We need in peace the free and conscious realisation of that of which men
are perforce, and dumbly, aware in war. It is that there is something
going on in the world which demands primary allegiance, and the putting
second of every self-interest. At the front men hardly know what it is.
They are suspicious of rhetoric and unreality in talk about liberty and
international equity, and right against might. They only know--a wonderful
majority of them--that something great and righteous wants them and
requires of them their help. So, reluctantly, with grumblings and
insistent longing for it all to be over, and yet with the inalienable joy
of doing the right thing, they obstinately endure. We can say, without
apportioning right wholesale to the Allies or wrong wholesale to Germany,
that, however dimly aware of it, they are 'seeking first the Kingdom of
God and His Righteousness.'
Can they maintain this allegiance in peace despite every seduction which
will rush to recapture their souls? That is the great question which all
who call themselves Christians should be considering on their knees while
the war is still raging.
The answer lies in a great measure with the Church. She has to enlist in
her warfare for the kingdom of God--the war which is never over--that
capacity in men for service and suffering which the war has disclosed. How
can this be? Would that I had no uncertain answer to utter! I fling these
cries out to comrades in the Lord that we may provoke one another to find
the answer. The answer cannot be merely an intellectual solution. It must
be spelt out in terms of costly devotion.
Some things are clear. First, the Church has to acknowledge that she is
not the kingdom of God but the means to it as an end. There are, I think,
a great many carts and horses to be changed round into their right
relations. Religious observances and organisations--all the whole
apparatus of religion--have come to be looked upon as ends in themselves,
whereas they are means to an end beyond themselves. People think that the
clergy's one concern is the success of ecclesiastical activities and
institutions. We clergy think so ourselves! It is not for her own
interests, which are by themselves incurably too small to evoke the heroic
in men, that the Church is in the world. She is in the world to change
the world, so that its whole extent may be filled with the glory of God,
and may become worthy of the eternal destiny of the souls of men. Hers is
a high and costly venture. She has strongholds to storm--the entrenchments
where the forces of private-mindedness and apathy and money-worship are
dug in. In the attempt she can exhaust to its depths the capacity which is
in men for dauntless sacrifice.
Secondly, if the Church's conception of her own interests must be changed,
so must the individual's conception of personal religion.
Self-preoccupation is as fatal to the latter as to the former. Personal
piety is travestied by being thought to be a respectable prudence here for
the sake of a reward hereafter. It is not a careful self-salvation at all.
Rather it is a salvation from self. It is the being lost to self in
devotion and service to God and one's fellow-men.
Lastly, if these changes are to be they depend on one thing--a new vision
of God in Christ, such as shall be for Church and individual the
over-mastering counter-attraction to self. What the world needs is
theocracy. That is, not the imposition of ecclesiastical shackles upon
secular life, but the consecration of all life, with all its
ever-multiplying treasures of knowledge and power, to one object--the
glory of God. If so, then God, as the centre and magnet of consecration,
must be all vitally apprehended. He must fill the horizon of the soul. He
must be the delight of men, to draw them out of themselves into childlike
selflessness, so that as children they may enter into the Kingdom.