Joan of Arc--Her Heritage
I saw in Orleans three years ago the celebration of the 487th
Anniversary of the deliverance of the ancient city by Joan of Arc.
The flower of the French army passed before me, the glorious
sunlight touching sword and lance and bayonet tip until they formed
a shimmering fretwork of steel. Then came the City Fathers in
democratic dress--and following them, the dignitaries of the Church,
in purple and crimson and old lace, and a host of choir boys singing
Glory to God in the Highest, and finally in his splendid scarlet
robe, a cardinal symbolical of power and majesty and dominion.
In whose honor was all this gorgeous pageantry? In honor of a simple
peasant girl, who saw or thought she saw visions--it is perfectly
immaterial whether she did or not--and who heard or fancied she
heard--it matters not--voices calling to her out of the silences
of the night to go forth and save France. Soldiers and clergy and
populace, Catholics and Protestants and pagans united in paying
homage to the courage of a woman. And I thought as I watched
the brilliant spectacle in the shadow of the old cathedral, that
thousands of women in the twentieth century in England and America,
and France and Germany and all the Nations are serving in a different
way, it is true, from the way in which Joan of Arc served France,
but none the less effectively. Aye, even more so, as they go forth
clad not in mail, but in Christian love to help mankind. In the
very forefront of this shining host are the trained nurses, following
the standard uplifted by Florence Nightingale.
When I see a trained nurse in her attractive cap and gown I always
feel that a richer memory, a finer intention has been read into
life. Wherever they go they carry healing with them.
To maintain this army of militant good will and helpfulness, and
to increase it as occasion requires is an obligation so imperative
that it cannot be evaded.
Never was it as urgent as it is to-day, that there should be generous
response to the appeal for nurses.
If we are often discouraged in our philanthropic work, it is not
because we consider what we are doing in a detached way, independent
of its world relationships. If we could only realize that we are
part of the mighty army composed of all nationalities and races
and creeds, an army of life, not of death, marching past disease
and suffering and misery and sin, we would be inspired to wage the
conflict with greater vigor, until our vision of the world freed
from suffering, was realized.
When the realization comes, it will not come with shouting and
tumult, but will come quietly and beautifully as the sun makes its
triumphant progress through the heavens, gradually conquering the
night until at last the earth is flooded with glorious warmth and
light and all the formless shapes that loved darkness rather than
light silently steal away and are forgotten.
John Lewis Griffiths
Note: Although the above selection was part of an address delivered in
London in 1911, its truth is more apparent today than ever before.
Things Which Cannot Be Shaken
There are season in life when everything seems to be shaking. Old
landmarks are crumbling. Venerable foundations are upheaved in a
night, and are scattered abroad as dust. Guiding buoys snap their
moorings, and go drifting down the channel. Institutions which
promised to outlast the hills collapse like a stricken tent.
Assumptions in which everybody trusted burst like air-balloons.
Everything seems to lose its base, and trembles in uncertainty and
confusion.
Such seasons are known in our personal life. One day our
circumstances appear to share the unshaken solidity of the planet,
and our security is complete. And then some undreamed-of antagonism
assaults our life. We speak of it as a bolt from the blue!
Perhaps it is some stunning disaster in business. Or perhaps death
has leaped into our quiet meadows. Or perhaps some presumptuous
sin has suddenly revealed its foul face in the life of one of our
children. And we are "all at sea!" Our little, neat hypotheses
crumple like withered leaves. Our accustomed roads are all broken
up, our conventional ways of thinking and feeling, and the sure
sequences on which we have depended vanish in a night. It is
experiences like these which make the soul cry out with the psalmist,
in bewilderment and fear,--"My foot slippeth!" His customary
foothold had given way. The ground was shaking beneath him. The
foundations trembled.
And such seasons are known in the life of nations. An easy-going
traditionalism can be overturned in a single blast. Conventional
standards, which seemed to have the fixedness of the stars are
blown to the winds. Political and economic safeguards go down like
wooden fences before an angry sea. The customary foundations of
society are shaken. We must surely have had such experiences as
these during the past weeks and months. What was unthinkable has
become a commonplace. The impossible has happened. Our working
assumptions are in ruins. Common securities have vanished. And
on every side men and women are whispering the question,--Where
are we? We are all staggered! And everywhere men and women, in
their own way, are whispering the confession of the psalmist,--"My
foot slippeth!"
Well, where are we? Amid all these violations of our ideals, and
the quenching of our hopes, in this riot of barbarism and unutterable
sorrow, where are we? Where can we find a footing? Where can
we stay our souls? Where can we set our feet as upon solid rock?
Amid the many things which are shaking what things are there which
cannot be shaken?
"Things which cannot be shaken." Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY
OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circumstances
of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to
be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate
materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily
press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement.
