulness of it. For these millions
of men grappling with death, what are they but humanity's sin-bearers.
On them is laid the burden of the sins of this generation. The
selfishness, greed, ambition, lust--all the passions which sweep men to
wars of conquest--have poured the vials of misery on their heads. The
son of the widow sitting on the mort-safe, who now lies in a nameless
grave, he bore it. The bearing of it killed him.
And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more
burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that passion for
righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust. There will ring
round the world the compelling cry that this power of hell must not for
ever hold humanity in its grip--that ruthless ambition, militarism,
despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth. Once more
the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men.
***
There was another power also that stirred the world under the shadow of
the Cross, and that was the power of self-sacrifice. There came to men
an overwhelming realisation that at the heart of the universe was the
Spirit of self-sacrifice, and that the Cross was but the expression of
it. They realised that the greatest thing a man can do with his life
is to lay it down. And as men realise to-day that the Cross still
abides in the heart of God, so that in all their affliction He is
afflicted, there comes to them the feeling that the one way of coming
nearest to His heart is the way of self-sacrifice.
Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought
life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of
self-sacrifice. What is it that sustains the men who go down to the
earthly hell of ruthless war? It is just this--the consciousness,
newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and
country, for home and kindred. They are content to be blotted out if
only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be
exalted. Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once
more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure. Men charge
across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes. They are
raised into the fellowship of the Cross. And we are raised with them.
If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the
glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again
lift up her face to the light. He has died that we may live. Greater
love hath no man than this--nor yet greater glory. But she needs not
to be told; she knows it already. She knows it far better than you or
I do, for she feels it. In the deep places of life where words are
meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the
glory of self-sacrifice.
By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the
soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of
lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine
wisdom which is hid from the wise. She knows that the road that goes
by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can
come to God. She knows that her son has walked along that road, and
that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying
while bearing it, God has brought him into that joy which all the
cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe. And because
she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has
felt the touch of God, she is ready to greet the day of still greater
sacrifice.
***
In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and
read an article. It was a bitter invective against Christianity and
the Church. Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross--and this
holocaust as the fruit. It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced
eye. It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity
for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the
wicked have continued to crucify Him. These things are so not because,
but in spite, of Christianity.
Grievous as war now is, yet it is not war as in the days before the
Cross was erected on Calvary. When Ulysses asked Agamemnon for
sanction to bury the body of Ajax, the King was greatly annoyed. "What
do you mean?" he answered, "do you feel pity for a dead enemy?" That
was the spirit of war in the old heathen world--the spirit which had no
mercy on the living and no pity for the dead. Slowly but surely the
spirit of Christ fettered the spirit of hate and dethroned the spirit
of revenge. We now minister to the wounded and bury the dead enemy
with the pity and the honour we render to our own.
We can trace the evolution of peace through the centuries. Wars
between individuals have ceased. A century and a half ago warring
clans in Scotland dyed the heather red; to-day wars between tribes have
ceased. There remains only war between nations, and already there are
great nations between whom war is unthinkable. If we in these days
wage war with Germany, yet we in these days also celebrate the
hundredth anniversary of unbroken peace with the United States of
America. If we bewail the failure of Christianity in the former, let
us be grateful for the triumph of Christianity in the latter.
Formerly war was the normal condition; now to the moral consciousness
of Christendom war is an outrage. We only need to look beneath the
surface to realise that Galilee is conquering Corsica, and will conquer
at the last. Beneath the shadow of the Cross men will at last find
healing for their grievous wounds.
***
And as a symbol thereof the doors of the sanctuaries of peace will be
flung wide open, and no burdened heart will find the House of God
locked and barred against groping hands. One fruit of these grievous
days may well be that the Church will realise that it does not become
her to occupy a lower plane than that heathen temple in ancient Rome,
whose door was shut not day or night while men were dying in battle.
In the coming days when the mothers of sorrow come to their dead, over
whose graves the falling leaves flutter as a benediction, they will not
be left sitting on the iron mort-safe. The open door will invite them
into the sanctuary of peace, and they will croon the coronach of their
woe in the holy place. For they are the priesthood of this generation,
offering up the most precious sacrifice--and the door of the holy place
must be open to them. And there, in the sanctuaries of peace, their
sorrow will be transmuted into joy.
