There was a period between the second and third year of the war, when
it seemed that the guiding, shielding spirits of the planet were slowly
being withdrawn--leaving only the mockery of goods, the chaos of
multiplied things. But at the blackest, in the very hush of desolation,
the new breath stole in upon us, a breath of lilacs on the chill, dank,
wintry air. Many now stand arisen, waiting the flash that changes the
world.... Five men were gathered in Stonestudy one evening; we talked
of our parts, the best we could do in the clean-up. It was hard to look
over the barriers at first; hard for an American to accept the fact
that he dare not say what he thought, nor write what he thought. It was
hard to realise that we were prevented from expressing what we thought,
by the very forces that had drawn us into this deep trouble. We who are
the distant generation of a party of pilgrims and voyagers who came to
America to find a free country, were strange and intolerant at first,
when we felt the yoke of Europe settle upon ancient scar-tissue.
We discussed.
A country is superb when one is unconscious of it, we said. One's
country should be like one's health, part of the song of life. Suddenly
to find the freedom of the past unremembered, the freedom of the
future unglimpsed, to hear the loathly low beat of talk from groups
of frock-coated Appetites, with heavy half-dead legs and heads like
pitching-quoits, settling our sacred future on the basis of steel
and coal and margin and murder market; to feel ourselves clutched
and borne forward with stub-nailed fingers in the stench of big
business; black-garbed shopmen pointing the way to the ports, urging
and shouldering other people's children to the ports of the gunboats,
advising the efficacy of "Nearer My God to Thee," as a song for sinking
ships,--we forgot at first in our own pain that this was merely the
body of the Old strained to a cracking point by the resistless growth
of the New.
Presently we grew kinder.... In a way, the Old was the grim stepmother
in whose house we learned how _not_ to do most things; in whose kitchen
we learned cleanliness, because of the vile example of her organic
sloth; in whose walled garden we learned the peril and the passion of
Quest, because we loathed her long snoring of afternoons; from the
death of whose sects and schism-shops we set forth to find the unity of
life; from the obscenity of whose loves we came into the first great
cleansing hatred of ourselves....
No hatred now. Hatred is part of the Old. It has no part to unsteady
the hands of the reconstructionists. This New Race has come up in
strong soil. The Old nourished and fertilised all its vitalities. The
new green beneath the litter of dead leaves cries out under the decay,
"You are stifling me!" but the plan of it all is wiser, for there is
warmth still in the humus of the old to protect the new and the frosts
may not be finished.
More and more as the sense of big cleansing and chastening came home
to us, the everlasting principles of reason and order and beauty also
appeared out of the chaos and the pain.... They were saying in Europe
that this war was a war without morale. We believed it would be a war
with morale before the destruction was finished. One of the cleanest
dreams we had was that America would bring, with its guns and knives
and instruments of flagellation, something of the almighty spirit of
the human heart to light the blackness where the Pale Horse has passed.
That's all morale is, and war without morale hasn't any cause or effect
on the constructive side, and will continue to destroy itself against
itself as all such forces do in their madness.
If any one concludes that we were a group of religionists gathered in
Stonestudy that night it will be well to point out that this planet
will be a whole lot more religious before war ends, and no one will be
louder about it than the trade-mind everywhere.
War brings death, and death enforces the faith of the human heart,
and faith is one of a trinity (as we learned in Sabbath School and
variously since) that inclines the heart of man to God. You take a
loved object from the Seen and place it in the Unseen (thousands each
day the soldiers pass) and faith is born of the agony of separation.
The human heart forces a bridge across the abyss from the Seen to the
Unseen. It's the old story of the bereaved turning to God. Saints are
thus made--thus tenderness and purity come to be.
Within the next ten years there will be heroisms before our
eyes--heroisms such as seers and saints and sages have dreamed of as
the consummation of the human heart. And those who have lost most and
mourned most will read the eternal joy of the Plan from the Book of
God's Remembrance.
* * * * *
When you see the remnant of a race of people crying out that there
is no God--then you begin to know what war means. When a country has
given its tithe of human blood, _or one in five is gone_--then you
begin to know what an Austrian woman meant, when she spoke of the
"horrible grinding of war and the answer of the women to man's cries
of pain afield." ... When peace brings a worship of materials and a
dulness that cannot look beyond existing institutions--the end is war,
and after that a sitting in black upon the ground.
We didn't know what death meant before this war--but many have learned.
The very word death has the sweetest sound of all uttered names to many
a lonely heart to-day. We didn't know enough about death. We had the
habit of thinking this was all. The end of such thinking is war, and
after that, a sitting in black upon the ground.
When your heart is cleft in twain and one part stays on this side, and
the other over the dim borderland--there's a straining of eyes into the
Unseen, a picture making out of the creative materials of human spirit.