And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we
must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent and
the transient. Behind the uncharted riot there hides a power whose
invisible energy is the real master of the field. The ocean can
be lashed by the winds into indescribable fury, and the breakers
may rise and fall in crushing weight and disaster; and yet behind
and beneath all the wild phenomena there is a subtle, mystical
force which is exerting its silent mastery even at the very height
of the storm. We must discriminate between the phenomenal and
the spiritual, between the event of the hour and the drift of the
year, between the issue of a battle and the tendency of a campaign.
All of which means that "While we look at the things which are seen,
we are also to look at the things which are not seen." Well, look
at them.
THE POWER OF TRUTH can never be shaken. The force of disloyalty
may have its hour of triumph, and treachery may march for a season
to victory after victory; but all the while truth is secretly
exercising her mastery, and in the long run the labor of falsehood
will crumble into ruin. There is no permanent conquest for a lie.
You can no more keep the truth interred than you could keep the
Lord interred in Joseph's tomb. You cannot bury the truth, you
cannot strangle her, you cannot even shake her! You may burn up
the records of the truth, but you cannot impair the truth itself!
When the records are reduced to ashes truth shall walk abroad as
an indestructible angel and minister of the Lord! "He shall give
His angels charge over thee," and truth is one of His angels, and
she cannot be destroyed.
There was a people in the olden days who sought to find security
in falsehood, and to construct a sovereignty by the aid of broken
covenants. Let me read to you their boasts as it is recorded
by the prophet Isaiah: "We have made a covenant with death, and
with hell are we at agreement: when the overflowing scourge shall
pass through, it shall not come unto us, for we have made lies our
refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves." And so they
banished truth. But banished truth is not vanquished truth. Truth
is never idle; she is ever active and ubiquitous, she is forever
and forever our antagonist or our friend. "Therefore thus saith the
Lord God...your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your
agreement with hell shall not stand...and the hail shall sweep away
the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-places."
Thus said the Lord! We may silence a fort, but we cannot paralyze
the truth. Amid all the material convulsions of the day the
supremacy of truth remains unshaken. "The mouth of the Lord hath
spoken it."
"Things which cannot be shaken!" What is there which cannot be
shaken? THE PASSION OF FREEDOM is one of the rarest of spiritual
flames, and it can not be quenched. Make your appeal to history.
Again and again militarism has sought to crush it, but it has
seemed to share the very life of God. Brutal inspirations have
tried to smother it, but it has breathed an indestructible life.
Study its energy in the historical records of the Book or in annals
of a wider field. Study the passion of freedom amid the oppressions
of Egypt, or in the captivity of Babylon, or in the servitude of
Rome. How does the passion express itself? "If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may
my right hand forget her cunning!" Study it in the glowing pages
of the history of this country, that breath of free aspiration which
no power of armament, and no menace of material strength was ever
able to destroy. The mightiest force in all those days was not
the power of threat, and powder, and sword, but that breath of
invincible aspiration which was the very breath of God. And when
we gaze upon stricken Belgium to-day, and look upon her sorrows,
and her smitten fields, and her ruined cities, and her desolate
homes, we can firmly and confidently proclaim that the breath
of that divinely planted aspiration, her passion of freedom, will
prove to be mightier than all the materialistic strength and all
the prodigious armaments which seem to have laid her low. It is
a reality which cannot be shaken.
There are other spiritual forces which we might have named, and which
would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is
the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with
the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless
vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight,
unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith
which hold on and out amid the massed hostilities of all its foes.
You cannot defeat spirits like these, you cannot crush and destroy
them. You cannot hold them under, for their supremacy shares the
holy sovereignty of the eternal God. "Not by might, nor by power,
but by my Spirit, saith the Lord;" and these spirits, the spirit
of truth, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of meekness and love,
are in fellowship with the divine Spirit, and therefore shall they
remain unshaken.
