BEHIND YOU IS GOD
The greatest need of our day is the reinforcement of the soul. Our
mistake has been that we thought the supreme good was the development
of the brain. We went on steadily increasing our power over the forces
of nature, but we neglected to develop the soul-power which could
control and direct the material power thus created. The result has
been the greatest catastrophe in history. The industrial civilisation
which we reared through the painful toil of a century, is passing in
the smoke of the howitzer shells. And the end is not yet. Unless man
becomes master of himself, it can bring nought but misery that he
should master nature. The war of the future will be war in the air.
From the {174} experience of one or two air-craft raining destruction
on a city one can imagine that dread future when thousands of air-ships
and aeroplanes will rain bombs like hail on doomed cities. The old
security of this sea-girt isle has vanished for ever. In the air there
are no frontiers which can be fortified or guarded. Every fresh
triumph of science will be only a new engine of destruction, a new
weapon of devilry. Humanity will be driven underground, burrowing like
rats. It is quite conceivable not only that civilisation should perish
but that the world itself might be destroyed. The development of
power, without the development of soul to control it, means ruin to
mankind. The amazing thing is that men should to-day declare with
passionate conviction that the future safety of England depends on the
increase of that knowledge which has given us the poison clouds of
chlorine gas, without ever a word to indicate that salvation can only
come through the {175} development of self-mastery and
self-control--even through the soul. We have stood for two years in
the centre of the maelstrom of human history, and have heard the
hurricane of judgment sweeping through the world, but as yet we have
not heard the still, small voice of God.
I
The lesson we have to learn is that the power of the soul must be
enforced. And that can only come by laying hold upon God. The power
that ever lay behind human progress, that worked out law and order and
security, has in all ages been the power of religion--of God. But
religion has been in our day a matter of contempt. It was merely a
'grotesque, fungoid growth which clustered round the primeval thread of
ancestor worship,' more or less a 'pathological phenomenon closely
allied with neurosis and hysteria.' There are few things more pitiful
in human weakness {176} than the contempt expressed by the scientist
and the learned for that power of the soul which created the
civilisation of which the contemners are the fine fruit!
Though religion has been contemned, yet it cannot be denied that those
forces which create abiding races and powerful empires are the very
forces which have never been found to exist apart from the sanctions of
religion. The development of the Roman Empire was profoundly
influenced by its religion. To religion virtue owed its power, and
from it patriotism drew its inspiration. And that religion claimed a
supernatural origin--the source of its might was in the Unseen. When
religion became a matter of public ridicule and the gods an 'object of
secret contempt among the polished and enlightened,' and the
philosophers 'concealed the sentiments of an atheist under their
sacerdotal robes,' then the restraints of morality were flung aside and
Rome went headlong to ruin. It was the same in Greece; {177} the same
everywhere. All religions have issued their commands: 'And God spake
all these words, saying...' And so long as men felt the supernatural
behind the mandate, they trembled and obeyed; when behind the mandate
they discerned only superstition, they surrendered to their base
desires. Morality can only be based on the Divine. Its commands are
operative when these commands are recognised as those of the Moral
Governor of the universe. If these commands do not affect issues
beyond the grave, if they have no sanction in the eternal order, then
there is no value in obeying them, and no crime in disregarding them.
Rather is there a merit in flouting them--the mere products of
ignorance and superstition. To despise them and disregard them was the
mark of an emancipated and superior mind! Thus it ever came that first
the supernatural vanished and afterwards morality vanished. And thus
has it been also in our day.
The amazing thing is that men should {178} ever have been blind to
this--that, however much God may hide Himself at the end of other
avenues of approach, at the end of this He stands forth clear before
our eyes. There is nothing predicated regarding God which we cannot
doubt and deny save this, that there is operative in the world a moral
order conformity to which means life and disobedience death. It is
thus with individuals and thus with nations. Let a man surrender to
evil, and instantly nature begins to marshal its forces against him and
digs for him the grave. The road by which humanity has marched is
marked by the ruins of empires and civilisations upon which destruction
came through the very same laws that we see working to-day, if we
choose to look. Whatever race or empire surrendered to the base,
sacrificed purity to sensuality, the good of the common weal to its own
selfish ends, made selfishness and pleasure its aim, upon that race or
empire, sooner or later, fell the consuming sword and the {179}
devouring flame. There is no sentence in all literature more pregnant
than that which tells how the stars in their courses fought against
Sisera. So it has been and ever will be. The whole forces of the
universe are arrayed against evil, and carry on a ceaseless war against
it. It is because of this divine surgery that humanity has been saved
from a corruption which would have entailed the world's destruction.
