Part 8

In the Civil War this record is repeated. The ministers of Yale fought at Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor. They rode with Sheridan's cavalry in the Army of the Potomac; they marched with General Sherman to the sea. Several, like Erastus Blakeslee (1863), well known for his services to the work of the Sunday school, rose to the rank of general. Moses Smith (1852) entered in 1865 with the first troops into Richmond, while Samuel W. Eaton (1842), after fighting in some of the hardest battles, was present at Appomattox Court House on the surrender of General Lee.

In all this there is no thought of glorifying war, or of haloing the head of the minister who lays down his Bible to take up his bayonet. Quite the contrary. These fighting chaplains condemned war and hated it. They never proclaimed that organized slaughter was a sane method of settling international disputes or ethical questions. They would have marched to their own Calvaries gladly if this would have saved them from the horror of the task of the soldier and at the same time helped to bring in the Kingdom of God. But to their minds there was a time when a Christian ought to put up his sword, and another when his duty was to buy one. Devilishness is not usually overcome by allowing the Devil to have his way. If the powers of evil attempt by force to overthrow righteousness, righteousness may well by force oppose and thwart them; not that it may escape martyrdom, or vent its anger, but with the clear purpose of rescuing the evil doer from his devastating delusion, and of saving the most precious treasures of civilization from the axe of a vandalism, which can and ought to be restrained. The thought finds a crude but characteristic expression in Kipling's poem of Mulholland, the coarse sailor, who, in fulfilment of the vow made during a storm on the cattle-ship, goes back to preach religion to the brutal and unsympathetic crew:

I didn't want to do it, for I knew what I should get, An' I wanted to preach religion, handsome an' out of the wet; But the Word of the Lord were lain on me, and I done what I was set.

I have been smit and bruised, as warned would be the case, An' turned my cheek to the smiter, exactly as Scripture says; But following that, I knocked him down an' led him up to grace.

An' we have preaching on Sundays whenever the sea is calm, An' I use no knife nor pistol, an' I never take no harm; For the Lord abideth back of me to guide my fighting arm.

It is devoutly to be wished that it was never necessary for the preacher to use knife or pistol; but at present apparently there is no other means by which the smiter may be knocked down.

This teaching is what might be called, in Dr. Van Dyke's phrase, "Fighting for Peace." It is the kind of militant pacifism which Paul hints at. "If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with all men." Sometimes it is not possible. It is neither wise nor saintly to attempt to negotiate with a tiger. It would be something worse than folly to allow the I. W. W. to dictate the economic policy of our country, or to suffer philosophical and practical anarchism to work its will with the law and order of the world. War as mere war deserves all the vitriolic epithets which have been heaped upon it. It is the scourge of scourges, the father of piracy and of murder, the mother of havoc, desolation and woe. It stands clearly revealed as "a monstrous crime, man's crowning imbecility and folly." But when through war the attempt is made to tear down law, overthrow justice and shackle the world's liberty, shall not war be met by war in order to preserve these priceless possessions, and perchance end all wars by rendering its mad champions powerless? No minister can be called Christian who does not hate war. But most of them hate still more the sinking of the Lusitania, the rape of Belgium, the massacre of the peaceful people of Armenia. They cannot with clear conscience sit still and watch the fulfilment of the plot of "the Potsdam gang" without striking a blow. Peace proposals from the successful marauders sound to them too much like Dr. Van Dyke's imaginary conversation between an outraged householder and his triumphant pacifistic burglar. It is not a question of Christ or Caesar. There is something of the Sermon on the Mount in pacifist and militarist alike. But in the choice our ministers in the army have registered their vote for what seems to be by far the lesser of two evils. They with their fellows have chosen to tread the new Via Sacra, as the road is now called which made the salvation of Verdun possible; and today they stand facing the forces of autocracy, greed and military oppression, uttering that great battle cry which broke from the heart of France, "They shall not pass!"

Whatever the verdict of history upon this decision of brave men in the ministry, certain effects of the war upon them and upon their work are sure. These again are both good and evil. On the debit side of the ledger will be the loss of many in whose future service lay much of the hope and strength of the church. A large proportion of the best men, who were looking forward to the ministry, are in the training camps and trenches. Some may now be diverted to other callings; some will never come back. Their vacant places in the ranks will be saddening and for a time crippling. Great tasks which might have been done must needs be left undone. New Elishas will wear the prophet's mantle; but the memory of many a vanished face will waken the old cry upon their lips: "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!" If the church does not begrudge them, it will mourn them among its multitude of sons who

laid the world away; poured out the red, Sweet wine of youth: gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene That men call age; and those who would have been Their sons they gave--their immortality.

