Chapter 2

That is the conclusion which war experience drives home. The special strain and pressure of war cannot elicit from the majority of men the religion which is occupied with the saving of self. The spiritual law is that we find our life by losing it, not by saving it. In a vague and unexpressed way, as they show again and again by their cheerfulness and unconcernedness, hosts of men in this war have laid hold on this law. They have found a purpose to which to cleave, something to give themselves away for. Only it is hardly acknowledged, but rather lies below the level of mental apprehension and expression. It is the function of Christianity to raise this unacknowledging trustfulness and self-giving out of dumb subconsciousness, and to give to it speech, and to crown it with the glory of fully human self-devotion. It is its part to declare that it is God Whom they find in the offering of themselves, His love in which they can lose themselves, His purpose to which they can cleave, His will to be done--and that to give Him joy is the supreme end of man.

This is the religion which sustains in war, because possessed in peace. And it is so little prevalent--that is, so little in any one's _conscious_ possession--in war just because God, and His love, and His desire have been so little in men's thoughts in peace. Let peace return--let the strain of war be lifted from a unit as it goes back into rest, or from an individual as he goes on leave, and the life of indulgence, without an object except self, threatens to repossess the soul. In the same way it is peace rather than war, health rather than sickness, youth rather than age, which really test the reality of our Christianity, when, without the shame of being driven thereto by need, a man can rejoice in God, and with full powers be made the instrument of His will.

VIII

There is then little conscious and articulate Christianity at the front, and yet there are profoundly Christian characteristics in what men are and do and endure, who have never known or do not understand or have forgotten the Christian religion. What, then, is this strangely honoured and yet neglected thing? Does it exist? Is it there for men were they to awake to it?

This utterly searching war justifies the critical temper which passes previous allegiances and acceptances under revision and judgment. I may be forgiven, then, for saying that I do not think that Christianity as at present expressed and presented to men in the Church (in the widest sense of the word) is _prima facie_ that which can win and possess them. It would be a big task and unsuited to the conditions under which I write to argue this out. What needs discussion is how much of natural religion has been absorbed into the accumulated deposit from the past which we call traditional Christianity, with the effect of disguising and overlaying in it those specifically Christian elements, which make Christianity not only a salvation from sin or from hell, but from the morbid and even contemptible in religion. Those elements can never be clearly abstracted and used by themselves, for Christianity was not a thing rounded and completed, and deposited upon the world _in vacuo_, but was as a seed sown, which grows by drawing into itself the nourishment of soil and atmosphere. There always must be elements of natural religion interfused with the Christian religion, for though not evolved out of natural religion, but rather coming to it as a deliverance, Christianity is the crown and fulfilment and corroboration of the good and the true in natural religion. It is not a question of clear separation and abstraction, but of distinction, emphasis, and proportion. I believe that things not characteristically Christian have acquired a disproportionate place in our religion as handed down to us.

I suggest (but will not work it out here) that many of the hymns in use are evidence of this, and that is why so often they do not ring true. I also believe that an unhistorical use of the Bible has proved a distorting influence. From early Christian days Scripture, which is a story of a process and growth containing many stages and imperfections, has been treated as something timeless and absolute. In particular, the partial answers to the problem of suffering to which the Jews in their development were led, have been made to bear weights heavier than they can sustain. Some of the Psalms, for instance, over-emphasise the connection between righteousness and immunity from misfortune. They can be used to justify a calculating and self-saving religion which is below the level of Christ's religion. A soldier, recently wounded on the Somme, handed to me at a dressing-station a small copy of the 91st Psalm as his religious handbook. Yet by itself the 91st Psalm, though a wonderful expression of trust in God, promises a security to which our Lord, and others akin to Him in spirit, have not put their seal. He did not ask--He resisted the temptation to ask--that no evil should happen unto Him, nor that angels should bear Him in their hands lest He should hurt His foot against a stone. He would not have men set their face in the day of battle in the assurance that, though a thousand should fall beside them and ten thousand at their right hand, the same lot would not come nigh them.