IV
The Power of Prayer
IV
For eight centuries the Church of St. Giles has been the centre of the
religious life of Scotland. At all times of sorrow the nation has
turned to it, and within its walls, consecrated by the prayers of so
many generations, the surcharged heart has voiced its woe in the
presence of the Unseen. But in all the years of the dim and fading
past there never was a day like this in which we now stand. Death has
come as a grim spectre, and has looked into our eyes. The winds carry
to our ears the moans of our perishing sons, dying gloriously for
freedom on the bloody fields of Flanders. The great ships guard our
shores, and we know that if that vigil failed, our cities and villages
and fair countryside would become as Louvain and the Low Country.
Death itself would be welcome rather than that.
If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye
has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our
ears. And that call soundeth not in vain. To-day[1] the two great
Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their
misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country--for all the
things which make life beautiful. They have come through days of
alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one
place. And in their hearts only one purpose--to seek the blessing of
God for their nation.
[1] November 18, 1914.
***
As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many bloody fights
for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the
church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of
time.
Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and
out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the
altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing
for their dead. The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of
the surf wailing on the shore, and their sobbing as the cry of the
grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide. But the city fathers
could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of
destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of
the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to
rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to
pass to the kyrk, and pray whane tyme requires for our Soveraine Lord
and his Army, and neichbouris being thereat."
That proclamation stirs the blood! They are dust, these fathers of
ours, but their spirit is all alive, throbbing in the heart of
us--their far-away children. Never did a race meet its Sedan in a
sublimer spirit than that. The strong, at toll of bell and tuck of
drum, manned the ramparts, and the women filled St. Giles' and sent
heavenward their cries. The bodies of such a race may for a brief
season be brought to subjection, but their souls are invincible--and it
is the soul that always conquers.
And here to-day it is the same. From every part of Scotland men have
come, and they passed "to the kirk to pray for our Sovereign Lord and
his Army." True, there has been no Flodden and no Sedan; but it is by
the good hand of God upon us that the enemy was frustrated in his
eagerness for another Sedan. And it is in part the prayer of
thanksgiving that is laid to-day upon His altar, and in part the
petition that His mercies may be continued to the nation in the cruel
days to come.
***
What a sanctuary for a nation's prayers, this church, where Kings have
prayed and gone forth to die in battle; where Queens have wept as the
voice of judgment, grim and stern, untouched by tenderness or love,
sounded in the ear; where three thousand people dissolved in tears as
the good Regent, foully slain, was borne to his grave. Over it passed
wave after wave of fanaticism and barbarism; and at last it fell into
the hands of the restorers--more ruthless far than Goths or Vandals!
But, through it all, the house of God survived; and, apparelled once
more in some of its pristine glory, it opens its doors to a nation that
once more seek after its God.
And above us, as we sit there, hang the colours of our Scottish
regiments stirring our patriotism, assuring us that the men who guarded
these flags on many bloody fields were guarded by God, and that we are
still in His keeping.
What a place this is in which to set vibrating that note of patriotism
which now quivers from Maiden Kirk to John o' Groat's. These colours
there--they are the most eloquent things on earth, for they pertain to
the realm of symbols. Words are poor compared to tears, and that is
because tears belong to the world of symbols. That tattered banner
there belonged to the Gordon Highlanders, and was carried through the
Peninsula and the Crimea. Woven in faded letters you can read on it
still Corunna, Almarez, Pyrenees, Waterloo. Ah! these flags tell of a
devotion stronger than death, rekindle the memories of the day when
stern silence fell on the ranks, as the Highland Brigade breasted the
slopes of the Alma until Sir Colin Campbell lifted his hat and they
rushed on the foe with the slogan of victory; and that other day when
"the thin red line tipped with steel" rolled back the surge of the
Cossacks; aye, and of a hundred such days when men went down joyously
to death that the race might be free and live.
Waterloo!--it is on many flags. And we remember how the Man of Destiny
himself, as he saw his ranks yield before the onslaught of the
Highlanders, did not restrain his admiration for his enemies, but
exclaimed with the true soldier's generosity, "Les braves
Ecossais"--"Brave, brave Scotsmen" (what a contrast to "French's
contemptible little Army"). The hands that carried, the hearts that
thrilled at the waving of these flags, their fame will never perish.