Part 3
The churchyard of our parish lies in a deep hollow, and a little river half encircles it. In the midst of it stands the church beneath whose shadow the parish has garnered its dead for centuries. There the generations have lain down to sleep, their hearts reconciled one to another, and the beadle has drawn the coverlet of green over them. As he goes about his allotted task he pats a mound here and there gently with the back of his spade--for roadman and belted earl are at one here.
The last time I wandered down to the hollow it seemed as if eternal peace brooded over the living and the dead. The leaves, russet and gold, glowed in the sunlight. At the stirring of a gentle breeze, like the dropping of a sea-bird's feather, leaf after leaf fluttered silently down on the graves. The great bank of trees across the river glowed with rivulets of dull flames running hither and thither. In its stony bed the river sang its endless song. The immemorial yews, beneath whose branches successive generations of children have played with now and then a thrill of pleasing terror because of the overhanging graves, stood regardless of the sun. The crows, sated with the gleanings of harvest fields, fluttered in their rookeries with scarcely a caw. It seemed as if no sound of discord or strife could ever break in that enchanted hollow.
***
As I turned away to retrace my steps through the gate I came on a woman sitting on the mort-safe, a handkerchief moist with her tears in her hand. She had come up from the quarries and she had visited her dead. And she came because yesterday she received word that on the battlefield of Marne her son was killed. He was her eldest. The others were not old enough yet to fight. Her husband was killed in an accident, and she had reared her children, refusing all help from the parish. The pride of the blood sustained her. And now that her son was dead she came hither, driven by an irresistible instinct to visit her husband's grave. It was as if she wanted to tell him about John, and how he died a hero, trying to carry a wounded comrade through the hail of the shrapnel.
She was weary, and from her husband's grave she turned to the church. She would go and sit in the corner under the gallery, where John used to sit. He had sat with her there at his first Communion. The memories wrapped her round, and she would feel her son near her there. But the door of the church was locked and barred. With an added ache in her heart she turned away, and weariness compelled her to sit on the iron mort-safe, which the parish provided in a former century to protect their dead from sacrilegious hands. "But the church used to be open," I said. "Aye," she replied tremulously, gathering up her handkerchief into a round ball; "but some did-na like it; the boots on the week-days are na sae clean, and they dirtied the kirk. That must be why they lockit the door." It was not that she complained. Those who locked the church were wise men, and no doubt they knew best. So she sat on the mort-safe.
"I have other sons, and when they are older they will go, too," she said. "I'll no' keep them back. And if they die it'll be for God's great cause." Her lips quivered as she spoke. The moist ball in the right hand was clenched tight--there were no more tears to shed.
And as I looked at the worn, lined face, the bent shoulders, the faded rusty black mantle with its fringe, and the sunken lips that quivered now and then, there came a sudden realisation. I saw no longer the one grief-burdened figure sitting dejectedly on the mort-safe--I saw the unnumbered host of mothers throughout the world who have given their sons over to carnage, and who are as Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they are not. Millions of men locked in the death grapple means millions of mothers given tears to drink in great measure, bound in affliction and iron.
The song of the river went on ceaselessly, the russet-leaves fell softly, and the sun shone on a world wrapped in peace--all nature utterly regardless of the millions of Rachels that weep. (Ten million hearts may break, but nature silences not one note of its joyousness.) And as she sat there, behind her, under the campanile, showed the church door, locked and barred. Nature was heedless of her; the church shut its door upon her. She seemed to me the Mater Dolorosa.
***
As I went up the brae there came the memory of a school lesson long ago. Out of the subconscious it leaped as a diver might come up from the depths of the sea with a gleaming coin in his hand. Among the temples of ancient Rome there was one temple always kept open in time of war. There the Roman General clashed the shield and the spear, invoking the god ere he went to the battle-line, and its door was shut not day or night. And I have no doubt but that the Eternal Ruler heard that clashing of spear on shield, and marked that open door. But over wide districts of Great Britain we have left these pagan habits far behind us. We shut the doors of our temples alike in war and in peace--excepting two hours on one day of the week, or in many cases one hour in the week. Nor do I doubt but that the same Ruler marks these doors now shut on the mothers of sorrow, and these sanctuaries locked and silent.