I think, too, that Christianity fails to make its characteristic appeal through the Church, owing to two prevalent "isms"--ecclesiasticism and subjectivism--both of which may be said to be the being primarily occupied in religion with something other than God. I doubt whether any Church-party advantage can be scored by any one in this matter. Roughly speaking, the weakness of Catholic Christianity is to get involved in the little things of "mint and anise and cummin"; whilst the weakness of Protestantism is to become absorbed in the luxuries of one's own religious experiences. The upshot of either is the same, namely, to be very religious, and yet to forget the living God. I remember being very much startled by an eminently pious Anglo-Catholic undergraduate at Oxford saying to me, "The fact is, I am not interested in God the Father." It is unwise to argue from one instance, but I seem to see there a symptom of a widespread and tragic estrangement of institutional Christianity from the mind of Christ. But I doubt whether things are much better on the other side of the ecclesiastical street, where so often the worship of God has downgraded into sitting and listening to sentimental music on Pleasant Sunday Afternoons. Single instances are misleading, but I can never dismiss the belief that there is something radically wrong with the world of religion of which the representative was a Chapel, in my old parish at Leeds, that indulged in a "fruit-banquet" on Good Friday. Right through organised Christianity of all kinds there is, I think, a great absence of the real Christian thing.

IX

But this brings round again the question, "What is this Christian thing?" What are the characteristic and specific elements which, though they cannot be nakedly abstracted from other elements, yet have to be kept salient amid everything else? What is the Christianity which is generally not in the conscious possession of men at the front, and yet receives the seal of their glorious excellences? What is the Christianity which lies hidden by traditional disguise and contemporary practice? Where is it to be found?

X

At any rate, in the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. We are blessed by the privilege, given to us by the work of realistic historians, of going to Him as our real Brother. We can study the religion of this Man. It was rooted first and last in one dominant reality--the Father and His will. From the first sight given to us of Him as a boy and onwards He was rich in one thing--He was rich towards God. He looked at the world without insensibility to its pain, without evasion of its evil--rather with uniquely sensitive insight into both--as God's world and the scene of God's sovereign activity. And He expected others to share His view. He was repeatedly astonished to find those around Him heedless of the air which He drew in with open mouth, blind to what He saw, deaf to what He heard, unelated by His joy. He was surprised to find them strangely and otherwise absorbed, with hearts elsewhere centred than in God. He expected to find them united to God in a loving loyalty. He found them in a spiritual adultery.

This unshared absorption of Jesus was not the fruit of adversity nor a resort in disappointment. He was not driven to it by anxiety. It came first for Him in peace, in full health, and youth and powers. His was a house which was built in fine weather upon a rock, so that when the storms of adversity beat on it, it stood firm. His religion stood the severest test, namely, the quiet of normal and uneventful days. It was ready for the strain of a campaign. He emerged out of the peace of Nazareth prepared for enterprise. For the Father to Him was not only the object of immobile worship and delight--not only a Name to be hallowed, but was He Who called Him out to a venture for His kingdom and the doing of His will.

That was how Jesus came among men. He came calling men to a great adventure, to non-calculating and self-regardless co-operation with the active energy and will of the Father. How much He knew beforehand of whither that will would lead Him can never be known. To suppose that He knew all and saw the end in the beginning and had no steps in the dark to take, would be to deny to Him the essential element of human faith and trust, which is that it has to step out beyond the light of knowledge into the darkness of uncertainty. On the other hand, to suppose that He knew nothing, is to deny to Him that humanly heroic resolution with which He set His face to tread the path which led Him to suffering. In our ignorance let us grip this certainty, that for Him the one sufficient thing was that the Father knew all things--the times and the seasons, the cup to be drunk, the will to be done and the final outcome. That was enough for Him and must be enough for us.

This religion of Jesus then is that to which all can turn, as their hearts are full beyond expression with proud and thankful sorrow for the great company of those who have trustfully given themselves to death for others. Jesus is the Word, that is, the full and crowning expression of that which is hardly articulate in others. His open-eyed self-consecration to do the will of the Father seals and ratifies their confused yet steadfast devotion. He is first among many brethren, giving full utterance to their dumb trustfulness. In a world of mixed and partial motives He is the absolute and unmitigated lover of God--loving with all His mind and soul and strength, freely hazarding all upon the Father.

XI

Is not that enough? This simple element--this religion of Jesus--is it not the one thing needful, possessed of which men may slough off all else in the traditional deposits of Christianity? Yes, would certainly be the answer if the men of His day had in fact been so possessed, and if men were so possessed to-day. What was actual in Him was, is, in fact, unrealised in them. He did find, of old, fellow-adventurers to share His enterprise. But they could not share it to the end. He could love God wholly, they only partially. He had to leave them, and they Him; He to do the will of the Father, they to fail to do it. He alone could not only announce but fulfil the first and great commandment; they in the end could only be defied and broken by it.

So it was proved. And it is a result which any honest man can verify for himself. As I have tried to show elsewhere,[1] the most rigorously human and non-miraculous view of Jesus and the Gospels leads to this point, to what may be called the porch where Peter wept, where the silence of God broods over the tragedy of human failure.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _The Mind of the Disciples_ (Macmillan).