A second regrettable result in the minds of some will be the discrediting of the ministry. There have been too many un-Christian utterances from the pulpits of all lands, though we are naturally especially sensitive to those "made in Germany"; too many petty, superstitious prayers addressed to tribal deities as little like the God of Jesus as Moloch and Mars; too reckless dealing with "high literary explosives" on the part of preachers possessing neither the wisdom of Solomon nor the restraint of Paul; too flamboyantly patriotic utterances from orators who apparently forgot their obligations as citizens of heaven and makers of a new world. So far as the writer knows, there have been no blasphemies from the pulpits of the Allies equal to the saying of Pastor W. Lehmann: "The German soul is God's soul; it shall and will rule over mankind"; or that still more brutal and unblushing pronouncement of Pastor D. Baumgarten: "Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve from the bottom of his heart the sinking of the 'Lusitania,' whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to unnumbered innocent victims, and give himself up to the honest delight at the victorious exploit of German defensive power--him we judge to be no true German." But if none have descended to these depths of theological blindness and ethical madness, there has been a certain kinship with the spirit of the imprecatory psalms, used as convenient and refreshing outlets for pent-up tempers, together with more or less pagan treatment of ethical and religious questions, camouflaged with felicitous phrases, which lulled the listener with the assurance that the preacher was quoting from the Litany. All this has not redounded to the respect of the thoughtful for the pulpit, or for the leadership of men supposed to be specialists in the rules of right and teachers of the counsels of a fatherly God.

Furthermore, while the mass of Christian unity and cooperation has been unprecedented, there have been here and there expressions of denominational rivalries. It is not an inspiring spectacle when a few--and fortunately only a few--bigoted denominationalists are seen storming certain camps, not because the religious welfare of the soldiers is not being amply cared for, but because the accredited purveyor of their ecclesiastical shibboleth is not teaching his patois and peddling his wares. Neither our best laymen nor our wisest religious leaders have either patience or sympathy with modern denominational Pharisees. They recognize temperamental, psychological and national differences among fellow Christians, and are content that Quaker and High Churchman, shouting Methodist and dignified Scotch Presbyterian, Salvation Army lassie and devout Romanist should choose their own liturgy and polity, and go to heaven each in his own way. But to their minds, in everyday life usually and in camp life always, sectarian squabbling and doctrinal hair-splitting are merely rocks of stumbling and stones of offense; and whenever they witness, especially in war time, such wrangling in the porch of the sanctuary, they discount the utterances and even the calling of the minister, and, instead of entering the edifice and joining in the service, pass by on the other side.

Still more damning will be the accusation, made even by loyal sons of the church's own household, that not only has the ministry failed to prevent war, but that it neglected to mass its forces and measure its might in the great task. To reply to the charge in its undiscriminating, blunderbuss form is easy. Many ministers gave up their lives to the cause, notably in the various forms of the peace movement. Others proclaimed and urged a cure, which the laity declined to put into operation and the governments ignored. The prevention of war should have been the work of the educator, the lawyer, the scientist, the promoters of commerce and the prophets of international socialism as well as of the minister. If he is blameworthy, so are they. Men who love to sit in the seat of the scornful and jeer at Christianity should enlarge the scope of their humor. If, as G. K. Chesterton puts it, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried," it is equally true that the ministry has not been trusted and found incompetent; it has been the herald of an unwelcome message and ignored. No one class in the community could work the miracle of a world-peace; it could be wrought only through the faith and works of all. To attribute to the ministers the failure to achieve it is in part fair; some of them are guilty. As Dean Hodges said of the much-discussed article, "Peter Sat by the Fire Warming Himself," the charges are richly deserved by those by whom they are deserved. In part, however, it is manifestly unfair; multitudes honestly tried. In part it is one of the greatest compliments ever paid them; for it suggests their power, acknowledges their leadership, and honors their task as the constructive statesmen of the world. No one ever before hinted that the clergy ought to have stopped the wars of Charlemagne or of Napoleon. During the Civil War neither the conflict nor the cause was laid at the minister's door. But in our day many clamor for priests after the order of Joshua as well as of Moses, men at the head of great bodies of Christian soldiers, who shall participate vigorously in domestic politics and international relations, until they actually bring in the reign of righteousness and of love and truth among men. As ministers we accept the compliment while we confess our sins and shortcomings. The burthen of having done the things we ought not to have done and of having left undone the things which we ought to have done is one that we carry shamefacedly but not exclusively. It is shared by all mankind.

