Part 2

GOD gave plenty of land, and plenty of water, and plenty of air, and if the New Testament motto had been followed, "Having food and raiment, with these we shall have enough," the generosity of GOD would have been mirrored in the generosity of man.

3. But even this marvellous power and generosity would not excite the passionate love of mankind, but for His _Humility_. Power may only awe; the merely generous Lord or Lady Bountiful, kind as they often are, are sometimes felt to do it in a spirit of patronage and self-pleasing; they like to be thought bountiful and kind, and have their reward in the grateful looks and even obsequious demeanour of the recipients of their bounty. But it is Christmas which really stirs the blood. That this powerful, generous Being should manifest His power and shower down His gifts was wonderful; but that He should give Himself--this was sublime! This is what stirred heaven to its depths--"Glory to GOD in the highest!"

The crowning splendour of GOD was His Humility. He was great when He said, "Let there be light, and there was light." He was mighty when He opened His Hand and filled all things living with plenteousness. But He was greatest of all when He lay as a babe in the manger. Well may the adoring Christian look up at Christmas and salute this third revelation of the splendour of GOD:

"Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown When Thou camest to earth for me.... Oh, come to my heart, LORD JESUS: There is room in my heart for Thee!"

II. What, then, ought this belief in the splendid power, generosity, and humility of GOD to produce in us?

1. It must produce Praise. It must make us say: "Praise GOD in His holiness; praise Him in the firmament of His power."

You have caught sight of Mont Blanc and you have seen Niagara, and you say quite naturally, "How splendid!"

2. It produces Hope. War, slaughter, misery, can't be the end, if such a GOD exists. It may be inevitable from man's lust, ambition, and greed; but it can't be the end--if GOD'S people work with GOD: there must be a kingdom coming at last in which dwelleth, not ambition, tyranny, or cruelty, but "righteousness, peace, and joy in the HOLY GHOST."

3. It produces Peace. Once believe in the splendour of GOD, and you get "the peace of GOD, which passeth all understanding." "Thou wilt keep him," says the prophet, "in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee." The world is not out of GOD'S Hand, as some people would persuade us, nor any individual in the world. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered," and "ye are of more value than many sparrows."

4. And it produces answering Sacrifice and Courage. What we want to-day is "the warrior's mind," which gives and does not heed the cost, which fights and does not heed the wounds; and we can only be nerved for this by the splendid self-sacrifice of GOD Himself.

If man is GOD'S child, then it must be a case of "Like Father, like son," and the splendour of GOD must be answered by the nobility of man. To know such a GOD is to live, to serve such a GOD is to reign; with such a faith, death loses its sting, and the grave its terrors. For to die is to pass into the presence of One who has shown Himself powerful and generous and humble. And the response of the grateful soul, with ten times the conviction of the psalmist, when he thinks of what happened on Christmas Day, will be the same words uttered so many thousand years ago:

"O GOD, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places.... He will give strength and power unto His people. Blessed be GOD."

III

GOD THE KING OF THE WORLD[4]

[4] Preached in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, in connection with the Annual Conference of the National Union of Women Workers.

"GOD is my King of old; the help that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself."--Ps. lxxiv. 12.

GOD is either non-existent or His existence is the greatest fact in the universe. Either the secularist is right, and there is nothing but the strong hand and the keen brain of man and woman to better the condition of world, or, if there be a Person who created the great blazing suns that we call stars, whose imagination is so vast that He controls the movements of history, and yet whose knowledge is so detailed that the welfare of the smallest child in a great city is of infinite interest to Him, then the existence of that Person is the greatest fact in all the world. No question is so urgent as what He thinks about a problem; nothing is so vitally important as to know what His mind is, for instance, as to the issue of a great war. No one is quite so foolish as the man or woman who either plans his or her own life, or who propounds schemes for the improvement of the world, without taking the greatest Fact in all the world into account, or keeping in touch with what must be on this hypothesis the ultimate Source and Fount of all power and the Mainspring of all energy. If there be such a Person at all, the wires might as well expect to convey a message apart from the electric current as for the human instrument to avail without GOD.

Now, I think it is quite likely that among so many busy people, whose brains are all full of practical schemes, there may be some whose minds may have but little hold on GOD, and may be troubled by doubts, such as I remember my own mind was in the days of my youth. After all, one mind is very much like another; and in speaking to women I have long learnt to speak as if I was speaking to men, and in this I never found myself very much astray. If I tell you, then, how the reality of GOD gradually dawned upon one mind, it is only in the hope that through what may be similar clouds of vagueness and doubt the light may shine upon another.

