War, when it breaks in on peace, reveals in a fierce light the condition
of men in peace. It would be ungrateful and disloyal not to acclaim the
main sound heart of our country which this war has revealed. It would be
treasonable to the great company of good men and true--not least out of
the school and university world most familiar to the writer--who have
risen to "the day" and have gladly given their all. Yet, after generous
allowance for that, a great poverty of allegiance to God has been laid
bare. Indirectly, in the answers made to the claims of duty, honour,
service, and self-sacrifice, He has been acknowledged, but of direct
devotion to Him as the one and pre-eminent reality there has been little.
After all, can it be denied that the war has found us devoted rather to
the idols of money, pleasure, and appetite than to God and His
righteousness? We have had to be aroused from a great sensual
preoccupation with worldly traffic. "As it was in the days of Noah," so in
a measure it has been to-day: "as we ate and drank, and bought and sold
and planted and builded, the flood has come upon us" and has all but swept
us away. At home, as the thinly-veiled wantonness of some of our weekly
illustrated papers reminds us in the field, it seems that a mass of
self-pleasing and luxurious folk cannot yet find an escape out of the
prison-house of Vanity Fair, though thousands bleed and die by their side.
In the field, the mind and manner of a gross peace-life is kept alive by
pictures of smirking nudities placarded in dug-outs and billets, and the
farther back from the front one travels, as the hot breath of war grows
more tepid, the more heavy grows the atmosphere of materialistic
indulgence. That _God minds_ is hardly thought of, for at home and abroad
we have been carried into war in a peace-condition of great heedlessness
of Him. And the strains and cost and dangers of war will not scare men out
of their forgetfulness. The heart of man is incorrigible by fear. God, if
He is little regarded in peace, is hard to come nigh to in war. If
religion in peace and prosperity has not been full of His praise--of joy
_in Him_, it is something to which adversity must drive men, and they
think it as such a little disreputable, and many of the best men, richly
gifted with manly excellences, tend to leave it on one side.
Yet "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." We can adopt the ringing
note of St. Paul's defiance. For the Christian religion does not spring
primarily out of human anxiety and need. It is not an expedient which may
be left on one side till the hour of need arises. That many men should
think thus of it shows that it has been widely forgotten, misunderstood,
or never known.