Part 2

Unhappily, and in flat contradiction to that “humane” spirit, which we so frequently profess, treachery strikes the dominant note in modern warfare, and this is one of the chief reasons why War should no longer be permitted. The new long-range quick-firing gun is as dastardly as it is powerful, for surely to shoot down men miles away who cannot see their enemies is as reprehensible and cowardly as to stab a man in the back unawares. Another instrument of treachery is the submarine--a truly devilish invention devised for the avowed object of destroying war-vessels by murderous action from the hidden depths of the sea. No one ever seems to pause and consider what an amount of fiendish cunning in the mind of man has evolved the construction of this deadly engine of warfare--still less does the question ever appear to suggest itself as to whether such a perfidious way of compassing slaughter is humane (we will not shame the word “Christian”) or truly “civilised.” If we refer back to what we are pleased to call the “dark ages” or ages of barbarism, we read much concerning “instruments of torture,” such as the rack, the thumb-screw, and other inventions brutally designed by man to injure his fellow-man, but these things for the most part avowed their murderous intention in open daylight--the doomed creatures knew what they had to expect and prepared to die accordingly. But modern science has sharpened our wits to a more merciless edge--we are cunning enough to hide ourselves and our instruments of death from our intended victims after the fashion of assassins lurking in ambush--therefore by the very law of compensation it is scarcely to be wondered at that we are sometimes “hoist with our own petard,” of which the many appalling submarine fatalities are proof and warning. And now, not satisfied with attack from the secret depths of the ocean, Zeppelins and aeroplanes shower bombs upon open towns and innocent civilians, so that even the hitherto neutral skies will be made spaces of vantage for pitiless assault. All these “civilised” inventions for the practice of barbarity ought to give so-called “Christian” empires food for serious thought--yet, strange to say, it would seem that every new and more murderous weapon for warfare is hailed with columns of praise in the press, and such general acclamation as may truly be called “savage”--as no “civilised” community educated according to all that we boast of in our advanced state of progress, could or _would_ rejoice over the construction of mere killing-machines for the slaughter of their fellow-creatures! Therefore, it may be asked: Are we truly “civilised” or is it all a Sham? Are we really humane?--or as bloodthirsty as when, in our aboriginal savagery, we cracked the skulls of our enemies open with flint axes?

The continued existence of War is, in the face of all faith and feeling, a shame to the world! So long as nations are slaves to the barbarous idea that Blood and Carnage alone can keep them in their places as authoritative forces for the higher progress and welfare of Humanity, so long will Civilisation be more or less a farce. No one denies the self-sacrifice, the endurance, the patience, and the courage which makes men military heroes--the pity of it all is that such splendid qualities of character should be wasted on the mere consummation of slaughter and conquest. What good to the world has ever come out of Napoleon’s many massacres? Looking down upon the sarcophagus containing that Imperial Murderer’s ashes in the gorgeous tomb consecrated to his memory in Paris, one wonders sadly why he was ever permitted to live. We may with the great poet Byron say:--

“To think that God’s fair earth hath been The footstool of a thing so mean!”

If War is still to confirm us and other nations as Savages, we must behave accordingly. We must train our men and youths to kill, and to use the newest and surest weapons for killing. When we are offered Dreadnoughts, we accept them with salvos of rejoicing and thanksgiving. Yet without War these Dreadnoughts will, in ten years’ time from the date of their completion, be useless, and the millions they cost will be sunk into waste material. Must we have continuous War, then?--just for the sake of employing Dreadnoughts--and proving to our own satisfaction that we can slaughter as many innocent thousands as other Savages if we like? Why should any cause arise for the visitation of such a scourge upon us or any nation! If we have foes who show a threatening front we are naturally bound to be on the defensive--and we should be prepared to guard our kingdom and coast from Savages more savage than ourselves. But when we can get rid of our Savagery we shall lay down our arms. We shall realise that Civilisation means Unity; Unity in all high purpose and progress towards the betterment of mankind.

“Sheathed be the sword for ever--let the drum Be schoolboy’s pastime--let your battles cease! And be the cannon’s voice for ever dumb Except to celebrate the joys of Peace! Are ye not brothers?--God, whom we revere, Is he not Father of all climes and lands? Form an Alliance holy and sincere And join your hands!”

Surely it is not too much to hope for this--to pray for this!--if our Faith means anything more than mere lip-service and false show!

FOR BELGIUM!

THE PRAYER OF THE ALLIES

(_Written for “King Albert’s Book”_)

“What shall we do for our Sister in the day when she shall be spoken of? If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver.” _Song of Solomon._

Maker of Heaven and Earth, Thou, who hast given birth To moving millions of pre-destined spheres, Thou, whose resistless might Resolves the Wrong to Right Missing no moment of the measured years-- Behold, we come to Thee! We lift our swords, unsheath’d, towards Thy throne-- Look down on us, and see Our Sister-Nation, ruined and undone! Martyred for nobleness, for truth and trust; Help us, O God, to raise her from the dust!