1. I think undoubtedly that _Nature_ was, and always will be to most minds, the first help. It does seem more and more impossible that the ordered universe can have been produced by chance. To use an illustration I have often used, especially on Sunday afternoons at the open-air meetings in the parks of East London, if a box of letters cannot throw themselves into a play of Shakespeare because there is clearly the mark of mind in the play, how little credible is it that the atoms of the universe have thrown themselves into the universe as we see it to-day! We feel inclined to add to the trenchant questions in the Book of Job the further question: Who wrapped the atmosphere round the earth and made life possible, and stopped the friction? Was the beauty of the earth the surprise, or the gift to His children of a Being with a beautiful mind? Can the ordered course of the silent stars be produced by any amount of juggling with chance out of the atoms of the world? In other words, Nature drives us not only to GOD, but to a very strong GOD and a very present GOD. If the great astronomer Herschel is right, and every atom has the appearance of a created thing and every law of Nature requires, as he says, the continual application of force, we are "up against"--to use a cant phrase of the day--we are up against the most powerful Person the world has ever known. To swing the smallest planet on its orbit is beyond the power of the greatest superman ever present to the brain of a megalomaniac. But to swing twenty millions of blazing suns, and to swing them every day and every night, and to swing them, as far as we know, for millions of years, requires a Person of surpassing strength and most present power, for it is clear that of this wonderful thing which is done upon earth every day and every night "He doeth it Himself."

2. But if the philosopher Kant was right in saying that the first thing which filled him with awe was the starry heavens without, he went on to say that the second was the moral law within. And if the minds of you women are like my own, the path of the discovery of GOD lies next through the _conscience_. What is it, this indistinct knocking, this voice, which though it can be stilled can never be silenced? If it is only a product of mingled self-interest and heredity, as some would uphold, why does it persistently urge us, sometimes in almost bitter tones, against our immediate self-interest?

Why must the boy leave his brilliant prospects and put himself under the bullets and shells in the trenches? Why must the mother let him go? It is only a shallow thinker, I believe, who can remain long under the impression that the "categorical imperative," as Kant called it, or, as we might say, this insistent, imperious voice, can be produced by any process of evolution at all. It speaks like the voice of a person; it argues like a person; it refuses to be silenced like a person. And the argument is more than justified that, if there is a Person who made the world and still carries it on, it is more than probably the same Person who is speaking to us in conscience. The fact that by His warnings and encouragements He clearly cares so much for righteousness is a standing witness that the Person who swings the stars is more than a strong and clever devil, which the author of the material universe alone might conceivably be, but a Person with a passion for goodness. Otherwise, as Dr. Chalmers said, He would not have placed in the breast of every one of His children, of every one of His created beings, a reclaiming witness against Himself.

We have come, then, a good way out of sceptical vagueness when we have arrived at a Person of appalling power, and yet of equally appalling righteousness, who is thundering His will through every conscience in the world, as though standing in the midst of the universe and striking at the same time four hundred million gongs; not leaving it for someone else to do, but doing it Himself.

But, alas! we are still far from loving Him, for indeed He is still far from being lovable. Love is the only thing which we cannot command at will and which we cannot give at will; and the world would be in a sorry plight so far as loving GOD is concerned, if nothing more had been done by GOD than this.

3. After all, there are many things which might make us inclined to hate this immensely strong and righteous Person. With all His strength and with all His righteousness, there is a terrible amount of suffering in the world. The old question that some of your children may have asked you who are mothers has far more in it than appears upon the surface: "Oh, mother, why does not GOD kill the devil?" The world is filled with injustice and cruelty, and especially so to-day. Ypres Cathedral and the Cloth Hall, as I have seen with my own eyes, are in ruins. So are thousands of homes in Belgium, France, and Poland, and yet not one single thing was done by the innocent inhabitants to deserve this fate. Who is going to give life again to the hundreds shot in cold blood in Louvain and Aerschott and elsewhere, and seen shot by one of the clergy of the diocese of London; or honour again to the outraged women and girls; or restore the dead children--born and unborn--to the mothers who lost their children in the last Zeppelin raid? Where is the GOD of the fatherless and of the widow? It is all very well to say, "It is GOD in His holy habitation." But why does He sit up there in His holy habitation while such things are being done upon earth? Is He reclining, as Tennyson pictured the ancient gods,

"On the hills, like gods together, Careless of mankind"?

he may stay there; but if he does, who is going to love him? whom do we love in england to-day? is our popular hero the man who, while he remains safe in the shelter of his home, suggests that someone else should go and do something to save the country? for myself, if i thought god was like that, i should not love him. browning, with that piercing insight which has helped so many, puts the matter in a sentence. is it possible, he asks in that great argument contained in the poem "saul,"

"Here the parts shift, Here the creature surpasses the Creator?"

