I do not for one moment believe that the world is less Christian than
it was before the war, or less intent on spiritual things. The exact
contrary is the case as far as my experience goes. I have more than
once stated that, if any man wants to be cured of religious pessimism,
or any other kind of pessimism, he had better go to the front. If I had
been an unbeliever before I went there, I should speedily have been
cured. There one sees things every day, almost every hour, to make one
marvel at the greatness of the human soul. You will see hell wide open,
it is true, but you will see heaven likewise. Such heroism, patience,
self-devotion, cheerfulness under affliction, readiness to fling life
away to save a comrade or a position--surely these mean more, and are
worth more, than the immediate object of their exercise.
. . . . . . . . . .
As humanity has been constituted up to the present, war has been the
means, more than any other agency, of bringing out on the grand scale
that truth of sacrifice without which flesh can never be made to serve
the ends of spirit, and the kingdom of the soul be won. This could be
realized without war if only the race as a whole could be lifted to the
requisite level. It often has been realized without war in individual
cases, but never for long on the wider basis of the communal life.
. . . . . . . . . .
What men are learning on the battle-fields of Europe of the glory of
sacrifice and its mystical potencies is drawing them back to God by
way of the cross of Christ; our vulgar, blatant, worldly, commercial,
pleasure-loving age is seeing meanings in that cross it never saw
before, and getting rid of many delusions in the process. We are being
saved as by fire. Let us recover the simplicities of life, and we
recover faith. We are re-learning the old, old lesson that man cannot
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of God. We are realizing almost with the surprise of a new discovery,
that not what we have but what we are, is the secret of blessedness
or wretchedness, that there is nothing to mourn over but the evil
in our own hearts, and that death, however sad and dreadful in its
accompaniments, is but the prelude to vaster ventures of the soul and
unimaginable joys. Nothing can be killed that is worthy to be kept
alive or essential to our highest well-being here or hereafter.
REV. R. J. CAMPBELL
_By permission of Chapman & Hall, Ltd.,
Publishers, London, England_