Be Thou our witness, Lord! We swear with one accord Swift retribution on her treacherous foe! Her bitter wrong is ours And heaven’s full-armèd powers Shall hurl her murderer to his overthrow! Upon her broken wall A silver palace of sweet peace shall rise At that high Festival When Victory’s signal flashes through the skies-- But--until then!--welcome the fiercest fray! We fight for Freedom! God, give us “The Day”!

THE GREAT UNREST

_(This article was written for “Nash’s Magazine” two years before the War, and was on its appearance prefaced by the following Editor’s Note.)_

EDITOR’S NOTE.--_While “Nash’s Magazine” cheerfully presents the following very radical and profoundly interesting article from the brilliant pen of Miss Marie Corelli, this Magazine should not in any sense be held accountable for either the Author’s views or her expression of them._

“Ye hypocrites! Ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”

Such was the question put to the people by the Founder of the Christian Faith two thousand years ago--a question not yet answered. Lack of discernment is still as much as ever one of humanity’s chief attributes, or is it perhaps less a lack of discernment than an unwillingness to discern? “Ye hypocrites!” said the Christ. Is it not, after all, sheer hypocrisy which, in the form of social convention, does so obsess Man that, though conscious of approaching storm, he prefers to bury his head, ostrich-like, in a sand-heap of his own delusions in order that he may be as blind and as deaf as possible to the lurid glare and wild uproar of coming disaster? He instinctively knows disaster is imminent--even at his very doors--and that it will presently swoop relentlessly down upon him, perhaps tossing him with other fragments of creation into a chaos from which he shall scarcely emerge with a sound skin; yet knowing, he pretends _not_ to know, and plays the fool with himself and destiny!

To-day, now, at this very moment, all over the civilised world, this terrible game of “playing the fool” is going on with reckless speed and continuity. I use the word “terrible” advisedly, for nothing more pregnant with all the elements of positive terror was ever seen than the present-time spectacle of Human Humbug set face to face with that Eternal Equity which has existed always, and which ever will exist without any change in its Divine Source, Cause and Intention. Man, endowed with splendid gifts of reason, imagination and psychic power, is everywhere gambling away his highest birthright for gold; Man, whom the celestial forces have led step by step through carefully measured gradations of intellectual evolution till he has arrived at the open gateways of Science, there to behold the infinitely marvellous benefits he may possess and enjoy, still insults the Giver of all his good by his fumbling forms of faith and worship suited only to barbaric minds in a state of embryo--Man, semi-apathetic and in many cases wholly indifferent to the higher roads of progress and to the steady unfolding of that endless perspective of order and beauty intended for the individual happiness of every individual soul, still makes wilful havoc of his own carefully organised civilisations, like a child who builds a house of cards and blows it down with a breath--and this because his civilisations are mostly of a flimsy structure, having no foundation on any fundamental Law which Nature can or will tolerate for more than a very brief time. All history teaches this with stern and pitiless repetition; and the signs and portents which gave warning of the downfall of the Roman Empire were of precisely the same character as the signs and portents which warn us of similar downfalls impending for great nations to-day. The scheme of Creation is plainly meant to be a perpetual movement towards perpetual advancement--this truth is clearly demonstrated in all natural evolution, and Man is perforce compelled, despite himself, to move with the onward and upward process--but he invariably “hangs back” and tries to put a stop on the wheel, with the result that he is himself crushed and ground to powder in the wheel’s relentless revolving. He makes religions, laws and morals for himself which have no prototype in the order of Nature, and he thereby stands rebelliously opposed to the Supreme Intelligence, whose design of life being exact mathematics, swerves not by so much as the shadow of a hair.

Hence arises, and always will arise, trouble. Trouble and unrest! The sum of things never comes right, add it up, subtract, or multiply as we will. We persist in our childish efforts to fit in figures which have no place or part in the Divine quantities. Now and then in some sudden flash of higher consciousness, we see the folly of our actions--but seeing, we pretend to be blind. Some of us devote ourselves to a study of the sciences, and we peep through a hundred loop-holes into a vista of shining truths, any one of which would help us to draw closer to God--yet presently we turn away and talk of predestination and original sin, and feign to believe in a Deity whose rage against His own Creation is so insensate and barbaric as only to be pacified by Blood! Blood--blood! The cry of the vengeful, the murderous, the cruel, the tyrannous in all ages of the world!--yet we do not hesitate to insult the Creator of the whole Cosmos by endowing Him with this animal and un-God-like craving! He, who holds the starry heavens in the hollow of His Hand--from whose expressed Thought solar systems are born like blossoms in the fields of ether--He, whose vast love broods tenderly over all that He hath made, even to the nesting bird hidden under a bunch of green leaves--“not one shall fall to the ground without your Father”--even He it is whom daily we wrong and blaspheme by our social methods of life and forms of worship, by our deliberate opposition to His Laws, and by the amazingly insolent indifference we exhibit to His inviolate Will as shown through the reflection of His Mind in visible Nature.

