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THE 
 WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. R. J. CAMPBELL, M.A. 
 
 Of St. Philip's Cathedral Church, 
 Birmingham 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1916 
 

 Copyright, 1916 
 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. 
 
 4if 
 
 AUG 10 1 
 
 ©CI.A437189 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PA GE 
 
 I Religion and the War ....... i 
 
 II Prayers for the Dead 12 
 
 III War Suffering: Why Did God Re- 
 
 frain From Stopping It? . . . . 18 
 
 IV What Is There to Be Afraid Of? . . 23 
 V War and Sacrifice 32 
 
 VI Pessimism 41 
 
 VII The Higher Command 51 
 
 VIII About Pacifism 63 
 
 IX If I Were God 74 
 
 X The Churches and Universal Peace. 
 
 A General Council 84 
 
 XI The Illusion of Progress .... 96 
 
 XII Religion After the War: Will Chris- 
 tianity Survive? 106 
 
 XIII Noel at the Front 123 
 
 XIV Retrospect 139 
 
 XV Our New Year Outlook 149 
 
 XVI What Is Hell? . 160 
 
 XVII Reunion 179 
 
 XVIII Imagination and the Future . . . 189 
 
 XIX Reorganisation After the War . . 200 
 
 XX Will Our Civilisation Survive? . .212 
 
 XXI Democracy and Autocracy Con- 
 trasted: Is the Former Less Effi- 
 cient? . . 225 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXII The Supernatural Order .... 235 
 
 XXIII King of England 244 
 
 XXIV German Comfort: Two Great Men 
 
 Contrasted 254 
 
 XXV The Uncaused Cause: the Mystery 
 
 of God and Man 264 
 
 XXVI Not Knowing 272 
 
 XXVII Our Mutual Ignorance .... 281 
 
 XXVIII The Ages of Faith and the Ages of 
 
 Reason; New-Old and Old-New . 290 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 In the autumn of last year the writer of the ac- 
 companying little dissertations on great themes was 
 approached by the management of a Sunday paper 
 in London with the request that he should con- 
 tribute a weekly article to the columns of that peri- 
 odical. He hesitated for some time before ac- 
 cepting the proposal, as he thought it hardly likely 
 that the words of a preacher would have much 
 value for such a constituency, and frankly said so. 
 In reply the proprietors of the paper courteously 
 assured him that he need have no misgivings about 
 the matter, that they were quite well aware of the 
 fact that the subjects in which he was most at home 
 were not those usually discussed in popular journals, 
 but that they believed there was a public which 
 wanted them, and that to this end they were pre- 
 pared to offer him what was practically a pulpit. 
 
 The connection thus begun has continued har- 
 moniously up to the present, and is likely to do so 
 for some time longer. Week by week these articles 
 have appeared, are still appearing regularly, and 
 are read by the vast circle to which this Sunday 
 publication goes. Some of them have appeared in 
 the New York American and other newspapers 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 in the United States. The experiment of includ- 
 ing articles on definitely religious and spiritual sub- 
 jects in secular journals is not so new in America as 
 it is in England. Readers of American Sunday 
 papers have long been accustomed to them. 
 
 Those that have been already published on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, together with some that have 
 not, have now been gathered up in volume form and 
 are here presented to the reading public. There may 
 be some who have already read most of them who 
 may be glad to possess them as a book, and perhaps 
 others who have not read them may prefer to do so 
 in a book rather than the columns of a newspaper. 
 This at least is the suggestion of many under whose 
 notice they have come. The author's thanks are 
 due to the proprietors of the publications in which 
 they have appeared for permission to re-issue them 
 in this more permanent form. 
 
 For the benefit of reviewers it should be stated 
 that the following chapters are not in any sense a 
 unity. They are printed almost exactly as they 
 originally stood, and therefore necessarily retain the 
 fragmentary and topical character of the weekly 
 article. The Great European War dominates them 
 all. They are not addressed to the intellectuals, but 
 to simple people, many of whom have lost their 
 dearest and best in the bloody strife that is going on. 
 America is watching all this suffering with openly 
 expressed sympathy and giving much practical sue- 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 cour to the wounded and despoiled; therefore it is 
 not unfitting that Americans should read words 
 which were penned in the first instance for people 
 who are passing through the furnace of pain and 
 anguish into which Europe has been plunged by the 
 wickedness of rulers. That these short essays deal 
 with some of the great problems of life and death, 
 of grief, and strain, and misery in view of the war 
 and all it means to the world, is only to be expected. 
 The writer undertook the work originally with this 
 purpose in mind. Some of the pages were penned 
 at the seat of war itself and within sound of the 
 guns. They represent a serious attempt to give 
 help and encouragement, and a certain measure of 
 enlightenment, to persons who at present feel their 
 need of these in the abnormal conditions which pre- 
 vail. They are therefore sent out on their further 
 mission in the hope that an honest intent may se- 
 cure for them some amount of welcome and good 
 will, and that critics will be merciful to their many 
 faults. 
 
THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 RELIGION AND THE WAR 
 
 A question which is agitating many minds at the 
 present time is that of the possibility of any longer 
 holding to belief in divine direction of human af- 
 fairs in face of the appalling havoc wrought by the 
 war. This is not what is ordinarily termed a re- 
 ligious question; it is being asked by thousands who 
 are neither religious nor irreligious in the conven- 
 tional sense. The majority of one's fellow-country- 
 men, if one understands them rightly, consists of 
 persons who have a sort of respect for religion with- 
 out troubling much about it; it is not until some 
 special crisis occurs, some drastic interference with 
 their ordinary modes of living, that they begin to 
 inquire into the nature of their spiritual resources 
 and what they are supposed to believe concerning 
 them. 
 
 And this inquiry is going on now very seriously; 
 or, rather, there is a widespread feeling of the utter 
 insufficiency of religion, as commonly understood, 
 to interpret for us the terrible situation in which 
 we find ourselves. People are said to have lost 
 
2 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 faith, if they ever had it; Christianity is declared to 
 have collapsed; and we are told that the worst of 
 all ironies just now is to try to impress the multitude 
 of bereaved with any confidence in benevolent super- 
 human agency. 
 
 One is constantly meeting with intelligent, culti- 
 vated people who take this attitude, not to speak 
 of the unthinking many who do the same. " Where 
 was God when my only boy was bayoneted in the 
 face and left to bleed to death in agony? " cries one 
 broken-hearted mother. " If prayer were any use, 
 would the child I bore with so much anguish, and 
 for whom I have never ceased to besiege heaven day 
 or night, be torn to pieces by German shells, and 
 shriek for death to end his torments?" wails an- 
 other. 
 
 And if it were men only, and death only! But 
 women, little children, the frailest, most sensitive, 
 most refined have had to endure every extremity of 
 horror and abasement, and are doing so still. 
 
 When I was last in France some of our soldiers 
 informed me of finding in certain bloody, filthy 
 Prussian trenches they had taken no less than nine- 
 teen French and Belgian women and girls, stark 
 naked, tied to posts, for their swinish captors to 
 abuse as they pleased. Most of them were in a 
 dying condition, some had lost their reason. Picture 
 that, Englishmen, and ask what we should be feeling 
 in this country should our wives and daughters ever 
 
RELIGION AND THE WAR 3 
 
 be subjected to such an infamy, as they unquestion- 
 ably would if the Huns succeeded in effecting a 
 landing on our shores. Nearly a million helpless 
 Armenians butchered amid every circumstance of 
 torture, rape, and pillage ! And then to talk of God 
 and Heaven! Are we fools? 
 
 Wait a moment. I am not over-anxious to defend 
 religion as such; let religion go, if go it must — 
 though I know it never can go while man exists. 
 What I want is to find out what we poor creatures 
 have to rely on in the struggle of life if the funda- 
 mental postulate of religion is a mistake and there is 
 no higher consciousness than our own to know or 
 care what becomes of us. 
 
 I am assuming nothing; I am only asking. Can 
 we dispense with a spiritual sanction for human 
 activities? Is it even conceivable that we could? 
 By no means; and, what is more, I hold, and would 
 be prepared to prove, that there never has been an 
 hour in the world's history when the spiritual sanc- 
 tions of human life were more apparent than now, 
 all its horrors notwithstanding — nay, even because 
 of them. We are getting down to realities if we ever 
 did, delusions and deceits are being shorn away, 
 and we are finding ourselves in losing all else. Let 
 us try to see the problem in its true proportions, and 
 I think we shall succeed. 
 
 Take the following propositions seriatim. 
 
 In the first place, the scale of the problem is not 
 
4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 quite what it seems. We are apt to take for granted 
 that if a million people suffer where only one suffered 
 before the pain to be individually borne must be all 
 the greater. But it is not. No person suffers a 
 million times as much because a million others are 
 suffering at the same time; we suffer one at once, 
 and each bears his own share. No human conscious- 
 ness can bear more than a certain amount of suffer- 
 ing, bodily or mental, and my point is that the prob- 
 lem of human anguish is not one whit greater because 
 a million or a hundred million lives are affected than 
 because one is. All the woe of all the battlefields in 
 Europe to-day might be concentrated in time of 
 peace into the bosom of one old woman dying of 
 cancer in hospital. All the grief of all the homes 
 bereaved could be summed up in the tears shed by 
 any open grave where faithful love mourns the loss 
 of its dearest and best; the sorrow is not one bit 
 bigger in the one case than in the other. 
 
 Let me insist upon the point, for it is worth noting. 
 I say that the problem of what is wrong with the 
 world is not greater by one iota because of the war 
 than it was before the war began; our imagination 
 is more deeply stirred, and that is all. The question 
 is not why things should be wrong on such a grand 
 scale, but why they should ever be wrong at all, 
 why any single pang should ever have to be endured 
 by a human heart, why loss and terror, and the de- 
 
RELIGION AND THE WAR 5 
 
 struction of things dear and beautiful should ever 
 have to enter into our experience. 
 
 And I think we can see behind appearances here. 
 Why should we assume that it is God's business, 
 so to speak, to see that we are made happy in this 
 world? That is the crux of the whole matter. 
 Without pausing to think it out, most people take 
 the ground that the goodness of God ought to imply 
 the felicity of His creation here and now; their great 
 puzzle is to account for a divine benevolence which 
 acts otherwise. But, I repeat, we have no warrant 
 for this; it does not in the least follow that because 
 God is good — granting for the moment that good- 
 ness, as we understand it, is an attribute of the divine 
 nature — therefore there must be no pain or imper- 
 fection anywhere in the universe; in fact, there are 
 not a few indications which point quite another way. 
 
 The object of life on this planet, so far as human 
 beings are concerned, and perhaps all other crea- 
 tures, too, is not happiness, but the development of 
 latent faculty, the bringing out of the potentialities 
 of existence as a whole. I grant that this is a pro- 
 digious assertion and one open to challenge, but I 
 contend that no reasonable being can well doubt 
 it if he have regard to history and experience. It 
 is almost a truism to say that the highest kind of life, 
 if we could realise it, must include all that we mean 
 by happiness, but then we have not yet achieved the 
 
6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 highest kind of life, or anything like it, and the very 
 conditions of our earthly lot forbid that we should. 
 
 Let us get this one thing well into our minds, and 
 it will clear the ground for a good deal else. I say 
 that we are not put here primarily to be happy; there 
 is a great deal of happiness in the world, but happi- 
 ness at this stage of our evolution is not, and should 
 not be, the first aim either of God or man in relation 
 to humanity in the mass or the individual in particu- 
 lar. Perfect happiness, fulness of joy, will come 
 later when we have got up to it, as it were, when we 
 have reached the ultimate goal of all our strivings 
 and attained to complete realisation of what we 
 essentially are and what life itself intrinsically is. 
 
 There are some things impossible even to omnipo- 
 tence. " Father, can God do everything? " asked a 
 small boy. " Yes," was the reply. " Well, then, 
 can He make a stone bigger than He can lift? " was 
 the next question put by the youngster. Here was 
 a poser. Obviously omnipotence was not equal to 
 such a task, for success in either direction would mean 
 its own limitation in the other. And the same is true 
 of higher issues. Not even omnipotence could de- 
 clare the highest reach of nobleness without pain. 
 The worthiest things, the sweetest and sublimest, in 
 human character and achievement, require pain for 
 their manifestation, and without pain could not be 
 revealed at all. The things we most reverence in 
 one another or in the mightly dead are things that 
 
RELIGION AND THE WAR 7 
 
 have been born of sacrifice and struggle. Where 
 were courage without danger, tenderness without 
 hardship couching at the door, sympathy without 
 suffering, glory and honour without peril and strife ? 
 Look deep enough and you will see that there is not 
 a single quality in the whole range of human excel- 
 lence that is not somewhere, somehow, associated 
 with the cross. I would rather see England great 
 than England safe; I would rather our hearts' best 
 beloved died to a man on the battlefields of Europe 
 than live ignoble in the soul-destroying delights of 
 sense indulgence; I would rather be the sorrowing 
 mother of brave Nurse Edith Cavell, whom the Ger- 
 mans have murdered, than know my child a mere toy, 
 a butterfly intent only on sipping the sweets of life, 
 and with neither eye nor ear for its more austere 
 ideals and demands. 
 
 Moreover, I do not for one moment believe that 
 the world is less Christian than it was before the 
 war, or less intent on spiritual things. The exact 
 contrary is the case as far as my experience goes. I 
 have more than once stated that if any man wants 
 to be cured of religious pessimism, or any other kind 
 of pessimism, he had better go to the front. If I 
 had been an unbeliever before I went there I should 
 speedily have been cured. There one sees things 
 every day, almost every hour, to make one marvel 
 at the greatness of the human soul. You will see 
 hell wide open, it is true, but you will see heaven like- 
 
8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 wise. Such heroism, patience, self-devotion, cheer- 
 fulness under affliction, readiness to fling life away to 
 save a comrade or a position — surely these mean 
 more, and are worth more, than the immediate object 
 of their exercise. 
 
 Was the commercialised Europe of a year and 
 a half ago really a better Europe than the Europe of 
 slaughter and misery in which we are living to-day? 
 That it certainly was not. Sordid, covetous, materi- 
 alistic it had become; now all its outward good is 
 going up in smoke and flame, and we are thrown 
 back, whether we will or no, on the vast eternities. 
 Either life has nothing in it or it must be lived to 
 higher ends than can ever be fully satisfied in this 
 world. If we are wise we shall not hesitate in our 
 choice of alternatives. This is no time for self-pity 
 or for abstract discussions of the ways of God. The 
 clarion call to high action has gone forth, and woe to 
 the soul that disregards it; our punishment will be 
 simply to drop out of the ranks of the advancing 
 host of those who go to meet the splendours of God 
 upon the cliff-tops of the morning. 
 
 It is trivial to ask whether heaven could or could 
 not have prevented this war, just as it is beside the 
 mark to question whether this or that human being 
 was to blame for it. Here it is, and we have got to 
 do the best we can in the new moral situation it 
 creates. God is not responsible for any man's wick- 
 edness; and wickedness is wickedness, whatever 
 
RELIGION AND THE WAR 9 
 
 comes of it. But when wickedness produces disaster 
 on a grand scale or a small one we are entitled to 
 say that that disaster could not have come about 
 unless divine wisdom chose to make use of it for 
 other and larger ends than any petty human will can 
 either thwart or compass. 
 
 Christianity has not failed, whatever we may say 
 of Christians. The Christian imperative is still here 
 in all its pristine force ; it is we who are found want- 
 ing. If the Church of Christ is not rising to the 
 full measure of her opportunities that is our own 
 fault, not the fault of the divine Founder. The 
 Pope has lost the greatest chance that any occupant 
 of the Vatican has had since the Reformation; his 
 silence so far in presence of such a flagrant moral 
 wrong as the violation of Belgium, and now the 
 wholesale destruction of the Armenian people by 
 Germany's dastardly ally, is one of the most regret- 
 table facts in all this period of upheaval and misery. 
 But Roman priests on the battlefield have more than 
 made up for the silence of their official head, and no 
 other Church has been a whit behind them. When 
 the Chief Rabbi of Lyons died holding the crucifix 
 before the glazing eyes of a Belgian Catholic who 
 took him for a priest, he exhibited more of the spirit 
 of Christ, the spirit that will yet lift mankind out of 
 this pit of horror into the light of eternal love, than 
 any amount of ecclesiastical protestations would or 
 could. The Church is not paralysed by the war, nor 
 
io THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 is her faith shaken. She needs a more vigorous 
 lead, that is all. 
 
 There is only one point more that ought to be 
 mentioned. Protestantism in general has had little 
 comfort to give to mourners, for it has been so sadly 
 silent regarding the fate of our dead. Once the 
 grave has closed over their dust we have been sup- 
 posed to be able to do no more for them and to be 
 ruthlessly cut off from all connection with them, 
 direct or indirect. May it not be that this war will 
 bring us back in a more definite and helpful fashion 
 to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints? Our 
 dead are not only not dead, but more alive than we. 
 To some extent they must need us still; the shock of 
 passing out of the physical body cannot have changed 
 them very much; they want us, think of us, long to 
 know that they are followed by our loving thoughts 
 and prayers. If they were helped in this way while 
 in the body they can be helped even more when out 
 of it. Perhaps they need such help all the more 
 because of the momentous transition to a new sphere 
 and new adjustments. Thought travels swiftly, and 
 helps or hinders according to the intensity we put 
 into it even in the flesh ; how much more potent must 
 it be when the flesh has been discarded! Hopeless 
 grief on our part can only distress and hamper those 
 who have gone, and they probably know of it quite 
 well; but earnest, faithful, persevering, loving prayer 
 
RELIGION AND THE WAR n 
 
 can reach to comfort them and cheer them on in their 
 new venture of soul. 
 
 Let all who have loved and lost think of this and 
 set to work to bridge the gulf of death accordingly, 
 and it will bring healing to their own wounded hearts. 
 Nay, more, I think they will find that ere long some 
 sure conviction will come to them from the mysteri- 
 ous beyond that what they are doing is known and 
 responded to by those on whose behalf it is done, 
 and that they in their turn are sending back waves 
 of heaven's tender grace and power to bless and 
 strengthen their bereaved on earth. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 
 
 A letter just received refers to the statement with 
 which the previous chapter concluded, about prayers 
 for the dead. The writer wishes I would say more 
 about this. He says that in his heart he has really 
 believed in it all his life, but has always been taught 
 that it was both useless and wrong. Once a person 
 is dead, it is said, his fate is fixed and you can no 
 more alter it by praying than you can alter the sea- 
 sons or the tides. Even to wish to do so is impious 
 and a questioning of the decrees of God. All the 
 same, this writer adds, he has always longed to do it 
 and never more so than to-day, when the world-war 
 is making such havoc among human relationships. 
 Will I give him some justification, some real author- 
 ity, for believing in the efficacy of prayer for the de- 
 parted? he requests. 
 
 I wish the writer of this letter could have seen 
 what I saw yesterday. It will be long past the date 
 before these words are printed, but yesterday was 
 what the French call " The Day of the Dead." 
 Near where I am staying is a fairly large church, 
 and in and out of this, all day long, the stream of 
 worshippers has been pouring without intermission. 
 
 12 
 
PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 13 
 
 They are still doing it to-day, though in a somewhat 
 less degree, and they will keep on doing it while the 
 war lasts. Yesterday was All Souls' Day, to give it 
 its ecclesiastical designation in England, as elsewhere 
 throughout Christendom. Here, especially in view 
 of the war, it seems to mean something very much 
 more real and comforting than it does to most of us 
 at home. 
 
 What a yawning gulf ordinary Protestantism 
 makes between the living and the dead, to be sure ! — 
 or, rather, between those still in the flesh and those 
 who have done with it. Not so the devout Catholic, 
 simple-minded, earnest and sincere. To him, to her, 
 the soul who has passed through the portals of death 
 has not passed beyond the reach of loving care and 
 tender sympathy. The loved one is not less, but 
 more responsive to the loyal, helpful solicitude of 
 those left behind, and perhaps, for a time, may need 
 it more. 
 
 I sat in the church for a good while and watched 
 those people come and go. It was an experience 
 never to be forgotten. All were in mourning; all 
 had lost some one near and dear either on the battle- 
 field or in the ordinary course of nature. I judged, 
 and I think I was not mistaken, that the war was 
 uppermost in their minds, that the grim reaper had 
 gained most of his harvest of late from the battle- 
 field so far as this company was concerned. 
 
 There were no young men present; they were all 
 
i 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 at the front. There were plenty of old men, old 
 soldiers many of them looked, stumping bravely 
 along with military stride and bearing; old women 
 leaning on sticks; grey-haired matrons with weep- 
 ing eyes; young widows carrying their babies or lead- 
 ing their little children by the hand; boys in their 
 teens, some of them already in soldier's garb or what 
 approximated thereto; girls, troops of them, with 
 subdued and reverent mien. 
 
 Most were kneeling before the dimly lighted altar. 
 Some of them, the veterans especially, stood erect, 
 their lips moving in devoted entreaty to the holy 
 Presence they believed to be there before their eyes. 
 For it should not be forgotten that to these people, 
 in the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, is vouch- 
 safed a visual revelation of the actual presence of 
 the Lord Christ Himself. Who shall say they are 
 wrong? Since the war began, I have realised in 
 French churches as I never did before, the devotional 
 value, the practical helpfulness, of the reservation of 
 the sacrament of the altar. It makes all the differ- 
 ence between a dead building and a place that is a 
 sanctuary indeed, wherein worshippers feel that they 
 are in immediate contact with the supernatural and 
 divine. 
 
 What a picture it was! One wished an artist 
 could have been present to seize and perpetuate it. 
 It grew dark; there was a storm raging outside and 
 had been all day, but it seemed to have made no dif- 
 
PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 15 
 
 ference to the numbers present. There was one 
 candle, and one candle only, to light the gloom, and 
 that was placed on the floor at the foot of the altar 
 steps. The lamps glimmering in the chancel above 
 it supplied the only additional illumination there 
 was. Here and there one caught a quick breath, a 
 murmur, a sob, a sigh as the feelings of the bereaved 
 became wrought to a pitch of intensity. There was 
 no other sound but that of feet passing softly to 
 and fro as individuals entered or left the church. 
 Now and then a faint gleam would fall upon a rapt, 
 upturned face — for the worshippers were kneeling 
 anywhere, not in serried ranks, but in the aisles, 
 near the doors, on the ground close up to the altar 
 itself — anywhere — all in black, all silent, all pray- 
 ing with one set purpose, one intention of love and 
 faith. It was impossible to be there without being 
 moved by it. There was a strange, unearthly power 
 in the very atmosphere. 
 
 Would any one tell me that the exercise upon which 
 these people were engaged was all in vain, that 
 heaven neither desired nor heeded it, and that the 
 trust and affection that prompted it were utterly de- 
 luded as to the object they sought to achieve? Be it 
 remembered, this, after all, is the faith of the major- 
 ity of Christendom, the faith that the communion of 
 saints still continues after the shock of death. It has 
 antiquity on its side, and, though greatly abused in 
 pre-Reformation days, satisfies such a natural in- 
 
1 6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 stinct, and is such a solace to the bereaved, that it is a 
 pity Protestants everywhere should not be encour- 
 aged to return to it forthwith. 
 
 If, as seems likely enough, the disembodied soul 
 feels somewhat bewildered at first in its new environ- 
 ment, as we are told many do; if it has entered that 
 new sphere through the din and excitement of battle 
 or fresh from the pain and weakness and delirium of 
 days and weeks in hospital; if it longs for the old 
 faces and the old fellowships of the earthly home, and 
 feels, as we may be sure it cannot but feel, the impact 
 of the grief and sorrow of those who mourn its loss 
 — surely the best thing one could do on this side, 
 both for that soul and for ourselves, would be to 
 send through nothing but earnest prayers that it may 
 rest in peace. I say " it," but I ought to say " he " 
 or " she," as the case may be. Our dead are not 
 gone far; they have only begun on the other side 
 where they left off here. If they needed us before 
 they need us now, and we need them. The body as 
 the medium of communication is struck away, but 
 that is all. Thought, feeling, memory, goodwill are 
 all what they were before — perhaps even stronger, 
 for the hindrance of the corruptible flesh is gone and 
 the spiritual can go straighter to its mark. If we 
 can help one another by prayer while we are still 
 on the physical plane, there is no reason, either in 
 logic or the nature of things, why we should not con- 
 
PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 17 
 
 tinue to do so even more effectually when some of 
 us have done with the body of our humiliation and 
 passed out of sight. 
 
 Death is only a bend in the road of life. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 WAR SUFFERING. WHY DID GOD REFRAIN 
 FROM STOPPING IT? 
 
 Another correspondent takes exception to a state- 
 ment in the opening chapter: u When wickedness 
 produces disaster . . . that disaster could not have 
 come about unless divine wisdom chose to make use 
 of it for other ends," etc. 
 
 He says he can understand the death of a heroine 
 like Miss Cavell, or one of our brave soldiers, having 
 lessons to teach to those around them and to us at 
 home; but if they had to go through the infamous 
 torture and degradation to which French and Belgian 
 women were subjected, as stated above, it would re- 
 volt us to have to believe that God permitted it for 
 some purpose of His own. 
 
 The statement, to which this gentleman says he 
 cannot subscribe, ought not to be considered apart 
 from its context. I am writing far away from my 
 home and my library, and cannot quite recall the pre- 
 cise words used in the paragraph to which reference 
 is made, but I know what I think about the matter 
 and will try to say it. 
 
 We are not entitled to draw a line in this way be- 
 tween one kind of suffering and another, and affirm 
 
 18 
 
WAR SUFFERING 19 
 
 that one is divinely permitted for a good reason and 
 the other not. Deity cannot be responsible in the 
 former case and helpless in the latter. Relatively 
 speaking, all suffering, bodily or mental, is evil — 
 that is, it would have no place in a perfect existence. 
 It may have a purpose to serve — indeed, we may be 
 sure it has — in the making of that perfect existence, 
 but no one could say existence is perfect while suffer- 
 ing remains. But there is no escape from the prop- 
 osition that what God permits He causes. He is an 
 efficient cause, as the logicians say, of any event or 
 series of events if He does no more than let them take 
 place even if other wills set them going. 
 
 The Kaiser is an efficient cause of the present war, 
 allowing for the moment that he did not actually start 
 it. I am afraid he did. I am afraid he meant to do 
 it; but even if he did not, even if other people planned 
 it more directly and remorselessly, he is responsible 
 for it if only from the fact that one word from him 
 could have prevented it and that word was not 
 spoken. 
 
 We might say the whole conflagration was imme- 
 diately caused by a mad-headed student firing a shot 
 at the Austrian heir-apparent. That shot was like 
 a spark to gunpowder and set the world in a blaze. 
 But does this exonerate the Kaiser? By no means. 
 He is infinitely more responsible for the oceans of 
 blood that have since been spilled than was the half- 
 crazy boy who fired that shot. 
 
20 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 Moreover, so far as the British empire's part in it 
 is concerned, Sir Edward Grey is more responsible 
 than the Serbian fanatic whose deed set the whole 
 train of disasters in motion; and every one of us 
 would say as much. Sir Edward Grey could have 
 kept us out of it, but he chose not to do so, and the 
 vast majority of his fellow-countrymen think he chose 
 rightly. Sir Edward Grey was an efficient cause of 
 the terrible fact that we are at war to-day, that tens 
 of thousands of our sons and brothers have been slain 
 and hundreds of thousands maimed for life, that mul- 
 titudes of homes have been plunged in mourning, 
 that Edith Cavell was foully murdered, and I know 
 not what else. But does this mean that our Foreign 
 Minister deliberately chose that these evils should 
 come about? Not at all; no one would say so. He 
 only accepted these consequences rather than submit 
 us to other and worse consequences such as national 
 dishonour. 
 
 Now is not the point clear? Heaven could pre- 
 vent anything it chose to prevent taking place on 
 earth. If it does not do so it is because it does not 
 wish to do so, because the alternative would bring 
 greater evil in its train. 
 
 John Henry Newman says, in his Apologia Pro 
 Vita Sua, that it is preferable for a soul to undergo 
 any torment rather than commit so much as one 
 venial sin. One shrinks from endorsing this utter- 
 ance to the full, but perhaps it is the truth. All the 
 
WAR SUFFERING 21 
 
 evil passion that is working such misery in the world 
 to-day was in the world before; now it has broken 
 loose and is showing its true character, destroying 
 itself by glutting itself as evil always does. God 
 could have stopped any suffering resulting from this 
 cause. But He refrained from so doing, and I think 
 we can see why. Innocent or guilty, we suffer to- 
 gether, and humanity is purged in the fires of afflic- 
 tion. The world would be in a worse state if evil- 
 doing were not followed by pain than it is even at the 
 present dark hour; and the innocent victims of bru- 
 tality and wrong help to demonstrate that more than 
 those justly punished, if ever any are justly punished. 
 The sinless Christ upon His Cross has done more to 
 convict the world of sin than all the criminals that 
 were ever executed since human society began. 
 
 A few weeks ago a lady of strongly pacifist opin- 
 ions was arguing with me against our participation 
 in the war, and I almost lost patience with her — to 
 speak quite truthfully, I did lose it. At length I told 
 her of some of the horrible things our soldiers had 
 related to me as having seen done to women in Bel- 
 gium. " If those hounds of hell ever come here," 
 I added, " they will do the same things to you and 
 yours. How will your pacifist sentiments stand 
 that? And, make no mistake about it, what stands 
 between you and that outrage now is our Army and 
 our Fleet. Let these give way before the foe, and 
 you may expect the very uttermost in bodily ill-treat- 
 
22 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 ment, degradation, and bloody massacre. " She 
 turned pale for a moment and looked greatly dis- 
 tressed. The vision appalled her. But she is a 
 good woman and absolutely sincere. Recovering 
 herself, she answered with quiet dignity: "Well, 
 if the worst came to the worst, I think I should not 
 lose my trust in God. The shame would not be 
 mine; the shame would be theirs who subjected me 
 to such a fate ; and they could only maltreat my body, 
 after all; no stain would rest upon my soul." 
 
 In those few brave and honest words I think is 
 summed up the best answer that could be given to 
 the question raised above. 
 
 While I am writing I should like to mention some- 
 thing that bereaved families at home may be glad to 
 know. On All Souls' Day, in the military district in 
 France where I am at present working, the hospital 
 staffs and the officers clubbed together to purchase 
 flowers and decorated therewith the grave of every 
 British soldier. Requiescant in pace. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 
 
 A friend, looking through the preceding chapter 
 before it was printed, remarked, " It is a pity you had 
 not space to discuss what we really have to fear in 
 life, and why." I quite agree that this is a subject 
 which arises inevitably out of the one already con- 
 sidered — namely, the relation of religion to the 
 world war. What are we afraid of; what ought we 
 be afraid of, if at all? 
 
 We are afraid of suffering, losing, and, in varying 
 degrees, of harm coming to persons and interests we 
 love. This is all that is the matter in England to- 
 day, barring our own ignorance and wrong-headed- 
 ness. We are afraid of pain in body or mind, of 
 bereavement in soul or substance, of evil overtaking 
 our country's cause or the few individuals we hold 
 most near and dear. And such feeling is very 
 natural, though, as I shall try to show, more or less 
 illusory. We ought to get above it; we ought to be 
 afraid of being afraid ; we ought to seek to rise to the 
 moral height whereon the only thing to be feared 
 is to fail of being and doing our best. For, if we 
 only knew it, this is all that is worth our solicitude ; 
 it includes every other good that could be thought or 
 
 23 
 
24 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 named. This is what life is for, to get the best out 
 of us; it has no other meaning. And this best car- 
 ries with it ultimately all the benefits we have ever 
 needed or desired, and probably much more than we 
 have even glimpsed as yet. Pain is joy in the mak- 
 ing; nothing can be lost that ever was ours; no evil 
 can touch, much less injure, the truly essential things 
 in man or nation. This is a great deal to say, but 
 it can be justified from the experience of those who 
 have lived their lives in terms of it in the past and are 
 endeavouring to do so in the present. If ever we 
 were on sure ground in the region of the unprovable 
 — and what on earth is provable in the strict sense, 
 good or bad? — it is here. 
 
 The primary cause of suffering is the vulnerability 
 of the flesh. If bodies could not be hurt we should 
 not suffer, in this way at any rate, and perhaps not in 
 any other either. And yet it is this very suscepti- 
 bility, this sensitiveness to physical pain, that has 
 brought the race to where it is ; it is the root of every- 
 thing fine and gracious, noble and admirable, in our 
 complex and imperfect nature. It is the heart of all 
 the social virtues, imagination, feeling, poetry, art, 
 and government; without it humanity as we know 
 it to-day, in all that distinguishes it from the lower 
 creation, could not have come to be. Physically we 
 are less protected by nature than any other organism, 
 more exposed at all points to the assaults of danger 
 and disease, are more liable to perish of hunger and 
 
WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 25 
 
 cold. We have had to bestir ourselves in order to 
 live at all; we cannot comfortably take existence for 
 granted; and it is to this, more than anything else, 
 that we owe the development of faculty which has 
 raised us to where we are in the scale of being; the 
 incessant stimulus of physical pain, and the necessity 
 of scheming to avoid it, have given us our elaborate 
 nervous organisation and the intelligence to make 
 use of it. And it has brought out much more, 
 though not yet so successfully; it has brought out our 
 moral consciousness and all the spiritual longings 
 that accompany it and which earth can never fully 
 satisfy. On the other hand, it makes us feel the pull 
 of the physical and to tend to overvalue it. Europe 
 is fighting to-day because we rate so highly the im- 
 portance of physical things; we individually and col- 
 lectively want to get and keep as much as possible of 
 material wealth in order to secure physical comfort. 
 That is the meaning of Germany's bid for world 
 power, mad as it is. What power could anybody 
 have over anybody else but for the physical? What 
 use would there be for governments but for the phys- 
 ical? What would lust of territory and commercial 
 predominance amount to but for the physical? 
 Suppose that at a stroke all necessity for feeding and 
 clothing people could be made to disappear from the 
 earth; suppose no quivering flesh could be torn by 
 shot and shell or injured in any way by material 
 means, Kaiserism and everything it stands for would 
 
26 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 be swept from the globe ; nobody would have a word 
 to say to it or pay the slightest heed to it. But, as 
 I have already shown, something else might disap- 
 pear too, and that would be the main dynamic of our 
 moral energies. Not entirely, I admit, for what is 
 gained is gained; man is man, and would not be man 
 without idealism; and all our idealism, I contend, has 
 been born of our pains and struggles. Take the 
 urgency for these away, while allowing conditions 
 otherwise to remain much as they are, and, judging 
 from all the indications of the past, our tendency 
 would be to let go and sink down to sordid and unin- 
 spiring levels. 
 
 "Then, welcome each rebuff 
 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 
 
 Be our joys three-parts pain! 
 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
 Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!" 
 