The glory was now gone from the day. I could not forget how the iron mort-safe gave the rest that the Church refused. The shadow lay heavy over the valley, and the mind tried to give the shadow a name. But it could not. So up the long flight of stone steps I climbed, and turned along a tree-shaded road. There, where three roads meet, stands a little chapel within whose walls a small section of our parishioners worship. I have passed it times out of mind without so much as glancing at it. But to-day its open door arrested my eye, and I stood in the roadway and gazed. And there came to me there a sudden sense of thankfulness for that there is one open door in our parish which witnesses to the fact that the power and solace of religion are not shut in within the confines of only two hours of one day in the week.
While I yet stood in the highway there came forth from the little chapel an honoured parishioner, who is passing the golden evening of a useful life in researches regarding Calvin and the Pope. Amazement possessed me, for he is a power in the parish church, whose door is locked and barred. We walked together towards the hills. There was a trace of apology in his explanation. Since this dreadful cataclysm has burst and the boom of the guns has come drifting from the sea across the high-perched city, he has felt the need of quiet meditation. Thus he has often on his walks slipped through the open door of the chapel that stands by the roadside.
"And you have locked the door of the parish church," I exclaimed, "and you deny to the poor the privilege you yourself enjoy." He stopped and faced me in the roadway, blinking at me. "We never locked the Church door," he said. "It used to be open," I answered; "I remember being glad to sit in it myself." "Oh! I remember," he exclaimed, "it was open every day for a few years, but the authorities were never consulted when it was thrown open--a most lawless proceeding!--and when a suitable opportunity occurred the beadle locked it up. Law and order have to be vindicated."
"What you did then," I replied, "was to allow the beadle to deprive the poor parishioners of a privilege which you and a few others enjoy elsewhere." At that he started off walking along the road very quickly, but I kept step with him. "You see," said he, waving a deprecatory hand, "I am only one among many, and I was so absorbed in these old Reformation controversies that I never gave it a thought, and it is only since the war began that I realised...." And as he spoke I felt that my old friend, learned in many controversies, had experienced a revolution. The great tide had swept him past all controversies right up to the fountain head. He had learned that man's high calling is not to dispute, but to pray.
As we walked under the darkling hills I told him of that shadow which had so suddenly fallen upon me that day, and he at once gave it a name. "It is the shadow of the Cross," said he. And thereupon he began to explain out of the wisdom and ripened experience of seventy years how across nineteen centuries the shadow of the Cross lies still over all the world. One thinks so seldom of these things, and if occasionally one hears them spoken of, familiarity with the words has deadened the hearer to their significance. It was because I listened to him talking in the lane that his words gripped me. They might have made no impression if he were in a pulpit.
***
We are accustomed to think of the greatest of all tragedies as an event consummated in six hours. It is, however, far from consummated, for it is an age-long tragedy. Its roots lay in self-interest. A degenerate priesthood in an obscure Syrian town saw nothing in the Greatest of Teachers but an unbalanced enthusiast, who struck at their ill-gotten gains, and whose triumph would make an end of them and their system. So self-interest cried "Crucify." And though the Roman Governor saw through them and wanted to save Him, self-interest again was brought into play, and when threatened with an awkward complaint to Rome, he said "Crucify." And ever since then self-interest on innumerable lips has cried Crucify, Crucify. Not only cried, but did it.
For this Teacher identified Himself with His followers, saying that He was the Vine and they the branches. It follows that whatever is done to the branch is done to the vine. A branch cannot be cut and severed from the vine without the vine bleeding. He declared it to be so. "Whosoever receiveth you receiveth Me," and it follows that whosoever crucifies you crucifies Me. And the history of the centuries is the history of how the poor and unlearned and the toiling have been persecuted, harried by war, driven to death and crucified.
Generation after generation have raised the Cross anew, and in the crucifying of the dumb multitudes have crucified Him. Along with His own He fought with wild beasts, went through the flames, and suffered many bloody and diverse persecutions, and He was with His people now. He confronted to-day the mighty of the earth as He did that blinded priesthood of old, and He declared that there is only one way of conquering, and that by love; that gaining the whole world was a miserable bargain if in exchange a man parted with truth and righteousness and purity--those things that constitute the soul's very breath.