Life of the soul begins again--out of pain--always out of pain.
We have not yet learned to accept life from the higher masters, Joy and
Beauty. We still learn through Pain. We forget the meaning of death,
even as we gather our things of death about us, and war comes along to
remind us again. Always those who answer to Master Pain must look to
death to find their relation to God. The faith that comes with peace
at last to the human heart, is energised by a love that crosses the
abyss of life and death.... A grand old teacher, Master Pain. When we
know all his lessons, and take his hand from our shoulder, and touch it
to our lips (for we shall know well his wonderful work when the time
comes for us to part with him), then we shall find that he is not a
black man at all--but a Sunburnt God....
* * * * *
Four at a supper table--a little child, its young mother, and the old
father and mother of a grown son, who has just died for France. The old
man's eyes roved from the child to its mother, back to the old woman,
and lingered there, something rough and deep and wise in his look. The
child suffered vaguely. There was much suffering in the house.... The
young mother asked coldly if they could feel _him_ in the room. Then
just as coldly she asked if there were a God. Then she ran from the
room with a cry like a night animal. The silent child began to weep.
The old man and the old woman stared at each other and wondered what
their daughter-in-law meant about _him_ being in the room.
A picture of the chastened world.
The child turned from the strange, sad human beings to the fairies
that played upon the peasant hearth. The child's mother had rushed
forth into the twilight to find a vision or a memory or a breath of
God. The old man and the old woman looked so long at each other in the
darkness--that the soul of the son of their flesh stood for one healing
instant between them. Thus the enduring figures of the Unseen reveal
themselves to those who have suffered to the end.
The nations are but names to fight for. These battle-lines are for
humanity's soul. If America is fighting for humanity, let it be with
surgical calm and healing in her hands. Hate spoils everything.
* * * * *
The babe knows a room; the child knows a house and looks out into a
street; the youth learns the street and then the city; the young man
learns his country, but the man should learn the world. You can never
be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no
human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when
the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever
suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity.
* * * * *
The few who brought the real American impartiality to the European
war in the first months, found themselves in the midst of the most
challenging chaos that ever reared its head to the light. Profound and
tragic impressions followed each other. It became icy clear that the
greater nations, as well as the pawns of the Balkans and the Levant,
were puppets alike, churned together in a great planetary cleansing.
Every partisan path was found to be increasingly crooked the farther
one advanced--and a sheer descent at the last. Any national point of
view used to dupe the people into greater destructive energy, proved
in itself, no matter how sincerely offered, as short-sighted and
ill-founded as the hatred of two soldiers who meet between trenches and
discover, as they gore each other to death, that their only basis for
hostility is a different colour of coat.
Studying Europe in those dark days, the unprejudiced eye was in danger
of having some truths torn down with the host of illusions. It was
hard to hold fast to the fact that there was anything magic or holy
about nations at war. Indeed, they seemed entities formed of groups of
greedy men who wanted their way--in the main, groups of leaders devoid
of vision and the spirit of fraternity, and careless of the welfare of
the people, quite the same as many great commercial organisations....
The real enemies of any people are groups of men who want things for
themselves. The real issue of the war has nothing to do with entities
of this kind, nor with alliances of such entities, but with the painful
groping consciousness of the peasant mind--its slow and torturous
awakening to the fact that royalty in its utmost pomp and glow does not
enfold God.
The people must learn before they can be free. Hitherto they have
been duped by the nations; and the nations are now being duped by each
other; but there is a greater plan at work--using men and nations
alike,--a plan to do away with boundaries and hatred and preying,
to strike the spear from the hand of man and leave it free to help
his neighbour, to establish democracy in the place of imperialism,
and fraternity upon the solid footings of the earth in the place of
separateness and strife.... The new volume of human spirit already
has been opened. We felt it that night in Stonestudy before lights
out,--the first beauty as of a song across still waters.
* * * * *
An American correspondent going home from the field in Europe "the
long way around," met an old Persian Master on the road to Damascus.
With the sage was his nearest disciple, also a Persian; in fact, the
young man was so loved that he had been changed from discipleship into
sonship. This young Persian became very devoted to the American. They
stood together for a moment in silence, when the time for parting came.
The old Master drew near and said:
"It is good to see you place your hands together. To me it is a symbol
of the marriage of the East and West, for the East and West must mate.
Long ago the East went up to God and the West went down to men. The
East has learned Vision and the West has learned Action. These two
must meet and mate again for the glory of God and the splendour of
earth. The East has lifted its soul to the hills and held fast to
its memory of the Father's house. The West has descended into the
folds of the valley, and won from agony and isolation its efficacy in
material things. And now the mystic is looking down and the materialist
is looking up. Soon their hands shall join--like your two hands in
mine--and there shall be great joy in the Father's House."
* * * * *
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