 But — here is the main point I wish to impress 
 upon my readers — nothing that touches the physical 
 only touches the real man or anything that is his. If 
 we could get this well into our minds it would set us 
 free from most of our fears and dreads, not to speak 
 of hopeless sorrow and blind despair. I do not say 
 it would deliver us utterly from suffering, either bod- 
 ily or mental ; that is not to be expected while we are 
 dwellers in the flesh; but I do say that it would take 
 us right out of the paralysing dominion of terror — 
 and only think what that would mean. Those were 
 
WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 27 
 
 wise words of old, " Our light affliction, which is but 
 for a moment, worketh for us more and more exceed- 
 ingly an eternal weight of glory; while we look not 
 at the things which are seen, but at the things which 
 are not seen: for the things which are seen are tem- 
 poral; but the things which are not seen are eternal." 
 And finer still was the utterance of one who knew 
 more about life and death than any who has ever 
 yet worn human form : " Be not afraid of them that 
 kill the body, and after have no more that they can 
 do." I admit the difficulty of realising this at all 
 times and consistently acting up to it; I have often 
 thought that if I had lived in mediaeval times I should 
 probably have confessed anything on the rack that 
 my tormentors chose to put into my mouth ; and it is 
 more than probable that if I saw my own child to-day 
 in the foul hands of German Uhlans, and I powerless 
 to save her from degradation, torture, and murder, 
 I should be near to madness. We all know that such 
 things as these have happened and are happening 
 still. But, I reiterate it, we ought to know at the 
 same time that nothing has been injured save the 
 perishable outer shell of the victims we pity and 
 would shed our blood to rescue from shame and 
 wrong; no bestial hands have ever yet been laid upon 
 the soul or ever will be. Death destroys nothing 
 that belongs to us; he only withdraws it from our 
 sight for a time. Behind the curtain of the visible 
 and tangible all we have ever loved that was worthy 
 
28 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 of our love is waiting for us to claim it on a surer 
 plane of possession; no one can be robbed of what 
 is his in the spirit; it is his for ever. 
 
 "The stars come nightly to the sky; 
 The tidal wave comes to the sea; 
 Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, 
 Can keep my own away from me." 
 
 I am not a spiritualist, nor have I ever seen a su- 
 pernatural appearance in my life; but I am absolutely 
 convinced, from testimony which I could not doubt, 
 that communication between the hither and the 
 yonder, between beings still in the flesh and the so- 
 called dead, is more frequently made than most peo- 
 ple suppose; and such communication is going on rap- 
 idly just now owing to the great number that in the 
 prime of their manhood are passing to the other side 
 through the shock of battle. It may not be wise or 
 healthy-minded to dwell much upon these super- 
 normal occurrences, but no one could deny them who 
 knows the evidence. And in any case what other 
 evidence do we want than the evidence of our spir- 
 itual nature itself? The great difference in out- 
 look between the oriental and ourselves is that the 
 former assumes the soul as the foundation of all ex- 
 perience and is not at all sure of the reality of the 
 material world, whereas we begin by assuming the 
 reality of the material world and go on to speculate 
 as to whether there is a soul to survive it. Surely 
 the former assumption has as much to justify it as 
 the latter. 
 
WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 29 
 
 What, then, is there to be afraid of in the turmoil 
 and confusion through which the world is passing 
 just now? Nothing whatever except to come down 
 from what we individually know, whether any one 
 tells us about it or not, to be our proper altitude of 
 feeling and aim, and to play the coward or the traitor 
 to our trust. And are we not in some danger of do- 
 ing this? At the beginning of the war we were full 
 of admiration for the spirit of the British people at 
 home and abroad, proud of the loyalty and devotion 
 of our fellow-subjects in every quarter of the world, 
 full of self-congratulation at the unity of purpose 
 manifest in all ranks and classes in face of the com- 
 mon enemy. We loudly announced our conviction 
 that the doom of Prussian militarism was sealed, that 
 the war it had so criminally provoked would bring 
 about its speedy destruction and disillusion the Ger- 
 man people who have dwelt so long under its shadow, 
 that the Berlin bureaucracy had clumsily blundered in 
 every particular from its bullying diplomacy and 
 cynical disregard of solemn pledges to its doctrine of 
 frightfulness as demonstrated in martyred Belgium. 
 There could only be one end to all this, we declared, 
 and that would be to dictate the terms of peace in 
 Berlin; we should have no half measures, no incon- 
 clusive peace; we were fighting the enemy of the hu- 
 man race, and all the moral forces of mankind were 
 on our side. How does the situation look now? If 
 there be unity of purpose anywhere it is not with us. 
 
3 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 Strikes, incompetence, and party factions have 
 brought the nation to the very verge of ruin, and if 
 they do not cease forthwith will precipitate us into it. 
 There is only one mind and will in Germany, and that 
 is the mind and will to destroy us; all its energies 
 are concentrated upon that one end, and there is not 
 the slightest sign of slackening or deviation of aim 
 in regard thereto. What have we to counter it with ? 
 Only one thing, and if that fails all is lost — I mean 
 the spirit of our people. It is strange how the spirit 
 of a people can rise and fall from age to age. Com- 
 pare the poor-spirited Greece of to-day with the 
 Greece of Thermopylae and Salamis, of Leonidas and 
 Pericles. We were a small and feeble folk in the 
 spacious days of great Elizabeth compared with our 
 numbers and resources to-day; but that tiny state 
 broke the power of imperial Spain, which occupied 
 then the same position relatively to the rest of the 
 world that Germany occupies now. It was done 
 by a great national spirit and nothing else, a spirit 
 that could create and inspire fleets and armies, and 
 without which fleets and armies are of little worth. 
 Never was a more glorious band of men than the 
 mighty captains who stood around the throne of Eng- 
 land in that supreme hour of our national destiny. 
 To-day an even greater crisis is upon us : is our na- 
 tional spirit equal to it? — our daring, self-con- 
 fidence, willingness to dedicate all we have and are 
 to the salvation of our name and race? If so, the 
 
WHAT IS THERE TO BE AFRAID OF? 31 
 
 future of mankind is safe; if not, then the morrow- 
 is with tyranny, brutality, and lies, and liberty is 
 trampled into dust. The grief-stricken father who, 
 at the Zeppelin raid inquest the other day, dramatic- 
 ally summoned the Kaiser to meet him at the bar of 
 God to answer for the crime of wholesale murder, 
 thereby proclaimed what most people really believe 
 in, his confidence in the moral order of the universe. 
 In the long run this moral order is sure to be vindi- 
 cated to the last detail, but how it will work out de- 
 pends largely upon ourselves. The vast empires of 
 Assyria and Babylon that oppressed little Judah are 
 to-day no more than a name ; they have perished ut- 
 terly from the earth, whereas the Jew still persists 
 and plays his part among the nations. But, oh, the 
 agony and blood it cost the Jew to survive and find 
 his soul! One day Germany and her tremendous 
 war machine, and her cruel trust in material force, 
 will be no more than a name, an evil tradition of the 
 past ; but where will England be ? When people pro- 
 test that we could not lose in this contest because our 
 cause is the cause of liberty and justice, I answer that 
 that does not follow. History has another tale to 
 tell — namely, that the better cause may for a time 
 have to go under till its adherents are worthier to 
 sustain it. Will that be our fate in this contest? I 
 do not think so, but we must set our house in order 
 and quickly. Every man to his post! All for the 
 dear motherland whether we live or die ! 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 WAR AND SACRIFICE 
 
 Recently I was the guest at mess of the staff of one 
 of our field hospitals somewhere in France, and the 
 conversation turned, as usual, upon the genesis of 
 the war. We exhausted the list of Germany's misde- 
 meanours in the fashion familiar to the world in gen- 
 eral and Britons in particular, discussed Nietzsche 
 and Treitschke ad lib., apportioned the blame be- 
 tween the professors and the military, waxed warm 
 upon the point as to whether the Teutonic swelled- 
 head resulting from the victories of 1870 had not 
 more to do with producing the bellicose professors 
 than the professors had to do with producing the 
 German spirit to-day, and so on and so forth. Fre- 
 quent reference was made to the published diplo- 
 matic correspondence as exposing Germany's criminal 
 designs upon the possessions of her neighbours and 
 her arrogant determination to trample upon the lib-, 
 ,erties of the world. Everybody knows the kind 
 of thing that was being said; it is being said every- 
 where except in Germany from hour to hour wher- 
 ever men meet and talk. Presently, however, a 
 young officer at the far end of the table spoke up. 
 " All you are saying is probably true enough," he 
 
 32 
 
WAR AND SACRIFICE 33 
 
 remarked; " and we have heard every bit of it many 
 times before. But the deepest reason of all for this 
 war none of you have mentioned yet, and it simply 
 is that human beings like fighting and are never con- 
 tent for long without a fight." Instantly conversa- 
 tion became controversy; I took no further part in it 
 but sat and watched while the young Adonis who had 
 flung the challenge — he was more like a Viking, by 
 the way: fair-haired, blue-eyed, and of a tremendous 
 height — developed his theme with animation and a 
 considerable measure of success. He maintained 
 that man cannot live without fighting, that there is 
 nothing to be deprecated in the struggle for existence, 
 that everything good in us is more or less associated 
 with our fighting qualities, and that whenever life 
 becomes colourless and commonplace, denuded of the 
 heroic virtues, an explosion of some sort must take 
 place to compel us to put forth our utmost again in 
 the never-ceasing effort to grasp the unattainable and 
 rise to superhuman planes of feeling and worth. 
 
 One could not help agreeing mentally that there 
 was much to be said for this view. That it does not 
 take everything into account is obvious, but it sug- 
 gests certain spiritual values which call for special 
 attention in the period of strife and tumult through 
 which we are living. I cannot think it really true to 
 say that any ordinary civilised man would deliber- 
 ately choose to precipitate a conflict like the present 
 for the mere sake of enjoying a fight; it is too hor- 
 
34 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 rible for that; but once the fight is started he becomes 
 conscious of demands upon his moral nature of 
 which, perhaps, he was previously unaware. Even 
 in time of peace life is none too easy for most people ; 
 but in time of war all its customary securities and in- 
 centives are swept away and we stand naked to the 
 blast of calamity, hearing at the same time the call 
 to high endeavour as we might never hear it in our 
 whole history. And the curious thing about this 
 call is that even the most unlikely people will re- 
 spond to it and fling every earthly treasure behind 
 them in so doing. Willingly, gladly, without com- 
 pulsion of any kind save their own inner mandate, 
 they will forsake home, comfort, the prospect of 
 a successful career, and will imperil life itself for 
 they hardly know what so long as the imperative 
 comes in this form. No one need envy the coward 
 and the skulker, the man who hears the call and re- 
 fuses to obey because he is afraid of his skin being 
 hurt or who is base enough to want to take advantage 
 of the safety purchased for him by his brother's 
 blood; but to me the truly impressive thing is to note 
 how comparatively few of him there are. In Eu- 
 rope to-day hundreds of thousands of young men are 
 maimed for life ; in our own country we shall be meet- 
 ing them by and by at every turn. Tens of thou- 
 sands are slain, and these are of every rank and class. 
 They have all been down into the very pit of hell and 
 endured pains unspeakable. Why? Yesterday I 
 
WAR AND SACRIFICE 35 
 
 met a man of ample means who has enlisted in the 
 ranks and been serving for months amid scenes of 
 privation and terror that beggar description. What 
 does he do it for? Why does anybody do it? 
 Three millions of the finest of our British youth have 
 volunteered for the front, and those who love them 
 dearly have let them go. Why should they if not 
 because of a feeling we all have, which can scarcely 
 justify itself to the reason — it is rather an instinct, 
 a spiritual perception, than an articulate idea — that 
 what we are fighting for is more of eternity than of 
 time ? We feel that personal sacrifice to the utter- 
 most is demanded of us and that we cannot hold back. 
 We are making it for England, it is true; but is there 
 not more than England at stake, more even than the 
 liberties of mankind? I am sure of it, and I am sure 
 we all know it, and that is why our sons and brothers 
 go out so bravely to meet death and the rest of us 
 steel our hearts to speed them to the ordeal. I have 
 already said that but for the physical there would be 
 no such fight possible, that what we are immediately 
 fighting for is to win or hold so much of the earth's 
 surface, that world power could have no significance 
 but for the flesh and all that pertains to the flesh. 
 And this is true ; but it is also true that the fight is not 
 for the flesh alone, and that every man taking part 
 in it is aware of the fact. No man would give his 
 life for what was of the flesh alone ; and deep down 
 in every one of us is the urge to give ourselves as 
 
36 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 fully as possible at the bidding of the ineffable some- 
 what that we feel has the right to require the sacri- 
 fice. That is what men are found willing to die for, 
 though they are not always equally willing to live 
 for it. It is a spiritual, not a material, thing. 
 Sometimes it expresses itself as patriotism, sometimes 
 as religious zeal, sometimes as the impulse to save 
 the life of somebody else, as when a lifeboatman 
 braves the storm to save a shipwrecked company, or 
 a rescue party goes down into the choke-damp of a 
 coal mine after an explosion to bring up the impris- 
 oned survivors; but always and everywhere the im- 
 pulse is the same ; it is the impulse to lay one's life on 
 the altar of a dimly apprehended but unescapable di- 
 vine reality behind and above the flux of sense, ma- 
 jestic, eternal, insistent, compelling. And in noth- 
 ing, perhaps, is the immediacy of this impulse so 
 apparent as in war. 
 
 Doubtless this is why great thinkers and seers have 
 been disposed to glorify war despite its brutality and 
 ghastliness. It is the inwardness of Ruskin's great 
 saying, reluctantly made, that nations are saved by 
 war and destroyed by peace ; and of that even greater 
 passage in De Quincey concerning which a correspon- 
 lent wrote to remind me the other day ■ — 
 
 " Under circumstances that may exist, and have 
 existed, war is a positive good; not relative merely, 
 or negative, but positive. A great truth it was which 
 
WAR AND SACRIFICE 37 
 
 Wordsworth uttered, whatever might be the expan- 
 sion which he allowed to it, when he said that 
 
 ' God's most perfect instrument 
 In working out a pure intent 
 Is Man — arrayed for mutual slaughter: 
 Yea, carnage is His daughter.' 
 
 There is a mystery in approaching this aspect of the 
 case which no man has read fully. War has a deeper 
 and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in 
 man than has yet been deciphered. To execute judg- 
 ment of retribution upon outrages offered to human 
 rights or to human dignity, to vindicate the sanctities 
 of the altar and the sanctities of the hearth: these are 
 functions of human greatness which war has many 
 times assumed, and many times faithfully discharged. 
 But, behind all these, there towers dimly a greater. 
 The great phenomenon of war it is, this and this only, 
 which keeps open in man a spiracle — an organ of 
 respiration — for breathing a transcendent atmos- 
 sphere, and dealing with an idea that else would per- 
 ish : viz. the idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, 
 doing and suffering, that finds its realisation in a bat- 
 tle such as that of Waterloo — viz. a battle fought 
 for interests of the human race, felt even where they 
 are not understood; so that this tutelary Angel of 
 Man, when he traverses such a dreadful field, when 
 he reads the distorted features, counts the ghastly 
 ruins, sums the hidden anguish, and the harvests 
 
 ' Of horror breathing from the silent ground,' 
 
38 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 nevertheless, speaking as God's messenger, * blesses 
 it and calls it very good.' " 
 
 This is language that I could not wholly endorse ; I 
 am not prepared to admire war in this indiscriminate 
 fashion and account it of God. It is only of God 
 while men's hearts are hard. But facts are facts, 
 and it is the fact, undeniable and often sublime, that 
 as humanity has been constituted up to the present, 
 war has been the means, more than any other agency, 
 of bringing out on the grand scale that truth of sac- 
 rifice without which flesh can never be made to serve 
 the ends of spirit and the kingdom of the soul be 
 won. This could be realised without war if only the 
 race as a whole could be lifted to the requisite level. 
 It often has been realised without war in individual 
 cases, but never for long on the wider basis of the 
 communal life. Please God, it will one day be uni- 
 versally realised without war, and when that is so 
 the cross of Christ will have won its final victory. 
 For when people speak of religion as imperilled by 
 the war they know not what they say; the very central 
 principle of Christianity is that which the war with 
 all its horrors has forced us to lift our faces from 
 the flesh-pots and visualise afresh — namely, that 
 life is only gained in proportion as it is laid down at 
 the call of the higher-than-self. 
 
 " A picket frozen on duty, 
 A mother starved for her brood, 
 
WAR AND SACRIFICE 39 
 
 Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
 
 And Jesus on the rood; 
 
 And the millions who, humble and nameless, 
 
 The straight, hard pathway trod — 
 
 Some of us call it duty, 
 
 And others call it God." 
 
 It needs no war to bring this home to us if only we 
 have eyes to see and a mind to understand. Sac- 
 rifice is always the same in essence, whatever be the 
 occasion that calls it forth. In a play produced by 
 Sir Herbert Tree some years ago, entitled False 
 Gods, this truth was presented very forcibly. The 
 scene was laid in ancient Egypt, and one of the prin- 
 cipal characters was a young girl who was to be 
 thrown into the Nile as a sacrifice to the gods in or- 
 der to secure a plentiful harvest. The character was 
 well played, and what struck me most in the perform- 
 ance was the way the girl was represented as going 
 to her death. On her face was a look of holy rap- 
 ture and supersensuous joy. So intent was she on 
 her self-oblation that she passed her weeping lover 
 by without so much as seeing him; her gaze was 
 fixed upon a sterner bridegroom. Should we call 
 this superstition and wasted nobleness? Not so: 
 there is no wasted nobleness. It matters little to 
 what immediate object a sacrifice is made so that 
 it be the best we can see. Perhaps none of the things 
 we are willing to suffer and die for to-day are in- 
 trinsically any worthier than those which awakened 
 the Egyptian girl's heroism, but they have served 
 their purpose in so far as they are the medium 
 
4 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 through which the eternal makes its demand upon 
 our uttermost. We rise or fall by the nature of our 
 response thereto. We die to live; we lose to find. 
 And having passed the portals of the great self- 
 offering to the Ideal, come in what guise it may, we 
 find that, after all, there is no such thing as sacrifice 
 in the sense of permanent loss or impoverishment. 
 We only lay down a lesser to grasp a larger good; we 
 surrender the part to possess the whole. That is 
 what our dead heroes have already found on the 
 other side of the red mist of war; and that is what 
 we who weep for them will one day find too when 
 we go to join them in the light that casts no shadow. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 PESSIMISM 
 (Written from the Western front towards the end of 1915) 
 
 Here on the table before me is a pile of newspapers, 
 French and English. I have been reading both — 
 the English with reluctance, the French with avidity. 
 I want to see how the war is going, as far as the 
 newspapers can tell us about it; and over here we are 
 all hungry for news as you are in England. But I 
 notice one curious contrast in the tone of these two 
 sets of journals : the English are all angrily pessimis- 
 tic, the French soberly optimistic. This is why I 
 take up an English paper with apprehension and 
 something of reluctance, and why I go to the French 
 for a corrective. Perhaps not all the English papers 
 are pessimistic nor all the French optimistic, but I am 
 bound to say that most that have come my way, and 
 they are not few, may fairly be thus described. Why 
 the contrast? for contrast there undoubtedly is. 
 The French are not cock-a-hoop, but neither are they 
 depressing; the English were cock-a-hoop not so long 
 ago, and now they seem to have formed a combine 
 for the special purpose of disheartening everybody. 
 Even those — I speak with all reserve as only having 
 seen a limited number — which make it their busi- 
 
 41 
 
42 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 ness to counter the anti-Government tendencies of the 
 rest seem to do so with a mournful air as who should 
 say, " Well, at any rate, they shall not be able to 
 accuse us of undue cheerfulness about prospects; we 
 shall wear as sad a visage as they; we shall be careful 
 not to over-estimate our chances in any wise." 
 What on earth is the matter? Once on this side 
 of the Channel I find myself in an entirely different 
 atmosphere, psychologically speaking, from that of 
 the London I left. There at home apparently you 
 are still quarrelling and calling each other names, still 
 demanding the resignation of this or that minister 
 or of the whole cabinet, still putting the worst pos- 
 sible construction upon what you don't understand. 
 Here the people are quiet, calm, restrained, deter- 
 mined as ever but without thought of harassing their 
 civil or military administrations. I pick up a French 
 paper and read of the operations in the Balkans or 
 somewhere else ; I see that matters are grave, but I 
 read encouraging words, words of hope and con- 
 fidence that the best is being done that can be done to 
 deal with the situation. Next day I pick up the Eng- 
 lish screamer of the same date, relating the same 
 events, describing exactly the same situation, and if 
 I had not read the French the night before I should 
 think all was lost and that the empire was on the very 
 verge of dissolution. The French editor gives care- 
 ful reasons for the general view he puts before his 
 readers; the English editor does the same, or says 
 
PESSIMISM 43 
 
 he does, but the conclusions are diametrically op- 
 posite. 
 
 Now I cannot think that this is because the French 
 censorship is more strict than the British, and that 
 editors are not allowed to write in this country what 
 they would dearly like to write and would write if 
 only they had the same chance as their English 
 confreres. If that is all, for goodness' sake let us 
 have the French censorship established in London 
 without delay. But it is not all ; it is not the case in 
 the least; the explanation must be sought other- 
 where. Does not the English mood originate with 
 a certain group of journals whose policy is directed 
 from one source, and all the rest, like sheep, feel 
 more or less bound to follow? Is there any other 
 country in the world, I wonder, that would tolerate 
 such a state of things? Perhaps it is to our credit 
 that we do, but we do it at a cost. Any foreigner 
 would be justified in supposing that the nation had got 
 into a jumpy condition and was prepared for some 
 wildcat scheme of revolution. I don't believe it; I 
 think I know my countrymen too well; but at the 
 moment it really does look as though Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw were right in his whimsical portraiture of John 
 Bull as anything but the staid, stolid, level-headed 
 person he is supposed to be — nervous, indeed, and 
 excitable to a degree, emotional and sentimental — 
 whereas the Gaul, so far from being flighty, easily 
 elated and depressed, voluble and blatant, and all 
 
44 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 the rest of it, is nothing if not cool, self-possessed, 
 master of his fate, and able to take long views of the 
 future as the Anglo-Saxon has never done. 
 
 But consider the effect upon our troops, not to 
 speak of the spirits of those at home. You may 
 be cheerful by nature and principle, but it needs a 
 good deal of resolution to stand up against a con- 
 tinual deluge of dismal prophecies and scolding dis- 
 content with what has or has not been done in the 
 field up to date. Tommy reads the newspapers as 
 regularly as you do, perhaps more so, for there is 
 not much else to read. They are sent out to the 
 seat of war just as systematically as they are sent 
 all over the land at home. And he does not like 
 all this grousing; he says so; it is not the kind of 
 pabulum he wants. And, bear in mind, the Tommy 
 of to-day is not the Tommy of old, not a professional 
 soldier. He is a man who has left the desk, the 
 forge, the loom, the mart, all the comforts and se- 
 curities of home life to go and fight our battles and 
 keep the foe from our gates. He need not have 
 gone; he did not have to be fetched; he went because 
 England needed strong hands and stout hearts to de- 
 fend her, and he could not hold back. He is a man 
 who yesterday sat by our firesides or worked with us 
 at the bench or in the countinghouse, and we know 
 him well. Is it fair to discourage him, to minimise 
 his achievements, to take the heart out of him by 
 grumbling at the slowness of his progress? God in 
 
PESSIMISM 45 
 
 heaven, I wonder what the Germans think about 
 that! If they hate us to-day with a black and 
 fiendish hatred it is because this new Tommy of ours 
 has so unexpectedly and effectively barred their prog- 
 ress. They never reckoned with a voluntary army 
 of three million men of England's best blood, the 
 biggest voluntary army, remember, that the world 
 has ever seen. Where would Europe have been to- 
 day without that army, not to speak of our glorious 
 fleet, as glorious to-day as it ever was? The French 
 know it and appreciate it, I can tell you. They know 
 well enough what would have become of them by now 
 if there had been no Britons to stand by their side. 
 It is no disparagement to the Tommy of old to say 
 that the new man is quite equal to him in all es- 
 sentials. The Tommy of old held back the Huns 
 like a hero in the long retreat from Mons, but there 
 are not many of him left now. Had that little 
 British force not been there during that terrible first 
 onrush of the overwhelming German hordes there 
 would have been no need to talk of how much or how 
 little we have done since, for the campaign would 
 have been over in a few weeks, with France possibly 
 down and out before she was ready to get in her 
 famous counter-stroke. We were more promptly 
 on the spot than our allies and bore the brunt of the 
 contest against such odds as no army has had to face 
 since on any front. We have done an hundred-fold 
 more than we ever undertook to do or thought of 
 
46 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 doing a year and a half ago. Granted, you say, but 
 not more than was necessary, not more than our allies 
 have a right to expect now to save the situation for 
 us all; we are fighting the most desperate fight of our 
 whole existence as a people, and are in the deadliest 
 peril ; is not our utmost called for and at once ? Yes, 
 yes, but why take way off the ship by badgering the 
 captain and the men in the engine-room? Let them 
 alone and do your own bit; you are not likely to im- 
 prove on them by bringing new and untried men on 
 to the bridge while the storm is raging. Try to con- 
 ceive the miracle of this new army of ours that has 
 arisen out of nothing within the space of a year. See 
 how it has baffled an enemy that for forty years has 
 been thinking about nothing else but war and organi- 
 sation for war. Understand that it is not we but 
 Germany that will have to look out when the supreme 
 tussle comes. Man for man, our men are better than 
 their foes are now, and will be more so as time goes 
 on. The Balkans? I know all that can be said 
 about our diplomatic failures and the rest of it, by 
 those who do not know and cannot know the facts 
 from the inside. Perhaps when the whole story is 
 told our blunders in this respect will not turn out to 
 have been so very bad, after all. Perhaps before 
 long Germany may have cause to rue the day she 
 tied herself up in the Balkans. I know all the other 
 dangers people are whispering about, dangers in our 
 rear out there, dangers of disaffection among sub- 
 
PESSIMISM 47 
 
 ject races who have hitherto held us invincible and 
 now see that we are not. Well, let us have the whole 
 truth; we shall be none the worse for knowing it. 
 We are not finished with yet, and would not be if all 
 the woes imagined by all the dismal Jimmies came 
 true together. Mistakes we have made, heaps of 
 them — tragic mistakes some of them — and we 
 shall make more before we have done, but we are 
 not going under, and I don't suppose there is a soul 
 in the world who really believes it. 
 
 It is to the quality of our men that I pin my faith. 
 It does one good to be among them and to witness 
 their invincible cheerfulness, gaiety, indomitable 
 spirit in face of wounds and death. These men are 
 not going to be beaten, you may depend upon it. 
 Simple, honest, boyish, without a trace of self-con- 
 sciousness, they make it a point of honour never to 
 whine at anything, and they never do. The harder 
 conditions may be the louder rise laughter and song 
 from their midst. The French contrast with them 
 rather curiously in these ways just now. They are 
 grave, silent, undemonstrative — an exact reversal 
 of what the world has grown to expect from them. 
 There is no slackening of determination anywhere, 
 but it is strange to find the phlegmatic Briton exhibit- 
 ing the very characteristics which are supposed to 
 belong more especially to the French race, whereas 
 the Frenchman has for the time being assumed an- 
 other air. It is rare, indeed, to meet a French regi- 
 
4 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 ment making any demonstration on the march; they 
 tramp on quiet and steady, without song or jest. 
 The British Tommy, on the other hand, never stops 
 making fun and melody. The day I landed I met 
 two British regiments swinging along at a good 
 smart pace towards the sea, raising no end of din as 
 they went through the streets, calling out good-hu- 
 moured remarks to the people at the windows, chaff- 
 ing one another, cheering at intervals, joining in some 
 popular chorus occasionally. It was sheer light- 
 headedness that was thus finding vent in one and all ; 
 the only grave face I saw was that of the officer in 
 front, and his eyes were twinkling. Naturally I 
 thought they must be going home on leave, so I 
 asked if it were so. Not a bit of it. They were not 
 going to the sea but to the train, and within an hour 
 or two would be in the trenches. I wished I could 
 have made the editor of the Daily Mail do a route 
 march alongside of them; it would have been a tonic 
 to his shattered nerves. 
 
 It was bitterly cold in camp the other Sunday 
 morning, a cutting north-easter blowing and torrents 
 of sleet falling. I had to take church parade and 
 was waiting the summons shiveringly. Not being 
 in a state of health just now to run risks I made for 
 the only fire I could find — namely, that in the cook- 
 ing range of a camp kitchen. You should have seen 
 that kitchen after a few score muddy feet had been 
 across it, and then realise that practically every man 
 
PESSIMISM 49 
 
 doing duty in it was as accustomed to home com- 
 forts as I was. They insisted on placing a chair for 
 me in the warmest corner near the stove, where I 
 stood a good chance of being roasted along with the 
 joint. And then the fun began. Not far away a 
 French youth was bargaining with the corporal — 
 about eggs, I think it was — and the merriment that 
 ensued over the efforts of the two to understand each 
 other's language was side-splitting. Jacques said 
 something about " oblige." " Lizzie? " roared the 
 corporal. " Don't you come trotting out your Liz- 
 zies here. We're respectable, we are. None of 
 your Lizzies for me. But p'raps you mean ' lazy ' ? 
 Right you are, sonny, right first time. Lazy we are, 
 sure enough, every man of us, but we never get a 
 proper chance to develop our talent, and not much 
 likelihood of it, either, from what I can see. Com- 
 pron that, eh? Have a cigarette (sticking it be- 
 tween the Frenchman's teeth). Why don't you say 
 'mercy,' you blighter? Have I got to teach you 
 your own language and your manners as well ? " 
 Roars of laughter greeted each sally, the French- 
 man's loudest of all. A large iron ladle greatly as- 
 sisted the corporal in punctuating his points. My 
 description is only the feeblest attempt to convey the 
 actual comicality and joyousness of the whole in- 
 terlude. " Mercy " was in frequent requisition as 
 the nearest approach Tommy could make to 
 " merci " ; it came out in nearly every sentence. 
 
50 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 cl Bong Jewer," they shouted, as their visitor took 
 his leave with many bows. Tommy bowing back 
 was the funniest incident of all. 
 
 The psychological differences between the two 
 races are continually obvious, however. I am not 
 sure that we should ever fully understand the French 
 people or they us. We can like and amuse each 
 other, but that is another matter. Some little time 
 back, in illustration of this, a few of our soldiers went 
 to purchase sweets at a shop in the village not far 
 away. While the proprietress was serving them her 
 wounded son came out, and, seeing his English 
 brothers-in-arms, drew himself up, struck an atti- 
 tude, and, pointing to the lapel of his coat whereon 
 the coveted distinction gleamed, exclaimed in dra- 
 matic accents, " Medaille militaire moi ! " The Tom- 
 mies instantly laughed at him — good-naturedly, of 
 course, but to his utter bewilderment. His action 
 was as characteristically French as it was absolutely 
 un-English. I got the story at second-hand but have 
 no doubt it is true. 
 
 All hail to Tommy, and confusion to those who 
 would make his task harder ! Get rid of the grum- 
 blers and back him up with all our united strength 
 and confidence. And the best way to do that is to 
 back up those who have the responsibility of leader- 
 ship in their hands. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE HIGHER COMMAND 
 
 Here is a coincidence worth telling about. I was 
 just sitting down to write something on the above 
 subject when a letter came in containing the following 
 story told on the authority of one of our wounded 
 Australian heroes. He says the bravest man he ever 
 saw was a Wesleyan military chaplain. He was on 
 one of the barges which were landing men from our 
 troopships at the Dardanelles. A man was shot 
 down. The chaplain made to dash to the rescue and 
 bring the wounded soldier back to safety, but a Cath- 
 olic priest standing near grabbed hold of him, say- 
 ing, " You mustn't think of it; it is madness; you are 
 going to certain death." The Wesleyan shook off 
 the restraining hand, replying, " I have got my or- 
 ders, and they come from a higher command than 
 yours, and I'm going." He went, and was struck 
 by a bullet while in the act of beginning his work of 
 mercy. Instantly the priest sprang after him, but 
 the officer in charge of the landing party called out, 
 " Stay where you are; I forbid your going; we are 
 losing too many men." The priest calmly went on, 
 only turning his head to say as he passed, " Did you 
 not hear what my Protestant comrade said? I too 
 
 5i 
 
52 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 have got my orders — from the higher command." 
 Within a few moments he lay dead beside his brother 
 of the Cross. 
 
 This is a fine story, only one of many similar 
 stories that one is hearing on every hand and most 
 of which will never be printed. It is amazing how 
 splendid men can be, and women too, under the stress 
 of a great demand such as the present hour is making 
 upon us all. The Prime Minister told us recently 
 that before the war we did not know we possessed 
 so much of this wonderful moral quality in the nation 
 and the empire. I confess I did not, and most of 
 those with whom I have talked about it agree that 
 they did not either. We all wondered, everybody 
 wondered, whether the Briton of to-day, at home or 
 oversea, had quite the grit of his ancestors. It 
 only needed a great world crisis to show it, and here 
 it is as of yore. 
 
 But the thing I am thinking most of at the moment 
 in connection with it is the strange compelling power 
 possessed by this inner imperative, this higher com- 
 mand, that makes ordinary everyday folk capable of 
 such mighty deeds. Where does it come from and 
 what is it? It is a queer thing, this higher command, 
 and takes the most curious forms. A reckless, 
 devil-may-care sailor is taken prisoner by dervishes 
 and told that he may save his life by forswearing 
 Christianity and becoming convert to Islam. He 
 says he will see them damned first, and dies a martyr 
 
THE HIGHER COMMAND 53 
 
 to the faith he has never greatly honoured by his 
 life. Now, why on earth should a man do that? 
 He might very well shelter himself under the plea 
 of necessity and bide his time. But, no, he will have 
 no truck with the alternative; something inside him 
 will not let him, something whose condemnation he 
 is much more afraid of than he is of death. I have 
 just been talking to a wounded private soldier lying 
 in a tent hospital. He is only a boy, and a delicate 
 boy at that, but here he is, after seven months in 
 the trenches, smashed up for life, if he ever succeeds 
 in getting well, which I doubt, and the busy, kindly 
 military doctors and nurses doubt too. He comes 
 from Lancashire — Wigan, I think he said — and he 
 looks it even if his speech did not betray him, such 
 a strong face he has and such an independent, manly 
 mode of addressing his visitor. Something of his 
 story and his views of life has come out in our inter- 
 course. He worked in an iron foundry but has never 
 earned good wages. His health has been partly 
 to blame for that, but circumstances have been to 
 blame also, and he is rather resentful about it and 
 curses our unjust social system with all his might. 
 Undoubtedly it has been hard on him; he has known 
 little but struggle and dull drudgery all his days, 
 and even starvation has threatened him more than 
 once. He does not remember his father; his mother 
 was early left a widow with a young family to bring 
 up, and wondrously she did it, as so many intrepid 
 
54 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 women similarly placed have had to do and will 
 have to do still more when war has taken its toll 
 complete. He seems to have no thought now but 
 for his mother, whereby I can guess what kind of 
 mother she must have been — " mutther " he calls 
 her in his broad Lancashire dialect, or the nearest 
 approach I can make to it with the pen. He wishes 
 she wouldn't u wurry"; he will be "aw reet." 
 That he will, however it goes. Poor mother ! She 
 has another lad, he says, lying in a bloody grave 
 somewhere on the Belgian frontier, and there are no 
 more left now to look after her as good sons should 
 — only daughters, one of them a permanent invalid, 
 to weep with her and battle on alone. He would 
 like to get better because of this, but has got " t' 
 parson " to write and cheer her up and tell her it 
 will be " aw reet " anyhow. And then he falls to 
 talking with extraordinary bitterness of the totally 
 unnecessary hardship of the lot of the toiling poor 
 at home in England — foolish, luxurious, pleasure- 
 loving, ill-directed, scrambling, shambling England. 
 He is an intelligent youth and knows what he is talk- 
 ing about ; he has read a good deal and thought more, 
 and takes a fairly active part in local labour politics, 
 or did before the war. Religion he appears to have 
 left mostly to " mutther." 
 