But self-interest answered with cold disdain: "What sickly sentimentalist is this? Let Him be crucified." He faced to-day the lust of conquest, and declared that the conquering of men's bodies was nothing; that the only way of attaining power was to conquer men's hearts and minds and wills, thus clasping them to us with hooks of steel; that the will of God for His children was that they should love their enemies and not pour upon them the vials of wrath, trampling them under foot; but the arrogance of man answered with the hoarse cry, "Crucify."
And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the holocaust of war--ten millions of men consigned to the hell of reeking trenches. In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before, bearing its awful woe. In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal Love is crucified. It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred door of the House of God.
***
The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power. And yet there must be some explanation of it. Why should a passion for righteousness be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified by a petty Roman official? There can be no explanation but this--that that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which wrought so evil a deed. That power was self-interest--selfishness.
The eyes of men turned to Jesus Christ, and they saw one holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, whose journeying was the journeys of healing among the sons of men, whose words were words of blessedness, declaring that God loved and pardoned His children, and yet men reviled, scorned, scourged and at last crucified Him. The power that moved men to this dread crime was sin, and thus the word sin became a word of horror. (For the selfishness that crucified was only one fruit of sin.) Out of that realisation of the horror of sin there sprang an ethical passion--a passion which in the heart and in the world waged ceaseless war on selfishness and all the devices of evil. Thus humanity was lifted out of the mire. They girded themselves to fight that dread and hateful power which crucified the Holy One.
Like the wind blowing in from the sea that sweeps before it the foul miasma that lies over the valleys, so that men look up and see the heavens and feel a new vigour moving in their blood, so a breath from the living God came stirring the foul places of humanity, and the eyes, no longer blinded by the exhalations of evil passions, saw the ideal of purity arise before their eyes, and they turned to climb towards the clearer vision. Through the revelation of purity in the face of Jesus Christ and the realisation of the awfulness of that power which crowned that purity with thorns, there came to humanity the dawning of deliverance from sin--a deliverance still going on to its fruition.
***
History is for ever repeating itself, and to-day the process of humanity's deliverance from evil will gather momentum and advance a long way towards the final triumph. For just as men only realised the hatefulness of sin when they saw it laid upon Jesus Christ, so will it be also to-day. A generation that had lost the sense of sin beholds sin laid upon millions of men, working woe unspeakable, and, beholding, learns anew what sin is and the hatefulness of it. For these millions of men grappling with death, what are they but humanity's sin-bearers. On them is laid the burden of the sins of this generation. The selfishness, greed, ambition, lust--all the passions which sweep men to wars of conquest--have poured the vials of misery on their heads. The son of the widow sitting on the mort-safe, who now lies in a nameless grave, he bore it. The bearing of it killed him.
And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that passion for righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust. There will ring round the world the compelling cry that this power of hell must not for ever hold humanity in its grip--that ruthless ambition, militarism, despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth. Once more the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men.
***
There was another power also that stirred the world under the shadow of the Cross, and that was the power of self-sacrifice. There came to men an overwhelming realisation that at the heart of the universe was the Spirit of self-sacrifice, and that the Cross was but the expression of it. They realised that the greatest thing a man can do with his life is to lay it down. And as men realise to-day that the Cross still abides in the heart of God, so that in all their affliction He is afflicted, there comes to them the feeling that the one way of coming nearest to His heart is the way of self-sacrifice.
Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of self-sacrifice. What is it that sustains the men who go down to the earthly hell of ruthless war? It is just this--the consciousness, newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and country, for home and kindred. They are content to be blotted out if only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be exalted. Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure. Men charge across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes. They are raised into the fellowship of the Cross. And we are raised with them.
If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again lift up her face to the light. He has died that we may live. Greater love hath no man than this--nor yet greater glory. But she needs not to be told; she knows it already. She knows it far better than you or I do, for she feels it. In the deep places of life where words are meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the glory of self-sacrifice.