But if the war kills some and discredits others, the credit page in the ledger looms large. The experiences and tasks of the present can hardly fail to make the manliest among us still more virile and vigorous. They will purge the leaders in every profession of all softness and sentimentalism, and lift them above a great danger in peace times, that of living a

ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart.

No sane and unprejudiced mind, possessing first-hand knowledge of the ministry, accepts as a representative of the profession the clergyman of the stage comedy and the popular novel. He may be a "sport," in the biological sense; but it would be equally easy to find as ludicrous and despicable examples in law, medicine or business. So far as the average, normal type is concerned, this popular clerical clown is a wretched caricature, possessing humor because endowed with the exaggeration and distortion of a political cartoon. But removing all such weaklings from the discussion, and granting that there are no more lax fellows, lolling through life, in the ministry than in any other profession, there is, as Donald Hankey points out, a certain directness and sternness in camp and military life which is singularly invigorating and even Christ-like. It stiffens a man's back to shoulder heavy burdens, trains the eye to face steadily and without flinching disagreeable and terrifying duties. It tenses muscles with great and glorious resolves. It girds up the loins for a race the issues of which are life and death, throttles any idea of sneaking sinuously through the world avoiding large and costly obligations, and at the end of the day's labor demands visible and tangible results. If any minister was in danger of becoming what Horace Greeley called "a pretty man," or what Holmes described as "a wailing poitrinaire," his experience as chaplain and as soldier will effectually cure him. We should have more prophets after the order of Amos as well as of Hosea when the men who have been under fire come home.

Such men will increasingly merit and possess the respect of laymen and of soldiers. Their lives have been knit together in the fellowship of suffering. Their bodies are inured to the same hardships, their faces lined with the same grim marks of dangers laughed at and of conquered pain. In the democracy of the trenches the sons of the Pilgrims and the immigrant sons of the slums have come to know and to understand one another. The pagan, illiterate dock-hand has fought shoulder to shoulder with the teacher of religion, trained in the first universities of our own and other lands. When such laymen attend plays like "The Hypocrites" or read novels like "The Pastor's Wife," they will never be persuaded that the clerical cartoons represent reality. Each will recall days in the dugouts and nights in the hospitals, when they came to know a different type of minister, a "beloved captain," who marched through the mire with song and laughter, and crept with them through the darkness and shadow of death in No Man's Land. An almost irresistible attraction will draw them to the churches of such ministers. To their leadership they will be inclined to render obedience; to their messages they will listen with respect. No scoffing jests at the minister will be allowed to go by them unchallenged. For the first time in their lives they have been brought into touch with the preachers of religion, and their hearts have burned within them while they talked with these disciples of Jesus by the way.

Furthermore, they will seek them out in the intercourse of ordinary fellowship. For the ministers have shown themselves friendly, approachable--no wan ascetics, no unhuman monks or superstitious other-worldlings, but jolly good fellows in camp life, sane and wholesome counsellors in times of perplexity, comforters in the hours of sorrow, efficient and tireless fellow workers; in brief, the best type of men among men. With such a minister there will be no social uneasiness, no camouflaged conversation during a pastoral visit or upon his entrance into the club. When he opens the front door, the father will not be so apt to call, "Mother, the dominie has come to see you!" It will be no longer the pastor who wishes to meet and to know the male parishioner; the male parishioner will be equally eager to meet and to know the pastor. One soldier phrased the difference in this way: "Well, sir, I like our services out here, and the church is all right; but our parson at home, sir--! You couldn't go to church or have anything to do with him!" All this will come to the minister as a reward for having realized the picture as painted by an English chaplain. "I like to think of the parish priest as fulfilling the Shakespearean stage direction--'Scene: a public place. Enter First Citizen';--for his ministry should mostly be spent neither in church nor in the homes of the faithful, but in public places; and he should be the First Citizen of his parish, sufficiently well known to all to be absolutely at home with each.... And so the word 'parson' will revert to its old proud meaning of 'persona,' and the priest will take in his parish a position analogous to that of the best chaplains in the army." That is the gift which true ministers have always coveted. Many have already won it, turning from the fascination of their studies "to waste time wisely in the market-place, gossiping like Socrates with all comers." After the war many more will possess it, having gladly paid the price.