 Here again I am filled with wonder and respect. 
 I ask myself what England has ever done for this 
 young fellow that he should leave his mother to suffer 
 
THE HIGHER COMMAND 55 
 
 and mourn while he goes to fight and die for mother- 
 land — or is it something else of which motherland 
 is but the most convenient symbol? I don't think 
 he knows himself, although he is under no illusions 
 about the course he has chosen. I put the question 
 to him. " Well, ye see," he answers slowly, " it's 
 a man's job. A man canna slink and hide when 
 there's a job o' this sort goin'." He could give no 
 further explanation. Here were two commands, 
 two ideals if you like, mutually incompatible; one, 
 very much more than the other, exceedingly dan- 
 gerous and disagreeable; but he knew which he had 
 to obey, and he knew without being able to give a 
 very clear reason for his choice. Dimly appre- 
 hended, perhaps, was the knowledge that in fighting 
 England's battle just now he was fighting for a 
 greater than England, for all that is sweet, and dear, 
 and wholesome in human lot, for the future of the 
 entire race, for things better and more worthful than 
 good wages and abundant leisure, or even the re- 
 finements of life that these can provide, for liberty, 
 comradeship, democratic ideals as opposed to Prus- 
 sianism and all its blighting, terrifying menace. 
 Was that it? I cannot tell; I think so; but I feel 
 also — nay, I am sure — that behind all this is a 
 motive, an incentive, that never can be completely 
 rationalised, a needsmust which has more of heaven 
 than of earth in it. We may be willing to die for 
 one thing to-day and another to-morrow, but it is al- 
 
56 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 ways the same thing in the end, the Eternal Right. 
 We never know what it is, but it is always calling to 
 us, always calling, and when we hear the summons 
 our dearest treasures drop unheeded from our hands 
 and we turn with averted mien from the contempla- 
 tion of our heart's desires to lift our gaze to the 
 shining heights whereon a glory beckons that is not 
 of earth alone. As Francis Thompson phrases it — 
 
 " I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds ; 
 Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
 From the hid battlements of Eternity; 
 Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then 
 Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again. 
 But not ere him who summoneth 
 I first have seen, enwound 
 
 With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned; 
 His name I know, and what his trumpet saith." 
 
 In all of us there is this strange, mystical suscep- 
 tibility, call it what you will, this urge to lay all we 
 have and are upon the altar of some inaffable ideal 
 that we feel has the right to demand our uttermost. 
 I know of nothing that so fully demonstrates man's 
 spiritual nature; it is the one great fact that differ- 
 entiates us from the brutes. All history through 
 you find it running. On the one hand you have man 
 selfish, greedy, earth-bound, cunning, false, and sor- 
 did in his aims; on the other, at repeated intervals, 
 in great and solemn hours, comes this austere appeal 
 for all we have to give, and we promptly give it, 
 joyously, willingly, without thought of reward, and 
 derive a greater satisfaction from that self-giving 
 
THE HIGHER COMMAND 57 
 
 than from all other kinds of gain put together. It 
 is deep, mysterious, elusive, this stress of the spirit, 
 but we all know it unmistakably, as all generations 
 have known it. Perhaps there is nothing so strong 
 in human nature as this impulse to fling ourselves 
 away at the bidding of we know not what, the some- 
 thing ever blessed that incarnates itself now in this 
 course or objective and now in that. Assuredly 
 there is nothing so exalting within the totality of hu- 
 man experience. Show me the man or the nation 
 without it and I will show you man or nation damned 
 and lost. The lower command, the command of ex- 
 pediency and common sense, the command of con- 
 ventionality and established order, or the dictate of 
 self-love insists, Be tranquil, remain secure, jeopar- 
 dise nothing, disturb nobody, hold on with care to 
 what you possess, take no risks; the higher com- 
 mand thrusts all prudentialisms aside and cries, Give 
 me all, I will have nothing less. It is madness to 
 listen if we want to be safe, but we do listen and al- 
 ways will. And does the specific requirement 
 through which the call comes ever matter in itself? 
 Hardly at all, I should think; what matters is our 
 response. Leonidas and his Spartans perish to a 
 man at Thermopylae — for what? For King Con- 
 stantine and the degenerate nation he rules to-day? 
 In God's name, no; it would have mattered little for 
 hundreds of years past if the Greece they saved had 
 been wiped off the map. They thought they were 
 
58 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 dying for Greece — and so they were, for the Greece 
 of the moment, for the Greece from which we have 
 inherited our ideals of the beautiful and gracious in 
 life — but if they were not dying for more than 
 Greece their death was a tragedy unrelieved. They 
 were dying for the soul of man, and to an extent they 
 must have been conscious of it, dying for a world 
 unborn and a greater world unseen; upon their own 
 triumph of soul they rose to the threshold of that 
 which is beyond manhood as manhood is beyond the 
 beast and the clod; they achieved more than they 
 understood or tried for. People have died before 
 now for what to our perception was not worth a mo- 
 ment's discomfort, but we are wrong and they were 
 right. An ancient city is besieged, and the oracle 
 goes forth that the only way to save it is for the 
 king's virgin daughter, or some one else of equal 
 rank and worth, the best and fairest that the com- 
 munity can produce, to be offered in burnt sacrifice 
 upon the walls. The girl consents and goes to her 
 doom amid the awestricken prayers and blessings 
 of the multitude of onlookers. What gods were 
 they that required this deed before they would in 
 terfere between these folk and their enemies with 
 out? None; the offering placated no blood-drink 
 ing deity; but it achieved its purpose all the same 
 The elevation of soul required in the one who will 
 ingly died for the rest was communicated more or 
 less to them all, and for ever ; who cares now whether 
 
THE HIGHER COMMAND 59 
 
 the city fell or not? When Edmund Campion, after 
 being bruised and broken on the rack, was compelled 
 to sit for three hours arguing intricate theological 
 propositions with his Puritan judges before being 
 dragged through the streets on a hurdle to be hanged 
 at Tyburn, the martyr thought he was witnessing for 
 the truth of God, the truth to which all Christendom 
 would speedily return. Was he? He died like a 
 hero, no man could have died better, but would it 
 have been well for the world that the Cause repre- 
 sented by the Inquisition and the Spanish Armada 
 should have prevailed over that of Frobisher and 
 Drake? I trow not. Yet Campion died for Eng- 
 land as surely as they, for that spiritual England 
 which had been slowly built up through the centuries, 
 on the other side of death as on this, may be, by the 
 glorious self-devotion of her sons. 
 
 There are clever men who tell us that the higher 
 command is only a mode of what is commonly called 
 conscience, and that conscience is only the survival 
 in the individual of the instinct for social self- 
 preservation. It has been found in generations past 
 that some forms of action tend to social detriment 
 and others to social benefit; the former have social 
 penalties attached to them and the latter social ap- 
 proval, so that in time everybody comes to feel that 
 the one kind of act is blameworthy and the other 
 praiseworthy — hence conscience. But that will not 
 do; it does not explain sufficiently. It does not ex- 
 
60 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 plain why the social pioneer so often has to take a 
 line in direct defiance of the accepted standards of 
 his time. " Here stand I, I can none other " has 
 been the testimony of many a reformer besides 
 Luther; expressed or implied it is the testimony of 
 them all. But the higher command I am writing 
 about can scarcely be classed as conscience; it has 
 affinities with it but goes beyond it. Conscience 
 warns or inhibits, marks this wrong and the other 
 right, is concerned with " thou shalt " or " thou shalt 
 not." But when the higher command comes in 
 like a flood it swallows up, transmutes, sweeps away 
 all merely moral maxims in its torrential course. 
 Right is comparatively seldom a clear issue; there 
 is nearly always a conflict of duties apparent. But 
 once let the higher command be heard, heard with 
 that trumpet note in it which all the world knows 
 so well, and these scruples and balancings are for- 
 gotten, and an exultant joy in losing everything, 
 forsaking everything, crucifying everything dear to 
 the natural man takes their place. We no longer 
 ask, Is this right or is that wrong? We overleap 
 all such alternatives. We are plunged, merged, lost 
 in the transcendental claim; we forget all else or 
 only remember it to consecrate it to the one high 
 end; if .we had a thousand lives they should all go 
 the same way, and home, kindred, hearts' beloved, 
 all should follow with it. Witness Serbia to-day, 
 old men, sick men, women, girls, little children dying 
 
THE HIGHER COMMAND 61 
 
 with arms in their hands. This is Serbia's hour of 
 agony and glory. Her people are not merely being 
 defeated, they are being exterminated. They need 
 not be, and at first sight one wonders why they 
 should consent to be; all they have got to do is to 
 throw down their arms and submit to the invader; 
 they might have to suffer a little more, endure an 
 ignominious subjection, but at least this tide of 
 slaughter would be stayed. And they will not; the 
 world with parted lips and straining eyes beholds 
 that they will not. And yet these very people, not 
 so long ago, were mean, ignorant, chaffering, thieving 
 petty traders and pig-breeders. Any who have had 
 to deal with them know they were no models of all 
 the virtues. They could trifle with conscience or 
 silence it altogether with the best (or worst) of us. 
 So it ever is. The higher command tears the 
 meanness out of us like a tornado sweeping through 
 a smelly township and hurling all its foulness away 
 in a moment on the wings of the blast. It trans- 
 forms our whole being — unless we deliberately close 
 our ears and bury ourselves out of reach of its peal- 
 ing summons. You do not recognise these giants of 
 the storm? they are the very men who yesterday 
 shared your petty sins and pettier pleasures, these 
 men who are to-day behaving like demi-gods. They 
 have been touched by the magic of the higher com- 
 mand and all their little vices have dropped from 
 
62 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 them like withered leaves when the burst of spring- 
 time comes. They have broken their fetters and 
 clasped hands with the immortals. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ABOUT PACIFISM 
 
 (Written before compulsion became law) 
 
 The time is drawing rapidly near when it may be 
 necessary for the Prime Minister to make good his 
 work and exercise compulsion upon those men of 
 military age who have not voluntarily joined the 
 colours to defend their country in her hour of need. 
 If Lord Haldane is right, and he ought to know, 
 special legislation may not even be necessary for this 
 step, it being a maxim of the British Constitution 
 from the earliest times to the present day that it is 
 the duty of every freeman to bear arms in the na- 
 tion's cause when called upon to do so by the nation's 
 voice. I for one devoutly hope that we shall never 
 have to resort to compulsion; it would take away 
 something from the splendour of our national 
 achievements in the field and elsewhere since the war 
 began if the confession had to be made that volun- 
 tarism had broken down and that there were still 
 a considerable number of England's able-bodied sons 
 who refused to fight for her. 
 
 But if compulsion does come we may have diffi- 
 culties, so I am told, with some — there cannot 
 surely be very many - — who are conscientiously op- 
 
 63 
 
64 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 posed to the shedding of blood whether in their 
 country's cause or any other, and whether that cause 
 is a so-called righteous one or not. No cause can be 
 righteous, these persons would argue, which involves 
 strife and the exercise of brute force between one 
 people and another any more than between one indi- 
 vidual and another. War, they hold, is a barbarous 
 and wicked method of settling international disputes; 
 it is, as Mr. Norman Angell would say, irrelevant 
 to the issue; but even if it were not, even if its cost 
 to the victors were not out of all proportion greater 
 than any material gain likely to be achieved, it is 
 still reprehensible from every ethical point of view; 
 better lose all than fight to keep any. So reasoning, 
 certain among these good people are prepared to un- 
 dergo imprisonment, spoliation of their goods, and 
 perhaps death itself rather than join the army. 
 
 There are other people who are perplexed in mind 
 about this question from the purely Christian stand- 
 point, though not a few of them are already doing 
 their utmost, in the army and out of it, to help to 
 defeat the Germans and save Europe. I had an 
 instance of this brought to my notice some months 
 ago. A fine young fellow who had just enlisted said 
 to me : "I feel I must do my bit for the old country 
 along with others; we are all up against it, and I just 
 cannot hang back while other men are being smashed 
 and killed in a cause that is as much mine as theirs. 
 But I am quite well aware that what I am doing is 
 
ABOUT PACIFISM 6s 
 
 not Christian, but the very opposite, if we are to do 
 what Jesus Christ told us to do." 
 
 Now is that really so? This is a question that 
 ought to be frankly and honestly faced, for they are 
 not all cowards who put it. Is it generally known, I 
 wonder, that certain Quakers, whose pacifist prin- 
 ciples forbid them to fight, have from the beginning 
 of the war been engaged in the hazardous service of 
 mine-sweeping in the North Sea and elsewhere? 
 Persons who are willing to jeopardise their own lives 
 in such an intrepid fashion as this are entitled to 
 full respect in differing from their neighbours on the 
 subject of war in general. Ought a Christian ever, 
 under any circumstances, to fight or approve of fight- 
 ing? Can a true follower of the Prince of Peace 
 consent to or take part in the shedding of human 
 blood on the battlefield or, indeed, anywhere? I 
 believe it was Dr. Salter of Bermondsey, a man 
 whose self-sacrificing labours among the poor com- 
 mand universal admiration, who said somewhere 
 with reference to the present colossal struggle, that 
 it was impossible to imagine Jesus bayoneting any- 
 body or tearing human flesh and bones to pieces with 
 explosives. A good many people feel that way; it 
 would shock them to think of their Lord under any 
 such aspect. This troubles them, as well it might, 
 for what is out of character for Christ, what would 
 be wrong for Him, ought to be wrong for us — on 
 this question, anyhow. And then there are His 
 
66 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 recorded words. Everybody knows them. He in- 
 culcated non-resistance, the turning of the other cheek 
 to the smiter, and substituted the law of love for that 
 of the resentment of injuries. What are we to say 
 about this? I should not like to say what some of 
 the German divines appear to find to say on the sub- 
 ject. Pastor Lober of Leipzig, for instance, ap- 
 pears to have been preaching on Christianity and 
 War and putting views before his congregation that 
 ought to please the Prussian and the Turk. Every 
 one, he maintains, serves God who makes the blood 
 of an enemy flow, and it is because he is thus serving 
 God that he can reckon on God's blessing. The 
 admonition of the New Testament to return good 
 for evil cannot be applied in war. In war evil must 
 be met by evil, and wherever possible by greater and 
 increased evil. War demands Old Testament sever- 
 ity, not the mildness of the new dispensation. He is 
 to be praised and envied who sees his enemies perish. 
 This, he concludes, is only another side of love for 
 one's country, this desire for thorough revenge on 
 the malicious enemy. " We beflag our houses, we 
 ring our bells, and sing ' Now thank we all our God ' 
 when countless multitudes of Russians meet a ter- 
 rible death in the Masurian swamps, or when two 
 thousand seamen are plunged to the bottom of the 
 ocean by our submarines. And such expressions of 
 gratitude and joy are genuinely German and genu- 
 inely Christian." These are Pastor Lober's words, 
 
ABOUT PACIFISM 67 
 
 remember, not mine, and are, indeed, the genuine 
 German blend of vindictive murderousness with 
 abominable pietism. They remind one of Punch's 
 sarcastic paraphrase of the first German emperor's 
 letters to his wife on the debacle of the French armies 
 in 1870-71. 
 
 " I write to tell you, dear Augusta, 
 We've had another awful buster: 
 Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below, 
 Praise God from whom all blessings flow." 
 
 But we need not emulate this blasphemous tosh. 
 The question for us is whether it is ever right to meet 
 force with force. We have to look to something 
 besides the letter of Scripture here. You can prove 
 almost anything from Scripture, and the mere citing 
 of isolated texts is a profitless proceeding. We have 
 to look at Scripture as interpreted by the mind of 
 the Church during nineteen centuries. From the 
 first the right of the State to make use of force, even 
 to the taking of human life, was admitted by the 
 Church, and from that admission she has never de- 
 viated. This must include the right, even the duty 
 under certain circumstances, to make war; for the 
 principle thus set forth extends much further than 
 the coercion of the subject. If the State has the 
 right to judge and condemn a criminal within her 
 own borders — and who would question it? — she 
 has the right to resist unjust aggression from without 
 or even to interfere on behalf of the oppressed and 
 
68 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 down-trodden beyond the area of her sovereign jur- 
 isdiction. Surely in taking this ground — which 
 she did even in New Testament times, as we see from 
 the Pauline epistles — the Church has all along 
 known the mind of her Lord. Is it so certain that 
 Jesus would not have sanctioned the taking of human 
 life? What distinction is there between the taking 
 of life and the employment of any other method than 
 that of moral suasion in the overthrow of iniquity? 
 and it is as clear as clear can be that our Lord did 
 contemplate bringing force to bear in the long run 
 upon human wrong-doing; His teaching about the 
 last things leaves no room for doubt about this, and 
 the force was to be employed by Himself. People 
 seem to forget this when talking about the example 
 of Jesus. It was only up to a point that He meant 
 to tolerate men's wickedness or appeal to their bet- 
 ter nature ; beyond that point He declared He would 
 overthrow it with a strong hand, and it makes not 
 the slightest difference to the question at issue that 
 He expected to be supported by heavenly rather than 
 earthly legions in so doing; the principle is just the 
 same; there is to be a consecrated use of force to 
 counter and overthrow force enlisted on the side of 
 evil. Nor can we absolutely restrict the participa- 
 tion in the struggle to angel hosts. That strange 
 book called Revelation, not one of the latest in the 
 New Testament, indicates otherwise in its myste- 
 rious allusions to Armageddon — a word often on 
 
ABOUT PACIFISM 69 
 
 the lips of journalists and public speakers to describe 
 the present European conflict — and to a final and 
 terrific trial of strength between the embattled forces 
 of evil and those of good on the stage of human af- 
 fairs. It is not all allegorical; it is a world war that 
 is spoken of. 
 
 Moreover, our Lord's own very emphatic words 
 about non-resistance are plainly addressed to the 
 individual and are concerned with the avenging of 
 personal affronts. He never told us to turn any one 
 else's cheek to the smiter, which is just the point; 
 and He never said a single word about refusing to 
 obey the call of the State to defend one's home and 
 kindred by force of arms. That the Church never 
 understood Him to mean that is plain from her 
 practice in the early centuries. There were plenty 
 of Christian soldiers in the imperial armies; being a 
 Christian did not disqualify a man for undertaking 
 such a service. On the abstract principle there is no 
 room for doubt; Christianity has always recognised 
 that the executive of the State " beareth not the 
 sword in vain." It is not so easy to say where the 
 limitations of that authority come in; in the last 
 resort that is a matter for the individual conscience to 
 settle; it might be a Christian duty to refuse to shed 
 blood in a bad cause at the bidding of the State or 
 any other authority. In the early days to which I 
 have already alluded there were martyrs who died 
 rather than fight just as there were martyrs who died 
 
7 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 rather than render divine honours to Caesar. I am 
 only pointing out, and it is well worth emphasising, 
 that from the very first the Christian Church as a 
 whole did admit that under certain eventualities un- 
 defined the State had the right to make war and 
 therefore the right to require its subjects to serve in 
 its armies. The Christian ideal was universal peace ; 
 but in such a very unideal world as ours it had to be 
 acknowledged that on the way to universal peace it 
 might be sometimes the duty of a Christian to draw 
 the sword. 
 
 I am not insisting that war itself is a good. It is 
 not a good; pain in itself never is; war may be a 
 necessary purgation of the body politic, a bracing up 
 of the energies of the soul; but it is a grim remedy 
 even at the best. It is no more a good than a 
 surgical operation is a good; it may be necessary to 
 get rid of a disease, but it would be better not to have 
 the disease to begin with. We have to distinguish 
 between what is ideally and what is practically right. 
 The Christian ideal of marriage, for example, is the 
 union of one man and one woman for life on the basis 
 of pure mutual affection and loyalty, but in practice 
 we have to recognise that it is not always attainable 
 with human nature as it is, and we legislate accord- 
 ingly. The Christian ideal, again, is that of the 
 angel song at the birth of the world's Redeemer, 
 " Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, 
 good will among men " ; but while tyranny, op- 
 
ABOUT PACIFISM 71 
 
 pression, and cruelty remain there must be war. 
 But, further, I utterly and entirely dissent from 
 the view that there is something essentially uplifting 
 in a war as war. The late Mr. Lecky, in his History 
 of European Morals, says : " That which invests war, 
 in spite of all the evils that attend it, with a certain 
 moral grandeur, is the heroic self-sacrifice it elicits. 
 With perhaps the single exception of the Church, it 
 is the sphere in which mercenary motives have least 
 sway, in which performance is least weighed and 
 measured by strict obligation, in which a disinterested 
 enthusiasm has most scope. A battlefield is the scene 
 of deeds of self-sacrifice so transcendent, and at the 
 same time so dramatic, that, in spite of all its horrors 
 and crimes, it awakens the most passionate moral 
 enthusiasm." Is there no other way of arousing 
 this moral enthusiasm, no other way of evoking to 
 the same degree the spirit of self-sacrifice? Yes, if 
 civilisation as a whole could rise to the moral level 
 requisite for it. The late Professor William James 
 of Harvard used to maintain that one great thing 
 which modern civilisation had yet to do was to find 
 a moral substitute for war, an incentive to action 
 that would bring out the grandest qualities of human 
 nature without the accompaniment of slaughter and 
 the suffering and anguish that follow in its train. 
 Oh that we were sufficiently great of soul to do it, 
 and to do it as one man ! Every normal human be- 
 ing must dread, loathe, and detest war, for if it re- 
 
72 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 veals some things that savour of heaven it reveals 
 more that reek of hell. See what the glorification 
 of war has done for Germany. I have not the 
 slightest hesitation in admitting that as a people the 
 Germans are intellectually better trained and more 
 efficient than we, their resources better organised 
 and developed, their manhood better disciplined and 
 equipped for the business of life in its material as- 
 pects. But look at the temper of mind that goes 
 with it — hard, arrogant, domineering, unable to 
 appreciate the rights of others or even to understand 
 others' point of view. It has given Germany the 
 most unscrupulous government of modern times; for 
 as sure as you get a nation mastered by the monster 
 of militarism, a nation in which everything else in 
 administration is subordinated to militaristic ideals, 
 you get a Government without sentiment, without 
 humanity, without respect for the ordinary obliga- 
 tions of truth and honour. Two ideals of the State 
 confront each other on the battlefield to-day ; for the 
 sake of the future welfare of mankind which were 
 it better should prevail? I think we could fairly 
 appeal to civilisation on that issue alone without fear 
 of the verdict. Is the State a moral entity or is it 
 not? Our enemies hold that whatever the State 
 chooses to do it may do if it thinks it to be for its ad- 
 vantage, that considerations of right and wrong have 
 no meaning as applied to the State; no question of 
 conscience must deter the individual from carrying 
 
ABOUT PACIFISM 73 
 
 out its behests. A more cynical doctrine the world 
 has never heard. If Germany were to win this war 
 that doctrine would be triumphant; it is for us to 
 determine that it shall not be. We war not for re- 
 venge nor for our own aggrandisement; we war to 
 set mankind free from a bondage under which it has 
 groaned for generations, Germany even more than 
 ourselves. We are fighting the battle of the Ger- 
 man people as well as our own, paradoxical though 
 it seem to say so. We are fighting the battle of 
 America as well as of Europe, and America knows 
 it. We are fighting for democratic institutions, for 
 international justice, for the right of the weak to 
 live in safety alongside of the strong. International 
 Law has broken down; we have got to rebuild it. 
 Political and social idealism has been swept under 
 by this flood of cultured barbarism from Berlin; we 
 have got to restore it to its proper place. We are 
 warring to end war if we can. The world has an 
 object lesson before it to-day as to what militarism 
 leads to. Heaven grant that the outcome of the 
 present awful collision of spiritual and material 
 forces may be the end of militarism and, as our 
 Prime Minister said a year ago, the creation of a 
 pact of the nations to prevent it from ever lifting 
 its head again, not in Germany only, but anywhere 
 else throughout the world. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 IF I WERE GOD 
 
 "Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodde: 
 Hae mercy o' ray soul, Lord God ; 
 As I wad do were I Lord God, 
 And ye were Martin Elginbrodde." 
 
 This striking epitaph, quoted by George Macdonald, 
 is said, though I cannot be sure, to have been placed 
 on the tombstone of some individual of Norse ex- 
 traction buried in the north of Scotland. The Norse 
 element in certain parts of Scotland has contributed 
 not a little to the characeristic sturdiness and inde- 
 pendence of her people and to the great part they 
 have played in the world in modern times. I hope 
 it is true that this inscription does appear, or once 
 did appear, in a Scottish graveyard. To my mind 
 there is something rather fine about it, without a 
 trace of irreverence or presumption. Something 
 similar is recorded as having been uttered in France 
 in the fifteenth century or thereabouts by a famous 
 captain of freebooters named La Hire, though not 
 with the simple dignity of the verse given above. 
 According to Hallam, this worthy was not addicted 
 to spending much time over his devotions and was 
 found fault with thereupon. He held, however, 
 that his mode of praying was as effective as any one 
 
 74 
 
IF I WERE GOD 75 
 
 else's. Before going into battle he would address 
 Heaven thus: " So do with me this day, God, as I 
 would do with thee if I were God and thou wert La 
 Hire." This bold, even audacious, anthropomorph- 
 ism, this drawing of a likeness between man and 
 God, makes one great assumption — namely, that 
 divine goodness is at least equal to human and not 
 different in kind. The crudity of the sentiment in 
 other ways need not blind us to the value of this. 
 That it puts man and God over against each other, 
 as it were, as distinct entities, regarding God as a 
 kind of larger man, but stronger, abler, and in pos- 
 session of fuller information, holding a supreme 
 magisterial office to which we are amenable, need 
 not disturb us. Perhaps no religious proposition 
 that has ever been framed has altogether escaped 
 this inherent anthropomorphism or could do so. Do 
 what we will, when we think of God, or, rather, 
 when we think of the character of God (if I may 
 be permitted the use of that not very satisfactory ex- 
 pression), we are more or less compelled to compare 
 Him with man. We do it as a matter of course, 
 even when we are not conscious of it. And we have 
 high authority for doing it; in fact, the highest au- 
 thority that has ever found expression through hu- 
 man lips, that of Christ himself, When He said, 
 " If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
 unto your children, how much more shall your father 
 which is in heaven give good things to them that ask 
 
76 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 him? " He was saying much the same as La Hire 
 and Martin Elginbrod, after all. He was bidding 
 us estimate the goodness of God by the best we have 
 learned to know of the goodness of man. 
 
 And yet we ought to be careful in our employ- 
 ment of this comparison. Obviously we cannot 
 press it so far as to make it explain all the ways of 
 God in His dealings with His creatures. God is 
 not a larger man, viewing life from man's restricted 
 standpoint and subject to the same limitation of feel- 
 ing and action. He is the life of all that is, the in- 
 finitely complex reality that is finding manifestation 
 in the world of worlds, present in every grain of dust 
 as in the farthest star. Without Him nothing ex- 
 ists; in Him is all that is or ever shall be. To quote 
 the words of one of the greatest of the world's spir- 
 itual seers, words that everybody knows without 
 stopping to ponder them, " In Him we live, and 
 move, and have our being." How can we then 
 enclose Him in human categories when we want to 
 discuss His attributes? At least we must keep our 
 thoughts clear while we attempt it. Of no man can 
 it be said that others live, and move, and have their 
 being in his; no man indwells any other being than 
 his own except in a very limited and special sense ; 
 no man is the creator and sustainer of any universe, 
 however small. As a matter of fact, no man ever 
 creates anything, he only discovers. He works with 
 nature and nature reveals her secrets to him. It is 
 
IF I WERE GOD 77 
 
 impossible for the human mind to imagine anything 
 that does not already exist in some form. Picture as 
 grotesque an animal as you please, you will still have 
 to give it limbs, mouth, teeth, and eyes, or some of 
 them; you may multiply the quantity but you cannot 
 invent an organ for it the like of which has never 
 been seen or heard of before. The telephone and 
 the wireless telegraph were hidden in earth and air 
 when Abraham marched to the rescue of Lot across 
 the plains of Mesopotamia millenniums ago, but he 
 did not know it and so could not advise his kinsman 
 of his coming in the way a British force on the 
 same spot is doing to-day. Moses crossing the Red 
 Sea used no aeroplane to reconnoitre Pharaoh's host, 
 nor had he ever heard of the submarine, but they 
 were there all right if he had only known how to 
 summon them forth. No, man is not as God in re- 
 lation to existence as a whole or in part. We have 
 to reason from the known to the unknown : God does 
 not. Our reason works within certain definite, 
 sharply defined conditions: it cannot be supposed 
 that God's does. As Henri Bergson tells us, the 
 human mind is a by no means perfect instrument for 
 enabling us to find our way about and do the best 
 we can in a three-dimensional world, a world of up 
 and down and to and fro, a world of material objects, 
 of weight and gravitation, and dinners and teas, and 
 clothes and houses, and cold and hot, and wet and 
 dry, and all such like. Suppose a world of fifty 
 
78 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 dimensions — as there very well may be — or a 
 world where none of these conditions held good at 
 all, what then? But still it would be God's world, 
 and His knowledge and power would pervade and 
 control it as now. Clearly, when we talk of any 
 likeness between man and God we must make large 
 allowances. 
 
 Let me point out that I am taking nothing for 
 granted so far. I am not on my own ipse dixit dog- 
 matically declaring that there is a God. I only say 
 that if there be — and it is really undeniable in the 
 last resort — He cannot be conditioned as we are, 
 and therefore His ways of behaving must be to a 
 large extent incomprehensible to us. Even the terms 
 " He," " His," " Him " as applied to deity are apt 
 to become somewhat misleading. They at once call 
 up the idea of a person of the male sex, like ourselves 
 but greater, wiser, better perhaps. Let us get that 
 out of our heads. God is neither male nor female, 
 and none of the other human qualities that depend 
 upon earthly relationships can be exactly predicated 
 of Him. If I had a better pronoun wherewith to 
 designate the divine being I would use it, but it is 
 part of our limitations that we have none. We can- 
 not call Him " It," for that suggests something less 
 than human, not something more; and God must be 
 more, infinitely more, than the greatest we have yet 
 known as man; for surely we have nothing that has 
 not come from Him ; how could we have ? I think 
 
IF I WERE GOD 79 
 
 I could get on common ground with the most pro- 
 nounced agnostic, as well as the most assiduous 
 churchgoer, by insisting on what I have said already : 
 God is that, whatever it is, and it is far beyond the 
 power of our intelligence and imagination to grasp, 
 whence all that is proceeds directly or indirectly, ex- 
 cept where our own wills come into play. He is 
 the eternal force that brings into existence and main- 
 tains the universe and everything in it. Hence He 
 must be the source of everything in ourselves which 
 we are accustomed to look upon as admirable — 
 good, beautiful, sublime. Can we get away from 
 that? I do not see how. In so far, then, as we find 
 anything fine and worthy of reverence in human na- 
 ture we are justified in affirming that that same 
 thing is in God. 
 
 These considerations are suggested to me by 
 remarks that have reached me concerning what I 
 have previously written in these pages. They have 
 not all reached me by post; some of them, and these 
 not the least piquant, have been addressed to me 
 orally by our soldiers who have been reading the 
 trench edition of the Sunday Herald, But all the 
 interrogations put together only amount to this: 
 If God is good as man is good, or as man thinks of 
 good, why does He permit evils to fall upon us from 
 which we should do our best to shield our children? 
 If I were God would I do it? " There cannot be a 
 God," cried a French essayist, " for if there were the 
 
80 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 woes of humanity would break his heart." Are you 
 sure of that? What if God knows, as we cannot 
 know, that the woes of humanity are but as the 
 troubles of childhood? The troubles of childhood 
 are real enough to children, but what do their elders 
 think of them? It is all a matter of perspective. I 
 can remember, as I daresay everybody can, that the 
 griefs and fears of my childhood's days were as in- 
 tense and poignant in their way as anything I have 
 endured since, but they would not seem very serious 
 to me now; they did not seem very serious to my 
 preceptors then, though no doubt I had their kindly 
 sympathy in bearing them. They knew, as I could 
 not know, that it was not so very important to save 
 me from them but highly important that I should 
 come through them rightly. My playmates would 
 have saved me from them, perhaps, or those who 
 cared most for me would; but as a rule they could 
 not. They took my point of view and mourned their 
 impotence. To them it really did matter a great 
 deal that I had lost my biggest glass alley or seen my 
 favourite puppy drown or been forbidden to go to 
 the school treat or been bowled for a duck in the 
 cricket match. They knew all about the quarrel- 
 lings and makings-up again which constituted school 
 politics, the smart of injustice at the hands of ruth- 
 less grown-ups, the humiliation and dismay of being 
 plucked in exams or given the cold shoulder by those 
 whose favour one most ardently desired to win. 
 
IF I WERE GOD 81 
 
 But that was because they took my point of view; 
 no adult either could or would, or if through sheer 
 kindliness of heart one here and there pretended to 
 they did it in such a way as to show me that they 
 did not regard it in the same tragic light as I did. 
 Is not this the clue to the matter that puzzles so 
 many people just now? Would we treat our chil- 
 dren thus? we cry, when tragedy dark and dreadful 
 invades our little world. No, we should not, any 
 more than one child would ordinarily condemn an- 
 other to the experiences that to the childish mind are 
 irksome and grievous. If I were God, would I al- 
 low mankind either to inflict or endure anguish as it 
 is doing to-day on such a colossal scale? If I were 
 God, would there be all this cruel welter of blood 
 and tears? With the immortal Omar we protest — 
 
 "Ah, Love, could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire; 
 Would we not shatter it to bits, and then 
 Remould it nearer to .the heart's desire?" 
 