[signed]J.H. Jowett
Somewhere in France
"Somewhere in France"--the day is tranquil, the sky unvexed, the
green earth without a wound as I write; yet "somewhere in France"
the day is torn with clamors, the sky is soiled with man's mounting
hatred of man, and long, open wounds lie cruelly across the disputed
earth. "Somewhere in France"--my mind goes back to remembered
scenes: the crowd blocking the approach to a depot; white faces
and staring eyes, eyes that alternately fear and hope, and in the
crush a tickling gray line of returning PERMISSIONAIRES. "Somewhere
in France"--on such a perfect day as this I see a little village
street nestled among the trees, and hear the sound of the postman's
reluctant feet tapping over the cobblestones--the postman that comes
with the relentlessness of Fate--and at every house the horror of
the black envelope. "Somewhere in France" the great immemorial
cathedrals and the dotted, cool, moss-covered churches are filled
with supplicating women and the black-framed, golden locks of
children lifting their eyes before the Great Consoler as the sun
breaks through the paling candle-flames. "Somewhere in France"--in
its crowded stations I remember a proud womanhood, gray in
the knowledge of sorrow, speeding its young sons and speaking the
Spartan words. "Somewhere in France," in its thousand hospitals,
the ministering white-clad angels are moving in their long vigils,
calm, smiling, inspired. "Somewhere in France"--I see again
imperishable fragments of remembered emotions; the women working
in the vineyards of Champagne, careless of fate or the passing
shells; the orphan children playing in the ruins of Rheims; a laughing
child in bombarded Arras running out to pick up an exploded shell,
a child in whom daily habits has brought fear into contempt; a
skeleton of a church in far-flung Bethany, that still lives in a
sea of fire, where a black-coated priest of the unflinching faith
was holding his mass among kneeling men before an altar hidden in
the last standing corner from which the shredded ruins had been
swept.
"Somewhere in France"--I remember the volcanic earth, the strewn
ruin of all things, the prostrate handiwork of man mingled with
the indignant bowels of the earth, and from a burrowed hole a POILU
laughing out at us in impertinent greeting, with a gaiety which is
more difficult than courage.
"Somewhere in France"--in bombarded Arras, was it not?--I remember
an old woman, a very old woman, leaning on her cane as she peered
from her cellar door within a hundred yards of the smoldering cathedral.
I wonder if she still lives, for Arras will be struggling back to
life now.
"Somewhere in France"--what thronged memories troop at these liberating
words! And yet, through all the passing drama of remembered little
things, what I see always before my eyes is the spiritual rise of
Verdun. Verdun, heroic sister of the Marne; Verdun, the battling
heart of France--whose stained slopes are anointed by the blood
of a million men. Verdun! The very name has the upward fury and
descending shock of an attacking wave dying against an immemorial
shore. To have seen it as I was privileged to see it in that
historic first week of August, 1915, at the turning of the tide,
at the moment of the retaking of Fleury and Thiaumont, was to have
stood between two great spectacles: the written page of a defense
such as history has never seen, and the future, glowing with the
unquenchable fire of undying France. When I think of the flaming
courage of that heroic race, my imagination returns always to the
vision of that defense--not the patient fortitude before famine of
Paris, Sebastopol or Mafeking, but that miracle of patience and
calm in the face of torrential rains of steel which for months
swept the human earth in such a deluge as never before had been
sent in punishment upon the world. This was no adventure such as
that gambling with fate which in all times and in all forms has
stirred the spirit of man. Regiment after regiment marched down into
the maw of hell, into the certainty of death. They went forward,
not to dare, but to die, in that sublimest spirit of exultation
and sacrifice of which humanity is capable, that the children of
France might live free and unafraid, Frenchmen in a French land.
They went in regiment after regiment, division after division--living
armies to replace the ghostly armies that had held until they died.
Days without nights, weeks without a breathing spell--five months
and more. They lie there now, the human wall of France, that no
artillery has ever mastered or ever will, to prove that greater
than all the imagined horror of man's instinct of destruction,
undaunted before the new death that rocks the earth beneath him
and pollutes the fair vision of the sky above, the spirit of man
abides superior. Death is but a material horror; the will to live
free is the immortal thing.
[signed] Owen Johnson
The Associated Press
It is worth while to explain how the world's news is gathered and
furnished in a newspaper issued at one cent a copy. First, as
to the foreign news, which is, of course, the most difficult to
obtain and the most expensive. In normal times there are the four
great agencies which, with many smaller and tributary agencies,
are covering the whole world. These four agencies are, as above
noted, the Reuter Telegram Company, Ltd., of London, which assumes
responsibility for the news of the great British Empire, including
the home land, every colony except Canada, and the Suzerain,
or allied countries, as Egypt, Turkey, and even China and Japan;
and the Agency Havas of Paris, taking care of the Latin countries,
France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland and South
America as well as Northern Africa; and the Wolff Agency of Berlin,
reporting the happening in the Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Slav
nations. These three organizations are allied with The Associated
Press in an exclusive exchange arrangement. Subordinate to these
agencies is a smaller one in almost every nation, having like
exchange agreements with the larger companies.
Thus it happens that there is not a place of moment in the habitable
globe that is not provided for. Moreover, there is scarcely a
reporter on any paper in the world who does not, in a sense, become
a representative of all these four agencies. Not only are there
these alliances, but in every important capital of every country, and
in a great many of the other larger cities abroad there are "A.P."
men, trained by long experience in its offices in this country.