All history is the proof that there is a mandate which means life or
death for individuals and nations. Along this road we can touch the
hand of God and see the sword of His divine justice. Righteousness is
the law of the world, the will of the Supreme Ruler who orders the
universe that righteousness must at last prevail. The source of
morality and all righteousness is--God.
II
It is manifest, then, that there is but one safety for individual or
race, and {180} that lies in getting into line with the Moral Order of
the world--with God. But the startling thing is that though we have
come through a discipline such as no generation ever experienced
before, at the end of two years of it there is no sign that we have
learned our lesson. The measure of our blindness is that politicians
summon the nation to cultivate its brains that it may be saved, without
ever a hint that salvation lies along the road of character and
morality--the road that leads to God. (If salvation lay in the brain,
the Greeks would have saved the world, for theirs was the greatest
brain-power ever developed on the earth.) And even the Church is
uncertain, and fails to summon the nation with clear and uncertain
sound back to God. For it is manifest that there can be no penitence
where there is no consciousness of transgression. There can be no
return except for those who realise that they have strayed.
The first step, then, back to God must spring from the soul wakened to
the {181} realisation that it has sinned and that God is fighting
against sin. But so far from the nation realising its true state, the
amazing fact is that the nation is hypnotised with the sense of its own
righteousness. It is only conscious of its own shining virtues. It
has drawn the sword for freedom and in defence of little nations. It
is waging a 'holy war.' Self-blinded, unable to believe that virtues
such as shine on its face could suffer repulse, in days of humiliation
and of defeat it has shouted 'Victory.' And from pulpit after pulpit
the doctrine is propounded that this war is not a judgment of our sins;
that to speak of war as a judgment of sin is 'antiquated.' The Church
has thus cut itself adrift from the teaching of prophet and seer, and
the Bible, which is aflame with the judgments of God upon sin, is but
the antiquated record of unenlightened ages. Thus the conscience of
the nation is narcotised. And it is manifest that a nation whose
conscience is chloroformed can hear no {182} call summoning to
repentance. When the Church is blind to the sword of God flaming in
the heavens, how can any expect the nation to behold it, and,
beholding, to repent?
This obsession that we are not living in a great day of divine judgment
is all the stranger when we consider that every day of our lives is a
day of divine judgment, and that we are ever standing at the bar of the
great assize. No sooner does a man sin than judgment begins to
operate. Let him surrender to intemperance, and the judgment of
disordered nerves and enfeebled frame is immediately declared. And so
with every violation of the divine order. And the judgment ever
operative against the individual is also ever operative against the
nation. It requires but little thought to see how the national sins
brought on the nation the judgment of these dread days.
For what was it that brought down upon us the cataclysm of war? It was
the degeneration into which the nation {183} had fallen. Like all
empires we had risen from poverty, through hardship and discipline, to
riches, and in days of luxury we lost our soul. We gave ourselves to
pleasure and self-indulgence. We worshipped at one shrine--that of
Mammon. We refused to bend the back to discipline or to exercise
ourselves in enduring hardship. We annexed a fourth of the world's
surface, but we were determined that we would have the world without
paying the price. With an army equal in size to that of Switzerland we
were holding against the rest of mankind an Empire which included most
of the world's riches. Our rulers knew of our danger, but they dared
not summon the people to arms, because whoever did so would risk
office. Those who were on the watch-towers saw the enemy mustering,
but they gave no warning, for the spoils of office were dear. Prophets
arose to warn us, but we meted out contempt to them. That was our
fashion of stoning them. (We have, {184} however, improved upon the
chosen race, for the very men who stoned them are already rearing
statues in their honour!) Crowds of thirty thousand would assemble to
shout and gamble over football matches, but the few days requisite for
the training of our Territorial forces were not to be endured! We
ceased to produce the population that could possess the vast
territories we held. We could think of nothing but the vapourings of
politicians who sacrificed the State to their faction. When Europe was
an armed camp and Germany was piling up armaments, we were preparing
for civil war in Ireland. Vision and genius were dying among us. For
the devotees of Aphrodite and Mammon are blinded to the stars. A
nation which sinks into degeneration, and which, holding the world's
wealth, refuses even to prepare to guard its riches, is loudly inviting
the robber. Germany concluded that we were degenerate and a negligible
factor. Does any one think that, if we had begun to prepare after
{185} Agadir, there would have been war? If Germany had for one moment
thought that the British fleet would have been arrayed against it, and
that Britain would have marshalled five millions of men to fight to the
death, there never would have been a war. It is not enough to say that
in that case the war would only have been postponed, for a war averted
is not necessarily a war postponed. Pendjeh and Fashoda might at least
teach us that.