 If I were God, would human folly and wickedness 
 be permitted to fill the earth with horror and flame, 
 to breed misery and injustice, to crush and trample 
 upon the weak and innocent ? Yes, if you were God. 
 That is just the point: You are not God. If you 
 were you would view the struggle and the pain " with 
 larger other eyes," as Tennyson affirms that even the 
 angels do or our sainted dead. You are not God, 
 nor are you yet of the great cloud of witnesses who 
 
82 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 compass us about from the side of heaven; you are 
 only a child at school, and with the eyes of a child 
 you gaze upon this death in life, beholding not what 
 lies beyond, and perceiving little of the reason why 
 things are as they are in the sombre arena where 
 
 "Man's inhumanity to man 
 Makes countless thousands mourn." 
 
 Let no one ask this question any more; it is a 
 childish question though it springs from a good im- 
 pulse. All that is good in us is of God; it must be; 
 where else could it come from? You cannot get 
 more out of the universe than is already in it some- 
 where. Is the stream of human tenderness likely 
 to be purer than its fountain? That is the way some 
 people talk, but it is pathetically silly; the very heart 
 with which you protest against the ills of life is 
 the product of the source of life. To the riddle of 
 existence 
 
 "I have no answer for myself or thee, 
 Save that I learned beside my mother's knee: 
 All is of God that is and is to be, 
 And God is good. Let this suffice us still, 
 Resting in childlike trust upon His will 
 Who moves to His great ends unthwarted by the ill." 
 
 There is comfort in this and inspiration too. But, 
 some one will object, if the good is of God so is the 
 bad; we have no more right to say He is good be- 
 cause there is goodness in the world than that He 
 is bad because there is badness in the world. No? 
 Is that the way you reckon with your friends ? You 
 
IF I WERE GOD 83 
 
 do not expect the same man to be true and a liar, 
 tender and brutal, faithful and treacherous. If your 
 best friend is accused of dishonourable conduct, no 
 matter how black the evidence may be, you refuse to 
 credit it. You say, I know him to be of strict in- 
 tegrity; therefore I wait in confidence for the matter 
 to be cleared up. Quite right: God cannot be the 
 gentle heroism of Edith Cavell and the vile devilry 
 of Von Bissing. That the one derives from Him 
 renders it impossible that He could be the other. 
 He could not be both Christ and Pilate. 
 
 The other night a soldier thus addressed me pub- 
 licly: " Sir, somebody has been saying in England 
 that a man who dies for his country goes straight to 
 heaven whatever his life may have been beforehand. 
 Do you think it is true that if a chap has been a bit 
 rackety, and yet gives his life in this way, he will be 
 all right on the other side, or will he have to go to 
 hell? " Do not smile, reader, at the naive simplicity 
 of the question; I thought I detected a certain wist- 
 fulness behind it, and it had evidently been widely 
 discussed among the men who heard it put. I re- 
 plied, " Probably the issue is not quite so sharp as 
 you make it; few of us are fit either for highest 
 heaven or deepest hell. But what would you do if 
 you were God? " " I think I should give a fellow a 
 chance," was the instant response. Need more be 
 said? 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE CHURCHES AND UNIVERSAL' PEACE. 
 A GENERAL COUNCIL 
 
 Not long after the war commenced I made a sug- 
 gestion from the City Temple pulpit which was 
 widely, though for the most part inaccurately, quoted 
 by the Press of this and other countries. Or per- 
 haps it would be truer to say that the quotations 
 were not so much inaccurate as inadequate because 
 without their context, and also because of mistaken 
 deductions from them. Merely to take a few sen- 
 tences out of a lengthy discourse and print them as 
 summing up a whole argument is seldom satisfactory. 
 Certainly it was not so in this instance. The para- 
 graph as a whole was somewhat as follows — 
 
 Would it not be possible for the Christian forces 
 of the world to combine after the conclusion of peace 
 for the one purpose of preventing a recurrence of 
 this horrible strife? If we could not unite upon 
 anything else, surely we might unite upon this one 
 practical object. I would even suggest that the 
 Pope, as the head of the largest Christian com- 
 munion, should be induced to take the initiative in 
 the matter and call Protestants to his councils in 
 
 84 
 
CHURCHES AND PEACE 85 
 
 connection therewith. At any rate such action 
 should be taken in concert with all the Christian 
 churches of the world, however designated. Prot- 
 estantism generally would support it, would be mor- 
 ally bound to do so. And no one but the Pope could 
 do it effectively, for the reason just given — namely, 
 that he is the head of the largest and most interna- 
 tional organisation of those who profess and call 
 themselves Christians. The Metropolitan of the 
 great Eastern Church — or, rather, of that great 
 branch out of the four or five belonging to it in which 
 the people of Russia are included — could not do 
 it. The Archbishop of Canterbury for obvious rea- 
 sons could not do it; he is the spiritual head of 
 Anglicanism only, and Rome would not respond to 
 an invitation issued from that quarter. What is 
 wanted is something analogous to a General Council 
 of the whole undivided Church of Christ — not a 
 General Council in the ordinary sense, of course, be- 
 cause not directly concerned with questions of faith 
 and morals — but it would be a wonderfully impres- 
 sive gathering all the same, and no doubt lead to even 
 greater things — the ultimate re-union of Christen- 
 dom, for instance. The Pope is the proper person 
 to summon such an assembly. And there is a prece- 
 dent for it in the Council of Trent, to which Prot- 
 estant delegates were invited but refused to come. 
 Had their response been favourable instead of un- 
 favourable, who knows what strife and anguish Eu- 
 
86 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 rope might have been saved in the last three hundred 
 years? 
 
 These were not the actual words I used; I cannot 
 recall them now; but they represent the gist of them. 
 One reason why I refer to them again is that I find 
 they are still being quoted. They are coming back 
 to me, or comments upon them are, from the ends of 
 the earth, both by letter and the printed page. And 
 they are generally misunderstood, not only by those 
 who disapprove of them but by those who hail them 
 with satisfaction. The Glasgow Herald, for ex- 
 ample, one of the most influential newspapers in 
 Great Britain, construed them as an appeal to the 
 Pope to stop the war, made them the text of an in- 
 dictment of peace-mongers in general, and went on 
 gravely to warn the public against all the misguided 
 individuals who advocated the laying down of arms 
 before German militarism had been smashed. Such 
 talk, the leader-writer declared, was not only futile 
 but mischievous, as it only served to encourage the 
 enemy by leading him to believe that certain elements 
 in this country were in favour of peace at any price. 
 I quite agree with him, only he was lecturing the 
 wrong man. On the other hand, to my utter sur- 
 prise, eminent leaders of thought in the churches and 
 elsewhere gave warm support to the suggestion, or 
 what they imagined to be the suggestion. I should 
 have thought they would have scouted it as too 
 
CHURCHES AND PEACE 87 
 
 friendly to the Scarlet Woman. But they did not. 
 Anti-papal prejudice scarcely appeared at all in their 
 utterances, being overshadowed by the purely hu- 
 manitarian aspect of the case. " If the Pope or 
 anybody else can put an end to all this bloodshed 
 and misery," said one Free Church leader, " for 
 God's sake let him have a try." 
 
 But I never said he could; nor did I say a word 
 about laying down our arms before Germany was 
 beaten. I was not speaking of putting a stop to 
 the present war but of what ought to follow when it 
 did stop. Most people agree that we should be wise 
 to think about that, though it is doubtful if we shall 
 to any good effect; the conclusion of peace may find 
 us unprepared for the future as usual. I know that 
 it is quite useless to desire any mediation with Ger- 
 many until she knows her power is broken. Nobody 
 needs to tell us that. If I had had any idea before- 
 hand that words spoken from a pulpit in the course 
 of an ordinary sermon were likely to be taken up in 
 the Press I should have been more careful to define 
 my meaning. The meaning was clear enough to 
 those who heard them in the first place. 
 
 The moment is not unsuitable for returning to the 
 idea and pressing it. The chief thing against it is 
 that in the interval indignation has mounted amongst 
 the allies at the Pope's silence regarding the fate of 
 Belgium. But that should not be allowed to affect 
 the main issue, which is whether organised Christian- 
 
88 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 ity is strong enough to make its mind felt and have 
 its decrees enforced in regard to the most crying 
 moral need of the age. The Hague tribunal is very 
 largely a failure, a sad disillusionment for advocates 
 of international amity, and we need something better 
 and ought to get it if we can. It is not as complete 
 a failure as it looks, perhaps; it has done a great 
 deal more than is popularly realised; but the way in 
 which its solemn agreements have been summarily 
 swept aside by the various combatants in this fright- 
 ful struggle is a demonstration of its helplessness to 
 control the jealousies and antagonisms of nations. 
 Germany cynically disregarded its requirements from 
 the first, and more or less the belligerents opposed 
 to her had to follow suit. Poison gas, for instance, 
 was no afterthought; it was a deliberate policy 
 secretly prepared for long before the war. In order 
 to take her neighbours at a disadvantage Germany 
 gave her plighted word along with them not to resort 
 to this fiendish device, and forthwith set to work to 
 experiment with one gas after another in view of 
 the conflict she meant to provoke as soon as it suited 
 her. This is all in keeping with her customary 
 methods. She had no objection to signing as many 
 Hague regulations as we pleased, but she had no 
 intention of keeping them; they did not bind her for 
 five minutes; it is not now only that she has broken 
 them, but all along, ever since the ink was wet on 
 the paper which bore her solemn pledge. 
 
CHURCHES AND PEACE 89 
 
 This is a revelation, and one wonders why an in- 
 ternational tribunal could thus easily be set at nought, 
 treated with contempt, in fact. In Germany's hands 
 it has simply been a means of throwing dust in the 
 eyes of possible enemies. Is it not because the 
 Hague Court is without true moral authority? It 
 should not be forgotten that we owe its establish- 
 ment to the Czar, and that without doubt it was an 
 honest and sincere attempt on his part to get rid of 
 the spectre of militarism and the ever-accelerating 
 competition in armaments with its inevitable out- 
 come, to prevent the very thing that has now hap- 
 pened and plunged the whole world in woe. We all 
 remember the joy with which the effort was uni- 
 versally hailed and how much was expected from it 
 — Germany, as usual, being the only dark horse, or 
 rather the only power unwilling to co-operate whole- 
 heartedly in the endeavour to secure universal peace. 
 That, of course, was because she did not intend to 
 have peace; she intended to have war. And yet it 
 was the Czar who went to war first. The Russo- 
 Japanese disagreement came to a head almost as 
 soon as the Hague Conference began its sittings. It 
 was a sad commentary on the hopes of its promoters. 
 The Czar's motives were all right, but a purely legal 
 tribunal, established by bargaining on utilitarian 
 grounds, and fortified by no common faith in God 
 and righteousness, was not likely to succeed. We 
 must go further and higher for the cure of our ills. 
 
9 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 Not many people realise, I think, that Europe was 
 once a unity — civilisation was a unity — in a way 
 it is not now. We have lost something very valu- 
 able in the last few hundred years that we urgently 
 need to regain in this respect. I mean the unity 
 which centered in the Catholic Church. At a time 
 when all Europe was a congeries of ill-organised, 
 constantly quarrelling States — though not one whit 
 worse than now, when internal organisation has de- 
 veloped only at the cost of making warfare in general 
 more deadly and terrible — there was one visible 
 seat of moral authority to which all men looked, one 
 mighty throne before which all secular potentates 
 bowed down, and that was the See of St. Peter. It 
 has been called the most magnificent failure in his- 
 tory, and with justice, this attempt to impose the law 
 of God by word of mouth only upon all the ends of 
 the earth. It was wonderful beyond words. Eu- 
 rope was one in virtue of that authority and that 
 alone, felt and knew itself to be one it has never 
 done since and never will till we recover something 
 like it. Would that it had never been abused! It 
 failed because it deserved to fail; it failed when it 
 became itself only one political power among many 
 and forfeited its prerogative of lofty disinterested- 
 ness. Let us get that unity back, and along similar 
 but safer lines. I am not advocating a return to ap- 
 peals to the Pope, and all that sort of thing; not 
 suggesting a resumption of his jurisdiction over the 
 
CHURCHES AND PEACE 91 
 
 internal affairs of this country or any other country ; 
 not asking that he as an individual or the holder of 
 an exalted office should do anything whatever on 
 his ipse dixit alone. What I am pressing for is a 
 unity of action on the part of the Christian 
 Churches through him which will result in something 
 like a restoration on better terms of the international 
 unity of nearly a thousand years ago. 
 
 Back to what we began with — Is it impossible to 
 hope for a high-souled concentration of the energies 
 of Christendom upon the design of putting an end to 
 warfare between civilised states? When the pres- 
 ent devastating struggle is over shall we not all be 
 in the mood to listen to some such proposal? Mr. 
 Asquith almost said as much in his Guildhall speech 
 in the autumn of 19 14. He held out the prospect 
 of a solemn agreement of the nations to forbid the 
 drawing of the sword again between any of their 
 number coming within the pale of International Law. 
 If serious and responsible statesmanship could say as 
 much as this at the outset of the most appalling war 
 that has ever been waged, what about the Christian 
 ideal of universal peace? Is it only a dream, after 
 all; a far distant glimmer of hope for the race? I 
 have given to the Premier's words what I take to 
 be a legitimate extension of their immediate scope. 
 A pact of the nations ! How is it to be brought 
 about? Broadly speaking, the nations coming 
 within the pale of International Law are the so- 
 
92 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 called Christian nations. Japan was not included 
 until a few years back. Cannot we utilise the tre- 
 mendous force involved in the Christian sentiment of 
 these nations to put a stop for ever to the use of 
 brute force, so wasteful, wanton and wicked, in the 
 settlement of international disputes and the prose- 
 cution of international rivalries? To be sure we 
 can if we want to. And the Pope is the most fitting 
 personage to take the lead in virtue of the peculiar 
 position he holds in the western world. When I 
 referred to the precedent of the Council of Trent 
 I was not taking too much for granted. The sepa- 
 ration between Protestantism and Catholicism had 
 not become absolute by the middle of the sixteenth 
 century. Protestantism up to then had been simply 
 what the name implies, a protest against certain 
 things within the Catholic system; it was not at first 
 intended as a complete break-off from that system. 
 Right on into the next century reconciliation was 
 sought and aimed at. It was a fierce age too. 
 When safe-conducts were offered to the Protestant 
 delegates in order that they might attend the Council 
 they were certainly justified in fearing a breach of 
 faith, with imprisonment and death as their portion, 
 if they were unwary enough to place themselves in 
 the power of their ecclesiastical adversaries. Any- 
 how, they did not go. But my point is that they 
 were invited, and invited to the most important 
 General Council of the Church since primitive times. 
 
CHURCHES AND PEACE 93 
 
 Why not invite them again, not to a General Council, 
 but to something even more comprehensive, con- 
 voked on a specific issue ? Could the Pope be got to 
 do it as soon as the war is over? No one could 
 charge him with pro-Germanism then, and it would 
 not matter a button if they did. His personal opin- 
 ions would not be in question. What the assembly 
 would be expected to do would be to place on record 
 its abhorrence of war between Christian powers and 
 to pledge itself to bring all reasonable pressure to 
 bear upon civilised governments and peoples to 
 render a world conflict like the present impossible 
 for all time to come. We should have had our les- 
 son by then and be more than disposed to listen to the 
 appeal. There is not a Church in Christendom that 
 would not join in it through its appointed repre- 
 sentatives. And the vast conference thus convened 
 would not end in smoke. As the outcome of it there 
 might be a tribunal established more authoritative 
 and effective than that of the Hague, to say no more. 
 Perhaps we should get even further than that in, 
 shall we say, the direction of adjusting our religious 
 differences too, and unifying civilisation once more 
 on that basis. 
 
 Why not? The like has been done before — not 
 so thoroughly, perhaps, but to a large extent. We 
 owe the mitigation of the horrors of modern warfare 
 to it. It was Church Councils in the tenth century 
 that forbade the spoliation and maltreatment of non- 
 
94 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 combatants; and who has not heard of the Truce of 
 God throughout the Middle Ages whereby hostilities 
 were limited to what was practically about three 
 months in the year; there was to be no fighting from 
 Wednesday evening to Monday morning in any one 
 week, and there were special seasons, such as Lent, 
 when there was to be none at all. Think of that 
 to-day! We have lost in some ways if we have 
 gained in others by our boasted material advance in 
 the past few generations. 
 
 When I was in Rome, in the early spring of 19 14, 
 I discussed the above subject with a highly placed 
 dignitary of the Papal court and found him not un- 
 sympathetic but more than doubtful of success until 
 a big war had taken place. He might have foreseen 
 what was coming, so truly did he describe the ter- 
 rible situation in which we find ourselves at this mo- 
 ment. " Governments would not listen to any such 
 representation, " he said, " even if backed by the 
 suffrages of all the Christian societies on earth, until 
 the arbitrament of brute force has been tried once 
 more. They have not been piling up armaments all 
 these years for nothing, and the explosion must soon 
 come. Moreover," he added, " this is the outcome 
 of the false ideals by which the nations have been 
 living. Politics are non-moral; conscience is left out 
 of them. The very men who in their private lives 
 are amiable and exemplary will, the moment they 
 enter the office from which they exercise their func- 
 
CHURCHES AND PEACE 95 
 
 tions as statesmen, divest themselves of all scruples 
 and behave without consideration for anything but 
 the material interests of the particular country they 
 happen to serve. It is all very sordid and very 
 grievous; and there is a period of great tribulation 
 ahead of us. After that, perhaps something may be 
 done on the lines you suggest. The Holy Father 
 would take the first opportunity he could find if he 
 saw any good likely to come of it." 
 
 I was sorry to hear his final word. " There could 
 be no committee," he declared. " If the Pope acted 
 at all he would act as head of the Catholic Church 
 and that only; but there is no reason why what he 
 was about to do should not be made known un- 
 officially to the chief authorities of the various his- 
 toric Protestant sects and let them be in readiness 
 to support it. Action would then be simultaneous 
 when it came, and do all you want." 
 
 No, it would not. We want something better 
 than that. We want the deliberate and sustained 
 co-operation of all who count themselves followers 
 of the Prince of Peace. Shall we ever get it? 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 
 
 Pythagoras said, " There is no being but becom- 
 ing." The statement is a paradox, but ordinary ex- 
 perience goes far towards justifying it. One does 
 not need to be a metaphysician in order to realise 
 that life is ever in progress of development. We 
 are ever looking forward, ever seeking a goal; the 
 zest of life is in anticipation. 
 
 " Man never is, but always to be blest." 
 
 No sooner have we arrived at any point at which 
 our endeavours have aimed than we instantly look 
 beyond it and find a new focus for desire. Somehow 
 we cannot stand still, cannot be content, cannot rest 
 in present attainment. We may say we do, but we 
 don't. There is no person so passive and listless in 
 relation to his environment that he does not try in 
 some degree to improve it if only to shift from one 
 side of the fire to the other; he is never completely 
 satisfied for long. It he loses interest in the future, 
 or despairs of it, he is already in the way of death. 
 With the ordinary healthy-minded member of society 
 to live is to hope, dream, plan and execute. One 
 always has something to do which one believes will 
 
 96 
 
THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 97 
 
 tend towards betterment, some object to be gained, 
 some end to be achieved; and as long as that goes 
 on one is truly alive — this is living. Is there any 
 reader among those to whom these words come who 
 is not at least trying to secure something for himself 
 or other people which he thinks will be an advantage ? 
 Not one, I should think. We are all trying, trying 
 in little ways and big ways, to make conditions bet- 
 ter than we found them or they found us, to make 
 to-morrow better than yesterday. 
 
 And there is more than a touch of illusion about it 
 too. You scheme and toil for years in the expecta- 
 tion that once a certain success has been won you 
 will thenceforth be able to take things more easily or 
 sail your barque in calmer waters or be freed from 
 the necessity of such energising again. If I could 
 only turn that corner, you say, or obtain this situ- 
 ation, or have done with the restrictions that have 
 hampered me so long, I should be all right. Does 
 it ever turn out so? Not in the sense you pictured 
 it, I warrant. You simply go straight on. There 
 is another corner to be turned just ahead, another 
 position to strive after, a fresh set of hindrances to 
 be battled with and overcome. I do not say there 
 is no gain accruing from the struggle. I only say 
 that the very same effort has to be made, the very 
 same strain undergone, but with a new objective. 
 
 Furthermore, we are all intent upon making some- 
 thing. Man loves to create; it is instinctive with 
 
98 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 him. Put him down on a desert island and he will 
 instantly set to work to bring into existence some ob- 
 ject of beauty or utility which was not there before. 
 I admit that he does not really create ; he only com- 
 bines and adjusts in terms of nature's laws; but he 
 has the creative idea, and gives expression to it as 
 nature affords him opportunity and supplies material. 
 And in this he finds his happiness. It is a joy to 
 build and increase, to subdue natural forces to 
 rational ends; there is no joy to equal it except that 
 of loving and being loved, and even that has a good 
 deal of the other in it; the two are intertwined. 
 Always we are reaching out towards betterment, 
 striving to produce it, and the main impulse so to do 
 is a social one. 
 
 Moreover, the best kind of work, the one that 
 gives the fullest satisfaction to the worker, is always 
 impersonal in motive. You have only to interrogate 
 your own experience to find that this is so. If you 
 succeed in inventing a machine that no other mind 
 has ever thought of, your principal delight consists in 
 the fact that it is of universal utility; it belongs to 
 the race, not to yourself alone. You would have no 
 pleasure in it whatever if you knew for certain that 
 nobody would profit by it but yourself. You may 
 be keen and eager for fame and wealth on account 
 of it, but nothing is more certain in this world than 
 that you would lose all interest in your own achieve- 
 ment the moment it proved to be worthless to man- 
 
THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 99 
 
 kind. At the back of everything worth doing, no 
 matter what, is this feeling that the whole race 
 benefits by it, and not the individual only — not the 
 doer only, anyhow. You may be selfish and grasp- 
 ing to an extreme degree, calculating, commercial, 
 but you cannot get any good for yourself out of your 
 creations unless you can feel assured that they belong 
 more to the community than they do to you, more 
 to posterity than to the present, are helping to enrich 
 the common life, adding somewhat to the constantly 
 mounting total of humanity's gains. You may not 
 keep much consciousness of this in what you are 
 doing; you may be so completely absorbed in your 
 task as a task as to be oblivious of its bearing on the 
 future ; but the fact is there all the same at the back 
 of all your striving, and gives it meaning and value. 
 Has any artist ever yet painted a masterpiece that 
 was not for other eyes than his own? Did he want 
 it to perish along with himself? In a sense the 
 whole race produced that picture as an expression 
 of its soul, and for the whole race it lives. What 
 poet ever sung save to and for his kind at large? 
 True, he could not help himself. As Tennyson 
 avowed — 
 
 " I do but sing because I must, 
 And pipe but as the linnets sing." 
 
 Nevertheless every soul that breathes is present 
 impersonally in every song that gushes from a poet's 
 heart. 
 
ioo THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 All our activities operate between two poles: 
 self-ism and other-ism. Perhaps the two are not 
 ultimately inconsistent. You cannot realise your- 
 self without serving the whole. Stark egoism, if 
 it could exist anywhere, which I doubt, would de- 
 stroy itself. In self-giving is self-gaining. And 
 what a curious thing it is that the impulse to self- 
 giving should be so mighty, notwithstanding all the 
 objections of prudent self-interest. I verily believe 
 those psychologists are right who maintain that the 
 strongest instinct of human nature, after all, is that 
 of self-immolation, the peculiar exalted joy that 
 comes of flinging all one is and has into the common 
 stook when some tremendous demand is made upon 
 our uttermost in an hour of crisis. I question 
 whether there is a single man in the whole range of 
 my acquaintance or anybody else's who would re- 
 main absolutely unmoved by an appeal to that in 
 him, whatever it is, that makes the individual willing 
 to die that others may live or some great cause pre- 
 vail. I have never come across one and never expect 
 to. Base men I have met, not a few, and suffered 
 from them — mean men, cowardly men, men with 
 shrivelled, sordid souls; but I am as certain as I live 
 that these same men, placed in circumstances of dire 
 need, such as the siege of a great city or the sinking 
 of a ship at sea, with all that such a tragedy would 
 mean for the weak and helpless, and appealed to at 
 the right moment — for that is important — or 
 
THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 101 
 
 fired by noble example, would rise to the full height 
 of their manhood and behave like heroes. They 
 may not live like heroes, but that is another matter. 
 There is something deep down in every one of us 
 that compels us, once it can be awakened, to count 
 not our lives dear unto us, in fact to find an austere 
 joy in walking straight into the arms of death if an 
 occasion arises big enough to demand the sacrifice. 
 Men have done this for generations unborn, are do- 
 ing it to-day. The lonely lot of the pioneer has 
 often been cheered by that realisation when no other 
 comfort was left. Thus brooded Theodore 
 Parker — 
 
 "I see before 
 My race an age or so; and I am sent 
 For the stern work to hew a path among 
 The thorns — I take them in my flesh — to tread 
 With naked feet, the road, and smooth it o'er 
 With blood. Well, I shall lay my bones 
 In some sharp crevice of the broken way. 
 Men shall in better times stand where I fell, 
 And journey singing on in perfect bands, 
 Where I have trod alone." 
 
 This thought of ministering to human progress 
 by what one does and suffers in the present has in 
 it an element of the sublime. We recognise in it an 
 intrinsic greatness. But is it enough, taken by it- 
 self, to justify the cost it generally exacts? I am 
 sure it is not. It either implies the eternal or it is 
 the greatest of delusions. We of the modern world 
 have been obsessed by the notion of progress as an 
 incentive to action, and, as I have shown, there is 
 
102 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 a noble ingredient in the conception such as it is. 
 But a progress which looks no farther than the per- 
 fecting of human society on this earth at some long 
 distant date, supposing such a thing to be possible, 
 which it is not, is an utterly inadequate ideal for man 
 or nation. No civilisation worth fighting for will 
 ever be made by it or ever has been. It is difficult 
 to imagine the difference in this respect between 
 ancient and modern thought. The ancients did not 
 believe in progress at all, rather in reaction and de- 
 cadence or a static condition of things waiting for 
 an inevitable end. The Greeks of the classic age 
 are commonly supposed to have been a joyous folk, 
 full of eager interest in the world as it is and valu- 
 ing it for its own sake; to them mundane existence 
 was ever full of smiling beauty. Was it? There 
 is no sadder testimony to the contrary in all litera- 
 ture than is supplied by the Greek tragedies and 
 Greek philosophy generally. The less said about 
 their morality, perhaps, the better, but their religion 
 had a note of hopelessness in it which was all too 
 faithfully reflected in the maxims of their daily life. 
 They dreaded to die because of the gloom of Hades, 
 the abode of the dead, as they pictured it; but they 
 never talked of living for any golden morrow as we 
 do. As for the great oriental empires of the past, 
 just as now, whenever the individual did become 
 articulate therein his note was one of mournful resig- 
 nation. No Jew ever looked forward to making 
 
THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 103 
 
 the world gradually better; the best he could antici- 
 pate was that God would one day intervene sud- 
 denly to drive all the evil out of it with a strong hand. 
 Christian civilisation was not greatly different for 
 centuries. It brought glad tidings of great joy, but 
 they had nothing to do with progress in the modern 
 sense of the word. Christianity despaired of the 
 world — never let us forget that. It expected little 
 from it at the best, and much evil at the worst. It 
 looked forward, not to the gradual emergence of a 
 better ordered human society in which every one 
 should be happy as a matter of course, but to a day 
 when Christ should come again with power to put 
 an end all at once and for ever to human disabilities, 
 or at least to those of the saints; it was to be other- 
 wise with the sinners. All these people of old 
 looked back, not forward, back to a better state of 
 things which they imagined to have once existed and 
 from which humanity had culpably and foolishly 
 declined. They never dreamed of such a thing as 
 going on, steadily advancing with the aid of science 
 from one achievement to another, till all human ills 
 had been conquered save death, and even he should 
 be postponed. That is the way we talk — or did 
 before the war. Perhaps we are wiser now. Mr. 
 C. G. Coulton, in his interesting study, From St. 
 Francis to Dante, states that one of the most striking 
 features of thirteenth-century mentality was its pes- 
 simism. That is surprising; we are accustomed to 
 
104 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 think the exact opposite. We have thought of this 
 as a violent but picturesque period, subject to ex- 
 tremes, naive and childlike in its outlook on life, full 
 of religious fervour and zeal, vigorous and unafraid. 
 And here we are told that it was nothing of the sort ! 
 Mr. Coulton says it was always looking for the end, 
 convinced that things were going from bad to worse, 
 and that human wickedness and misery could not 
 be divinely tolerated much longer. 
 
 What ground is there for believing that human 
 affairs must inevitably progress towards betterment? 
 None whatever. History almost demonstrates the 
 contrary. There is nothing in our civilisation to 
 guarantee its permanence more than any of its prede- 
 cessors. It might completely collapse, as did the 
 wonderful Graece-Roman civilisation upon whose 
 ruins ours arose. In fact, there are plenty of signs 
 of such a catastrophe already. We have not solved 
 the problem of living in mutual dignity, harmony 
 and peace; we have no clear object before us as in- 
 dividuals or states, unless it be that of the ceaseless 
 accumulation of material good; we are only partially 
 socialised as yet; and, finally, all governments are 
 more or less mad. Progress on the whole there may 
 be, but it is like that of the incoming tide on a level 
 sandy beach. The waves may seem to be coming 
 in fast, but they run back as well as forward, and 
 progress is slow. A long arm of water will creep 
 inland here and there far in advance of the rest and 
 
THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS 105 
 
 too shallow to carry fishing craft. It reaches a cer- 
 tain point, and then waits till reinforced from an en- 
 tirely different side. 
 
 " For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main." 
 
 To talk of progress as sufficient in itself as a dyna- 
 mic to human devotion and enterprise is like saying 
 that it is worth setting a prairie on fire in order that 
 possibly some people a thousand miles off in the 
 direction the wind is blowing may be able to cook 
 their evening meal. Is all the agony and bloody 
 sweat of mankind since the beginning of time to have 
 none other outcome than that? I repeat that, even 
 supposing you could get a perfected form of human 
 society on this earth in some remote age to come — 
 which the very conditions of fleshly existence forbid 
 — it would not be worth a single tear to-day. The 
 humblest private who lays down his life on the battle- 
 field for us is worth more than that in himself alone. 
 And he dies for more than that, even if to his own 
 thought he only dies for England, the England that 
 is to be. He dies for an immortal good, a good in 
 which he, with all the race, past, present, and to 
 come, will be included and fulfilled at " the consum- 
 mation of all things." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 RELIGION AFTER THE WAR: WILL CHRISTIANITY 
 SURVIVE ? 
 
 One subject upon which a great deal is being said 
 and written at the present time is the relation of the 
 Christian Church to the war and the new conditions 
 created by the war. On the one hand we are told 
 that the war itself proves the failure of Christianity, 
 and on the other that it has already led to something 
 like a religious revival. Critics of the churches 
 storm at them for having so little comfort or guid- 
 ance to give in a time of such prodigious upheaval as 
 this, and at the same time we are receiving over- 
 whelming testimony to the devotion of the chaplains 
 at the front and the amazing activities of religious 
 organisations in general in providing for the spir- 
 itual needs of the troops; nothing of the kind has 
 ever been attempted so thoroughly and systematically 
 before; it is as much a new creation as our vast 
 armies themselves. But what many people are ask- 
 ing is whether it will continue and in what form. 
 How will religion come out of the struggle? Will 
 Christendom repudiate its ancient faith or not? 
 Will civilisation in the future, or what is left of it, 
 want to have anything to do with Jesus Christ or the 
 
 106 
 
RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 107 
 
 Church that professes to speak in His name? Here 
 is a composite question which we ought to be facing 
 now and have some definite answer ready. 
 
 It may be as well to say, in the first place, that 
 this is a challenge addressed not so much to us as 
 to our Lord. This should not be forgotten in any 
 searchings of heart or confession of our own short- 
 comings which we may undertake. Christians, and 
 especially the clergy, may be greatly to blame for 
 much that the critics complain of or they may not, 
 but the fact remains that if the Church of Christ 
 can perish from the earth, as some even among its 
 own adherents are fearing, the result will be the 
 failure less of Christians than of Christ. He prom- 
 ised that the gates of hell should not prevail against 
 it, and so far that promise has been kept, kept 
 through periods much more menacing and deadly so 
 far as the spiritual well-being of mankind was con- 
 cerned than now. Would anybody affirm that the 
 Europe ecclesiastically governed by the Renaissance 
 popes, for instance, was in a better state than the 
 present; or that religion in the western world in the 
 dark and troublous tenth century, when human so- 
 ciety seemed on the verge of collapsing altogether, 
 gave hope of a better morrow than ours? Yet the 
 Church recovered herself then, and why should we 
 doubt her ability to do so still? There is absolutely 
 no comparison in the mortal status of the ministry to- 
 day as viewed against that of either of these epochs, 
 
108 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 not to speak of the Georgian era in England alone, 
 when it was only too easily possible for a drunken 
 reprobate to hold half a dozen livings at once and the 
 king make the cynical remark that half his bishops 
 were atheists. The Methodist revival, the Evan- 
 gelical movement, and the Tractarian movement have 
 all had their effect in raising the quality of those who 
 follow the most sacred of all callings in our country, 
 and different causes have operated in the same di- 
 rection at intervals in other countries. With all 
 their faults, and they have been many and grievous, 
 this can honestly be said of the monastic orders, and 
 the Friars and Jesuits each in their generation and 
 degree ; they all breathed new life into the dry bones 
 of the regular ministry as they successively came on 
 the scene. The Church has often failed locally but 
 never universally. She has disappeared entirely 
 from certain parts of the world where she had estab- 
 lished a footing for a time, and she has had the con- 
 quest to make all over again as, most remarkably, 
 in the case of China. The flame of spiritual fervour 
 has again and again died down in Christendom as a 
 whole, but has never gone out, and never will unless 
 Christ Himself was wrong in His forecast of the 
 future; and it is a great strength to any Christian 
 worker to know that. After all, it does not princi- 
 pally rest with us and our merits to keep the flag of 
 the faith flying; it rests with Him who gave us the 
 commission to go and make disciples of all nations. 
 