This is done because, first, the organization is naturally anxious
to view every country with American eyes; and, second, because a
number of the agencies spoken of are under the influence of their
Governments and, therefore, not always trustworthy. They are relied
upon for a certain class of news, as for instance, accidents by
flood and field, where there is no reason for any misrepresentation
on their part. But where it is a question which may involve national
pride or interest, or where there is a possibility of partisanship
or untruthfulness, the "A.P." men are trusted.
Now, assume that a fire has broken out in Benares, the sacred
city of the Hindus, on the banks of the Ganges, and a hundred or a
thousand people have lost their lives. Not far away, at Allahabad
or at Calcutta, is a daily paper, having a correspondent at Benares,
who reports the disaster fully. Some one on this paper sends the
story, or as much of it as is of general rather than local interest,
to the agent of the Reuter Company at Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras;
and thence it is cabled to London and Hongkong, and Sydney and
Tokio. At each of these places there are Associated Press men,
one of whom picks it up and forwards it to New York.
The wide world is combed for news, and an incredibly short time
is delivered and printed everywhere. When Pope [Leo] XIII died in
Rome the fact was announced by an Associated Press dispatch in the
columns of a San Francisco paper in nine minutes from the instant
when he breathed his last. And this message was repeated back to
London, Paris, and Rome, and gave those cities the first information
of the event. When Port Arthur was taken by the Japanese in the
war of 1896 it came to us in New York in fifty minutes, although
it passed through twenty-seven relay offices. Few of the operators
transmitting it knew what the dispatch meant. But they understood
the Latin letters, and sent it on from station to station, letter
by letter.
When Peary came back from his great discovery in the Arctic Sea
he reached Winter Harbor, on the coast of Labrador, and from there
sent me a wireless message that he had nailed the Stars and Stripes
to the North Pole. This went to Sydney, on Cape Breton Island,
and was forwarded thence by cable and telegraph to New York.
The organization is cooperative in its character. As a condition
of membership, each one belonging agrees to furnish to his
fellow-members, either directly or through the Association, and
to them exclusively, the news of his vicinage, as gathered by him
for his own paper. This constitutes the large fountain from which
our American news supply is drawn. But, as in the case of the
foreign official agencies, if there be danger that an individual
member is biased, or if the matter be one of high importance, our
own trained and salaried staff men do the reporting. For this
purpose, as well as for administrative work, there is a bureau in
every leading city.
For the collection and interchange of this information we lease
from the various telephone and telegraph companies, and operate with
our own employees, something like fifty thousand miles of wires,
stretching out in every direction through the country and touching
every important center. To reach smaller cities, the telephone
is employed. Everywhere in every land, and every moment of every
day, there is ceaseless vigil for news.
People frequently ask what it costs thus to collect the news of the
world. And we cannot answer. Our annual budget is between three
and four million dollars. But this makes no account of the work
done by the individual papers all over the world in reporting the
matters and handling the news over to the agencies. Neither can
we estimate the number of men and women engaged in this fashion.
It is easy to measure the cost of certain specific events; as, for
instance, we expended twenty-eight thousand dollars to report the
Martinique disaster. And the Russo-Japanese war cost us over three
hundred thousand dollars.
Such is an outline of our activities in what we call normal times.
But these are not normal times. When the great European war broke
on us, eighteen months ago, all of the processes of civilization
seemed to go down in an hour. And we suffered in common with
others. Our international relations for the exchange of news were
instantly dislocated. We had been able to impress the governments
abroad with the value of an impartial and unpurchasable news service,
as opposed to the venal type of journalism, which was too common
on the European continent. And in our behalf they had abolished
their censorships. They had accorded us rules assuring us great
rapidity in the transmission of our messages over their government
telegraph lines. They had opened the doors of their chancelleries
to our correspondents, and told them freely the news as it developed.
All the advantages ceased. The German news agency was prohibited
from holding any intercourse with the English, French, or Russian
organizations. Simultaneously, like commerce was interdicted in
the other countries. The virtue of impartial news-gathering at
once ceased to be quoted at par. Everywhere, in all of the warring
lands the Biblical rule that "he that is not with me is against me,"
became the controlling view. Government telegrams were obviously
very important and there was no time to consider anywhere any of
the promised speed in sending our dispatches. Finally, censorships
were imposed. This was quite proper in principle. Censorships are
always necessary in time of war. But it is desirable, from every
point of view, that they be intelligent, and that is not always
the case.
Nevertheless, we have fared pretty well in the business of reporting
this war. We have made distinct progress in teaching the belligerents
that we hold no brief for any one of them, and, while each would
much rather have us plead his cause, they are coming to see why we
cannot and ought not do so. And our men are everywhere respected
and accorded as large privileges as, perhaps, in the light of the
tension of the hour, could be reasonably asked.
[signed] Melville E. Stone
Pan and the Pot-Hunter