Do not let us blind ourselves to the facts. One source of this war is
in ourselves. We bewail the horrors of war; what we ought to bewail is
the horror of sin. For war is only a symptom of the hidden disease, as
raving is the symptom of fever. And one of the sources of the blood
and tears that overwhelm the earth is our sin. The horror of the
battlefield pales before the horror of sin in our streets, sweeping
souls to death. Our surrender to pleasure, our pursuit of vanity, our
sacrifice of the State to party, of the race to our ease, our refusal
to {186} make the sacrifice that would make the Empire secure--these
are the conditions which made war inevitable and which evoked it. As
alcohol and the drunkard's palsied limbs are cause and effect, sin and
judgment; so the national sin and the horrors of war are cause and
effect, sin and judgment. Only the self-blinded are unable to discern
that they are living in a great day of judgment: judgment on Germany
for its greed and lust and covetousness: judgment on Britain for
wasting at the shrine of self-indulgence that wealth committed to it
for the serving and the uplifting of the world. And if the Church
cannot see the divine judgment, then it cannot call the nation to
repentance. For the nation, unconscious of wrong, will but say along
with the Church: 'I am rich and increased in goods and have need of
nothing.' After the war it will rush down the slope faster than ever
before. The real fact is that the vision of God is hid from us by the
mists of our sin. We cannot {187} imagine the sword of the divine
judgment unsheathed over the world, for a sword hanging from heaven
must be gripped by some hand. And if there be no hand of God, how can
there be a sword of His justice?
III
The one way of salvation for the human race is that of conformity to
the righteous will of God. On the side of those who seek to walk along
that road all the forces of nature fight; against those who resist the
will of God all the forces of the universe are marshalled. Those who
would conquer must walk with God. To return to God is the only hope.
Let us try and realise the truth of this.
The greatest danger threatening the race is, as we have seen, that of
racial suicide. The mentally developed have made the devitalising of
life a code of conduct. Unconscious of sin, they have made sin a
science. For the race that sets its face towards this goal there
awaits {188} nought but ruin. The problem is how to save the race from
the coffin.
A great many remedies have been proposed, but almost all of them are
not only futile but pernicious. A system of bounties to parents for
each child would be no inducement to the classes which have already
surrendered to this degeneration. Such a policy would only encourage
the further multiplying of the poor and the unfit. And the remedy is
not to be found in the multiplication of agencies for the preservation
of child life. The conservation of the child in the slum will not
compensate for the destruction of the child in the mansion-house. A
policy which aims at the survival of the unfit cannot enrich the race.
Such methods are to be commended, but they are mere palliatives. When
the bone needs to be scraped, it is futile to go on applying poultices.
The true remedy is in the realisation of God and in the return of the
nation to Him. It is when the soul is awakened {189} to God that men
realise the heinousness of sacrificing life to selfishness. For God is
the fountain of life; and it is not merely the physical life that is
atrophied by racial limitation. The blow is in reality aimed not at
the race but at God.
For from God all life proceeds, and the whole universe is the process
of His self-realisation. The glory of earth and sea and sky are the
glory of the outgoing of the divine energy. But the highest of all the
processes of the divine self-realisation is in man. In the world there
is nothing great but man; and the world is enriched for God by His
children. There is no limit to His creative energy, no failure in His
imagination, for each new life is different, and each fresh and new.