RELIGION AFTER JHE WAR 109 
 
 By the " gates of hell " He must have meant the 
 forces of evil in the world and perhaps in other 
 worlds too. I take it that He was thinking of all 
 that, seen or unseen, is fighting against the Kingdom 
 of heaven. So here is one thing to be reckoned with 
 at the outset of any inquiry as to the position and 
 prospects of Christianity in this or any other age : 
 our Blessed Lord and Master guaranteed that it 
 should not fail. Let the discouraged and apprehen- 
 sive lay hold on that. It can only be proved false 
 when the human race rejects Jesus Christ, and that 
 is not likely to happen. For, whatever may be said 
 about His Church, it seems agreed to reverence Him. 
 At the same time it must be admitted that there 
 have been tendencies at work for the past generation 
 or two which the war has brought to a head and 
 which were and are directly and consciously opposed 
 to Christianity as a system of belief and practice — I 
 do not mean in regard to this or that doctrine or 
 mode of worship or explanation of the cosmic scheme, 
 but as a moral ideal, a rule of life desirable for men 
 to follow and by which society should be ordered and 
 governed. In this respect the latter part of the 
 nineteenth century and the opening years of the 
 twentieth have witnessed a return to the sub-apostolic 
 age. When Christianity first began to be a power 
 in the world it found itself up against the ideals of 
 an ancient and elaborate civilisation, seemingly im- 
 pregnable and rooted in human nature. The Chris- 
 
no THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 tians had a certain standard of conduct to proclaim 
 and live which was treated with great scorn by the 
 pagan philosophers and magistrates as being an ethic 
 for women and slaves. The Stoic philosophy, whose 
 finest but not most characteristic product was the 
 noble Emperor Marcus Aurelius, was that which best 
 interpreted the Roman genius, the genius of those 
 marvellous soldiers who conquered the world. To 
 tell a successful Roman general that he ought to love 
 his enemies would have been tantamount to telling 
 him that the Roman empire ought not to exist, and 
 he would have treated the proposition with the most 
 utter contempt. We take for granted nowadays that 
 the Christian law of love is the highest whether we 
 obey it or not, but the Roman thinker of eighteen or 
 nineteen hundred years ago would not have done 
 anything of the kind; he would have maintained that 
 this was not a proper ideal to set before the mind 
 of youth. Two moralities thus strove against each 
 other, and in the end the Christian prevailed, though 
 everything seemed against it. Let me emphasise 
 the point : it was not a contest between what every- 
 body saw to be right and everybody knew to be 
 wrong, but between two inconsistent views of right 
 and wrong. The new Christian ethic did emphasise 
 the more feminine qualities in human nature, the 
 gentle, self-effacing, tender and considerate in op- 
 position to the more characteristically masculine, 
 egoistic, overbearing. It took a long time before the 
 
RELIGION AFTER THE WAR in 
 
 issue was made clear, and when the victory came — 
 for it did come — it built a new civilisation. Men 
 have never fully obeyed the Christian rule of life, 
 but the enormous, the incalculable gain made to hu- 
 manity was the universal admission ultimately secured 
 that this was right, this was the true ideal to aim at, 
 and that everything inconsistent with it was wrong. 
 We are still far from having worked it out in our 
 social relations, which are largely influenced by sel- 
 fish and therefore anti-Christian considerations, but 
 at least we profess our belief in it, and that is a tre- 
 mendous change from the time when it had to over- 
 come and drive out another and widely different idea 
 as to what was truly admirable and to be aimed at in 
 character and conduct. 
 
 But, as I have just said, for a good while past 
 potent attempts have been made to overthrow the 
 Christian ethic and substitute another for it on the 
 ground that it is effete. The avowed object of 
 Nietzsche and others who thought with him on this, 
 however much they might disagree with him in other 
 things, was to destroy Christianity as a false moral- 
 ity — slave morality they called it. It is curious 
 to note what a reversion to type this was. Nietzsche 
 hated and despised Prussianism and yet was himself 
 made by it, for there is not the slightest doubt that 
 the Prussian spirit which has increasingly dominated 
 the German people for the last forty years was partly 
 created by and partly created the professors who 
 
ii2 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 have truculently preached it in the seminaries, and 
 instilled it in season and out of season into the rising 
 generation. History certainly does repeat itself in 
 some ways, and this is one of them. The successful 
 war of 1870 made the new-born German empire 
 drunk with the lust of power. Its militaristic temper 
 : — brutal, ruthless, domineering — was a recrudes- 
 cence of that of old Rome, the Rome of the invincible 
 war machine and the pagan philosophies; the sim- 
 ilarity is rather striking; the main difference is that 
 in modern Germany patriotism in the exclusive sense 
 has become a passion to which everything else must 
 be subordinated, whereas Rome, at least, aimed at 
 the idea of a world-citizenship. Otherwise we have 
 just the same worship of power and might, the same 
 lust of domination, the same ruthlessness in attain- 
 ing ends; and then, of course, in both cases we have 
 the philosopher coming along to show that this hard, 
 grim, bloody-minded monster that had its foot on the 
 neck of the human race represented something 
 stronger, greater, more desirable from the ethical 
 point of view and every other point of view than 
 what it was seeking to supersede. Morality, the 
 professor assures us, as we have hitherto understood 
 it is but a device of the weak to protect themselves 
 against the strong; and he insists upon the necessity 
 for a new morality, the morality of German Kultur 
 and the mailed fist, the morality of the terrible 
 " blonde beast." We have seen it at work in the 
 
RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 113 
 
 last eighteen months and know its fruits. Here is 
 its genesis — a triumphal war, a consequent State 
 policy consistently carried out, and then the elevation 
 of the cult of nationalism and brute violence into a 
 religion. True, the name Christian is retained for it, 
 but it is not Christianity at all; it is Paganism re- 
 vived. If Germany were to win this war Chris- 
 tianity would be trampled in the dust and anti-Christ 
 enthroned. The slave-morality would have gone 
 under, Nietzsche or no Nietzsche; his main conten- 
 tion would be justified. 
 
 Nevertheless we must admit that such a state of 
 things could not have arisen without the co-operation 
 of the rest of Christendom to some extent. We are 
 all in it more or less. Ever since the marvellous and 
 comparatively sudden forward leap of natural sci- 
 ence in the nineteenth century, practically the whole 
 civilised world has been feverishly busy exploiting 
 our hitherto unknown material sources. There is 
 no harm in that, to be sure, seen in its propel propor- 
 tion, but, unfortunately, that is what has been lack- 
 ing. Alfred Russel Wallace says that from the ma- 
 terial point of view civilisation made more progress 
 in the latter half of the nineteenth century than in the 
 two thousand years preceding. What more likely 
 than that men should come to be so preoccupied with 
 considerations of material good as to forget for a 
 time that there was any other kind of good? Peo- 
 ple always tend to become like their pursuits, and the 
 
ii4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 practical materialism of the past fifty or sixty years 
 has gradually developed a type of man who is, to 
 use E. A. Abbott's term, " indisposed " towards re- 
 ligion. He does not fight it, does not definitely re- 
 ject it, he simply becomes indifferent to it; he has no 
 use for it. This is not because he is cleverer than 
 his forefathers, far otherwise; it is that he has de- 
 veloped another kind of a mind, a mind that is taken 
 up with the things of this world, that dwells mainly on 
 the outside of life. It is not even that we have gone 
 backwards in our moral standards nor that the vicious 
 perversion of moral ideals which we have noted in 
 the case of Germany has had very much vogue with 
 us. Moral standards are always changing, or at 
 least changing their stresses. The morality of one 
 generation is not quite that of another; still less is 
 the morality of one race that of another. It is a 
 moot point, indeed, whether morality could not exist 
 without religion. To have a human society at all 
 we must have a morality of some sort; if every man 
 were a law unto himself society would not hold to- 
 gether. And in commercial countries like our own 
 the virtues emphasised will naturally be those which 
 tend to the increase and conservation of property, 
 as being able to place reliance upon a man's word 
 and the like. " Integrity " is a favourite excellence 
 in the character of a successful industrial or com- 
 mercial magnate. In other and less prosperous coun- 
 tries, such as the southern districts of Europe, this 
 
RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 115 
 
 is seldom so marked, and stay-at-home British Phil- 
 istines are apt to be shocked when they hear that the 
 Spaniard or Neapolitan has less regard for the truth 
 than they and is quite without " integrity." It does 
 not occur to them, perhaps, that their own integrity 
 and truthfulness are consistent with a good deal of 
 moral blindness in the matter of social justice. Per- 
 haps a future generation will ask with amazement 
 how it ever came to be thought that the possession 
 of vast wealth and luxurious habits of living were 
 consistent with a profession of Christianity while 
 slums and rags remained. It has been truly said 
 that the laws of England attribute more importance 
 to offences against property than to those against the 
 person, while in the Romance countries it is almost 
 the reverse. If we could get outside our world al- 
 together and view it from some totally different en- 
 vironment we should see at once that we have long 
 been so obsessed by materialistic conceptions as to 
 have lost consciousness of the fact; we simply take for 
 granted that the practical things of life are those 
 which relate to material values, and the practical 
 man the man of sound judgment upon material prob- 
 lems, whereas, surely, it should be just the other way 
 round. The truly practical man is the man who has 
 some idea as to what life is for, and who knows that 
 the pursuit of material objects as ends in themselves 
 starves and enervates the soul. 
 
 This is the real secret of the falling away in regard 
 
n6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 to religion which has been noticeable throughout 
 Europe and America for such a long time. We have 
 been growing a wrong type of mind, a type whose 
 tendency is to think and feel in terms of material 
 good and that alone, and to assume almost without 
 question that the only real kind of good is that which 
 directly or indirectly pertains to the body and its 
 needs. There is not a pin to choose between the rich 
 and the poor in this respect; the one has what the 
 other wants, and that is about all. And it is this 
 invincible prepossession which has made the war. 
 The war is a clash of spiritual ideals, it is true, but 
 if Germany had not been convinced that it was a 
 thing supremely desirable to despoil other nations of 
 their material possessions she would not have armed 
 to do it, and we on our part would not have armed to 
 resist her. How far we are right or wrong to re- 
 sist her I will not now discuss. Suffice it to say with 
 Mr. Norman Angell that there is nothing now to be 
 done but to smash Prussianism; let us do that first, 
 and then perhaps we shall get a chance to rebuild 
 civilisation on a safer plan. For what is happening 
 now is the inevitable outcome of the ideals by which 
 we have all been living. Holding, as we have done, 
 that the more of this world's goods we could heap 
 together the better, and that physical well-being was 
 the first of all considerations, no wonder we fight to 
 get and keep. Germany has but outdistanced the 
 rest of us in this view of life and its meaning. And 
 
RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 117 
 
 by the law of the good God all this has recoiled on 
 itself and is destroying itself, as it always must in the 
 end. Matter is but the sacrament of spirit, the in- 
 strument of the soul's probation; if its spiritual use 
 be lost sight of or degraded the result is chaos and 
 suffering till we learn our lesson better. And with 
 all its horrors the war has taught us that the ordinary 
 man knows perfectly well when driven back upon it 
 that there are things better worth living and dying 
 for than can be measured and weighed in material 
 symbols. The men who are fighting our battles to- 
 day have got up to this level, and it is hardly to be 
 supposed that they will entirely come down from 
 it when the war is over. It is not Christianity that 
 has failed, but ourselves, and we have got to get back 
 to first principles and endeavour once more to under- 
 stand and, what is much harder, to obey our Master's 
 precepts concerning life and its potentialities. 
 
 It is to me inconceivable that mankind at large 
 should ever cease from taking interest in the spir- 
 itual background of life ; as well expect it to descend 
 to the level of the beasts of the field. I use the word 
 spiritual in a wide sense to denote all the higher as- 
 pects of life — our loves, fellowships, mutual affini- 
 ties, social joys, lofty emotions, yearnings, aspira- 
 tions, wonderments. Is there anything that so com- 
 pletely differentiates us from the brutes as the faculty 
 of wonder? Man is the animal with the upward 
 look. Think of what music means in the enlarge- 
 
n8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 ment of our spiritual horizons, think of all the poetry 
 and the painter's art, all the works of imagination 
 that are the common possession of the race, and then 
 ask whether it is possible to divorce these for long 
 from their true setting in the worship of the Creator. 
 The possession of a spiritual nature implies religion, 
 and religion we must have, not only as the sanction 
 of all that we feel to be great, good, and beautiful 
 in our total experience, but as the very soul thereof. 
 It is often maintained that the artistic temperament 
 can exist without religion, just as morals can and do; 
 but the answer to that is that neither of them ever 
 really does. The artistic temperament can wallow 
 in sensuality, but it is bound to feel the thrill of tran- 
 scendental mysteries or it would not be itself; beauty 
 is the eternal thrusting through into the temporal, 
 and always elusive; he who sees beauty sees God, 
 though in a glass darkly. And there is a point be- 
 yond which all mere utilitarianism in morals gives 
 way to a passion for the ideal which loses itself in 
 the skies; ethics may begin in the necessity for fram- 
 ing rules to enable human beings to rub along to- 
 gether, but soon get beyond that and rise into a region 
 where the individual conscience may have to defy 
 the whole of society in the name of a higher than 
 any merely human law; God stands revealed in the 
 very thought of an ideal right towards which to as- 
 pire. As Browning has it in the " Guardian 
 Angel " — 
 
RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 119 
 
 "O World, as God has made it! All is beauty: 
 And knowing this is love, and love is duty. 
 What further may be sought for or declared?" 
 
 What men are learning on the battlefields of Europe 
 of the glory of sacrifice and its mystical potencies is 
 drawing them back to God by way of the cross of 
 Christ; our vulgar, blatant, worldly, commercial, 
 pleasure-loving age is seeing meanings in that cross 
 it never saw before, and getting rid of many delu- 
 sions in the process. We are being saved as by fire. 
 Let us recover the simplicities of life and we recover 
 faith. We are re-learning the old, old lesson that 
 man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word 
 that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. We are 
 realising almost with the surprise of a new discovery 
 that not what we have but what we are is the secret 
 of blessedness or wretchedness, that there is nothing 
 to mourn over but the evil in our own hearts, and that 
 death, however sad and dreadful its accompani- 
 ments, is but the prelude to vaster ventures of the 
 soul and unimaginable joys. Nothing can be killed 
 that is worthy to be kept alive or essential to our 
 highest well-being here or hereafter. 
 
 If I had my time to come over again I should with 
 even greater earnestness try to put first things first. 
 The spiritual is not the social any more than it is 
 the intellectual; these derive from it but are not it- 
 self, and if made a substitute for it can but issue in 
 disillusionment. I should fight for social justice with 
 
120 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 all my might and main, for the abolition of caste 
 privilege, grinding poverty, and the all-round ugli- 
 fication of life by greed and covetousness. But I 
 should know that to try to make men good and happy 
 by giving them a perfect environment would be hope- 
 less taken by itself. Quicken the spiritual conscious- 
 ness, the sense of God, and we shall solve the social 
 problem too ; I have no confidence in any other solu- 
 tion. The best friends of the working man have 
 seen that long ago; was it not Mr. Philip Snowden 
 who said that we should never get the Socialised 
 State till we had trained all classes to think and feel 
 socially? — and what is that but to say that what 
 we need is a Church-State, a State which realises it- 
 self the Body of Christ and its citizens members one 
 of another? We are that already, but we don't 
 know it, hence all our troubles. And if Germany, 
 by preaching one idea persistently and thoroughly 
 for forty years could create a general consciousness 
 of national solidarity for predatory purposes, cannot 
 servants of Christ everywhere begin to work with 
 consecrated determination to create a general con- 
 sciousness of spiritual solidarity which will destroy 
 all the forces of harm and hate, and superimpose the 
 Kingdom of God upon the ruins of the materialistic 
 civilisation which is now perishing in smoke and 
 flame? There is nothing the matter with the world 
 but wickedness, and wickedness, as some of the Alex- 
 andrian Fathers would have said, is at bottom noth- 
 
RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 121 
 
 ing but ignorance. If we only knew our true interest 
 no man would ever dream of trying to exploit his 
 neighbour. 
 
 So to those who fear for the future of the Chris- 
 tian religion I would say, Trouble not yourselves ; it 
 is not Christianity that has failed, but Christians. 
 All talk about Christianity being on its trial and the 
 like is sheer nonsense; it has never been on its trial; 
 it is about time it was. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said 
 from my pulpit that there had never been more than 
 one real Christian and that the world crucified Him. 
 Some time after the war started he is reported to 
 have said also in reply to a question as to what would 
 be the best course to follow when peace returned, 
 that he hoped the nations might be persuaded to try 
 Christianity for a change. Individuals have tried 
 Christianity with a certain amount of success : society 
 never. Where, then, is the use of charging a rule 
 of life with having proved inadequate to human needs 
 when it has never had the chance of showing itself 
 equal to them ? And who can doubt that it is equal 
 to them, and more than equal ? The one certain cure 
 for all our ills would be to get men to live, as John 
 Stuart Mill said, so that Jesus Christ would approve 
 their life. If that could be done little else would re- 
 main to be done, for we should have the disposition 
 to get together and help to bear one another's 
 burdens instead of adding to them, and that would 
 soon solve all our problems. And the curious thing 
 
122 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 is that there is in every one of us something that can 
 be appealed to along this line already. I think it 
 would be no exaggeration to say that the two strong- 
 est tendencies in human nature are absolutely anti- 
 thetical — namely, the tendency towards self-preser- 
 vation and the tendency towards self-sacrifice. Call 
 for either and you will usually get it according to the 
 plane on which you issue your summons. The very 
 same men who will do mean and selfish things in the 
 ordinary way of business will spring to arms and fling 
 their lives away in the hour of their country's need, 
 as we are now seeing. This impulse to self-immola- 
 tion in presence of a great impersonal ideal, of some- 
 thing we feel has the right to demand our uttermost, 
 is the very basic principle of the Christian gospel. 
 Until it can be eradicated from the human heart there 
 can be no question of dethroning Him whose very 
 name is the synonym for self-sacrificing love and in 
 whose pierced hand is the sceptre of omnipotence. 
 May this sombre season in a blood-drenched world 
 find us prostrate at His feet. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 NOEL AT THE FRONT 
 
 How many people realise, I wonder, that there are 
 two New Year's days in the calendar, one in Janu- 
 ary and one in December? But it is so. Christmas 
 Day is really the beginning of a new year, or was or- 
 iginally intended to be such, so perhaps Scottish folk, 
 with their characteristic consistency and economy of 
 time and other things, have wisdom on their side 
 in refusing to celebrate two, and therefore confine 
 themselves to the first of January only. I don't 
 know how it happens that we have the two within a 
 week of each other, though I daresay one could soon 
 find out. The history of the calendar is an interest- 
 ing and intricate study. The beginning of the year 
 has been fixed in nearly every month of the twelve 
 by one nation or another, but why the civilised world 
 has finally settled upon two separate dates for the 
 event, one ecclesiastical and the other legal, I am not 
 aware. 
 
 No one knows the day on which Christ was born. 
 The great world paid no heed at the time; it was a 
 lowly birth unaccompanied by earthly recognition 
 and display; though doubtless there was stir enough 
 about it in heaven, and, as is said to have been the 
 
 123 
 
124 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 case with other notable though far less important 
 nativities, certain portents and intimations were al- 
 lowed to break through to this side for those who had 
 eyes to see and ears to hear. But when, generations 
 later, the Church was making her way in the world 
 and aiming to present her great mysteries to the 
 various races who were coming under her sway, she 
 in her turn, and very wisely, had to adapt and assim- 
 ilate a good deal. She found a good many old-world 
 customs and institutions she was willing to let stand, 
 even when they bore a quasi-religious character. 
 Thus the shrines of local pagan deities were often 
 reconsecrated and associated with the name of some 
 Christian saint. The people of the neighbourhood 
 could still continue to worship there as they had al- 
 ways been accustomed to do; if miracles of healing 
 had taken place on the spot, as some devoutly be- 
 lieved, there was no reason why they should not go 
 on taking place even more liberally under Christian 
 auspices. These transformations must have pro- 
 ceeded very extensively ; there are traces of them even 
 in our own country and still more in Ireland. Pro- 
 fessor T. R. Gloves says, in his Conflict of Religions 
 in the Early Roman Empire, that there is plenty of 
 evidence that in southern Italy and elsewhere many of 
 the shrines of the Madonna are only those of Isis 
 re-named. Be that as it may, there can be no ques- 
 tion about the great Christian festivals; there are 
 
NOEL AT THE FRONT 125 
 
 ancient cosmic anniversaries, relics of nature worship, 
 taken over and spiritualised, given a new and higher 
 meaning and value. Christmas starts the series; it 
 represents the new birth of the sun after the winter 
 solstice. We reach the shortest day about the 20th 
 of December, the days on which the hours of light 
 are fewest and those of darkness are at their max- 
 imum. Then follow three or four days during which 
 this proportion remains practically unchanged; but 
 on the 25th the sun rises a little earlier than hereto- 
 fore, and thereafter goes on rising earlier each day 
 till midsummer is reached, the amount of light in the 
 world increasing all the time, day by day, without in- 
 termission save at the next solstice. Were not our 
 ecclesiastical fathers right in seeing in this a felicitous 
 figure of the coming of Christ into the world? 
 What better day could have been chosen on which to 
 celebrate the birth of Him who is to all ages the 
 Light of the World than what we now know as 
 Christmas Day? For, although only heaven knew 
 it at the time, there did come a new inpouring of 
 divine light into the dark places of the earth on the 
 particular day, whenever it was, that Mary's child 
 first lay within her arms; something broke through 
 from the transcendental world into human life that 
 had never been here before, and from that day to 
 this the light has grown and broadened, with here 
 and there a solstice or a temporarily darkened sky, 
 
126 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 and will go on increasing till we reach the perfect 
 day. The first Christmas Day was the beginning 
 of the world's new year. 
 
 Horticulturists tell me that if our ears were quick 
 enough to hear it we should know when the miracle 
 of the new year takes place; it must inevitably be on 
 or about Christmas Day. Vegetation has reached 
 its nadir when things are at their darkest; it is not 
 cold as much as darkness that forbids growth and 
 movement, as witness the snowdrops. Away, deep 
 down in the earth, the roots and tendrils hide, 
 shrivelled, inert, asleep. On Christmas Day the 
 change begins; a new ray has found its way right 
 down through sodden soil and dead leaves and in- 
 carnated itself in the life beneath; it stays there; it 
 does not go back; and day by day more comes, and 
 yet more, and yet more, and a whispering tumult 
 begins everywhere underground, and in the trunks 
 of the trees, and creeps along the branches and the 
 twigs ; and a heaving, straining, swelling goes on and 
 on until the new life and the old break through to- 
 gether in the miracle of the springtime, and fields 
 and hedgerows become decked in sudden glory. The 
 beauty of bud and blossom, as of all the wealth of 
 nature's summer colouring, is only sunlight blending 
 with the flesh of flower and thorn. Is not this a 
 continual parable of the work of Him whose life is 
 the light of men? There are days even in the spring 
 when grim winter seems to have resumed his sway, 
 
NOEL AT THE FRONT 127 
 
 when buds and blossoms are destroyed in lavish 
 waste, when the fresh green leaves burn and wither 
 before the icy breath of the east wind; but it is never 
 really what it seems; life may perish for a moment, 
 but the light is still there and will prove the victor by 
 and by. 
 
 So, too, must it be with the world war. It is a 
 tempest that for the period of its rage seems to have 
 destroyed all our idealism, a wintry blast that has 
 torn up our fairest fabrics of optimism by the roots; 
 but the silent light is steadily at work all the same 
 within and beneath the far-spread chaos and destruc- 
 tion, perhaps even to some extent by means of it; 
 Christ is coming to His own in the ruin of projects 
 and objectives incompatible with it. A terrific shak- 
 ing is going on in the world of visible values; but 
 where is it stated on divine authority that the King- 
 dom of God would come without such? Nowhere 
 that I know of — on the contrary. " He hath prom- 
 ised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth 
 only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once 
 more, signifieth the removing of those things that 
 are shaken, as of things that are made, that those 
 things which cannot be shaken may remain." 
 
 My friend the corporal was in a talkative mood 
 the other morning. We were sheltering together 
 under the flap of a hospital tent, one of those big, 
 elaborate erections originally constructed for the 
 Coronation Durbar at Delhi (so I am told) , and now 
 
128 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 very sensibly made use of at the seat of war for the 
 housing of our wounded. The rain was coming 
 down in sheets, and everywhere around us the camp 
 surface was like a muddy lake bubbling and seething 
 with the violence of the deluge. When the rain 
 stopped — if it ever did stop — the surface flood 
 would clear off and the good old mud would appear 
 again, seven pounds to each boot as we splashed and 
 floundered through it. Rain! I have never seen 
 such rain outside the tropics, and it seemed tireless. 
 Day after day it went on almost without intermission, 
 but on the present occasion it excelled itself and I was 
 wondering somewhat ruefully how I should get to my 
 own quarters without being thoroughly drenched for 
 the second time that morning. 
 
 " Nice cheerful weather, ain't it? " remarked the 
 corporal serenely. Nothing ever puts the corporal 
 out of countenance, I may observe. " Reg'lar 
 Christmas weather this," he went on without waiting 
 for any reply. " The only kind of Christmas 
 weather we ever see nowadays, blowed if it ain't. 
 But if they ever tell me again that Old England is 
 the only place where we get it I'll tell them they're 
 deluded. We've took a little trip abroad a-purpose 
 to find out, and we know sure-/y. 
 
 " Reminds me of last Christmas," he continued in 
 
 a reminiscent tone. " I was up at B then, and 
 
 we had the Saxons opposite to us, not much more 
 than fifty yards away. They didn't like the rain 
 
NOEL AT THE FRONT 129 
 
 no more than we did, you bet; and they stuck as close 
 to their dug-outs as they could; so did we except 
 for necessary look-out duty. On Christmas Eve we 
 started singing a few Christmas ditties. There was 
 a big Yorkshireman in my company with a voice it 
 was a treat to 'ear, and he sung, ' Once in royal Da- 
 vid's City,' ' Christians, Awake,' ' O come, all ye 
 faithful,' and things like that, and the rest of us 
 joined in as well as we could. And then — would 
 you believe it? — we heard the same tunes coming 
 from the German trenches. They were singing 'em, 
 too, by all that's good. They knew them tunes, 
 every one of 'em — not the words, of course; they 
 had different words, words of their own that sounded 
 like a mixture of Welsh and Aberdeen, but the tunes 
 were all right. After a bit, during a pause in the 
 double performance, one of 'em gets up on their 
 parapet and shouts : ' You English ! Oh, you Eng- 
 lish! Speak, you English! We are coming over.' 
 We weren't having any for a long time, and stood 
 at the ready for fear of treachery. But they kept 
 on with their funny cry, ' You English ! ' And at 
 last our sergeant says, * Well,' he says, * what d'ye 
 want? ' c Christmas! ' they shouts. ' Let's have it 
 together, and no fighting.' As soon as we found they 
 meant it we caught on, and we had a bully time. 
 They were a great lot for singing, that lot were. 
 We visited them and they visited us; and we shared 
 up the provender as friendly as you please. 
 
130 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 " One of our chaps got plugged in the leg by a 
 sniper while he was taking a 'am across to their side 
 to exchange for something they'd got. They rushed 
 out and picked him up and carried him back to our 
 lines and apologised, saying the sniper didn't know 
 about the truce. Then they went off at 'im — the 
 sniper, I mean — and brought 'im in, too, to explain 
 and shake hands with the man he'd plugged. And 
 we got more and more friendly after that, and mixed 
 up anyhow, till at last orders came from the officers 
 on both sides that the Christmas festivities had gone 
 on long enough and were to stop, for we were getting 
 into the new year, you see, and were making peace 
 all on our own, so to speak, without waiting for the 
 war to finish. 
 
 " But the Saxon fellows took a lot of stopping. 
 They didn't want to fight, not they. In the end, to 
 get rid of 'em we had to carry 'em one by one, a leg 
 and a wing, back to their own trenches and dump 
 'em in. And they weren't all drunk either! No 
 sooner had the dumping party got back to our lines 
 than a German officer jumps up and sits down on the 
 parapet of theirs with his back towards us. ' Get 
 down,' we shouted, but he took no notice. We kept 
 on telling him to get down or we'd have to shoot, but 
 still he took no notice. After a while we fired over 
 his 'ead to frighten 'im. But, bless you, he didn't go 
 then, and what do you think he did? 'E turns 'is 
 'ead over 'is shoulder without shifting 'is position, 
 
NOEL AT THE FRONT 131 
 
 and 'e says, smiling like, c Oh, you English, you think 
 to frighten me. But I know I am safer with my back 
 to you than if I turned my face.' 
 
 " What could we do? We couldn't kill the man, 
 so we just had to let him be. 
 
 " The Saxons were moved soon after that, but 
 before they went they told us that if Prussians were 
 coming in their place they would signal to let us 
 know. And they did. They put a board up, and 
 all it said on it was ' Look out.' And we understood. 
 The Prussians didn't try any of the brotherly love 
 business. But ain't it wonderful what Christmas 
 will do?" 
 
 It is wonderful, indeed. The birthday of the 
 Prince of Peace is being celebrated this year as last 
 amid the terrors of a world-war, but it is still a po- 
 tent fact, nevertheless. All that is tender and 
 gracious in human feeling seems to cluster round it 
 and to become indissolubly associated with it. The 
 spirit of the Christ-Child who was born in a stable 
 and cradled in a manger will yet show itself stronger 
 than Kaiserism and all its works. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt is reported as saying that morally 
 civilisation has gained nothing since the Napoleonic 
 wars. We are as predatory as ever and as ruthless. 
 The law of the jungle is still stronger than the Golden 
 Rule in the relations of states and individuals to all 
 appearance. 
 
 Well, it may be so. It would be difficult to prove 
 
132 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 either way. What we have gained in one direction 
 we may have lost in another, and vice versa. But 
 my own experience is — and everything I have seen 
 in the war zone only goes to confirm it — that the 
 mightiest force in human affairs to-day is that which 
 the Christmas festival celebrates. If, on the one 
 hand, we are shocked and startled at the savage de- 
 pravity of German military methods, we can but 
 stand amazed, on the other, at the wealth of simple 
 kindness that abounds, conjoined to the most heroic 
 self-sacrifice. 
 
 For what a kindly creature Tommy is, with not a 
 trace of vindictiveness in his composition. And he 
 is a good deal of a sentimentalist too, one is sur- 
 prised to find. Again and again I have been struck 
 by the fact that in camp concerts the song that strikes 
 the human note, the note of simple, homely joys, 
 of heart's affection and loyalty, is the one most 
 rapturously received. He is not particular, as a 
 rule, to what Church you belong, or whether you be- 
 long to any Church at all, but you must not make 
 light of the name of Christ. " Hark, the Herald 
 Angels Sing " will be sung with a will at many a point 
 on the firing-line this Christmas, and Tommy will be 
 conscious of no incongruity in the strange conjunc- 
 tion of experiences. He will be thinking of home 
 and bright eyes and Christmas cheer, and in his mind 
 these realities will be bound up somehow with the 
 greatest miracle of all ages, the birth of Mary's child 
 
NOEL AT THE FRONT 133 
 
 whose fuller advent by and by is to put an end to war 
 forever. 
 
 Among the patients I visited in hospital this week 
 was a rubicund young chap who had come in with 
 " trench feet," as they are only too accurately called. 
 Imagine what it must be to fight up to your waist in 
 water, especially if the water freezes in your boots. 
 I have seen some ugly results from this, but we will 
 not discuss them. This boy of mine had got the 
 complaint badly and must have been in much pain, 
 but, as usual, he was ready to make the best of it. 
 " I never saw my boots for three months," he re- 
 marked with pardonable exaggeration. " They 
 were never out of the mud, I quite forgot I had any 
 feet, and was very surprised when they turned up 
 again yesterday." Brave, light-hearted lad! He 
 had no prospect of going home for Christmas, but 
 was eagerly looking forward to the Christmas jolli- 
 ties that were being prepared on the spot. They are 
 to have a Christmas tree there, I understand, with 
 a thousand gifts on it. What a Christmas tree! 
 Kind friends at home sent me out packages which 
 went a long way towards furnishing it, but I shall 
 not be able to stay to see it up as I should dearly like 
 to do. 
 
 They are to have Holy Communion in the ward 
 on Christmas morning, and then there is to be a 
 day of such brightness and delight as generous hearts 
 in England and equally generous hearts here can fur- 
 
134 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 nish. A French military band is coming in to play 
 to them — to play their own Christmas hymns if you 
 please — and a great deal more besides. God bless 
 the chaplains, doctors, nurses, and all others who are 
 contributing in any way to make up to these heroes 
 for what they lose at Christmastime through having 
 to be absent from home, fighting our battles in a 
 foreign land. 
 
 And a fine thing this boy with the trench feet has 
 just told me. The Germans made desperate counter- 
 attacks at Loos to try to regain the trenches our men 
 had won from them. They failed, but the struggle 
 was terrible while it lasted. Again and again they 
 were thrown back with appalling loss, and, said my 
 young informant, " one of our sergeants started 
 the song, and every time we hurled the enemy off we 
 sang with all our might, ' Keep the home fires burn- 
 ing.' " 
 
 It brings a lump to one's throat to hear testimony 
 like this. Mr. Roosevelt is a healthy-minded man 
 if there be one on this planet, and he knows that 
 humanity's real gains are never to be measured by 
 immunity from catastrophe, neither is its good de- 
 stroyed by the impact of disaster in outward things. 
 It simply is not true to say, as is so often done just 
 now, that the war has either thrown us back morally 
 or shown that any previous advance under Christian 
 influences was only illusory. The world was a worse 
 world, a more selfish and sordid world, before the 
 
NOEL AT THE FRONT 135 
 
 war began than it is to-day. This is not to praise 
 the war. One does not praise the fever that reveals 
 the filthiness a man had in his blood when he thought 
 he was well. When you are tempted to sigh over the 
 failure of the promise associated with the advent of 
 the Prince of Peace nearly two millenniums ago, for- 
 bear. It is no failure but a probation. 
 It is Mr. Chesterson who sings — 
 
 "The day is ours till sunset, 
 Holly, and fire, and snow, 
 And the name of our dead brother 
 Who loved us long ago " ? 
 
 The sentiment is receiving strange exemplification 
 in the war zone at this advent season. One hears 
 weird and moving stories which all point to the same 
 thing — namely, that the veil between seen and un- 
 seen is getting thinner and the thought of the Christ- 
 child more intense. Men are believing in the mystic 
 significance of Yuletide who never paid much heed 
 to it before save in the matter of bacchanalian riot. 
 What is it they whisper to each other about the White 
 Comrade who is seen passing over the field of bat- 
 tle and where He treads is peace and easing of agony 
 to the stricken? It may be fancy, and it may not. 
 Heaven is but a thought away even from the deepest 
 depths of hell. Men fresh from the trenches tell me 
 of the miraculous preservation of sacred emblems 
 under shell-fire. A church will be shattered to pieces 
 and the life-size Christus over the high altar left 
 
136 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 standing intact. The very glass and wire protection 
 outside the shrine which encloses the image of the 
 Virgin Mother and her Babe will be shivered into 
 dust and the divine figures sustain no injury. Even 
 an altar will be torn to fragments and the Blessed 
 Sacrament left inviolate. 
 
