IV

I must modify, then, and say that on the whole there is not a great

articulate revival of the Christian religion at the front. But further I

must add that there is religion about, only, very often it is not the

Christian religion. Rather it is natural religion. It is the expression of

a craving for security. Literally it is a looking for salvation. It is a

very unnatural man who does not feel at any rate more inclined to pray

when danger abounds and anxiety presses, than at other times. Naturally,

then, chaplains find a readier response to their efforts right at the

front than farther back. Men come to a service before they go to the

trenches. Communicants increase before a fight. Chaplains are frequently

told of prayer being resorted to under this or that strain of this

terrific war. There is in short a general association of ideas about

religion and, as I have said, it may be called the association of a

craving for security.

I would say nothing disrespectful of it. I would not pretend for a moment

to be void of this very natural craving. I would recognise that

impressions made by strain and anxiety are often the means whereby God

brings men home to Himself. I thought it a hard saying of an ardent

salvationist lad, who told me of a transport sergeant's prayers one night

in a ditch by a shrapnelled roadside, and of the same sergeant's reversion

to apparent irreligion on return to safety. "I call it," said the boy,

"cowardice." But what I do say about it is, firstly, that religion thus

mainly associated with danger, is not the Christian religion, and

secondly, that many of the best men of all ranks have little to do with

it, or what little they do have is intermittent and rather shamefaced.

I leave the first statement for the moment. About the second I hazard the

belief that this has been more or less true of all soldiers in history.

Religion regarded _merely_ as a resort in trouble, as a possible source of

good luck, as a charm or insurance policy is as old as man; but I believe

many of the best soldiers up and down history have had little to do with

it, and the more sporting and soldierly the man, the less he has had to do

with it. After all, the soldier-man's code goes clean the other way. It is

ever insisting on non-calculating and self-regardless service, endurance,

and sacrifice. As such, it lies above the ordinary level of life, calling

out the heroic and honourable in men. But religion associated with anxiety

touches men at a level lower than the highest in them, it has the

morbidity of their weaker moments hanging about it, it wears badly, and,

above all, often it does not seem to work. I have had the case propounded

to me of "Bill who did pray," but yet had had "his head blowed off."

V

I recur, then, to my verdict that on the whole there is not a great

revival of the Christian religion at the front. Why is this?

First, war is war, and, what is more, this war is this war. I will not

attempt to paint the picture. Every one must realise by now that the main

concentration of all military effort is directed at creating in the

trenches an ever-intenser inferno of heavy shells. In a great army there

is every degree of risk to be run or immunity to be enjoyed; but at the

very front, where all is stripped and laid bare, modern warfare is at

times a furnace of horror. Its smoke darkens the heavens, thickening the

"clouds and darkness" round about God, and deepening His silence. Its

white heat scorches out human confidence in Him. He does not seem to

count. There are stars in the darkness of war--stars which are the

achievements of man's indomitable spirit. But God-ward there seems

sometimes to be great darkness.

Further, war, despite all the easy things said in its praise, is a great

iniquity. It is, as others have said, hell. As an environment to the soul

it is, for all the countervailing heroisms of men, a world of evil power

let loose.

And, again, war abounds in a number of trials--mostly associated with the

extremes of heat and cold and damp and fatigue--for which, as the phrase

goes, religion seems not to afford the slightest relief. It is a very

physical business, squeezing out or overlaying the spiritual in men,

though powerless wholly to extinguish it. War being what it is, the

absence of religious revival during its course is not surprising. I have

come to be very doubtful whether there is truth in the prevalent notion

that war as such and automatically makes men better.

Secondly, that element in religion which can survive the weather of war

must be a very hardy growth, something deeply engrained and

habitual--something rock-built. And that is just what is lacking among men

of our race. As an Anglican priest I reach here a glaring fact about the

English Church. The war reveals that there are few men in its loose

membership who are possessed by and instructed in its faith. Religion, as

taught by the Church of England, has a feeble grip on the masses. They

hold it in no familiar embrace. And if reasons are sought, they are

partly found in the want of cutting edge to her sober comprehensive

teaching, partly in the characteristics often theoretically so justifiable

but practically so awkward, of the Prayer Book. There is little in our

Church which corresponds to that elemental regimen or discipline which

possesses simple-minded Roman Catholics. The power of cultus, of

institutional and family religion, is largely absent.

To explain this brings me to a third reason why, under the stress of war,

English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The

Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the

literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective

manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute

dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague

and somewhat insensible way lost its hold on the common mind. It has not

the absolute and simple authority which in religion is a necessity for the

little-educated. Few of the general public have thought very much about

the matter, but all the more they are influenced by that which has

percolated through to them from the more learned, loosening what before

was firm and tight, confusing and complicating what before was starkly

plain. This has been brought home to me as I have sat at sing-songs and

have heard a coon-song sung entitled "The Preacher and the Bear." With

apologies to the easily-shocked I will quote. The hero of the song is a

coloured minister who, against his conscience, went out shooting on a

Sunday, and, after good sport, on returning home was met by a grizzly

bear. Taking refuge up a tree this was his prayer:

O Lord, who delivered Daniel from the lions' den,

Also Jonah from the tummy of the whale--and then

Three Hebrew chilluns from the fiery furnace,

As the good Book do declare--

O Lord, if you can't help me, don't help that grizzly bear!

Here is an epitome of a far-spreading incredulity about the Bible. It is

the higher criticism in its crudest popular form, and men are at the mercy

of it. I have known a mess of officers engage in argument about the Bible

with a sceptical Scots doctor, cleverer than they. As old-fashioned

believers in the Bible they had to admit to being thoroughly "strafed" in

the argument, yet they had no way out, such as an intelligent

understanding of the Bible affords. One at least of them maintained

stoutly that nevertheless he was going to stick to the old view, however

indefensible. Such men are not free intellectually to follow the

movements of religious revival. They are immobilised by the dead weight of

Biblical literalism.

Yet if the main verdict to which I have committed myself is to be

radically accounted for, it is necessary to reach deeper reasons than any

I have mentioned. I sympathise with those who have high hopes of the good

effects of Church and Prayer Book and Bible-teaching reforms. Yet such are

relatively superficial matters. The main reason for the comparative

absence of religious revival among men at the front is that we all have

been overtaken by the cataclysm of war in a condition of great poverty

towards God.