"Would I suffer for him that I love?" cries David, as he looks with love and pity on stricken Saul. "Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldest Thou, so wilt Thou." And it is an argument that no petty quibbles can affect. For instance, if the boys in the trenches every day and every night so give their lives for their friends; if the mother every day so loves the world that she gives her only begotten son, and GOD either cannot or will not, then man is greater than GOD; then the creature surpasses the Creator; the parts in the great drama have changed indeed.

And that brings us straight up to the New Testament, expecting the very story--yes, asking for the very chapters--to carry on the great witness of Nature and of conscience. And there we find the story just as we should expect, only more so. To use Archbishop Temple's phrase, the character depicted in the New Testament educates our conscience instead of merely satisfying it. It is a more glorious exhibition of the character of GOD than we had any right to ask, and all carried out personally by Himself. The help that was brought to earth, He brought it Himself. And just as, on a gloomy day, when bright sunshine bursts through clouds, it changes everything, so this revelation changes everything. It does not do away with difficulties; it lights them up. It does not do away with suffering, but lights it up. It is quite another thing to suffer or to see suffering if GOD suffered. "Then I can feel the bullet tear out my eyes and still believe," as a young officer to whom this happened still believes. It does not do away with the crime of the men who have wantonly produced this unnecessary war, and who have trampled underfoot every law of chivalry and humanity in carrying it out. But it does give great inspiration to those who die for what has been called the nailed hand against the mailed fist. "As CHRIST died for the salvation of the world, my two boys have died according to their lights for the same cause. May I not think"--asked a Colonel who lost both his sons in one week--"that CHRIST counts them as His comrades in arms?"

And what that thought did for him it will do for others. It does not do away with the inequalities of human life, but like a trumpet note it summons every man and woman to come and rally round Him who sprang into the midst of them and gave His life, and who, while employing human minds and hearts for His work, means that the help that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself.

What, then, has all this to say to a conference of women workers? It suggests a warning, and flashes an inspiration to you. It suggests a warning. It is possible that the keenest, ablest women, like the keenest, ablest men, may make a mistake which might more clearly be seen to be ludicrous if it were not so common, that they imagine they can accomplish great things without GOD. History is strewn with the failures of those who have made this tragic and hopeless mistake. Many humble and noble souls who in infinite distress have found faith impossible have been really in touch with this wonderful and righteous and loving Person without knowing it, and have left behind them on earth the work which GOD did through them, and who acknowledge now in a clearer atmosphere that the work that they had done He did it Himself. But the merely busy men and women, the man or woman who deliberately believes like Nebuchadnezzar: "Is not this great Babylon that I have built by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?" have been the failure, the laughing-stock of the world; they have been out of touch with the Source of all power, and wisdom, and grace, and the world, when they have passed, will be the same as it was before.

But if it suggests a warning, what inspiration, dear sisters, it flashes before you! not so much to do something you have never done before, but possibly to do it in a different spirit; for the first time in your life, perhaps, to be consciously fellow-workers with GOD, to come again and again to GOD, and to fill yourselves with great heartfuls of His power and love, to unite yourself in sacramental union to Him who came to seek for the lost, to lift up all work into a new atmosphere, and to find a joy in it which the world can neither give nor take away.

That is the glorious prospect which opens out before us all. GOD has no favourites; He is the same for all, and invites all to join in the great comradeship which changes life. It is the chance of our life to accept His offer. "The help that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself;" and as you find the reality of that help at your disposal more and more, day by day and year by year, you will look up as trench after trench is taken in a power obviously not yours, to gladly acknowledge: "Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but to Thy name give the praise."

IV

MISSIONARY WORK THE ONLY FINAL CURE FOR WAR[5]

[5] Preached in Westminster Abbey on Advent Sunday.

"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain: for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea."--Isa. xi. 9.

It is with a pathetic wistfulness we hear described by the prophet this Advent picture of the reign of peace, in which the wolf is to dwell with the lamb, and the leopard to lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and the sucking child to play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child to put his hand on the cockatrice' den, and in which the special feature of the holy mountain was to be that they should not hurt nor destroy. For we look round after nineteen hundred years of the religion which was to bring this "peace on earth and good will among men," and we see an outpouring of more blood and an outbreak of viler passions than has been seen in this world for a thousand years.