XII

"But the third day He rose again." Peter was not left in the porch, nor are we. His broken hope was remade by the One fully trusted in by Jesus only--by the "God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ."[2]

The Christian thing which we look for is the Good News of _God_ in Christ. It is not only the religion _of_ Jesus our Brother, but religion _in_ Jesus, in Him revealing God to men. It is not only His human richness towards God, but in Him the richness of God towards men. It is the Cross not only as the climax of free loving self-offering to the Father, but as itself the laying bare of the Father's heart--it is _God_ reconciling the world unto Himself.

It is this--the revelation of God in Christ--of which the experience of the war shows we are above all else in the world in need. God, not merely assented to as a mysterious "One above," at the back of things, but God, known and delighted in, in terms of Jesus Christ. It is one great light which we need to walk in--the light of the knowledge of what God is, as it shines upon the face of Jesus Christ. The specific Christian thing that makes Christianity salvation is not--as so many men in the army think--just goodness nor negative and kill-joy propriety, but the fact that _in the ardent, venturesome, and self-regardless sacrifice of Jesus, we see the Love of God Himself coming out to win the souls of men_.

Everything else follows from that, and comes second to it as first--all that follows from God's love being holy, and from men being unholy, all that is meant by Christian experience, all that is involved in the activities of prayer and service. Men have to begin from, and ever keep rallying round, the truth of what God is as made known in Christ--treating the truth as no matter of course, but as the disclosure which in this strange world seems nearly too good to be true.

For there is no reconciliation between the facts of the world and the Absolute of philosophy or the highly attributed Supreme Being of natural religion. One thing alone can meet the passion of men--whether imposed upon them or self-inflicted--it is the passion of God in Christ whereby His Love works out its victory. That alone can harness to itself the vitality and heroism of men, which else will riot away in waste or flag in disillusion. That alone can be the constraining object of their joy and praise, and the satisfaction of their adventurous devotion.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] 1 Peter i. 3.

XIII

There has been in this war a wonderful display of the heroism of men. But their thoughts about God and religion are for the most part at a level below the highest in themselves. They have come to themselves in giving themselves away. But they think that religion is mostly concerned with self-saving. They tend to recognise most easily the signs of God's favour in this or that instance of safety or escape. This means that they do not think of God in terms of Christ, but that they think of Him as outside the trouble and pain and cost of life, and in the immunity of heaven. They do not think of Him as involved in the risks and agonies of the world. Though they do not formulate it to themselves, the glories of human nature go beyond anything they know of the divine. For them God is less wonderful than man. A fine soldier protested to me lately about the service which was read at the funeral of a very brave officer, "Why say more than 'here is a very gallant soldier'?" as though there were nothing in the Author of our being akin to the gallantry in man. Not that such a man would deny the idea, but that he and the rest are not possessed by joy in its truth. Men of our race do not deny greatly, but then neither do they joyfully assert. They have not received the good news of God in Christ.

XIV

We all need to be so possessed before peace comes back. For peace, as I have said, is the real test of our religion, not war. We have been plunged into war, rejoicing little in God. We have got to put Him and His will and desire first before peace returns. Or else the thought of Him will sink out of our attention, and we shall return to the getting of gain and to self-service in a mood of perpetual postponement. God will come last again. He did so in the minds of soldiers at the beginning of the war. Often they looked upon chaplains as no more than preliminary undertakers. At the beginning of the war, officers in my old regiment, in the friendliest way, asked me what there was to do as a chaplain except burial duties. Clearly they thought of _life_ as something apart from God.

What is needed is a new joy in God as Love and Purpose, here and now. Need, whether the pressure of sickness or danger or anxiety or age or guilt, will often operate in turning the heart God-ward. The sense of being thrown in entire dependence upon God can be the God-given turning-point in a man's life and an end to his godlessness. But need will never provide the lasting religious motive which sets the chord of what is noblest in men vibrating within them. The peculiar glory of the Christian religion is that it provides that motive--it is the motive of God's need. He wants us, for He loves us. He is love.

I have found myself at the front pressed to ask men why they should have to do with religion. Is it because they are on active service and exposed to danger and liable to death? Is that to be the constraining motive? And, in particular, why pray? Is it to express their natural sense of need, their desire for security and support? Is that to be the main impulse? I try to answer these questions by asking them another question: 'Why do they write home?' What keeps them at it in the damp dug-outs with the indelible pencil running smudgily over the paper? Why do some men write every day? Is it for what they can get--the cakes, the fags? Does the constraining motive lie in their own need? It does not. It lies in the joy which letters bring to loving hearts at home. Likewise there is joy in Heaven when one forgetful wayward son turns in heart thither homewards.