In His children God realises Himself as love and tenderness. They are
the only things that can love and laugh and cling. The music of their
joyous merriment is God's best anthems. Each new human life is a
temple of the Holy {190} Ghost. Through them the divine life grows
more and more. And to each is committed some separate element of the
divine treasure, for each is as different from others as if it alone
were created. When men, then, set themselves to suppress human life,
they are setting themselves to suppress God. It is the great tide of
the creative life that they set themselves to dam. The joyousness of
the creative genius that ever creates but never repeats itself, they
bring to nought. They deny to God on earth the temples for His
indwelling. Only when the soul realises God thus brooding over the
face of the world, thus waiting for the fulness of the divine
enrichment, will men realise the heinousness of life-suppression.
Lives based on the code of morals which prefers coffins to cradles are
lives which fight against God, and as such are doomed to be ground to
powder by His judgment. When God, the source of all life, is once
realised, then the soul of the life-destroyer must shrink back in
horror and dismay. {191} 'Woe is me, for I am undone,' will be the cry
of his lips. Men can conquer their fellows, but there is only the
devouring of hell for those who fight against God. When God ceased to
be a reality, the destruction of life was but a natural sacrifice to
our ease. There being nothing higher than ourselves, then to ourselves
let us sacrifice even life. When God in His divine majesty will again
shine forth before the soul, and the eyes behold the Divine Life
everywhere waiting its realisation, then human life again shall become
precious and desired, and the race will measure its felicity by the
multitude of its children. The silent terraces will again ring with
joyous voices. The race, with its fountains of life overflowing, will
again go forth to vivify the earth.
If only the world were realised as of God, all our difficulties would
vanish. Think what it would mean to the man who has devoted a whole
parish to his own recreation. The green places where {192} little
children called to each other are covered with pheasant coops! The
places where children could grow in health are given over to birds.
Let such a man once see that the world was created that love might
increase and be multiplied, that on it God might realise His creative
energy in the highest form, and he will be stricken with shame and
convicted of sin. Childhood and innocence he has vanished from his
land that his ears might hear the whirr of the flying of grouse, and
that he might have the joy of killing. When the vision of God arises
upon him he will abhor his selfishness and set himself to repair the
desolation that has been wrought. He will have no rest until the green
places again are filled with the glory and the radiance of life. The
slums will be emptied and the now silent places peopled anew, when the
nation realises again that God created the world to be the home of His
children.
In this return to God is the solution to be found of all our
difficulties. For {193} in this return is the discovery of our common
sonship, and of the law of love.
We are at present divided into classes with warring interests waiting
for peace to begin the strife again. The body-politic is fissiparous
and there is nothing to bind it together in the unity and consistency
of steel. Here is the element through which the disintegrated elements
can be united into a weapon that can win victories. At the feet of God
there comes the knowledge that all we are brethren, and that the one
law is love. It is love that unites. It is love that bridges chasms
and throws down dividing walls. Love does not throw doles to the
perishing, it gives itself. Love never says, 'You carry my burden,'
but rather, 'Let me carry your burden.' To the eye of love, man is no
longer a mere crank in the great machinery of labour, a unit in the
vast mass designated the 'lower classes'--he is a brother. And love
will not give a brother over to be the prey of vice, {194} or surrender
him as a victim to monopolies that destroy him. Love will sacrifice
and fight for the brother's life. The remedy for all our ills lies
here--in our return to God.
IV
To many the preaching of repentance is the dreariest of all things. It
is but the voice summoning them to the impossible--to mourn for sins of
which they are unconscious. They cry out for life--and they are
offered tears.