By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine wisdom which is hid from the wise. She knows that the road that goes by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can come to God. She knows that her son has walked along that road, and that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying while bearing it, God has brought him into that joy which all the cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe. And because she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has felt the touch of God, she is ready to greet the day of still greater sacrifice.
***
In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and read an article. It was a bitter invective against Christianity and the Church. Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross--and this holocaust as the fruit. It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced eye. It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the wicked have continued to crucify Him. These things are so not because, but in spite, of Christianity.
Grievous as war now is, yet it is not war as in the days before the Cross was erected on Calvary. When Ulysses asked Agamemnon for sanction to bury the body of Ajax, the King was greatly annoyed. "What do you mean?" he answered, "do you feel pity for a dead enemy?" That was the spirit of war in the old heathen world--the spirit which had no mercy on the living and no pity for the dead. Slowly but surely the spirit of Christ fettered the spirit of hate and dethroned the spirit of revenge. We now minister to the wounded and bury the dead enemy with the pity and the honour we render to our own.
We can trace the evolution of peace through the centuries. Wars between individuals have ceased. A century and a half ago warring clans in Scotland dyed the heather red; to-day wars between tribes have ceased. There remains only war between nations, and already there are great nations between whom war is unthinkable. If we in these days wage war with Germany, yet we in these days also celebrate the hundredth anniversary of unbroken peace with the United States of America. If we bewail the failure of Christianity in the former, let us be grateful for the triumph of Christianity in the latter.
Formerly war was the normal condition; now to the moral consciousness of Christendom war is an outrage. We only need to look beneath the surface to realise that Galilee is conquering Corsica, and will conquer at the last. Beneath the shadow of the Cross men will at last find healing for their grievous wounds.
***
And as a symbol thereof the doors of the sanctuaries of peace will be flung wide open, and no burdened heart will find the House of God locked and barred against groping hands. One fruit of these grievous days may well be that the Church will realise that it does not become her to occupy a lower plane than that heathen temple in ancient Rome, whose door was shut not day or night while men were dying in battle.
In the coming days when the mothers of sorrow come to their dead, over whose graves the falling leaves flutter as a benediction, they will not be left sitting on the iron mort-safe. The open door will invite them into the sanctuary of peace, and they will croon the coronach of their woe in the holy place. For they are the priesthood of this generation, offering up the most precious sacrifice--and the door of the holy place must be open to them. And there, in the sanctuaries of peace, their sorrow will be transmuted into joy.
IV
The Power of Prayer
IV
For eight centuries the Church of St. Giles has been the centre of the religious life of Scotland. At all times of sorrow the nation has turned to it, and within its walls, consecrated by the prayers of so many generations, the surcharged heart has voiced its woe in the presence of the Unseen. But in all the years of the dim and fading past there never was a day like this in which we now stand. Death has come as a grim spectre, and has looked into our eyes. The winds carry to our ears the moans of our perishing sons, dying gloriously for freedom on the bloody fields of Flanders. The great ships guard our shores, and we know that if that vigil failed, our cities and villages and fair countryside would become as Louvain and the Low Country. Death itself would be welcome rather than that.
If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our ears. And that call soundeth not in vain. To-day[1] the two great Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country--for all the things which make life beautiful. They have come through days of alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one place. And in their hearts only one purpose--to seek the blessing of God for their nation.
[1] November 18, 1914.
***
As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many bloody fights for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of time.
Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing for their dead. The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of the surf wailing on the shore, and their sobbing as the cry of the grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide. But the city fathers could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to pass to the kyrk, and pray whane tyme requires for our Soveraine Lord and his Army, and neichbouris being thereat."
That proclamation stirs the blood! They are dust, these fathers of ours, but their spirit is all alive, throbbing in the heart of us--their far-away children. Never did a race meet its Sedan in a sublimer spirit than that. The strong, at toll of bell and tuck of drum, manned the ramparts, and the women filled St. Giles' and sent heavenward their cries. The bodies of such a race may for a brief season be brought to subjection, but their souls are invincible--and it is the soul that always conquers.