 Are these tales true or the product of excited im- 
 agination? I know not, but they come from many 
 quarters. Why should marble forms and features 
 of painted wood be miraculously preserved when flesh 
 and bone are rent and crushed? Again, I know not; 
 may it be as a testimony that the tornado of human 
 passion has no power to imperil aught that pertains 
 to eternity? A group of soldiers, the sole survivors 
 of a regiment, tell me they saw not long ago a church 
 ablaze during a fierce engagement in the middle of 
 the night. In the graveyard adjoining was a gi- 
 gantic crucifix, and as the flames leaped up from the 
 burning edifice it seemed to the awe-stricken watchers 
 as though the white body upon the cross came to life 
 and pointed with majestic hand away beyond the 
 hell of man's making to where the gentle dawn was 
 pressing through the eastern sky. It was a quasi- 
 supernatural reminder that the ruin wrought by 
 earthly evil reaches not so very far. 
 
 11 Ah, m'sieu," said a Walloon peasant, " you see 
 not the wonder of the Child-God. You are too 
 busy, m'sieu, and too safe, n'est ce pas? No one 
 
NOEL AT THE FRONT 137 
 
 sees that wonder till he is prepared to die like the 
 crucified, and then he knows assuredly that nothing 
 holy can be killed, and that the royal Babe reigns even 
 in the midst of strife and trouble, see you. Our good 
 cure saw Him after midnight mass last Christmas 
 Eve, vraiment. There was no church, m'sieu, no 
 church left. The Boches had burnt it, and there 
 were only blackened walls ; and the altar — helas ! — 
 the swine had made a table of it, and ate and drank 
 and profaned the name of the Bon Dieu. But the 
 good father he said his mass for the living and the 
 dead out yonder in the snow just the same. And 
 then he saw Him — oh, believe me, yes — he saw 
 Him on His throne above where the altar stood, and 
 a shining crown upon His head, and His little hand 
 uplift to bless, and before Him knelt all the dead of 
 our village, m'sieu — my brothers Jean, Pierre, and 
 my uncle, the sacristan whom they had stabbed in the 
 doorway, yes. And the good sister, too, was there 
 whom they had desecrated and then murdered, the 
 sister who was the bride of Christ. And she smiled 
 with gladness, and they all looked, oh, so happy. 
 But you do not believe, m'sieu, for you are English 
 and a heretic. But no? " 
 
 It is all true, every word of it, whatever be the 
 symbolism in which the truth finds utterance. It 
 reminds one of the vision of Sir Galahad at the 
 sacring of the mass in his quest for the Holy Grail — 
 
138 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 11 1 saw the fiery face as of a child 
 That smote itself into the bread and -went." 
 
 But this was he, the pure of heart, who had also 
 heard the summons — 
 
 "O Galahad, and O Galahad, follow me." 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 RETROSPECT 
 
 Nearly a year and a half we have been at war now, 
 and the blood total is mounting up steadily and grief 
 and tears keeping pace with it. Once more we are 
 approaching the last hours of an old year, the year 
 in which it was confidently prophesied the war would 
 end and end in our favour. Who will dare assume 
 the role of prophet now? Looking forward is not 
 an exhilarating business, but we cannot help looking 
 back. Has there ever been a year like this in all our 
 history, a year so packed with misery and sorrow, a 
 year so heavy-laden with sinister portents for man- 
 kind at large? We can scarcely remember what the 
 world was like before the war, so drastically different 
 is the world of to-day; and yet we are compelled to 
 think of it — wistfully, remorsefully, sadly as the 
 case may be, but think of it we must. We did not 
 know then what we know now, nor had we visualised 
 what the future could bring as we are only too trag- 
 ically familiar with it now. It is a changed world, 
 and we are a changed people. 
 
 What have we learned in the grim period through 
 which we have passed and are passing still? Well, 
 for one thing we have had to realise that there are no 
 
 139 
 
i 4 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 short cuts to well-being. Was ever anything more 
 pitiful than the downfall of the hopes and dreams em- 
 bodied in the social legislation of a few years ago by 
 the Government whose chief representatives are still 
 in power? When I went to America in the autumn 
 of 191 1 it was the one thing audiences over there 
 wanted to hear about. England had inaugurated a 
 new era, they said, an era of prosperity, contentment 
 and justice for all. The rest of the nations would be 
 bound to follow, even America. " The most demo- 
 cratic country in the world to-day," declared the 
 chairman of one of my meetings in the middle west, 
 "is not the United States, but Great Britain; it is 
 giving a lead to all others in daring idealism, public 
 righteousness, and the development of the arts of 
 peace. We are watching with earnest and respectful 
 attention your numerous notable experiments in the 
 endeavour to evolve a brighter, happier, and nobler 
 social order. The day of privilege is over ; and inter- 
 national consciousness is dawning; and now, as many 
 times already, it is England that is leading the way 
 towards humanity's promised land." It made one's 
 heart beat quicker to hear all this about one's native 
 country from the lips of statesmen of another and 
 younger nation. How proud I was and how confi- 
 dent! I believed all this myself, believed it ardently 
 and without misgiving. Over and over again I 
 had to tell the story of the Great Budget and the 
 many economic reforms associated with the name of 
 
RETROSPECT 141 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George. And the questions that poured 
 in afterwards ! Whatever may have been thought in 
 England at the time, there is no doubt that in the 
 great Republic of the West our young Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer was popularly regarded as the Mes- 
 siah of a new kind of civilisation, a civilisation that 
 would get rid of the extremes of hopeless destitution 
 at one end of the social scale and heartless luxury at 
 the other, a civilisation whose chief note was to be the 
 pooling and organisation of our common resources 
 for the benefit of each and all — in a word, the chris- 
 tianising of human society. The shadow of militar- 
 ism was scarcely felt at all — in America — and only 
 occasionally made us uneasy over here. 
 
 Where has all that world of rosy visions gone to? 
 We recall the fierceness of the struggle over the 
 Parliament Act and the far-reaching social measures 
 that preceded and followed it, and we wonder what 
 we were raving about. Are we the people that 
 prated of revolution, civil war, and all the rest of it? 
 Was it, indeed, ever seriously contemplated to in- 
 voke military force to save the last remnants of 
 feudalism? Where are the fire-eaters now who used 
 to gabble in clubs about falling back on the army and 
 forcing a coup d'etat " to get rid of the junta that 
 for the time being had gained control of the legisla- 
 tive machine and the king's person " ? Where are 
 the financiers who raised the cry of panic at the bare 
 suggestion of having to pay into the Treasury a 
 
i 4 2 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 larger proportion of their unearned increment, or 
 the landowners who vociferated that they must go to 
 the wall if the exactions detailed in Form IV were 
 literally to be enforced? How they one and all 
 hated the little Welsh attorney! Where have they 
 all got to and their woes? O temporal O mores! 
 O human consistency ! Not a few of them are clam- 
 ouring for the little Welsh attorney to be made Prime 
 Minister. As Minister of Munitions he has lifted 
 more out of their pockets in a few weeks than in all 
 the years of his chancellorship, and they complain 
 not at all. But he on his part — I should like to 
 know what he thinks. The world was not ready for 
 his dream of the socialised state ; it was worth dream- 
 ing, but human nature was not ready for it. And we 
 had forgotten the Kaiser, or tried to think him only a 
 bogy. Now we know what we know, alas ! There 
 are no devices, no schemes of statesmanship that will 
 lift the race suddenly above its true moral level at 
 any given time. No system, no proposal, no machin- 
 ery will do it, nothing but effort, anguish, soul-purg- 
 ing; and even that we must endure one by one. We 
 gain more of what is best worth gaining by suffering 
 than by comfort. And our kingdom is not of this 
 world. 
 
 We have learned, further, what we knew before, 
 but did not care to dwell upon, that the chief feature 
 of human lot is its instability and undependableness. 
 As change takes place from day to day we do not 
 
 
RETROSPECT 143 
 
 realise this or we put it from us as an uncomfortable 
 thought. But when some cataclysm comes such as 
 this world war we are compelled to look facts in the 
 face and reckon accordingly. I know of a man who 
 had live fine sons. He was very proud of them, as 
 well he might be, and they thought a good deal of 
 him too. No one could observe the family without 
 taking note of the brightness and bonhomie of its 
 members with one another. The one grand set pur- 
 pose of the father's life was that of securing advance- 
 ment for his boys. It was not an unworthy motive 
 of action, and I do not suppose it ever entered his 
 mind that there was any likelihood of its remaining 
 unfulfilled unless something happened to himself per- 
 sonally, such as failure of health or premature death. 
 To-day he is alive and well and all those splendid 
 sons for whom he worked and planned lie in soldiers' 
 graves in Flanders. Who could have foreseen it; 
 and what is the man to do now who has thus, with 
 such appalling completeness, been deprived of the 
 light of his eyes and his one chief incentive to en- 
 deavour? Ah, if he were the only one! 
 
 But he is not the only one by many thousands. 
 We have all lost some one or something through the 
 war, and I should suppose there is hardly one among 
 us who has not lost a great deal. The number of 
 people who have lost practically everything, not only 
 their dearest but their substance, been utterly ruined, 
 in fact, by the sudden stoppage of their particular 
 
144 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 business, cannot be small. One wonders how many 
 of them had reckoned with it as a possibility before- 
 hand. And then the hold on life. What have such 
 people left to hold on to ? One must have something 
 to live for, something as a point for one's energies, 
 something to make effort seem worth while, or life 
 becomes a burden and a weariness, " goes disspirit- 
 edly, glad to finish.'' There must be many in this 
 mood at the present hour. A hurricane has swept 
 through their place of habitation, their little world of 
 hopes and dreams and customary duties, joys and sor- 
 rows, and left them standing alive in the midst of a 
 desert. How are they to begin again? Stripped 
 bare of all incentive to action, they discover, if they 
 never knew it before, that no man can live to him- 
 self alone ; the spice of life is in its relationships ; take 
 these away and it is over. I question if an absolutely 
 selfish life has been ever lived or could be; it would 
 be intolerable. Ours is a world of much kindness 
 and of but little gratitude. The people we love the 
 best are seldom those who have done the most for us; 
 more often it is those for whom we have done the 
 most. How frequently the cry of a mourner is that 
 what he or she misses most in the blank silence of 
 bereavement is the former joy of rendering service 
 to the one who is gone ! " He needed me so," they 
 will tell you ; " no one needs me now in the same way. 
 I keep on thinking I hear him call, or my foot is on 
 
RETROSPECT 145 
 
 the stairs to go to him, and then I remember that he 
 isn't there and never will be there any more." 
 
 No, life never will be again as it was yesterday; it 
 changes from hour to hour. If its livableness con- 
 sists only in the permanence of the experiences which 
 to-day seem to us to give it its chiefest value we are 
 doomed to unhappiness. They will not stay; they 
 are bound to go soon or late, swiftly or slowly. And 
 to some minds this is inexpressibly sad; it seems to 
 cheapen human nature so. Why, we ourselves 
 change with the passing of the years, change far 
 more radically than, perhaps, at all times we should 
 care to admit. Go back ten, twenty, thirty, fifty 
 years, and see how your outlook on life has altered 
 with them. The things you wanted, the people you 
 loved, the events that had power to cause you 
 pleasure or pain have all, or nearly all, undergone 
 drastic transformation. You may even be a little 
 ashamed of it. Are you the same person who longed 
 for a particular gratification so much that you were 
 almost prepared to cut your throat because you 
 couldn't get it? Yes, in very deed; would you like 
 to have it now? The chances are a thousand to one 
 that you would not. And deep though some trag- 
 edies through which you have passed have set their 
 mark upon you, you would not be honest if you did 
 not confess that time has made a difference. You 
 thought your heart was broken, and perhaps it was; 
 
146 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 you will never be quite the same man again; but you 
 were wrong when you thought that that was the end 
 of everything for you so far as this life is concerned; 
 you have done and suffered a good deal since, and 
 you will do and suffer more. You reproach your- 
 self, perhaps, that you could so easily forget. You 
 hate to think that a love which once absorbed your 
 whole soul and brought out the very best that was in 
 you could pass as the seasons pass and be no more 
 than a golden memory, more and more dreamlike as 
 year succeeds to year. But so it is; time is a won- 
 derful healer, and a still more wonderful magician, 
 weaving his spells of oblivion over the brightest 
 as over the darkest hours of the past. We may 
 wish it were not so, but it is. Life seems to roll 
 over us, as it were, without ever uniting us im- 
 movably to anything, good or bad, great or small. 
 I am the same person that I was five and forty years 
 ago; I have the feeling of identity, of unbroken con- 
 tinuity, though it would be hard to explain or justify 
 it in any intelligible fashion. I am sure I am the 
 same person, but nothing else is the same to my per- 
 ceptions to-day, either within me or without, that it 
 was then. Beautiful things, glorious things, wonder- 
 ful fellowships have come and gone ; can it really be 
 that they are as though they had never been ? Is the 
 very best and sweetest that can be lived or imagined 
 in the intercourse of soul with soul here on earth no 
 more than a mirage, a drifting cloud, a bubble on a 
 
RETROSPECT 147 
 
 stream? How the suggestion tends to lower their 
 worth! And the cynic smiles and says, Even so. 
 
 "Ah, ray beloved, fill the cup that clears 
 To-day of past regrets and future fears. 
 To-morrow? Why, to-morrow I may be 
 Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years." 
 
 Is that all? If it were I should have nothing to 
 write about, and all poetry and vision would be blot- 
 ted out of human hearts. It is the outside of life, 
 and that only, that is unstable and fleeting. The 
 very things that to us in an ordinary way seem most 
 solid and imperishable are the things that have the 
 seal of death upon them, whereas our spiritual re- 
 action to them, which seems so utterly ephemeral, is 
 everlasting. It is selves that are real, not worlds. 
 A child's glad cry at the sight of his father is a fact 
 which in its essence will outlast the solar system. It 
 is the brain that forgets, the soul never. You need 
 not be ashamed that your memories even of tender 
 and gracious things, things to which your heart is 
 ever loyal, grow dim with the passing of the years; 
 they have not failed nor diminished in intensity one 
 iota; it is the poor dying body that has failed and 
 overlaid them with dust and clay. Have you never 
 watched the miracle of the resurrection of buried 
 faculty in the dying? You will sometimes hear them 
 murmuring names you never knew; sometimes with 
 wide-open eyes and radiant face they appear to be 
 greeting persons you cannot see, as I truly believe 
 
i 4 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 they are. You will find them going back and back 
 even to childhood's happy hours and living them over 
 again with a peculiar gladness, gladness that ignores 
 nothing that lies between. Have you ever been close 
 to the great transition yourself? I have more than 
 once, and can bear witness that nothing is ever lost 
 or forgotten that has once been an authentic posses- 
 sion of the soul, and the pain with which we have 
 acquired it or parted from it for a season serves but 
 to give keener joy to its recovery. It is all there, 
 stored up in the subconscious deeps, and becomes 
 more than ever ours when the illusions of sense no 
 longer bar our apprehension of it. Thus to look 
 back is to look forward, but with the shadows gone. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 
 
 Some one nearly related to me once said that he 
 found it impossible to view the approach of a new- 
 year without some measure of misgiving. The cus- 
 tomary exchange of friendly greetings at this season 
 caused him a certain amount of unconfessed per- 
 turbation. He never could hear the words, " A 
 Happy New Year," without something akin to a 
 shiver of dread. He could not help wondering what 
 the new year had in store for the speaker and those 
 he addressed, and whether it might not contain more 
 sorrow than joy, be big with unforeseen catastrophe. 
 You may call this morbid, and so perhaps it was, 
 though the person I have in mind was not of morbid 
 temperament; but there was a good deal to justify 
 his attitude. Again and again he had noticed how 
 friends of his, full of cheery anticipation at the be- 
 ginning of a new year, had been visited by tragedy 
 before the end of it, how those well and strong had 
 uttered the ancient good wish to the weak and sickly 
 and themselves been cut down by the hand of death 
 within a few weeks or months, leaving the objects 
 of their solicitude to mourn their loss in utter deso- 
 lation. It was because of things like these, he said, 
 
 149 
 
150 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 that he rather shrank from giving or receiving the 
 conventional salutation, " A Happy New Year." 
 
 Many people will sympathise with him this year 
 who would not have done so before. We cannot 
 look forward lightheartedly after such a year of suf- 
 focating horror as that which has just closed. A 
 year which has witnessed the Lusitania infamy and 
 the massacre and rape of a million helpless Armen- 
 ians, to speak of nothing else, will stand out in the 
 annals of our time as one of peculiar darkness and 
 depravity. That theatrical potentate, the Kaiser, 
 who with the Junker caste deliberately made the war 
 to save his dynasty and their order from being over- 
 whelmed by the advancing forces of German democ- 
 racy, has been issuing directions to his public for a 
 sober observance of the season. There are to be no 
 festivities, no gaieties within Berlin court circles or 
 elsewhere that its influence extends. The War Lord 
 thinks it unfitting that at a time when the Fatherland 
 in particular and civilisation in general are enduring 
 such unspeakable calamities there should be any at- 
 tempt at merry-making — or, presumably, New Year 
 greetings on the old lines, unless " Gott strafe Eng- 
 land " can be considered such. He is full of pious 
 exhortations and apostrophes as usual, but what 
 about those slaughtered Armenians? They seem to 
 lie lightly on the Hohenzollern conscience; but God 
 is not mocked, and there will be a reckoning. Does 
 he see it coming, I wonder? We on our part have 
 
OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 151 
 
 now settled down to the war in grim earnest and 
 there is not much optimism about. Any fancies we 
 ever had as to a speedy termination of this bloody 
 struggle are over and done with, I should think. 
 We know now what we are up against, though it has 
 taken a long time to bring it home to us, and we are 
 beginning to have a truer conception of what it is go- 
 ing to cost us. The war, the war, the war — we can 
 think of little else, and we enter upon this new year 
 with less buoyancy, perhaps, but more determination 
 than last; less vapouring about the inevitable end, 
 and so forth, but with a quieter, sterner, more thor- 
 ough grasp of the whole situation and our wills set to 
 see it through. That is all we can say; we dare not 
 mortgage the future any more. Instead of wishing 
 each other a Happy New Year — there is no harm 
 in that, to be sure, but to many thousands of be- 
 reaved and sorrowing ones it would seem sadly out 
 of place — we shall wish, and doggedly wish, and 
 work, and sacrifice, and fight till our cruel foe is 
 broken and the world is once more free to betake 
 itself to happy laughter and song. The Germans 
 know this as well as we, hence their frenzied hatred 
 of us. Careful neutral observers tell us that their 
 new hate, which we might call the 19 16 brand, is 
 born of fear, the fear which has replaced the old 
 contempt. They have learned by now that they mis- 
 understood us, underestimated us, saw us in a false 
 light. No wonder they did, however — we gave 
 
1 52 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 them every opportunity. Truly we are a curious 
 folk, or rather, most of my readers are, for not be- 
 ing an Anglo-Saxon myself, I am sometimes as puz- 
 zled by your temperament as the foreign. Slow, 
 deficient in imagination, undisciplined, often muddle- 
 headed, fumbling and blundering his way along, 
 somehow the Englishman always gets there in the 
 end. It is his tenacity the enemy fears now ; he finds 
 it is there still, just as it was a thousand years ago. 
 John Bull will never give in; the worse things look 
 the more he will grip hold and keep hold till victory 
 is secured. In the process he will curse his own 
 leaders and everybody else, high and low, as no Ger- 
 man would ever dream of doing; he will wash his 
 dirty linen in public with utter obliviousness of the 
 consequences on the public mind of other nations, 
 friendly or unfriendly. He does not care what any- 
 body thinks of him ; it would be better if he did. For 
 a long time Germans believed that when English- 
 men angrily criticised those who had the direction 
 of the war, so far as our part in it is concerned, they 
 must be panic-stricken and almost at the point of 
 revolution. They know better now. They know 
 that that bulldog grasp on their throat is not coming 
 off till the menace of the mailed fist is forever de- 
 stroyed. Perhaps not all Germans know it even yet, 
 but the knowledge is spreading rapidly, and it will 
 not be possible much longer for official lies to hide 
 it from the mass of the people. 
 
OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 153 
 
 And then what will happen? I don't know; no- 
 body knows; but there are several things that may 
 happen. Is it possible that we may refuse to treat 
 with the Hohenzollerns at all? Will Germany have 
 to find another mouthpiece? Will the gagged and 
 silent multitude find its tongue? Will our arms set 
 Germany herself free? It would be a wonderful 
 result of the war if this should happen; it would 
 be a war of liberation indeed, far beyond the scope 
 of any statesman's forecast when it began. And 
 why not? As I have just said, there is small doubt 
 that one great reason why the Kaiser and the privi- 
 leged orders wished for war and provoked it was 
 because they foresaw that within the next ten years 
 social democracy in the Reichstag and in the empire 
 at large would be strong enough to dispossess them 
 and seize the reins of power. Like Napoleon III, 
 forty years ago, they saw that the only way to avert 
 this was to wage a successful war. And in this they 
 calculated rightly. If Germany were to win in the 
 present contest, the yoke of militarism, with all its 
 anti-popular, anti-liberty accompaniments, would be 
 riveted upon the necks of the German people more 
 firmly than ever. But they thought England would 
 keep out of it, or would be able to do little if she 
 came in, and there they calculated wrongly. It is the 
 cause of freedom and justice, as opposed to privilege 
 and brutal tyranny, that rests on our arms to-day. A 
 democratic Germany would not be a Germany to be 
 
154 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 dreaded by her neighbours, albeit a happier and more 
 prosperous Germany than that which entered upon 
 this conflict a year and a half ago. If Germany 
 could be made a republic there would be no more 
 fear of the violation of treaties and the menace of 
 militarism. That is our real way of escape from a 
 renewal of this wicked strife. Get rid of these mil- 
 itary monarchies and you get rid of war. Democ- 
 racies are never aggressive, history notwithstanding. 
 They were no true democracies that made the wars of 
 old. A Germany with the spirit of the United 
 States, not to speak of our own, which is a democ- 
 racy under monarchical forms, would be a Germany 
 at peace with all the world. With such a Germany 
 we could and would form a pact of comradeship at 
 once at the conclusion of the war. There would be 
 no reason why we should do otherwise, and I believe 
 no bitterness would survive between the two nations, 
 as it is almost certain to do if Kaiserism and the mili- 
 tary caste are left in the dominating position they 
 now hold. This is one great thing to hope for as an 
 outcome of the present terrible upheaval, a republi- 
 can Germany or Germany and Austria, a United 
 States of Middle Europe. In time we should all 
 become members of such a Federation; and even if 
 not we could almost afford to beat our swords into 
 plough-shares and our spears into pruning hooks. 
 Give us democratic control in the monarchically 
 
OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 155 
 
 ruled nations of the world and there will be no more 
 wars. 
 
 This would be a thing worth fighting for, and prob- 
 ably it is what Europe is fighting for without knowing 
 it. But we have got to win, and there must be no 
 slackening of the pace until we do win. If Germany 
 wins, the cause of humanity is lost for generations 
 to come. I was going to say the cause of free insti- 
 tutions would be lost, the cause which assumes in ev- 
 ery man a certain sovereignty, a certain value to the 
 whole as a responsible, self-directing unit. But it 
 is something much more serious than that. That, 
 taken by itself, has happened before. The Roman 
 empire — born of a republic, by the way — crushed 
 political freedom, interest, and initiative while allow- 
 ing the largest scope in other ways to the nations 
 under its sway; and it is at least an arguable propo- 
 sition that this was a benefit to mankind in the long 
 run, for the energy thus refused a political outlet 
 ran into other channels and enriched the spiritual 
 output of the world. But that would not be so now. 
 Germany's conception of Kultur forbids. It is a 
 tyranny over minds as well as bodies ; it forces every- 
 thing into the mould of intellectual efficiency for ma- 
 terialistic ends, and sacrifices all the finer sides of hu- 
 man nature to this monster of its own creating. The 
 educational system under which her unfortunate 
 youth are brought up presupposes that man is nothing 
 
156 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 but a brain and a body; the soul and its needs it ig- 
 nores. Civilisation as a whole has suffered not a 
 little from this danger. We have been measuring 
 all our good in material symbols, making a fetish of 
 progress, talking and acting as though we had no 
 goal of endeavour but that which is bounded by the 
 senses. Would to God that the world were poor, 
 and simple, and clean. When we speak about the 
 future do we ever stop to analyse what we mean? 
 What would it matter to the mother whose only son 
 lies buried in front of the German lines somewhere 
 in France that ages hence a saner, sweeter society 
 should live and grow on that same soil because he 
 shed his blood there? How will it comfort a grief- 
 stricken wife to be told that her husband was torn 
 in pieces out yonder in Gallipoli that the England 
 of a hundred years hence might be a happier, richer, 
 more contented England than the England of yester- 
 day? They would each demand to know, woman- 
 like, what there was to be as compensation for the 
 men who died to make this future possible, and what 
 in the way of comfort for their own stricken hearts 
 here and now. There is something to be said for 
 the Irishman who objected to working for posterity. 
 " What has posterity done for us?" was his not 
 unnatural inquiry. I say that every man whose 
 bones lie rotting in French or Belgian earth to-day 
 that England's future may be secured, must have a 
 place and a stake in the grand result or the price was 
 
OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 157 
 
 not worth paying. I look beneath all this agony 
 and beyond all that politicians give as the reasons for 
 it, and I see that it is a clash of ideals, a battle of 
 souls that is going on ; and in the long run that con- 
 cerns, not perishable flesh, but immortal spirit. 
 
 We are going to win. Be sure of it. We are 
 hearing much from our friends and our enemies 
 about our appalling mistakes and the frightful toll 
 they have exacted in human blood and anguish. We 
 have made them, beyond doubt, and the story that 
 will one day be told about them will be a terrible one, 
 amazing in the fatuity and utter incompetence it re- 
 veals on the part of men we trusted and believed in. 
 An officer remarked to me in France that if the whole 
 truth were known now regarding the crass stupidity 
 and gross negligence in high quarters which have 
 squandered thousands of precious lives there would 
 not be lamp-posts enough to go round on which to 
 hang the guilty parties. This may be so; but not all 
 the blunders have been on our side. The worst mis- 
 take of the whole war was perpetrated not by Eng- 
 land but by Germany. In those first few awful 
 weeks, when the German armies were sweeping 
 southward and westward bearing our brave boys be- 
 fore them, they had the greatest chance they are ever 
 going to have of concluding the war speedily in 
 their own favour — and they lost it. Paris was 
 to them like a bunch of carrots before a donkey's 
 nose. Their higher command was determined 
 
158 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 they should get there at all costs; so on they went 
 in their mad rush, lengthening out their lines 
 of communication, outstripping their transport, and 
 finally left short of ammunition and in imminent 
 danger of being cut off from their far-distant bases 
 by a flank attack. That was why the sudden 
 retreat took place which culminated in the battle 
 of the Marne and the protracted trench warfare 
 of the sixteen months that have followed. But note 
 this: If the German higher command had made 
 sure of the coast first they might, and probably 
 would, have had Paris at their mercy afterwards and 
 made our task immeasurably more difficult. Some 
 of those who ought to know have told me that every- 
 thing north of the Loire would have been in their 
 hands. What was there to stop them? Calais was 
 undefended; Boulogne was actually declared an open 
 town. They had only to walk in and take posses- 
 sion, and thus prevent us coming to the rescue ex- 
 cept by a much longer and far more dangerous route. 
 They did not do it, and have lost their chance for 
 ever. They have been fighting for Calais ever since, 
 and will never get it, nor Paris either. Say what you 
 will about the Dardanelles or the Balkans or what 
 not; nothing we have ever done or left undone is 
 comparable in its disastrous consequences to this 
 colossal failure of the much-vaunted German mil- 
 itary machine and its up-to-date scientific methods as 
 contrasted with our rough-and-tumble sort. We 
 
OUR NEW YEAR OUTLOOK 159 
 
 were not ready ; they were. France was caught nap- 
 ping; they knew it. And yet they collapsed. The 
 war was lost to Germany in the first three weeks. 
 Let us take comfort; all the fools are not in Eng- 
 land. We have nothing in our record as bad as that. 
 
 We have much to suffer yet, and perhaps for long 
 too — who knows? There are many more tears to 
 flow and many more hearts to break. God only 
 knows whether we can bear the strain for the full 
 period required for victory satisfying and complete. 
 But it is more a question of nerve than resources, 
 and I cannot imagine England's nerve giving way. 
 We have a righteous cause and a clear issue before 
 us, and these alone are assets of the greatest worth. 
 We give ourselves and our best beloved in the strife, 
 but we give both for an eternity in which every pang 
 turns to power and every sorrow is swallowed up in 
 joy. 
 
 So with a solemn yet cheerful confidence I wish 
 all who read these pages a Happy New Year — in 
 19 17 or may be later. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 WHAT IS HELL? 
 
 This is perhaps a strange subject for the pages of 
 a popular publication, but it is the editor's choice, 
 not mine ; and I presume he has his own reasons for 
 wishing to have it discussed at the present time. I 
 have more than once remarked from the pulpit that 
 there is no subject on which popular thought stands 
 in greater need of being clarified. Within the past 
 forty years or so there has been a marked tendency 
 towards the rejection of the ancient belief in hell as 
 a place or state of everlasting punishment for the 
 wicked after death or after the general judgment. 
 This change may be illustrated from the comparative 
 silence of the pulpit on the question. Indeed, I may 
 remark that the only time I have heard it mentioned 
 in the pulpit within recent years, except by myself 
 occasionally, was when Mr. Lloyd George spoke of 
 it in his memorable speech in the City Temple in the 
 autumn of 19 14. It was very impressively done too. 
 The Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he then was, 
 turned preacher for a few moments in his appeal to 
 all ranks and classes, and especially the young men, 
 to come forward and do their best for their country 
 in her hour of need. Would any man hang back 
 
 160 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 161 
 
 through fear of death? he asked. Death would 
 come to all soon or late, and then what? "After 
 death the Judgment," said the speaker in solemn 
 tones, amid the deep hush of the audience. " After 
 death the Judgment," he repeated. " If you have 
 failed in your duty, with what feelings will you look 
 forward to that?" It was a searching utterance, 
 gravely and weightily made, and all the more so as 
 coming not from a minister of religion but a states- 
 man. I wondered at the time what others thought 
 of it ; my own feeling was that such warnings ought 
 to be more frequently given in sermons and by the 
 printed page if only we knew how to do it effectively. 
 The revolt against the dogma of eternal torment as 
 popularly construed has gone too far. It has led to 
 a sort of vague indifference to the Last Things, as 
 they are called — namely, Death, Judgment, 
 Heaven, and Hell. I think it was Dr. George 
 Adam Smith, the present Principal of the University 
 of Aberdeen, who said some years ago that for a 
 considerable period the tide of general interest had 
 been steadily ebbing away from the shores of another 
 life. And this is, I think, very true, though the 
 causes of it are not wholly traceable to theological 
 sources. It is not the omission of this or that doc- 
 trine from our pulpit discourses that is mainly re- 
 sponsible for the alteration in outlook on the part of 
 the laity, but a far more complex set of factors of 
 which our increased absorption in material and 
 
*62 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 utilitarian concerns has been the chief. No doubt 
 preachers do refer now and then to the punishment 
 of sinners after death: I do not mean to say other- 
 wise ; but I should think any of them would admit that 
 they do it far less frequently, and with far less dra- 
 matic insistence than their predecessors of a genera- 
 tion or two back. At that and earlier periods the 
 language of preachers when describing the pains of 
 hell was often lurid and terrible in the extreme, and 
 must have made their hearers shudder with dread. 
 It would be no use employing that kind of language 
 now, for no one would be moved by it in the least. 
 Mr. Spurgeon was the last great preacher who 
 habitually went far in this direction, but his was only 
 a survival of the method of a race of mighty prophets 
 who could paint the evil-doer's doom with such force 
 as to work upon his fears and drive him to amend his 
 ways. It must have been an awful sermon which 
 caused the minister of a certain church to rise from 
 his seat when Jonathan Edwards was preaching, and 
 cry, with white and trembling lips, " Spare the peo- 
 ple; oh, sir, spare the people. " He would not need 
 to say it now. 
 
 In some degree this is due to humanitarian con- 
 siderations. It is almost universally felt that belief 
 in hell and belief in divine love are not mutually 
 compatible, especially if hell be unending. Even 
 divine justice is difficult to understand in such a con- 
 nection; for the worst sin that could be sinned hardly 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 163 
 
 seems to deserve, on human analogies, an eternity of 
 punishment. Then, too, we have come to think of 
 the object of punishment as remedial and not merely 
 vindictive. If our penal laws have not yet arrived 
 at this standpoint the public conscience has. Society, 
 in order to protect itself, has to inflict such penalties 
 upon criminals as will deter others from following 
 their example, but it cannot reasonably be held that 
 this motive would govern the actions of God. Most 
 people feel, and very naturally, that if God visits 
 wrongdoing with pain His object must be the good 
 of the transgressor and not the vindication of His 
 own dignity or the maintenance of His own security. 
 A God who merely tortures the damned without hope 
 of remission cannot, it is urged, or rather assumed, 
 be benevolent in any intelligible sense. As Tenny- 
 son puts it — 
 
 " Hell ? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been told, 
 The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn 
 
 for his gold, 
 And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you say, 
 His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish'd away." 
 
 It has further to be admitted that the traditional 
 doctrine about hell was shaped in an age when there 
 was less sympathy with human suffering and less 
 sensitiveness than now. I make this observation 
 with reserve, for we have had some sad disillusion- 
 ments on the point since the war began. But on the 
 whole it must be true. The late Sir James Paget is 
 reported to have said that the nervous organisation 
 
1 64 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 of the civilised man of to-day is so much finer and 
 more complex than that of the civilised man in the 
 western Europe of, say, the sixteenth century, that 
 there is no comparison in the amount of physical 
 pain they could respectively bear. No ordinary man, 
 he said, could stand the rack to-day for five minutes, 
 whereas refined and delicate ladies endured it in the 
 ages of persecution without flinching. I am afraid 
 that if I were put on the rack myself I should prob- 
 ably say anything my tormentors chose to put into 
 my mouth, unless I died first of sheer agony, but our 
 forefathers, Catholic and Protestant, were racked for 
 days on end without giving in. The periods when 
 the tortures of the Inquisition were possible, not 
 to speak of the burning of heretics at the stake, were 
 not periods when people in general could have felt 
 pity for sufferers as they do now. When I say now, 
 of course I mean in the case of the normal man or 
 woman in a country like our own. A friend of mine, 
 a distinguished surgeon, tells me he has seen a navvy 
 brought into hospital with a great gash in his neck 
 and shoulder caused by an accident, and while it was 
 being stitched up — the subject refusing an anaes- 
 thetic — he maintained an animated conversation 
 with a companion, and got so annoyed at some re- 
 mark of the latter that in raising himself to con- 
 tradict it he tore out some of the stitches and had to 
 be told at last that if he did not keep quiet until the 
 operation was completed he would be sent home to 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 165 
 
 manage as best he could. Evidently this gentleman 
 was not very sensitive to pain. The same is well 
 known of Chinamen, North-American Indians, and 
 African natives. What would kill an ordinary white 
 man from shock will scarcely discompose them at all. 
 One has heard of a Kaffir setting his own foot after 
 it had been smashed by a cartwheel going over it. 
 Some reader will very likely be thinking at this 
 point " Yes, the Germans could send the Lusitania 
 to the bottom with hundreds of women and children 
 on board, and drop bombs from the sky on helpless 
 folk sleeping in their beds, and perpetrate the most 
 abominable atrocities on Belgian civilians whose only 
 crime was that they had defended their homes. " 
 Just so ; I admit it, as I admit the possibility of re- 
 version to type in anything. But this monstrous de- 
 velopment of German militarism is the result of a 
 deliberate policy long entered upon and consistently 
 carried out; I cannot think that any other civilised 
 nation could be guilty of it. And, broadly speaking, 
 we may surely admit without cavil that civilisation 
 as a whole has outgrown it. We do not rack and 
 burn people to-day, for the simple reason that we 
 feel so much more keenly ourselves that we could 
 not bear to inflict such torments, much less endure 
 them. And we may fairly infer, therefore, that the 
 elaboration of the doctrine of hell-fire as the world 
 used to be familiar with it would not be possible now. 
 It owes its existence to the fact that men were less 
 
1 66 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 sensitively organised at one time than they are now. 
 For the moment I need say no more on the point. 
 I am not arguing that the doctrine of divine retribu- 
 tion for sin owes its existence to the same conditions; 
 that is a very different matter, as we shall see. But 
 think of a time when monkish chroniclers, and even 
 latter-day Puritans, could teach that the bliss of the 
 righteous in heaven would be enhanced by their be- 
 ing privileged to witness the writhings of the damned 
 in hell! The hearts that could conceive such a sat- 
 isfaction must have been hard indeed. What Christ- 
 like soul is there to-day, what man or woman of or- 
 dinary human feeling, who would not wish to for- 
 sake heaven's bliss on such terms and go to the rescue 
 of the lost? 
 