But far from being compact of all weariness and sorrow, repentance is
the most thrilling of all that the soul can experience. It is the
essence of all romance. For what is it but this--the turning back to
God. And in turning to God comes the vision of the glory of life. The
eyes are illumined with radiance when they behold no longer processes
and laws--but God. Who can compute that enrichment when suddenly the
veil is rent and from some hill-top the eyes behold {195} no longer
meadow and moorland and the gleam of waters afar, but the Life behind
them all--God; and everything created, the green sward and the clouds
swimming in glory, the mist-caressed mountains and the great sea
heaving in all its waves, become but one vast transparency through
which God flashes His splendour on the enraptured soul. And in this
return to God the soul is ever led on from glory to glory. That is the
alluring power of Christianity. The Shepherd of souls leads us ever on
until we come to the Cross and realise that the God of heaven and earth
is the God of sacrifice; that His love stoops to agony that He may
save. And onward from the Cross He leads until on our enraptured
hearts there rises the vision of the Cross abiding still in the heart
of God, and our eyes behold over all the universe the sheen of that
love which still stoops to death that it may save. As we tread the way
back, and go on ever nearer to the hidden fire, we feel the flame of
His love filling all our {196} being. And beauties undreamed of leap
into light at each bend of the road. To come to God is to journey from
death to life. The world has nothing great comparable to this.
V
But to return to God means not only a transfigured soul in a
transfigured world, it means also a transfigured life. To turn the
face Godward is to change one's ideal, and the change of ideal
eventuates in a change of life. When the new light illumines the
secret places, the soul, quickened by the fellowship of God, sees the
unclean with new eyes, and sets itself to conquer whatsoever is
unworthy of God. National repentance with us will realise itself in
peopling the waste places, in emptying the slums into the country, in
destroying the vested interests in the vice of the people, in making a
healthy and beautiful life the birthright of every citizen. For the
Church that will give itself to the realisation of this {197}
repentance there will never be the stagnation of monotony. Life will
be electric with conflict, triumphant at last with victory.
It is the thrill and romance of life--this experience of the soul to
which we are summoned. It heralds every great day of God. 'Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,' is the herald of every dawn. It
is a message to be preached with yearning and wonder and love, and not
with clenched fists. It can be preached with fierceness, but that will
little avail. The prophet can call to the people: 'Return, for the
precipice is in front of you and destruction yawneth at your
feet--return.' But terror is feeble to move the heart. Better far is
it to call to the people as Hosea called to Israel: 'Return, for God is
behind you; your own God who saved you again and again when there was
none to help, who bore you and carried you through the terrible
wilderness.... Return, God is waiting for you, just behind you.' The
gospel of repentance is the gospel of the love of {198} God. When the
soul realises the love and the tenderness and the glory of God waiting
to enrich and save--then the soul will return. The greatest adventure
in life is just this: the way of repentance leading back to God. If
only the Church would voyage forth anew on this enchanted sea, the day
of its power would again dawn.
VI
If there be, thus, the wonder of riches untold, the gleam of virgin
peaks summoning our feet to climb, a glimpse of the land afar, and the
clear shining of God's face in the call to repent, let us not forget
that there is also something very terrible bound up with it. And the
terrible thing is that it is possible so to disregard it that at last
it becomes impossible to obey it. In vain did the prophet call, 'O
Israel, return unto the Lord thy God,' for their paralysed wills had
become incapable of effort. 'Their deeds will not let them return,'
was at last the prophet's {199} mournful verdict. To every nation
there comes, after long decline, the stage when recovery is impossible.
When the warnings of the wise have been flouted and disregarded; when
the prophets have not been stoned but treated with mere contempt; when
there is no discernment because there is no longer any consciousness of
sin; when no call of the divine is audible any longer even when God
speaks by terrible things and the heavens are shaken; when the hearts
steeped in self and surrendered to the flesh can see no longer the
beauty of purity,--then the call to repentance is heard as one hears
voices in sleep. Their deeds will not let them return.
It is not very far away from us that last irrevocable stage when
national repentance becomes impossible. A nation such as this, that
spends over half a million pounds sterling a day on alcohol when the
greatest crisis in the world's history requires all its strength and
all its resources; that turns grain into a {200} waste when food is so
dear that the poor can scarcely buy; that cries out for economy and
offers daily at the shrine of Bacchus the ransom of a province; that
suffers vice to wound and slay its children, narcotising its conscience
the while; that in God's terrible day empties its churches and crowds
its music-halls; that sacrifices its children to the Moloch of its
pleasure, or to the greed of its property exploiters; that suffers its
people to be massed in slums until the body-politic becomes a
gangrene,--for such a people the last stage, where no return is
possible, cannot be far removed. Arise, O Israel, and return to the
Lord your God, ere the day of repentance sinks into night!
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE,
Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press