To the spiritual practitioner, moreover, will have come increased skill in that most difficult of all arts, personal work. He will have had daily hospital training in ministering to the souls of men. He will speak their language, even their lingo, rather than what is to multitudes the unintelligible patois of the seminary Canaan. He will know not only his own theories but their difficulties and experiences in regard to a belief in immortality and the practice of prayer. Like Jesus at the well, he will have learned the method and value of gaining a point of contact in teaching. Formerly it was easy to discourse from the pulpit concerning the being and nature of God and to champion theories of the atonement. The prophet of the regiment will have learned what is far more difficult and more necessary--to persuade a man to follow the teaching and to practice the friendship of Jesus. That is his task, and he will have become efficient in its accomplishment--so to bring modern prodigals to themselves that they loathe the far country, and arise, and go home to their Father's house.

Another gain will be that of a deeper appreciation of denominational cooperation and an enlarged scope for the practice of it. Sectarian rivalries and ecclesiastical trivialities vanish in the trenches. Man-made walls between Christian brethren are crumbling. Petty partisanship becomes first ridiculous and then wicked in the light of the universal church's ambition. "We need a standard so universal," writes H. G. Wells, "that the plate-layer may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the Chinaman, 'What are we two doing for it?' And to fill the place of that 'It' no other idea is great enough or commanding enough, but only the world Kingdom of God." The same buildings are now serving congregations of Jews, Protestants and Romanists. Instant calls come when rabbis, priests, rectors, and representatives of every hue in the rainbow of Protestantism minister to men of other creeds and of no creed. Partisan politics in the field of pure religion are seen to be essentially irreligious; and chaplains of every ilk and kirk are working together like "Bill" and "Alf," two cockney soldiers, one of whom had lost a right arm and the other a left. They always sat side by side at the C. C. S. concerts "so as we can have a clap," as "Alf" put it. "Bill puts 'is 'and out, an' I smacks it with mine." Such men cannot come home and take part in the heresy trials and ecclesiastical hecklings of men whom at heart they recognize as Christian brethren. It is perfectly safe to prophesy that there will be more of church unity, and possibly more of uniformity, so far as this is desirable, when these apostles of hundreds of churches come home from the war.

With this enlarged cooperation will come also an enlarged ambition. The pastor who has been plodding along the familiar ways of an uninspiring parish will never be content to suffer his people to travel in the old ruts or to countenance out-worn and inefficient methods. That way, he now knows, lies ministerial melancholia and the present situation, something far worse than Lear's madness. His task, and that of his people, is nothing less than to transform their portion of the world into heaven. Singing and praying about it are good and necessary; but in the words of the old negro spiritual, it is perfectly patent that "Eberybody talks 'bout heaben ain't a-gwine dah," and the work of the church is to see to it that they go. Some of the strongest and most venturesome among the clergy, unwilling to turn back to the safe life after the thrill of the trenches, will seek adventure in pioneer work in our own land and abroad. Home missions will come as a challenge to men inured to danger and hardship. Foreign missions will have a new and poignant meaning for all the world. We knew before that the bubonic plague in Calcutta was a menace to San Francisco; we know now that the cult of militarism in a single group in Germany can crucify mankind. No chaplain will ever settle down into a parish as if it were a "pent-up Utica." No cultivation of individual piety will atone for the failure to Christianize society, leaven industry with the principles of Jesus, and convert from its Machiavellian heathendom and Bismarckian brutality the diplomacy of the old-time state. Nothing less than the ambition to take the world and its kingdoms for Christ can ever satisfy his soldiers; not, like the Central Powers, in order that they may be enslaved and exploited, but that they may know the fullness of joy and of freedom, and possess the true riches of that divine life which is life indeed.

Almost of necessity the experience at the front will simplify and vitalize the minister's message. For many all discussion of the future of unbaptized infants, and premillenialism, and the verbal inspiration of the Pentateuch had long ago lost interest. In the minds of others, matters regarded by some earnest Christians as of vital importance, like the Virgin Birth and the physical resurrection of Jesus, had ceased to function. To them Jesus would still be the unique Son of God, the divine Saviour of the world, whatever the method of his human generation; and he would still be alive, their unseen friend and present helper, whether or not his body had remained in the tomb. Belief or disbelief in such articles of faith would never transform a demon into a saint or a saint into a demon. Even to those accepting them, they had no visible effect upon character or upon the course of ordinary daily life. No soldiers ever asked about such scholastic problems as they faced going over the top on the morrow. In the hospital they never mentioned them, as they lay lonely and fearful on their beds of pain. But they did ask, or long to ask, had shyness not prevented them, about the treasures for which the heart hungers and to which religion alone holds the key.