 But when all is said and done we must get hell 
 back into our practical everyday belief, or rather we 
 must get back a reasonable understanding of what it 
 is, try to grasp and explain it in terms of the rest of 
 our experience of life. This is a great want, I am 
 persuaded, and our halting tones when we deal with 
 it are not creditable to our Christianity. There is 
 a hell, and men ought to be warned to shun it and 
 shown why. If the universe is a moral order, that 
 moral order must be vindicated against those who 
 seek to violate it. Moral standards may and do 
 change from age to age and race to race, but that 
 there is an ideal right few would deny, or that it is 
 our duty to try to find and obey it. There is a true 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 167 
 
 line of development both for the individual and so- 
 ciety; if we refuse to follow it we shall incur ret- 
 ribution somewhere and somehow, just as certainly 
 as that if we live over a polluted drain we shall go 
 down with typhoid, or if we form habits of intem- 
 perance we shall be sowing the seeds of corruption 
 and early death. Any one can see this law operating 
 on the physical plane, but perhaps it is not so obvious 
 on the spiritual, though no less certain. Perhaps I 
 ought to say here that there is a remedy against the 
 spiritual destruction to which it inevitably leads, and 
 that, as all Christians believe, is to be sought in the 
 redeeming work of Christ; but into that I must not 
 enter just now, further than to say that there is a 
 point at which divine grace can on repentance super- 
 sede the terrible law of measure for measure, the law 
 of cause and effect, with which we are so familiar in 
 the processes of nature. There is a valuable truth 
 in Whittier's line, speaking of the Saviour — 
 
 " To turn aside from thee is hell, 
 To walk with thee is heaven." 
 
 Let it not be supposed that it is only God's sove- 
 reign act that sends this man to hell and that man to 
 heaven. We could almost for the sake of argument 
 leave God out of it. The sinner sends himself to 
 hell by the way he lives. If evil living did not result 
 in disorder, and did not recoil upon the transgressor, 
 there would be something badly wrong with the spir- 
 itual universe. If for God we read the universal 
 
1 68 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 life the principle is just the same. If you sin you 
 must suffer; the punishment may be immediate or 
 deferred, but every sin carries its own punishment 
 wrapped up in itself. Hell is being out of harmony 
 with God, and it may take time before the dreadful- 
 ness of that is realised by the person guilty of it. It 
 may take the whole of life to waken up to the fact 
 that it is madness and folly ; the full realisation may 
 only come upon a man in the hour of death. To 
 sin against God is to sin against your own soul, and 
 in a sense you are your own judge. A gooseberry 
 bush will not get typhoid, but a human being will, 
 because he is constituted for a higher kind of life 
 than the gooseberry bush, and if he does not live in 
 harmony with the nature of that life it is in a sense 
 his own constitution that punishes him; it is just be- 
 cause his physical nature is what it is that he has to 
 suffer if he disregards the laws of health; those same 
 laws do not apply to the gooseberry bush. And so 
 with the soul. We are spiritual beings, and as spir- 
 itual beings will fare accordingly as we follow the 
 law of life which reveals itself in conscience and 
 heart. The voice of conscience has often been called 
 the voice of God, and so it is, but it is also the voice 
 of one's own spiritual nature. It can be sophisti- 
 cated only too easily, but if we are in earnest to find 
 out what our duty is we shall never be allowed to go 
 far wrong. We can defy and silence conscience, and 
 in time it will cease to warn, but the inevitable awak- 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 169 
 
 ening when it comes will be as terrible in its way as 
 that of the man who has lived a life of fleshly self- 
 indulgence and finds at length that he has contracted 
 a deadly disease. In the late Robert Hugh Ben- 
 son's Light Invisible there is one vivid sketch of the 
 experience of a successful man of the world to whom 
 this appalling revelation in the spiritual sense had 
 come too late for him to be able to turn back in this 
 world. The writer says : " What I gathered from 
 the story was this — that he had identified himself, 
 his whole will, his whole life practically, with the 
 cause of Satan. I could not detect as he talked that 
 he had ever seriously attempted to detach himself 
 from that cause. It has been said that a saint is one 
 who always chooses the better of the two courses 
 open to him at every step ; so far as I could see this 
 man had always chosen the worse of the two courses. 
 When he had done things that you and I would think 
 right, he had always done them for some bad reason. 
 He had been continuously aware, too, of what was 
 happening, . . . God forgive me if I was wrong — 
 if I am wrong now — but this is what I think I saw. 
 Out of his eyes looked a lost soul. As a symbol, 
 or a sign, too, his eyes shone suddenly with that dull 
 red light that you may see sometimes in a dog's eyes. 
 It was the poena damni of which I had read, which 
 shone there. It was true, as he had said, that he was 
 seeing clearly what he had lost and would lose; it 
 was the gate of heaven opening to one who could 
 
170 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 not enter in. It was the chink of light under the 
 door to one who cried, ' Lord, Lord, open to me,' 
 but through the door there came that answer, ' I 
 know you not.' Ah! it was not that he had never 
 known before what God was, and His service and 
 love ; it was just his condemnation that he had known : 
 that he had seen, not once or twice, but again and 
 again the two ways, and had, not once or twice, but 
 again and again chosen the worse of those two; and 
 now he was powerless." 
 
 Awful, but true — true of every one sooner or 
 later who lives in deliberate defiance of what he 
 knows to be the will of God, or rather of what he 
 knows to be right. No man, I should think, ever 
 deliberately defies God; he only goes on gratifying 
 himself, choosing the worse instead of the better part, 
 but it comes to the same thing in the end. It is im- 
 possible to live like that and be as though one had 
 not done it, and the discovery of the truth when it 
 comes is hell. 
 
 Many years ago, when the late Charles Bradlaugh 
 was lecturing on the atheist platform he was tackled 
 at one of his meetings in Nottingham by a young fel- 
 low in the audience who objected to some of his state- 
 ments, notably his remarks about hell. " I suppose," 
 said Mr. Bradlaugh, " you are a believer in the bot- 
 tomless pit." " Yes," was the young man's reply, 
 " and so are you. I will undertake to show that you 
 and every other rational being believes in the bottom- 
 
WHAT IS HELL? I?I 
 
 less pit. If you see a man hardening his heart 
 against good influences, stifling the reproaches of his 
 better self, giving way to evil habitually, do you not 
 know that he is falling into what is practically a bot- 
 tomless abyss ? What is there to stop him ? Things 
 he could not do without a twinge of conscience at 
 first come easy to him later, and by and by he can do 
 them without any remorse at all. Lower and lower 
 he sinks until, humanly speaking, he is beyond re- 
 demption ; nothing can alter him ; he must go on from 
 bad to worse." I think I am right in saying that Mr. 
 Bradlaugh instantly admitted this as true to the facts 
 of life. Neither he nor his opponent, of course, 
 would have insisted on the inevitableness of any such 
 destiny beyond the fact that a man can become so 
 depraved as to cease to be amenable to appeals to 
 his better nature, which at one time could have moved 
 him to repentance. What is to happen to such a 
 man in the next world? What can happen but that 
 when the sources of his earthly gratification are struck 
 away he finds himself in conditions with which he is 
 totally out of harmony and suffers accordingly? It 
 is no exaggeration to say that the wrath of God and 
 the love of God are the same thing viewed from op- 
 posite standpoints. The wrath of God is the con- 
 sistent opposition of God to sin, and what is that but 
 the perfection which is love ? Put a man with a dis- 
 eased eye in a room flooded with light and he will 
 scream with anguish until he is shielded from the 
 
172 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 naked rays. The eye is made for the light, the light 
 which reveals all the glory and the beauty of the 
 world, but being out of harmony therewith it suffers 
 unless it is darkened. So with the soul that is habitu- 
 ated to evil ways. It is made for the eternal light, 
 and therefore it suffers when the veil of the flesh is 
 torn away and it is exposed naked to the truth. 
 Logicians may cavil at this phraseology, but hardly 
 at the fact behind it; the analogy between the physical 
 and the spiritual experience must be pretty close in 
 this as in other things. 
 
 Is hell, then, a place or a state? I should say it 
 is both, but especially the latter. Without assum- 
 ing that the word is a geographical expression one 
 may fairly infer from the language of Holy Scripture 
 as well as from reasonable probability that there 
 must be some difference in the conditions surrounding 
 those who are in enjoyment of the blessedness of 
 heaven and those who are in the outer darkness; they 
 cannot very well be sharing the same abode. But it 
 is equally reasonable to suppose that there may be 
 many spheres or states in the world beyond, accord- 
 ing to the stage of development the soul has reached. 
 There is some indication of this in Scripture, too, as 
 witness St. Paul's words about the third heaven, 
 and Dante and Swedenborg have elaborated the idea 
 for us extensively. 
 
 "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 173 
 
 is the inscription which the grim Florentine seer im- 
 agines as placed over the gates of hell, and he leads 
 his readers on through cycle after cycle of terrors, 
 from the outer Limbo where dwell the comparatively 
 blameless unbaptised to the deepest central pit into 
 which the very wickedest are flung. The materi- 
 alistic conceptions of the Middle Ages are thoroughly 
 well illustrated in the Inferno. Swedenborg speaks 
 of the " hell " and professes actually to describe 
 them from clairvoyant vision as spheres of punish- 
 ment adjusted to the culpability of the souls that re- 
 spectively inhabit them. This seems likely enough. 
 And it should not be forgotten that the word hell in 
 the Bible covers more than a place of punishment. 
 It would be unprofitable to discuss it minutely here. 
 Suffice it to say that it is frequently used — in fact, 
 one might say mostly — as equivalent to Hades or 
 Sheol, the place of departed spirits in general, and 
 does not necessarily carry with it any suggestion of 
 penal conditions. It is different when it is used to 
 translate the word Gehenna, about which more in 
 a moment. The clause in the Apostles' Creed, " He 
 descended into hell," thus means that our Lord, after 
 His death on Calvary, passed through the abodes of 
 the dead, declaring to them — so high authorities 
 state — the same gospel that He had declared on 
 earth. According to Dante again, He did not take 
 much hope with Him, though. Thus he makes Vir- 
 gil say (Longfellow's translation) — 
 
174 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 " I was a novice in this state, 
 When I saw hither come a Mighty One, 
 With sign of victory incoronate. 
 Hence he drew forth the shade of the First Parent, 
 And that of his son Abel, and of Noah, 
 Of Moses the lawgiver, and the obedient 
 Abraham, patriarch, and David, king, 
 Israel with his father and his children, 
 And Rachel, for whose sake he did so much, 
 And others many, and he made them blessed; 
 And thou must know, that earlier than these 
 Never were any human spirits saved." 
 
 Virgil himself was in hell, be it noted, in spite of his 
 virtues, if this uncompromising pupil of his is to be 
 believed, and so was the whole pre-Christian human 
 race, good and bad, with the above fortunate excep- 
 tions. Happily, we can think better of the justice 
 of God than that. 
 
 There is a sense in which hell may begin here and 
 now, when retribution follows hard upon the heels 
 of wrongdoing. Heaven and hell may dwell in the 
 same family circle, sit at the same table, sleep in the 
 same bed. It does not matter so very much what 
 your environment is as to whether you are happy or 
 not. There is no much worse hell than the torture 
 of remorse, for instance. As Milton has it in Par- 
 adise Lost — 
 
 "The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." 
 
 Or the immortal Omar — 
 
 " I sent my Soul through the invisible, 
 Some letter of that after-life to spell: 
 And by and by my Soul returned to me, 
 And answered, ' I myself am Heaven and Hell.' n 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 175 
 
 But, properly speaking, the designation heaven or 
 hell appertains to conditions following death, and 
 strictly, even then, if one were minded to adhere 
 closely to theological language, to the conditions of 
 bliss or woe said to be unchangeable after the Gen- 
 eral Judgment, as it is called, the consummation or 
 wind-up of the order of things under which we are 
 living now. But we need not dwell upon that. The 
 question cf importance for us is whether the penal- 
 ties upon sin which constitute hell here or hereafter 
 are interminable; is there any hope of universal res- 
 toration? The doctrine of an intermediate puri- 
 ficatory state in which the souls of those who have 
 not died in mortal sin are being cleansed from earthly 
 stains, and are benefited by the prayers of the faith- 
 ful on earth, is ancient and catholic and accordant to 
 the feelings of most people. Few who make the 
 great transition are fit either for heaven or hell, in 
 the strict sense of the terms, and it is a natural thing 
 to want to pray for those who have gone just as for 
 those we love here. The practice of prayers for the 
 dead would never have been challenged at the Ref- 
 ormation but for the corruptions that had come to 
 surround it at that period. But can we go further 
 and say that Purgatory is the only hell, that there is 
 no other? for that is what it comes to if hell is not 
 to be accounted everlasting. We do not know ; there 
 is always the faculty of the human will to be reckoned 
 with, and its terrible power of sinking the soul into 
 
i 7 6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 utter depravity; who can set bounds to it? But at 
 least we may say this: that there is nothing in the 
 New Testament to justify any one in declaring that 
 the punishment of sin is everlasting. " I am re- 
 quired to believe that there is a hell," said a Jesuit 
 priest to me once, " but I am not obliged to believe 
 that God will put anybody in it at all, much less for 
 ever." " While sin continues, hell continues," de- 
 clared a well-known bishop in my presence on a pri- 
 vate occasion subsequently, " and when sin stops hell 
 stops." " That is heretical," I replied, smiling; " it 
 is distinctly contrary to a defined dogma of the 
 Church Catholic." " So it may be," was the re- 
 joinder, " but it is Christian." I quite agree with 
 him; he may have said it in public for aught I know; 
 I rather hope so. From what I have already said 
 it should be clear that it is the state the soul is in that 
 makes its heaven or hell; God does not change. 
 Says St. Thomas Aquinas : " An innocent soul 
 would not feel the pains of hell, and a guilty soul 
 could not enjoy the bliss of heaven." " Eternal " 
 is not synonymous with " everlasting " ; it denotes 
 quality of life, not its duration. It is what is, as op- 
 posed to what seems, the reality behind all flux and 
 change. Now what is, as opposed to what seems, 
 the reality behind all flux and change, is just that be- 
 ing of God of which I have already spoken as the 
 source both of our hell and our heaven according 
 to the way we come up against it. If we are out of 
 
WHAT IS HELL? 177 
 
 harmony with it in any degree the result is pain; if 
 we are in harmony with it the result is joy; but in 
 itself it remains always the same — that is why it 
 can rightly be termed eternal. The eternal fire is 
 always there, always a consuming fire to sin, it is the 
 eternal; but it is home, and rest, and perfect bliss to 
 goodness. 
 
 "Thou judgest us, thy purity 
 Doth all our lusts condemn; 
 The love that draws us nearer thee 
 Is hot with wrath to them." 
 
 This is how I understand both eternal punishment 
 and eternal life; it is simply a matter of our personal 
 adjustment to what is an eternal fact, that which is. 
 When our Lord uttered the solemn warning about 
 the worm that dieth not and the fire that is never 
 quenched, He must have been thinking of something 
 like this. When, in speaking of hell, He said Ge- 
 henna, He may possibly have been looking at the very 
 spot that supplied the name, the sinister valley of 
 Hinnom, outside Jerusalem, where criminals were 
 formerly stoned to death, where worms preyed, too, 
 upon the putrefying corpses, and fires were kept con- 
 tinually blazing to destroy the stench and burn up the 
 corruption. In His vivid way He made this a figure 
 of judgment to come, and every word of it is con- 
 sistent with the view just expressed. St. Paul prob- 
 ably echoes the same thought in the striking passage : 
 " Every man's work shall be made manifest; for the 
 
178 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by 
 fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what 
 sort it is. . . . If any man's work shall be burned, 
 he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet 
 so as by fire," the fire that is at once wrath and love 
 according to what we bring to its embrace; the fire 
 that, thank God, never can be quenched, for it is 
 Himself. Let us beware how we trifle with it. To 
 preach the love of God as though it were nothing but 
 a weak, tireless amiability is the grossest of blunders. 
 Being what it is, it can do no other than scorch and 
 blast the soul that is conformed to evil. " Be not 
 deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man 
 soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth 
 to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he 
 that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap 
 eternal life. n 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 REUNION 
 
 At the present time of almost universal mourning, 
 there is one subject which in a quiet way engrosses 
 attention to the exclusion of many others of minor 
 moments, and that is the question as to whether and 
 on what terms we may hope to rejoin those of our 
 loved ones who have preceded us through the gates 
 of death. One sees but little of it in the papers, 
 but that is mainly because the things we talk about in 
 the papers are not usually those on which we feel 
 most deeply. Even the pulpit is reticent in its ref- 
 erences to it. And yet one meets it again and again, 
 and it is clear that people are thinking of it to a de- 
 gree unprecedented. When the young and strong 
 are taken away from us in such numbers as now, it 
 is but natural that this should be so; we feel the pres- 
 sure of the problem more than in normal time. 
 When the aged enter into rest it is like the finish of 
 a song, but when youth perishes in the furnace of war 
 it is like an interrupted symphony and we long to 
 hear it resumed. Bereaved parents, wives, sisters, 
 and lovers all over our land to-day are listening wist- 
 fully for some real message of comfort in this regard. 
 Whether they can get it is another matter. 
 
 i79 
 
180 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 Does life go on or does it finish with the shock of 
 death? Assuredly it goes on, but how? that is the 
 point. Nothing ever dies except as that particular 
 thing: it only changes its form, its mode of being. 
 This is a simple fact beyond dispute; our interest is 
 not in immortality as such, for any kind of life is im- 
 mortal, but in whether it can be predicated of the fel- 
 lowship of soul with soul. Maurice Maeterlinck 
 has a striking passage in his book, Our Eternity, 
 which states the issue forcibly when he points out that 
 what we are really afraid of in the thought of death 
 is the destruction of our identity. " It is utterly in- 
 different to us that, throughout eternity, our body or 
 its substance should know every joy and every glory, 
 undergo the most splendid and delightful transfor- 
 mations, become flower, perfume, beauty, light, air, 
 star — and it is certain that it does so become, and 
 that we must look for our dead not in our graveyards, 
 but in space and light and life — it is likewise indif- 
 ferent to us that our intelligence should expand until 
 it takes part in the life of the worlds, until it under- 
 stands and governs it. We are persuaded that all 
 this will not affect us, will give us no pleasure, will 
 not happen to ourselves, unless that memory of a 
 few almost always insignificant facts accompany us 
 and witness those unimaginable joys." Yes, quite 
 true : we do not feel that an immortality which fails 
 to carry with it the continuity of individual self-con- 
 sciousness is of much value. The elements compos- 
 
REUNION 181 
 
 ing my body at this moment were in existence a mil- 
 lion years ago and will be forming new combinations 
 a million years hence, some of them, doubtless, far 
 more elaborate and wonderful organisms than I have 
 ever been, but they will not be me. (Forgive the 
 colloquialism; it is badly wanted, and will be good 
 English some day.) And what would it matter to 
 me if the mysterious life that is mine now were to be 
 withdrawn into the universal life out of which it 
 came, and my pin-point of consciousness be merged 
 in an infinite consciousness, if at the same time I lost 
 all memory, all recollection of myself as myself? 
 To all intents and purposes I should be as dead and 
 done for as if life ended at the grave. And, more- 
 over, all that to our experience at present makes life 
 livable is bound up with this. If it is not spiritual 
 it is worthless. As human beings we truly live in 
 our relations with each other; and all the worlds 
 that to us connote great, beautiful, and inspiring 
 ideals are words that assume these relations. What 
 meaning would honour, fidelity, tenderness, sacrifice, 
 have apart from these ; and where would be our hu- 
 manity without them? It would not be humanity 
 at all. 
 
 So it really comes to this, that when we talk about 
 immortality we mean the persistence of the individual 
 self, with its memories, loves, and fellowships. We 
 do not mean simply going on; still less do we mean 
 that life as a whole goes on, that the substance com- 
 
1 82 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 posing us goes on. We know it does, but the fact 
 does not interest us much. Do we go on? — the we 
 who mingle together in all those attachments, serv- 
 ices, mutual associations and affinities that are the 
 stuff out of which all our highest hopes and dreams 
 and ends and aims are constituted. And if we in- 
 dividually go on do we take up the thread of earthly 
 relationship anew in the sphere beyond death, what- 
 ever it may be, or is death the finish of all that? 
 Shall we know and love again in some brighter world 
 the people we have known and loved here? I re- 
 peat that this is the only sort of immortality that is 
 really worth anything; and I re-emphasise the point 
 that all that is best and noblest in us looks to this 
 kind of immortality or to none ; we have no other sort 
 of experience that makes the prospect of an im- 
 mortality denuded of these things in the least at- 
 tractive. It does not follow, of course, that the 
 mere fact of surviving the shock of death implies 
 immortality. We might wake up on the other side 
 of death and go on for awhile and then flicker out; 
 it is at least conceivable. But the presumption is 
 that if we — the real we — - can survive physical dis- 
 solution at all we shall continue to survive for ever. 
 The principal point on which we want to be convinced 
 is that the death of the body is not the death of the 
 man. There may be great changes, immense 
 changes, in the quality of the consciousness that sur- 
 vives; it may go on changing and enlarging for ages; 
 
REUNION 183 
 
 but if we could really be assured that, as the Bishop 
 of London once said, a man is much the same person 
 five minutes after death that he was five minutes 
 before, we might fairly take for granted that he will 
 continue to know himself the same person for ever 
 after, even if he grows to be a demi-god. It would 
 be no comfort to anybody to be told that the person 
 or persons he or she loved best in all the world were 
 still living after death had claimed them, but they 
 no longer had any knowledge or recollection of those 
 who mourned their loss on earth, or, indeed, of any- 
 thing that had to do with earth. They might just 
 as well be extinct; if the old friendships are dead, 
 they are dead too; if memory is gone, they are gone ; 
 they are as completely new beings as if they had never 
 existed before. 
 
 Now, having said all this, I want to add, as clearly 
 as I can, that we have the best possible ground for 
 believing that the immortality I have been describing 
 as alone desirable is a fact, and, therefore, that re- 
 union after death is a fact too — an indefeasible fact, 
 as much a fact as that I who write and those who 
 read these words exist now. We shall never stop, 
 and our inter-relations with other beings will never 
 stop. Let no one ask me how I know this; I do 
 know it, and that is all I can say. No one can ever 
 absolutely reproduce for others the evidence that 
 satisfies himself on the deepest things. But I hold 
 that the fact of survival after death has been proved 
 
1 8 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 up to the hilt over and over again, and is being dem- 
 onstrated still to thousands of bereaved ones, despite 
 the prepossessions of this materialistic age of ours. 
 And I am not thinking of the cult of necromancy 
 when I say this ; it is a practice attended with grave 
 dangers, as the Church has long ago recognised; but 
 that communication between the living and the so- 
 called dead has frequently been made and is still be- 
 ing made, is to my mind beyond all doubt. Whether 
 it is well that it should be habitual is another thing. 
 I should question it on the ground that it is surely 
 undesirable to drag our emancipated dear ones back 
 into earthly conditions; far better speed them on- 
 ward by our loving thoughts and prayers, and yield 
 ourselves to the good influence of theirs for us. 
 There is such a thing as spiritual communion, as the 
 Church has always taught; it is one of the tenets of 
 our faith. Why, even between beings still in the 
 flesh there is often such sympathy that thoughts and 
 feelings can be transmitted from one to another 
 across great intervening distances. One senses what 
 is happening to the other, so to speak, or is aware 
 when the other is specially thinking of him or her 
 and pouring warm, loyal, benevolent wishes upon 
 him or her. How the knowledge of it often helps 
 and sustains us through difficult and trying circum- 
 stances! Many a soldier at the front to-day is not 
 only the better for what he knows is reaching him 
 hourly from the heart of mother or wife, but owes 
 
REUNION 185 
 
 to it more than he knows. Is it going to stop if he 
 gets killed? Assuredly not; it will but reach him 
 more easily then, for there is no longer any fleshly 
 barrier to the spiritual tide. 
 
 And in a few short years at most we shall all have 
 entered upon that higher side of life, and be learning 
 lots of new things. It is probable, for instance, 
 that we shall learn to transcend all imprisoning 
 affections. Do my readers know what I mean? 
 Love is the greatest thing in life, to be sure — the 
 only thing that makes continued life desirable, as I 
 have already shown — but our earthly love is a 
 poor, restricted thing compared with what love might 
 be in a higher state of existence. We are only able 
 at present to love a very few people intensely, though 
 we may be so happy in this love as to feel kind to 
 everybody. But we cannot actually love everybody 
 as we love our own nearest and dearest. Now, is 
 it not both imaginable and desirable that, without 
 ceasing to love those we love now, we might attain 
 in time to a state of consciousness so much vaster and 
 higher that we could love a myriad souls or more 
 with the same devotion that we now give to one or 
 two? In other words, would it not be a glorious 
 thing to be able to love as we have always been taught 
 that Christ loves, as if every soul were the only one 
 in the universe, so strong would be our regard for 
 that soul and so discriminating, but with an all-in- 
 clusive scope and range, none omitted, none forgot- 
 
1 86 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 ten, none rejected or despised? That would be 
 heaven indeed, a state of universal good-will, and 
 therefore of a joy beyond all our present powers of 
 mind to conceive. Perhaps that is why St. Paul 
 speaks of it as, " to know the love of Christ which 
 passeth knowledge " — that is, passeth knowledge 
 now, but not always; the day will come when we shall 
 get up to it in the life elysian. 
 
 What is called natural affection may therefore 
 have to become merged in something higher, but 
 without being either dimmed or destroyed. I cannot 
 doubt it myself. It will never become indifference ; it 
 will only cease to be exclusive. And I believe, too, 
 that the rather sad fact, sad from one point of view, 
 which none of us can help observing, that the dead 
 are soon forgotten, is more or less an illusion. It 
 is a merciful thing that time does take the raw edge 
 off grief, does heal the deepest wounds of the heart 
 in most cases; but it is not quite what it seems. It is 
 the mortal part of us that does the forgetting; the 
 immortal part, the true, imperishable self, holds on 
 to its own and reasserts its claim, but on newer and 
 higher levels, when the body is laid aside. What 
 would you say if some one you loved with the whole 
 force of your nature forty years ago were to walk 
 into the room? You might be overcome with de- 
 light, or you may have grown so far away from that 
 early stage of experience as to be utterly unmoved; 
 but wait till death comes, and you will see that what 
 
REUNION 187 
 
 was truly spiritual in that relationship will instantly 
 leap back to its place in your soul and all else disap- 
 pear with the worn-out garment of the flesh. And, 
 oh, how many there are who are simply waiting for 
 this great change to take place, with whom a beauti- 
 ful love of early life is as fresh to-day as it ever was, 
 and who are looking forward with patient eagerness 
 to the everlasting morning! 
 
 " O, thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again, 
 And with God be the rest." 
 
 Memories may fade, sorrow and heartbreak die 
 down, familiar faces recede with the passing of the 
 years, but all the precious fellowships of old will 
 come back on a securer plane of possession, an alti- 
 tude where there are no rival claims to be adjusted, 
 no jealousies and littlenesses to be feared. 
 
 There is a difficulty in imagining life in heaven. 
 What we love, or think we love, in our friends and 
 kindred is so closely interwoven with the physical 
 organisation that it is no wonder we are inclined to 
 identify the two. We long and yearn for the famil- 
 iar associations — 
 
 "For the touch of a vanished hand, 
 And the sound of a voice that is still." 
 
 But in a world where there is no eating and drinking, 
 and marrying and giving in marriage, intercourse 
 must be different. Speech is a clumsy instrument at 
 the best for the conveyance of ideas; and shall we 
 never get closer to one another than tongue and em- 
 
1 88 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 brace can take us? Yea, verily, we do it even now 
 in the hours when silence gives the sweetest com- 
 munion — a fore-glimpse of what is to be when the 
 physical medium is gone. And the most familiar 
 face and form are changing before our eyes hour by 
 hour; there is nothing permanent, nothing of eternal 
 worth, in the purely physical; it is but as the sacra- 
 ment of spirit that it has value, though that is much. 
 But the essence of what we love is always invisible. 
 No man has ever yet seen a soul, and it is that in- 
 visible that cannot die. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Up to the present this country has not been hard hit 
 by the war. Those who say so do not know what 
 they are talking about. Mourners we have in plenty, 
 and are like soon to have many more; individuals 
 once prosperous have been impoverished through 
 the sudden stoppage of their particular business or 
 source of income owing to the diversion of the na- 
 tion's energies into other channels. Most of them 
 will recover in time if they can hold out, but not 
 yet; and we can only marvel at the patience and self- 
 control exhibited by these unfortunate ones whom 
 economic disturbance has victimised; we hear almost 
 nothing about them, so silent are they and so ready 
 to accept the inevitable ; but they exist, and some day, 
 perhaps, may become articulate. Their story is as 
 well worth telling as any one else's. But on the 
 whole we, as a people, have not suffered much so far, 
 nothing comparable to Germany, and nothing to be 
 mentioned in the same breath with little Serbia and 
 helpless Armenia. While in France I frequently ex- 
 pressed my astonishment at the apparent exchange 
 of roles between the French and the British in the 
 war zone: the former sombre and stern instead of 
 
 189 
 
1 9 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 light-hearted and gay, the latter just the reverse. 
 The Englishman seemed to have borrowed the 
 Frenchman's characteristics for the nonce, and the 
 Frenchman to be exemplifying in his own person 
 what used to be said of the Englishman, that he took 
 even his pleasure sadly. In seeking a reason for 
 this one received several different explanations, of 
 course. My own view was, and still is, that Tom- 
 my's cheerfulness is part of his notion of honour; it 
 is playing the game as he understands it. He is not 
 enjoying his task; it would be folly to say so. It is 
 too horrible and altogether dreadful for that. But 
 he feels he must make the best of it, and therefore 
 he must act like a sportsman even to the extent of 
 keeping up his own spirits and those of his comrades 
 by every means in his power, and one of the most 
 potent of these is laughter and song. This, I be- 
 lieve, is the sole secret of the brightness of demeanour 
 we hear so much about among the troops at the 
 front; it is a lesson to us at home. But I am bound 
 to admit that other and less flattering accounts of it 
 were given me. Some officers declared that it was 
 merely due to the thickness of Tommy's head. This 
 sounds insulting, but it was not meant to be; those 
 who said it are admirers of Tommy and share his 
 dangers and hardships daily. They only hinted at a 
 certain dulness of imagination which prevents the 
 average Briton from realising, as the more sensitive 
 and quick-witted Frenchman is bound to do, the ter- 
 
 
IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 191 
 
 ribleness of the task in hand. There may be some- 
 thing in this, though how much it would be impos- 
 sible to say. How men who have been in the 
 trenches, exposed to the horrors of shell fire and, in 
 the judgment of many, to the still more appalling 
 horrors of bayonet fighting, not to speak of the con- 
 stant rigours and miseries of life in the open under 
 the prevailing weather conditions of these winter 
 months, can be fairly described as failing to realise 
 what is taking place I do not know. I still hold by 
 my own theory of the matter. 
 
 But this at least is true : we here by our own fire- 
 sides, safely sheltered from the enemy by the guns 
 of our Grand Fleet and the heroic exertions of our 
 sons and brothers in France and Flanders, do not 
 and cannot understand what war is like as our brave 
 allies do, or as we ourselves speedily should if it were 
 raging in our midst. No contrast is more striking 
 to a traveller than the contrast between this side 
 of the channel and the other in regard to the im- 
 mediacy of war, so to speak. It was the first thing 
 I noticed when I crossed last February, still more in 
 July, and abundantly more in October. Here on 
 the outside of life is little observable difference : there 
 the difference is everywhere apparent. There is a 
 different feel about France, somehow — the war is 
 in the air as it certainly is not in England even now, 
 after all these terrible months of bloodshed and 
 strain. This, remarked the elderly head of a mil- 
 
1 92 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 itary hospital staff to me, is the real reason why the 
 British soldier is not so grim-looking as his French 
 brother-in-arms. He very soon would be, so should 
 we all, if we had seen our country invaded, our 
 homes knocked about, and our women maltreated as 
 French people have had to see theirs ever since 
 the autumn of last year. Let the Germans plant a 
 couple of million of men in our home counties and 
 lay our fair land waste with their usual thorough- 
 ness, and there would be little disposition left for 
 indulging in pleasantries of any sort. 
 