And so it happens that, after a certain space of time in which we are offered fresh chances of amendment or betterment which we seldom take, things begin to go wrong. We know not how or where the mischief first started, because it has stolen upon us by gradual and insidious degrees, and we never dream of looking for the root of the evil in ourselves or in our ancestry. But we do become slowly and reluctantly aware that we are not on the right track--that “something” is about to happen which will upset all our most cherished plans and push us off our present road of what we are pleased to call “progress” in a sufficiently disastrous manner. We have no time to retrace our steps and look for the way we have missed, for we find that we are running down hill with a singular self-imposed velocity which would make any sort of a stop almost impossible--while to go back would mean to climb a very steep and difficult ascent, an exercise for which we are neither prepared nor willing. We have no idea how we managed the muddle in which we find ourselves, but muddle it is and muddle it remains.

And then we enter upon the doubtful period--the kind of period in which the whole world is living to-day--a period of vague uneasiness, restlessness, and feverish suspense, looking for we know not what, dissatisfied with things as they are, yet unable to decide how they ought to be. Then is the hour of the brazen-mouthed religious ranter and the political demagogue. The nations of the earth are disquieted mentally and spiritually--the pulpit braggart assumes to teach them, and the upstart in politics offers to reform them. And like the waves of the sea before a storm breaks, the people surge to and fro in billowy masses, with here and there a gleam of hope among them like light on spraying foam, but for the most part moving in darkness and deep unrest. For the time is past when the balm of old tradition can be applied as a soothing salve to the spiritual wounds of humanity. Men do not want to be soothed, but roused--fired to noblest energy, greatest aims and splendid achievement--and they need to feel that their efforts to reach the Highest are worth the making, and that the fight which they enter upon means victory in the end.

This, most unfortunately, is not made plain to them by either the faiths or followings of modern society. The Churches have in a great measure lost their hold upon the people, and the consolidation of family life is a thing of the past. When England was truly great, the love of home and country was the chief foundation of her greatness, as it should be with all nations seeking to hold high place and power--but in our present modes of living, both in England and America, “home” is voted hum-drum and a bore--sons and daughters openly profess the gad-about principle of what they term “pleasure,” and are more or less indifferent to the interests or convenience of their parents, showing no more reverence or consideration for them than is necessary to obtain financial “supplies.” They snap the chain that should bind them to filial tenderness and duty, and follow their own particular forms of enjoyment with a cool selfishness which can but astonish any thoughtful beholder--yet even this reprehensible attitude of the rising generation is but a phase of the general “Unrest” pervading all classes and all ages--the vague sense that nothing is going to last very long--that some dire mischief threatens the world--and that one must try to enjoy oneself while one can, because there is no time left to do anything else. And well-meaning fathers and mothers, especially those of the upper classes, adapt themselves more or less compassionately and with regret to the new and often exceedingly bad manners of their children, who, in nine cases out of ten, resemble the Biblical “daughters of the horse-leech,” crying “Give! Give!” and regard their progenitors merely as human banks on which they expect to draw _ad libitum_ till the coin gives out. All this is wrong, hopelessly wrong. Fathers should be supported by their sons, if support is needed--not sons supported by their fathers. And in such strange times as these, when women are so ready to throw off their womanliness and become mere roughs in the general fray, they too must be expected to put themselves in harness and earn the right to live. They have wilfully destroyed the ideal of woman, so long and lovingly cherished by man in the days of sentiment and chivalry--and now they can hardly wonder if husbands prove difficult to secure. Men will think a hundred times before entering into marriage with possible window-smashers.