For God loves us and therefore wants us and desires to use us. It is what He is which is the saving motive of our religion. Every other motive, however natural, is tainted with morbidity, and can never long possess the eager hearts of men nor be their glory in the full tide of life. But in God they can glory as they see what He is, at work with purposes of holy love in the venture of creation; and this they can see in Christ, living, suffering, dying, rising, and alive for evermore; or else Christianity is nothing in the world. That is the pure metal of our glorious religion, which the fierce fires of war must refine out of its traditional alloy. That is the great golden secret uttered in Christ--God, all-suffering and all-faithful love, calling out into active alliance the like qualities in His children for the accomplishment of His will on earth as in heaven.

XV

We need in peace the free and conscious realisation of that of which men are perforce, and dumbly, aware in war. It is that there is something going on in the world which demands primary allegiance, and the putting second of every self-interest. At the front men hardly know what it is. They are suspicious of rhetoric and unreality in talk about liberty and international equity, and right against might. They only know--a wonderful majority of them--that something great and righteous wants them and requires of them their help. So, reluctantly, with grumblings and insistent longing for it all to be over, and yet with the inalienable joy of doing the right thing, they obstinately endure. We can say, without apportioning right wholesale to the Allies or wrong wholesale to Germany, that, however dimly aware of it, they are 'seeking first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness.'

Can they maintain this allegiance in peace despite every seduction which will rush to recapture their souls? That is the great question which all who call themselves Christians should be considering on their knees while the war is still raging.

The answer lies in a great measure with the Church. She has to enlist in her warfare for the kingdom of God--the war which is never over--that capacity in men for service and suffering which the war has disclosed. How can this be? Would that I had no uncertain answer to utter! I fling these cries out to comrades in the Lord that we may provoke one another to find the answer. The answer cannot be merely an intellectual solution. It must be spelt out in terms of costly devotion.

Some things are clear. First, the Church has to acknowledge that she is not the kingdom of God but the means to it as an end. There are, I think, a great many carts and horses to be changed round into their right relations. Religious observances and organisations--all the whole apparatus of religion--have come to be looked upon as ends in themselves, whereas they are means to an end beyond themselves. People think that the clergy's one concern is the success of ecclesiastical activities and institutions. We clergy think so ourselves! It is not for her own interests, which are by themselves incurably too small to evoke the heroic in men, that the Church is in the world. She is in the world to change the world, so that its whole extent may be filled with the glory of God, and may become worthy of the eternal destiny of the souls of men. Hers is a high and costly venture. She has strongholds to storm--the entrenchments where the forces of private-mindedness and apathy and money-worship are dug in. In the attempt she can exhaust to its depths the capacity which is in men for dauntless sacrifice.

Secondly, if the Church's conception of her own interests must be changed, so must the individual's conception of personal religion. Self-preoccupation is as fatal to the latter as to the former. Personal piety is travestied by being thought to be a respectable prudence here for the sake of a reward hereafter. It is not a careful self-salvation at all. Rather it is a salvation from self. It is the being lost to self in devotion and service to God and one's fellow-men.

Lastly, if these changes are to be they depend on one thing--a new vision of God in Christ, such as shall be for Church and individual the over-mastering counter-attraction to self. What the world needs is theocracy. That is, not the imposition of ecclesiastical shackles upon secular life, but the consecration of all life, with all its ever-multiplying treasures of knowledge and power, to one object--the glory of God. If so, then God, as the centre and magnet of consecration, must be all vitally apprehended. He must fill the horizon of the soul. He must be the delight of men, to draw them out of themselves into childlike selflessness, so that as children they may enter into the Kingdom.

XVI

There are objections, I know, which arise in the mind to this insistence on God and the will or kingdom on which He is at work in the world, and they must be faced. It is easy, I feel, to speak of the will of God in general terms. But what does it mean in particular? Can it be known or defined? Is it practicable?

I remember being puzzled by a great religious teacher to whom I owe much--Father Kelly of the Society of the Sacred Mission, Kelham. It was almost comic to me that in the same breath he would urge (1) that the one thing needful was faith in God and in the will which He is accomplishing in His world, and--with equal energy--(2) that no one could say what in the world that will is. It reminded me of those philosophers who liken the meta-physical pursuit of the Absolute to Lewis Carroll's _Hunting of the Snark_.