One can little wonder that the cynics scoff, and those who refuse or fail to look below the surface speak openly of the breakdown of Christianity, and that some of the most earnest and loving of GOD'S children are deeply moved and disturbed. Is this beautiful picture a Will-of-the-wisp? they ask. Is it a mirage in the desert? or are the longing eyes of GOD'S children some day to see it realized?

I. "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain." And first we see Belgium stabbed in the back and ravaged, then Poland, and then Serbia, and then the Armenian nation wiped out--five hundred thousand at a moderate estimate being actually killed; and then as a necessary consequence, to save the freedom of the world, to save Liberty's own self, to save the honour of women and the innocence of children, everything that is noblest in Europe, everyone that loves freedom and honour, everyone that puts principle above ease, and life itself beyond mere living, are banded in a great crusade--we cannot deny it--to kill Germans: to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended the Armenian massacres, who sank the _Lusitania_, and who turned the machine-guns on the civilians of Aerschott and Louvain--and to kill them lest the civilisation of the world should itself be killed.

And no doubt for many to-day this belief in Christianity is trembling in the balance; the world seems to have returned to the primitive chaos of paganism from which it came.

"There's nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone."[6]

[6] Kipling.

But this awful nightmare only besets those who fail to look below the surface. Two small publications will help those who are in this frame of mind; one is an excellent lecture by the Dean of Westminster (Dr. Ryle), entitled "The Attitude of the Church towards War," and the other a brilliant little book by the well-known American writer, Owen Wister, called "The Pentecost of Calamity."

In the first it is clearly shown that, although Christianity and War are ideally opposed to one another, and although when the world is wholly Christian there can be no war, yet the writers of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church have always held that, until that ideal time arrives, a Christian man might have to go to war.

In the New Testament itself, as the Dean points out, we must balance "They who take the sword shall perish by the sword" with the words from the lips of the same Divine Teacher, "He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one."

Later on, Christians are found in the Roman Army in increasing numbers, and St. Ambrose's and St. Augustine's words quoted by the Dean may be taken as typical of the teaching of the early Church. "The courage which protects one's country in war against the raids of barbarians is completely righteous," says St. Ambrose ("De Offic.," i. 61). And St. Augustine says ("Ep.," 227): "Provided they are really good men, those who are fighting are unquestionably engaged in the pursuit of peace, even though the quest be prosecuted through bloodshed."

And in Mr. Wister's brilliant essay, after a delightful picture of Germany as it appeared to be on the surface in June, 1914, with its efficiency, its comfort, its culture, and after especially describing a delightful children's festival in Frankfurt to celebrate the bicentenary of Glück, he then portrays the awful horror which seized him and all the educated Americans who had learnt to love their holiday in Germany, when the wild beast suddenly appeared from among the flowers, and, to use his own words, made his spring at the throat of an unsuspecting, unprepared world.

"Suppose a soul arrived on earth from another world, wholly ignorant of events, and were given its choice, after a survey of the nations, which it should be born in and belong to. In May, June, and July, 1914, my choice," he says, "would have been, not France, not England, not America, but Germany.

"It was on the seventh day of June, 1914, that Frankfurt assembled her school-children in the opera-house to further their taste and understanding of Germany's supreme national art.

"But exactly eleven months later, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo sank the _Lusitania_, and (this was the awful revelation) the cities of the Rhine celebrated this also for their school-children."

He then gives the Prussian creed, sentence by sentence, compiled from the utterances of Prussians, the Kaiser and his Generals, professors, and editors, of which I can only quote these sentences:

"War in itself is a good thing. GOD will see to it that war always recurs. The efforts directed towards the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe is only a secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one good; the infliction of suffering does one more good. This war must be conducted as ruthlessly as possible."

Now, I do not quote this (and you will find four pages of similar sayings) to stir up unchristian hatred of the German race, many of whom as individuals would repudiate such sayings as their own personal belief, but I do it to defend Christianity. I only heard just before coming here, in the home of one of the many mourning families I visit, that a son who had died in Germany testified in his last letter to the great kindness with which he had been treated in hospital.

Such teaching as this is not Christianity; this is the spirit of Antichrist. You, poor brother and sister, who are allowing your faith to be shattered by the war--you are not looking deep enough.