Yet it is all part and parcel of the one thing--the Great Unrest which, like a storm atmosphere, envelops all our modern civilisation. There is no country that does not feel it--no nation that is not uneasily conscious of being on the verge of change. The disruption of family life--the revolt of Woman against her own nature, and the frenzied ultra-stupidity she exhibits in the efforts she makes to reverse her own God-ordained position in the scheme of creation--the pathetic bewilderment and weariness of Man himself, left without any of his old ideals of faith or love, and clinging to gold as the only seemingly tangible good which may procure him some bodily comfort and ease, though feeling in his own soul that even this is little worth--all these things are forerunners of coming trouble to which we are as yet unable to give a name. Most notable and most tremendous of all portents, however, is the earthquake tremor that is shaking the Churches to their foundations, and the growth and extension of what is called the “New Thought.” The New Thought is really the Old Thought--the Thought which was the underlying germ of the mystic religions of the East, and the foundation of the Platonic philosophy. The “Thought” has become overlaid by a multiplicity of differing human opinions, forming, as is their habit, into useless and mischievous systems--but in its pure beginning it is the Christ in embryo--the God-in-Man. In simplest truth it is an eternal Thought which by Divine inspiration teaches us that the Soul or spirit of every human being is an individual portion of the Spirit of God--and that as such it is an immortal creature, whose destiny is glorious, whose splendid faculties are for the purpose of evolving itself through phases of wide advancement to wider attainment, and for whom there is and can be no such thing as death. This Earth is its present school and playground--Nature is its teacher, as well as its subject and servant. It is to learn what it can and will by patient study and grateful experience--it is to use what it finds in all things pleasant, helpful, joyous, noble, and gracious--it is to breathe in an atmosphere of love; and with the Supreme Intelligence of which it is a part, it may feed as it will among the lilies of life, and may say, “My Beloved is mine and I am His.”

This spiritual tie between man and his Maker has never been sufficiently emphasised by the Churches. Their religious forms of worship impress upon us that we are miserable sinners whatever we do, that we must try to save our souls, and that we must put as much as we can into the collection-plate. In great sorrow or difficulty these instructions are not very helpful. Sometimes indeed we doubt whether God meant us to consider ourselves such “miserable sinners” after all. Our perpetual whinings and lamentations cannot make sweet music on the Divine records. God gave us our bodies, not to chastise and mortify, but to care for and make healthy and beautiful; and the laws He has framed for our guidance and maintenance are such that if one be broken, punishment is bound to follow. There is no forgiveness, because there simply _cannot_ be any deviation in the mathematical precision of the universal plan. And the punishment is measured exactly to the fault. If we refuse to go forward, we must go back--we are not allowed to stand still. If a man elects to throw himself headlong from a steeple, not all the prayers of the saints could alter the law of gravitation which causes him to fall and break his neck. What is true of physical law is equally true of spiritual law, since Matter is simply Spirit substantiated and made temporarily visible in endless temporary forms. And all God-ordained laws, whether physical or spiritual, are framed for the guidance, benefit, and advancement of creation--whereas we, by devising other laws which pull contrary to Divine ways and means, find ourselves “in darkness and the shadow of death” instead of in light and the splendour of life. In our day Science has come to our rescue, and like a great Angel stands at the open door of the Kingdom of Heaven; she shows us the “many mansions” of worlds upon worlds in the Father’s House--she points out the loving care with which even the tiniest organism of life is protected--she instructs us how we may press the lightning into our service and use the waves of the air to convey our messages from one land to the other--and she impresses upon us, even as a loving mother impresses a beautiful truth upon her child, the fact that we--even we--are permitted to be the rulers of this wonderful planet, so full of exquisite beauty and joy--and that we are expected to use the endless gifts bestowed upon us with love, wisdom and courage, developing ourselves into a noble race of creatures worthy of ever nobler and higher issues.

Thus it has come to pass that with Science leading us ever onward and upward, we cannot any longer in reason look upon “Our Father” as a capricious tyrant, needing a sacrifice of blood to pacify His wrath against us. Instead of this barbarous conception, we realise that Perfect Justice cannot possibly be angry with what it has Itself ordained--and we are overpowered and brought to our knees in devout adoration before the Great Spirit of Love which is the Generator of the universe, and which out of smallest beginnings works to greatest ends--work in which we are permitted, nay, expected and commanded, to take an active part, our disobedience always resulting in disaster to ourselves.

It is the contemplation of these truths which Science hourly and daily demonstrates to the glory of the Creator that the “New” or “Old” Thought has arisen in all its strength, like Christ from the grave, “walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Hence the earthquake tottering of the Churches, and the ever-spreading great wave of religious unrest. There is, among many deeply thinking people, an uneasy sense that we have insulted the real and ever present God by our narrow and more or less selfish systems of faith, and that we must hasten to make amends. Therefore, putting the question of the mentally unfit aside in the general sorting of the sheep from the goats, it seems evident that the time is ripening towards a New Revelation of the Divine in Man--a “sign from heaven” for the better guidance of the human soul towards ultimate perfection, and a surer means of obtaining peace and happiness in this life as well as in the life to come. But before the sign be given there must and will be heavy tribulation; “nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and divers troubles”--and the very beginning of these “divers troubles” is upon us now.