 No, we have not been sorely hit by the war — not 
 yet. One of the strangest paradoxes about this pe- 
 riod of destructiveness through which we are pass- 
 ing is that there is very little dire poverty about. It 
 has taught me a lesson, a lesson which probably the 
 workers as a class are assimilating too — namely, 
 that destitution and the degradation which so gen- 
 erally accompanies it could be got rid of in a month 
 in time of peace if we were only in earnest to do it. 
 It is caused simply by an unfair distribution of 
 wealth. We always knew that, but what we did not 
 know was that it could be so speedily remedied; we 
 thought it would take a long time even if the nation 
 were willing to tackle the problem seriously, which 
 it has not yet shown any anxiety to do ; we were afraid 
 of drastic experiments of a social nature, with the 
 consequent displacement of capital, the shock given 
 to that very delicate entity, the national credit, and 
 
IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 193 
 
 so on. "Go more slowly," was the universal cry; 
 " give us breathing space ; these drastic changes one 
 after the other — all in the direction of making the 
 rich pay more into the pockets of the poor — are 
 very dangerous. You are impairing public con- 
 fidence ; do wait a while before you attempt anything 
 further. You are imposing a tax on industry which 
 is certain to hinder productiveness. Call a halt; turn 
 the present Government out — meaning the Govern- 
 ment responsible for Lloyd George finance — and let 
 us have one which will give us time to recover from 
 the inroads it has made upon the big incomes. Old 
 Age Pensions and the Insurance Act need paying for, 
 and who is going to do it? Let us see whether we 
 can meet this obligation before incurring any new 
 ones." This was what we all thought more or less; 
 we did not know how much the national resources 
 could stand; we were terribly afraid of killing the 
 goose that laid the golden eggs — namely, the em- 
 ployer and his profits with their bearing on com- 
 mercial enterprise generally. There were numerous 
 experts, financial and otherwise, who assured us we 
 had already done it, and that the country could never 
 recover from this wild-cat legislation and the drain 
 it had made upon our material reserves of all sorts. 
 Politics had become class war and little else, and I 
 am pretty confident that if a General Election had 
 taken place before Germany struck the verdict of the 
 electorate would have been in favour of putting the 
 
i 9 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 brake on for awhile. I know plenty of admirers of 
 Mr. Asquith and his forceful Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer who thought it was time to say so. Doubt- 
 less the Kaiser and his advisers were awake to this 
 and shaped their policy accordingly. 
 
 And we were wrong, the whole lot of us — Kaiser, 
 German Bureau, British Tories, hesitant Liberals, 
 landowners, bankers, manufacturers, shopkeepers, 
 taxpayers generally, and probably the proletariat 
 too. It is nothing short of amazing. Here we are 
 hurling our accumulated stores of wealth into hell, 
 the hell of war, and the workers as a whole were 
 never so well off. We are able to pay, and we do 
 pay, without complaining. We are doing it without 
 suffering very greatly, without hearing the cry of 
 hunger going up from our congested areas as it has 
 too often done in time of peace, and without the 
 slightest apprehension that we are drawing near to 
 the end of our strength. We shall be able to go on 
 doing it for years if need be. The savings of the 
 working classes have hardly yet been touched for 
 national purposes, and if report speaks true there 
 has been a not too creditable increase in the purchase 
 of cheap luxuries — and luxuries not commonly ac- 
 counted cheap, also, such as pianos — among a sec- 
 tion of these, unskilled labourers especially. They 
 are not unpatriotic, but is it to be wondered at that 
 they should suddenly feel themselves well-to-do and 
 fail to realise that war is economic wastage as well 
 
IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 195 
 
 as wholesale murder? " Three pounds a week, and 
 no 'usband ! " a lady engaged in munition work is 
 credited with saying. " Wy, it's 'eaven!" There 
 is humour in the sentiment, one must confess, though 
 it was not complimentary to the absent husband. 
 There was some hard drinking in Dublin last year 
 after the maintenance allowances began to be paid — 
 Dublin was not the only place, by the way — and it 
 is stated that some outspoken females declared they 
 wished the war would go on for ever on the same 
 terms; they had never had so much money to spend 
 in their lives. 
 
 We are not only squandering wealth and manhood 
 in this insane business of war — though we had no 
 choice in the matter but to fight or perish — not only 
 destroying the slowly built up total of our national 
 savings in the effort to inflict a still greater destruc- 
 tion on those of the enemy, not only causing world- 
 wide havoc, mourning, and woe, but we have with- 
 drawn not less than four million men from productive 
 occupations and set them to smash and kill instead. 
 Think of it ! and then remember that these men have 
 to be equipped and maintained somehow or other 
 by the rest of us, and that most of them are the very 
 pick of the country's early manhood. And we can 
 afford to do it! We can do it and in the process 
 make an end of destitution for the time being and 
 secure to wage-earners a higher standard of com- 
 fort than they have ever enjoyed before. Will the 
 
196 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 electors of Great Britain, rich and poor, try to digest 
 that fact and grasp its implications? The logic of 
 it is that we can, if and when we choose, get rid 
 for ever of the crying disgrace of starvation and mis- 
 ery at one end of the social scale and senseless osten- 
 tation at the other. The thing is demonstrated now. 
 When the war is over we shall have an amount of 
 distress to cope with that we do not visualise at pres- 
 ent, and economic problems will emerge which will 
 tax our statesmanship to the utmost. We shall have 
 tens of thousands of maimed and crippled soldiers 
 on our hands, and a gigantic national debt on our 
 backs which will be a crushing burden for generations 
 to come. We shall hear of unemployment then with 
 a vengeance ; and we have a convenient way, to judge 
 from the precedent of former wars, of forgetting the 
 debt we owe to the man who has given up his place 
 in life to go and fight for us and been made incapable 
 of earning his living in consequence. Perhaps that 
 will not happen this time. I found, while address- 
 ing soldiers' meetings in France this autumn, that 
 our fighting men are quite alive to it and determined 
 to prevent it if they can. Nothing roused more en- 
 thusiasm in the course of our discussions than any 
 expression of resolve that when the war is over no 
 effort or sacrifice shall be spared in seeing that jus- 
 tice is done to the claims of those who have suffered 
 in our cause, not least the fathers of families who 
 have been permanently invalided by what they have 
 
IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 197 
 
 gone through. Again and again one met men who 
 had held good, well-paid positions at home and given 
 them up to go and serve in the ranks. The orderly 
 who waited on me at mess on several occasions was, 
 or had been, a wealthier man than any officer at the 
 table. At almost any service I ever held I would be 
 addressed afterwards from the floor by privates or 
 non-commissioned officers whose very accent showed 
 them to be men of education and good breeding. 
 The army as it exists to-day is a fine, all-round lev- 
 eller; a good many artificial prejudices and social 
 distinctions are being swept away by the power of 
 actual daily comradeship in the face of death. 
 These four million citizen soldiers have votes: how 
 will they use them when they come home? Is it 
 conceivable that they will either forget, or allow us 
 to forget, that a first charge upon the national ex- 
 chequer for long to come must be the proper main- 
 tenance or the reinstatement in their callings of those 
 who did not wait to be fetched, but sprang to arms 
 to defend their country, and have done it at a great 
 cost in body and substance ? 
 
 Let the lesson be driven well home : we can do all 
 that is required if we want to do it. Behold the 
 economic miracle of to-day, and consider what is 
 possible to-morrow. There need never be another 
 hungry mouth ; no honest man ought to have to dread 
 the loss of a job or to lower his self-respect by seek- 
 ing the aid of the Poor Law. It is all nonsense to 
 
i 9 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 say that the problem of destitution is unsolvable, or 
 that our resources will not bear the institution of a 
 standard living wage for everybody and not for the 
 aristocracy of labour only. After the debacle of 
 1 87 1 France was apparently ground to powder, her 
 manhood decimated, her trade ruined, her treasury 
 empty, and an enormous indemnity to pay to her 
 triumphant foe. She recovered so quickly and com- 
 pletely, to the surprise of everybody, that in 1875 
 Bismarck, like the bully he was, wanted to hit her 
 again, and would have done so but for Queen Victoria 
 and the British Government. All Europe will be 
 in a like position by the time the present war is over 
 — Great Britain the least so probably. The indem- 
 nity we shall have to pay will be to ourselves — 
 namely, the capital and interest of the great war 
 loans that have been successively raised. It will be 
 a tremendous task to do it, and we shall have all 
 our industry and commerce to organise afresh. But 
 it can be done, that is the main point to keep before 
 our minds. It has been done before on a sufficiently 
 large scale to afford us example and encouragement. 
 Let us be ready for it. Do not let us drift and mud- 
 dle till the problem is upon us in an intractable form. 
 If we can do what we are doing now when we are 
 daily destroying more than we create, what will it 
 be when we cease to destroy and begin to build up 
 once more? We can do it better then and without 
 risk of failure if we are careful to avoid loss of time 
 
IMAGINATION AND THE FUTURE 199 
 
 in preparing for it. It is all a matter of organisa- 
 tion and united will. 
 
 A New Zealander was lecturing some of our Tom- 
 mies on our national deficiencies. His language was 
 lurid; he had been provoked thereto by some caustic 
 remark made by a British officer on Australian lack 
 of discipline. " Anyhow," he yelled in conclusion, 
 " we do know enough to know there is a war on, 
 which is more than you do in your back number of 
 a country. You will wake up to it, I reckon, by the 
 time it's finished with, unless we have to come over 
 and hammer it into your heads. And whatever you 
 do when you win " — the implication in this phrase 
 surely would soothe the wounded amour propre of 
 the slowest-going Briton — " be sure you make the 
 Germans send over their best men to teach you how 
 to feed and clothe and educate your people ; it would 
 be the best indemnity you could wring out of them, 
 and the only one they will be able to pay." 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 REORGANISATION AFTER THE WAR 
 
 In the Illustrated Sunday Herald of January 16 ap- 
 pears a friendly criticism of my article of the week 
 previous. It is from the pen of Mr. James Sher- 
 liker, and traverses, or professes to traverse, state- 
 ments of mine in the article in question, which was 
 mainly concerned with the problem of destitution and 
 its relation to the war, and is reprinted as the chapter 
 above. 
 
 This criticism demonstrates a thing I have noticed 
 over and over again, that few people, even among 
 the educated, ever take in an argument as a whole. 
 They seize on bits, often unimportant bits, and worry 
 away at them without allowing for their due pro- 
 portion to the rest. Generally, too, they fail to per- 
 ceive that their objections in regard to these bits have 
 been anticipated in the argument itself. I have had 
 occasion to observe this so frequently that it is no sur- 
 prise to me to find Mr. Sherliker doing it in this 
 instance; I daresay I do it myself when reading or 
 listening to other men's words. Perhaps, in addi- 
 tion, I may be to blame for having written obscurely, 
 but I don't think so; and in reading the article over 
 again I see little to alter in the phrasing and noth- 
 
 200 
 
REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 201 
 
 ing in the opinions expressed. One of my fiercest 
 opponents in the theological field said years ago that 
 I possessed the fatal gift of lucidity — or was it the 
 gift of a fatal lucidity? I forget. I believe he 
 added that it was about the only gift I did possess — 
 but that is neither here nor there. I took his remark 
 as a compliment because he was supposed to be some- 
 thing of a judge in such matters, and still is. 
 
 But let the facts speak for themselves. Here are 
 Mr. Sherliker's criticisms seriatim, and it will be 
 seen that every single one of them is answered before- 
 hand. There is practically no difference between us, 
 and the only reason why I return to the subject is 
 that I am anxious to get as many people as possible 
 to consider seriously the main point of the original 
 article — that the war has proved that destitution 
 can be got rid of, and speedily, if we are really in 
 earnest about it. And if we are not in earnest about 
 it we had better look out when the war stops, for 
 then the distress will be terrible. 
 
 Mr. Sherliker: " There is poverty in this war, and 
 a great deal of it. The war has increased incomes, 
 I admit, but it has also increased the cost of living. 
 There are hundreds of thousands of people in this 
 country, pre-war widows and the like, who know 
 nothing of separation allowances, but who, unfortu- 
 nately, know a great deal about the extra cost of 
 food. The war has brought poverty about; it has 
 increased poverty." 
 
202 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 The article: "Individuals once prosperous have 
 been impoverished through the sudden stoppage of 
 their particular business or source of income owing 
 to the diversion of the nation's energies into other 
 channels ... we can only marvel at the patience and 
 self-control exhibited by these unfortunate ones 
 whom economic disturbance has victimised; we hear 
 almost nothing about them, so silent are they and 
 so ready to accept the inevitable; but they exist." 
 " Here we are hurling our accumulated stores of 
 wealth into hell, the hell of war, and the workers 
 as a whole were never so well off." " We are not 
 only squandering wealth and manhood in this insane 
 business of war . . . but we have withdrawn not less 
 than four million men from productive occupations 
 and set them to smash and kill instead." 
 
 Mr. Sherliker: " I agree with Mr. Campbell that 
 there need not be hungry mouths when the war is 
 over; there need not have been hungry mouths be- 
 fore the war began. But when he says that no hon- 
 est man ought to dread the loss of a job after peace is 
 declared he tells us that he has never been out of a 
 job himself, that he has never had to look for one, 
 and that he knows nothing of the haunting anxiety 
 as to what the morrow may bring. . . . When the 
 war is ended we shall return to the old conditions — 
 or worse. . . . What about when the million boys 
 come home to return to their former occupations? 
 What about when at least half the munition works 
 
REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 203 
 
 close down? . . . Will Mr. Campbell explain why 
 no honest man will then need to dread the loss of 
 a job?" Evidently my critic has missed the point 
 altogether here. He then goes on to point out the 
 plain economic fact, as he calls it, that for a long 
 time there will be more men than we can find work 
 for, consequently unemployment, and probably, too, 
 a fall of wages. Employers will not be able to pay 
 to the State and to the wage-earners too. 
 
 The whole purpose of the article was to show that 
 this need not be. Mr. Sherliker says things will be 
 again as they were before the war, and worse. Will 
 they? That depends upon ourselves. From what 
 we only too sadly know of our muddling, bungling 
 methods as a nation they very likely will, but not 
 if we prepare against it. I did not say that no hon- 
 est man would need to dread the loss of a job; I say 
 he ought not to have to dread it, and there is no 
 need that he should. The paradox of the war is 
 that what the public generally thought we could not 
 do in time of peace when we were piling up wealth 
 we actually have done in time of war when we are 
 recklessly squandering wealth. No one can deny 
 that; it is a truly marvellous thing. For the time 
 being we have abolished destitution; are we going 
 to let it return? Can the community afford to let 
 the wasteful struggles of capital and labour con- 
 tinue? Are we going to be fools enough simply to 
 bring our soldiers home again and discharge them, 
 
20 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 while at the same moment closing down the munition 
 factories, and throwing this vast mass of unorganised 
 labour idle upon the market? Again I say it is not 
 unlikely, judging from our previous methods; but 
 cannot measures be taken beforehand to prevent it? 
 They could if we would. A society already exists 
 for dealing with the problem which will then be upon 
 us; but what earthly use is one voluntary society 
 in face of a vast, complicated issue like this? The 
 whole nation should be facing it, and the best brains 
 of the nation be at work upon it with Government 
 authority and support behind them. If not, the suf- 
 ferings that will follow upon the conclusion of peace 
 will outvie those of war. 
 
 The Lord Mayor of London has already taken 
 action upon one aspect of it in calling together a 
 great conference at Guildhall, representing all the 
 big commercial and industrial towns, bankers and 
 merchants, and employers of labour. The object of 
 this gathering was to organise British trade and com- 
 merce so as to prevent the enemy countries from 
 gaining an undue advantage over us again in these 
 respects in spite of all our fighting. This is all to 
 the good; we can but rejoice that it is being thought 
 of in time ; but we want more than that. We want 
 a bold policy adopted with regard to labour. At the 
 risk of being tedious I must remind my readers once 
 more of what the war has proved. It has proved 
 that in a period of waste and destruction we can 
 
REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 205 
 
 suddenly afford to pay a living wage to practically 
 all workers. Suddenly, remember ! All at once we 
 wanted all the labour we could get, and we used it 
 and paid for it at a higher rate than before the war 
 began. True, the cost of living has gone up too, 
 but not in the same proportion. This is only a 
 personal opinion, I grant, and would take some 
 proving, which I have not the means of doing at 
 present; but is it not plain to everybody that there 
 is not the same amount of distress about that there 
 has been in winter time in former years? Mr. Sher- 
 liker advises the workers to save against the hard 
 times coming: are they saving? Such is not the 
 evidence available. They feel more comfortably off 
 than they were, and no wonder, but it is hardly to 
 be expected that they should as quickly realise the 
 necessity of laying by for a rainy day. They feel as 
 anybody would feel when entering upon a period of 
 comparative opulence after pinching, that they want 
 to enjoy it. 
 
 Now, let me repeat, if this is possible in time of 
 war it should be still more possible after the war. 
 The fears have been proved groundless of those who 
 insisted that the social legislation of the few years 
 immediately preceding the war were laying too 
 heavy a burden upon our resources and would drive 
 capital abroad, etc. There is a limit to driving capi- 
 tal abroad. Capital is only stored-up wealth, or 
 power over production; and wealth is produced from 
 
206 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 two things, labour and land. Unless we send old 
 England itself abroad we shall not lose all our capital 
 in any eventuality. What are we doing with it now? 
 what have we been doing with it ever since this hor- 
 rible strife began? In a few months we have flung 
 away with both hands a hundred times the amount 
 Mr. Lloyd George would have dared to ask for to 
 put an end to destitution. It was there to throw 
 away, and there is plenty still behind it. The war 
 has not hit us yet as it has hit other nations; we 
 scarcely know what it means as compared with any 
 other belligerent. And the secret is that we are go- 
 ing on producing all the time. Our mills and fac- 
 tories are not idle; we are earning the wherewithal 
 to exchange for the commodities necessary to feed 
 and maintain our population at home and our armies 
 abroad — thanks to the Fleet. We are doing this 
 while employing in productive occupations only a 
 tithe of the number we should in time of peace ; that 
 minority, including many women, is providing what 
 the rest of us live on and fight with. It must be so ; 
 where else could it come from? Wealth is not 
 money: it is goods. Neutral nations do not main- 
 tain us out of charity; they supply what we want 
 because we are able to pay for it by sending an 
 equivalent in articles of value overseas. And if that 
 can be done under such conditions as prevail to-day 
 it could and should be done as a matter of duty and 
 national well-being when all the workers are at work 
 
REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 207 
 
 again and war's wastage has stopped. I will return 
 to that point in a moment, for upon it everything else 
 hangs : the whole question is just that of seeing that 
 the workers are set to work again. 
 
 But to illustrate what I have been saying up to 
 now. Here, let us suppose, are two families settled 
 in a savage country far from civilisation. They 
 earn their living by trapping and shooting animals, 
 and curing and sending away for sale the furs thus 
 obtained. The head of the one household claims all 
 the territory as having been first there, and he em- 
 ploys his more lately arrived neighbour in his busi- 
 ness and allows him a certain moiety of the proceeds. 
 To every request by the man for more, the master 
 replies that he cannot afford to give it. He will not 
 even allow him plenty of ammunition wherewith to 
 do some business on his own account. One day they 
 are attacked by redskins, and both families are block- 
 aded in the master's house. Week after week goes 
 by, and by economising their supplies and using their 
 powder and shot effectively they manage to come 
 through safely and defeat their assailants. Then 
 the employe speaks up to his superior: " See here, 
 are we going back to the old condition? Before this 
 murderous attack began you could not afford to give 
 me anything extra either in means or profits. In the 
 first half hour's fighting we blazed away more am- 
 munition than I should have asked from you in a 
 year; and you have maintained me and my children 
 
208 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 on the accumulated store of our joint labours in the 
 past. Through dire necessity, and because we had 
 to stick together or go under, you have distributed 
 your substance freely. I did not know you had such 
 a quantity by you ; neither, perhaps, did you. None 
 of us have starved or been anywhere near starving, 
 and yet we have been fighting instead of toiling. 
 Can't you be more generous when the toiling begins 
 again without being afraid that you will not have 
 enough left for yourself? Make me a partner; I 
 will work all the better and produce all the more." 
 
 To make the parallel exact one only needs to sug- 
 gest that the non-combatant members of that little 
 garrison are able to do something to add to the 
 stock of provisions while the siege lasts, and to keep 
 the weapons up to the mark for their defenders. 
 And here you have a faithful picture in little of what 
 is taking place in this island at the present hour. 
 The Germans have acted the part of redskins sure 
 enough. In a suggestive article in the Daily Chron- 
 icle of January 18, Mr. H. G. Wells says: " Ger- 
 many is feeling the pinch of the war much more even 
 than France, which is habitually parsimonious and in- 
 stinctively cleverly economical, and Russia, which is 
 hardy and insensitive. Great Britain has really only 
 begun to feel the stress. She has probably suffered 
 economically no more than have Holland or Switzer- 
 land. . . . She has not even looked yet at the Ger- 
 man financial expedients of a year ago." There is 
 
REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 209 
 
 no more clear-headed writer on economic subjects 
 living to-day than Mr. Wells, and his words carry- 
 weight. It will be time enough to talk about this 
 country being hard hit by the war when the cry of 
 hunger begins to be heard as it already has been in 
 other countries; but, please God, if we are wise it 
 never will be heard here. It would be a tragedy, 
 indeed, if we had to wait till after the war to hear it. 
 To get back to the problem of setting the worker 
 to work. Do not let us make the mistake we were 
 making before the war and shout our non possumus 
 before we have even tried. Here are two proposi- 
 tions which I will challenge anybody to confute. 
 First, every able-bodied man with two hands can be 
 enabled to produce something of benefit to the com- 
 munity. Secondly, there is no such thing as over- 
 production, though there may be over-proportional 
 production. As regards the former of these twain 
 I fall back on the old commonplace — and almost 
 apologise for referring to it, it is so obvious — that 
 it is not production that is the matter, but distribution. 
 There would be no dire poverty but for the inequi- 
 table distribution of the means of life. Cure that, 
 and you have cut at the root of most of our economic 
 ills. As a people we may be very poor for a good 
 while after the war, but nobody need be destitute. 
 We shall begin to build up again from the hour peace 
 is declared. I remember hearing Mr. Sidney Webb 
 say once that if all property were shared up equally 
 
210 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 to-morrow we might still have to call ourselves poor; 
 there would not be enough to make us rich all round. 
 " But," he added, " destitution is curable, and with- 
 out long delay." That is it. Poverty does no one 
 any harm though luxury easily may; I am not at 
 all sure that civilisation would not be better in a 
 hundred ways if it were poorer than it is — and it is 
 likely to be poor enough after the war. But poverty 
 with simplicity and clean living spells happiness; des- 
 titution spells misery and degradation. 
 
 John Stuart Mill pointed out about two genera- 
 tions ago that there may be real and acute distress 
 in times of general prosperity owing to the shifting 
 of markets or introduction of labour-saving appli- 
 ances. And when that happens, he said, measures 
 should be taken by the community as a whole to tide 
 over the period of readjustment. Ought we not to 
 be getting ready for that now by organising industry 
 on a national basis without destroying individual en- 
 terprise? The community is all the richer by the 
 number of commodities produced at any one time so 
 long as we do not go short of others that are as 
 necessary or more necessary. If three-fourths of 
 the workers of the world suddenly took to producing 
 boots and shoes it would not be true to say that we 
 had too many boots and shoes; it would only mean 
 that we should each have a new pair of boots as 
 often as we now have a clean pocket-handkerchief. 
 But what would be disastrous would be to have three- 
 
REORGANISATION AFTER WAR 211 
 
 fourths of the workers making boots and shoes if 
 there were not sufficient left to grow corn. That is 
 where gluts come from, and that is what wants reg- 
 ulating. Too many boots and shoes to enable those 
 who make them to exchange their products for corn 
 — a shortage of corn — hence hunger and unemploy- 
 ment. 
 
 With all our might let us join together to set all 
 idle hands going after the war, and to see to it that 
 none of such labour is misapplied or ill-requited. As 
 Ruskin said in Unto this Last: " Luxury is indeed 
 possible in the future — innocent and requisite ; lux- 
 ury for all, and by the help of all : but luxury at pres- 
 ent can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the crudest 
 man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat 
 blindfold. Raise the veil boldly; face the light; and 
 if, as yet, the light of the eye can only be through 
 tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth, 
 go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until 
 the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ's gift 
 of bread and bequest of peace shall be Unto this last 
 as unto thee; and when, for earth's severed multi- 
 tudes of the wicked and the weary, there shall be 
 holier reconciliation than that of the narrow home, 
 and calm economy, where the Wicked cease — not 
 from trouble, but from troubling — and the Weary 
 are at rest." 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 WILL OUR CIVILISATION SURVIVE ? 
 
 Amongst those who deserve well of their country 
 at the present time the name of Mr. Arthur Balfour 
 stands out prominently. Not so prominently as it 
 ought by a great deal. Here is a man who led the 
 House of Commons for a longer continuous period 
 than any statesman since Walpole, who has held 
 with distinction the highest offices under the Crown, 
 including the premiership itself, who had earned and 
 entered upon a period of comparative leisure and 
 cultured retirement, and yet in the nation's hour of 
 need places his talent and experience ungrudgingly 
 at the service of the Government of the day, and 
 finally takes charge of one of the most difficult and 
 responsible posts in the administration of an old 
 political opponent, a younger man than himself. If 
 this is not admirable I do not know what is. Amid 
 all the bickering and intriguing that has been going 
 on since the formation of the present ministry it 
 never has occurred to any one to accuse Mr. Balfour 
 of self-seeking or of being animated by any other 
 motive than that of doing his best to strengthen Mr. 
 Asquith's hands for Britain's sake. He might very 
 well have expected the highest place in a Coalition 
 
 212 
 
WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 213 
 
 Government considering his record, influence, and 
 ability. But, no, he takes what is given him, and is 
 content to occupy a subordinate position at a table 
 where for many years he has never sat except as 
 chief. Mr. Churchill's withdrawal from the Ad- 
 miralty created a situation of extreme difficulty and 
 tension ; Mr. Balfour calmly stepped into it although 
 in his long career he had never been head of that de- 
 partment before, and the whole British public heaved 
 a sigh of relief when it heard that he had done so; 
 the crisis was past, our naval future was safe; we 
 could get back to our wrangling again without any 
 fear of alarming interruptions to our favourite pas- 
 time. And we have been at it ever since, hammer 
 and tongs, pounding away at this man and praising 
 that, pushing one up into public favour and pulling 
 another down according to the prevailing mood of 
 the moment, pressing new claims to the headship of 
 a reconstituted Cabinet or repudiating them as the 
 case may be. But no one has ever credited Mr. Bal- 
 four with taking part in these squabbles. He is 
 there to help, not to hinder, and when he is no longer 
 wanted he will go. We all know this, and are glad 
 of it. Still, we might at least remember to say so 
 sometimes. 
 
 But this is not what I set out to write just now. 
 It only came up by association of ideas, so to speak. 
 It was not Mr. Balfour the statesman I was thinking 
 of primarily, but Mr. Balfour the philosopher and 
 
2i 4 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 man of learning; and I could not help recalling our 
 debt to the one while considering the other. I was 
 pondering a suggestive remark he once made in an 
 address before Cambridge University — the Henry 
 Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, I think it was. He 
 said that we of the modern world were witnessing 
 an entirely new thing in the story of human develop- 
 ment. Hitherto within the period of recorded his- 
 tory one civilisation had followed another, each oc- 
 cupying its own special patch of the earth's surface, 
 having its own distinctive characteristics, continuing 
 for a certain definite period long or short, and then 
 passing away to be replaced by another on different 
 ground, the work of a different race, and with a dif- 
 ferent destiny. But now, he pointed out, for good 
 or for all we are evolving one vast, complex, world- 
 wide civilisation, a civilisation which soon or late will 
 gather all the peoples of the earth into its embrace. 
 What then? Here is a new problem for mankind 
 to solve. If this civilisation of ours perishes like 
 the local ones of old, what is going to take its place? 
 Where are we to look for the revivifying influence 
 that, coming originally from new races, made good 
 the failure of a worn-out ancient society? 
 
 This is an impressive generalisation proceeding 
 from a master mind; and it is true to the facts as 
 well as the question to which they give rise, a question 
 with portentous implications at the present hour, 
 when civilisation seems to be doing its utmost to de- 
 
WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 215 
 
 stroy itself. I met Mr. Bernard Shaw in Oxford 
 Street one day last summer, and he characteristically 
 accosted me thus: " Well, what do you think of civ- 
 ilisation now ? Don't you think we have had about 
 enough of it? But, anyhow, it doesn't seem likely 
 to last long; human beings at large are working hard 
 to make an end of it, and the sooner the better, I 
 should say; it has been no great success. Our cussed 
 race has gone mad and is committing suicide as fast 
 as ever it can. It might be a mercy to shorten the 
 process. You are holding Intercessory Services at 
 the City Temple. I suggest that you ask Almighty 
 God to throw humanity on the scrap heap." These 
 were perhaps not the precise words in which Mr. 
 Shaw thus pungently expressed himself; they may be 
 less forceful; but they give the general sense of them, 
 and I do not think he would object to my reproduc- 
 ing them here. Their cynicism is only apparent, 
 and represents the disappointment of idealists in gen- 
 eral with the course affairs have taken in these last 
 days. 
 
 What is our civilisation intrinsically worth? 
 What guarantee of permanency has it that its prede- 
 cessors had not? It is a question worth looking into. 
 What Mr. Balfour said about the civilisations of old 
 is undeniable : they were all limited both as to race 
 and to the territory occupied. I might add that they 
 were limited in time succession also ; as one rose an- 
 other fell, as a new one came to the birth an older 
 
216 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 was overthrown or sank into decay. Thus we have 
 the civilisation of China, no one knows how old, but 
 very ancient, practically shut up to itself, possessing 
 characteristic features which distinguish it from all 
 others. It reaches a certain point and then it stops; 
 as far as can be ascertained it has not made the slight- 
 est advance for ages. It is a case of arrested de- 
 velopment, and unique at that. India has its own 
 history not at all like China's. Long, long ago it 
 topped a high point of excellence both materially and 
 intellectually. In certain ways that attainment has 
 never been surpassed; but a blight fell on it; it be- 
 came moribund. What we see in India to-day, with 
 its teeming millions of population, is but the ghost 
 of a departed glory, a mournful decadence in the 
 quality of the inheritors of an immemorial tradition. 
 Babylon, that great city of the plains and seat of one 
 of the most formidable empires of the ancient world 
 — itself a name that has survived into our own time 
 as a symbol for soulless materialism and vicious 
 abundance — going back to an antiquity as remote 
 as 10,000 B. c. and producing a literature and sci- 
 ence the very memory of which has been lost — what 
 of Babylon to-day? Our troops advancing from the 
 Persian Gulf are fighting over its ruins, and many 
 of them, perhaps, do not even know it. The de- 
 scendants of that imperial race of a long forgotten 
 world have lost all sense of continuity and become 
 merged in other and younger people. We do not 
 
WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 217 
 
 know where to look for them nor how to trace a link 
 between them and the folk who erected the colossal 
 structures — monuments, elaborate plants for irriga- 
 tion and the like — that lie strewn about the plains 
 of Mesopotamia. The seal of death is over every- 
 thing there. One of the richest districts in the world 
 in natural resources, it is now one of the poorest in 
 cultivation, its inhabitants half savages. 
 
 And so one might go on. Assyria, that land of 
 fierce and ruthless warriors, the Prussia of three 
 thousand years ago; Persia, with its mighty Cyrus, 
 the Napoleon of his day; Egypt, that home of mys- 
 tery and occult lore — what do we know about them 
 all? Kings, prophets, sages they produced, men of 
 the sword and men of the mind, and passed; the very 
 names of most of them were writ in water. There 
 is good reason to believe that many of our scientific 
 inventions were anticipated in the country of the Nile 
 so far back that the secret of their use was lost again 
 while Europe was still primeval forest, swamp, and 
 waste. Each of these imposing despotisms had its 
 own particular centre and its own specific period of 
 prosperity, its own unique type of race culture, and 
 then it perished. Egypt alone went on and on ; there 
 is a magic, a lure, an immortality about Egypt hard 
 to describe ; but the Egypt of to-day is not the Egypt 
 of the Pharaohs. " From the summits of the Pyra- 
 mids forty centuries look down upon you," grandilo- 
 quently cried Bonaparte to his soldiers. He might 
 
218 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 have said a hundred and not been far wrong, but 
 only the shadow of that wondrous past remains, a 
 shadow and a tomb. 
 
 Greece leaped upon the stage when Egypt was 
 already hoary, broke Persia's dominion, and laid 
 the foundations of modern culture and refinement of 
 life. Alexander's armies penetrated the Orient, 
 and proved themselves invincible against the barba- 
 rians of their own borders too. Where is that eager, 
 buoyant Greek spirit now? Was not Byron 
 right ? — 
 
 "The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! 
 Where burning Sappho loved and sung, 
 Where grew the arts of war and peace, 
 Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung! 
 Eternal Summer gilds them yet, 
 But all, except their sun, is set. 
 'Tis something, in the dearth of fame, 
 Though link'd among a fetter'd race, 
 To feel at least a patriot's shame, 
 Even as I sing, suffuse my face; 
 For what is left the poet here? 
 For Greeks a blush — for Greece a tear." 
 
 We owe to that amazing Greece of the compara- 
 tively brief classical age more than we can ever 
 compute; but it is dead; it does not live in Constan- 
 tine and the pusillanimous nation he rules. And 
 here is a curious thing. The blind Homer, while the 
 Greece we know was yet young, sang of an older and 
 greater Greece, a Greece of doughty heroes and 
 matchless splendours, a Greece of wealth and worth 
 compared with which the Greece of his own day was 
 
WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 219 
 
 rude and weak. We used to think this was a poet's 
 imagination, and that there never was such a Greece. 
 We were wrong. Archaeological investigation has 
 rediscovered it; the spade and mattock have dug it 
 up, or enough of it to tell us what it must have been. 
 Homer did not exaggerate. There it was, that 
 Greece of dim legend and mythic story, the Greece 
 of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus — there it 
 really was. It has been so completely blotted out 
 by some ethnic catastrophe, some unexplained descent 
 of barbarian hordes as to leave no account of itself 
 behind save the vague belief in a golden age to which 
 the Iliad refers. 
 
 Then came Rome, mistress of the world, Rome 
 the eternal, as all men at one time believed. For a 
 few generations civilisation lay under one sceptre 
 and centred in one city. The proud boast — 
 
 "While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; 
 When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; 
 And when Rome falls — the World," 
 
 seemed safe enough when it was first uttered. The 
 Emperors were entitled " lord of the world." So 
 potent was the spell cast upon all minds by this great- 
 est of human institutions — Roma immortalis — 
 that for centuries after the empire was dead nobody 
 knew it, and people everywhere went on talking as if 
 it were alive. New nations grew up inside it, and 
 the proudest title their rulers could take was that of 
 the old Roman Caesar. That is all " Kaiser " 
 
220 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 means, or " Czar " either. Every " emperor " is 
 but a projection of the old Roman " Imperator," who 
 was only general of the armies of a Republic. This 
 is one of the little ironies of history. Rome itself is 
 gone for ever, the Rome whose sway stretched from 
 Spain to India, and Scotland to the Sahara. It col- 
 lapsed from within before it was overthrown from 
 without. 
 
 Why then should we assume, as we almost uni- 
 versally do, that our particular civilisation will last 
 for ever — or, rather, as the Roman thought of the 
 Coliseum, until the end of the world? It might very 
 well be that we should sink back into barbarism either 
 as a result of the present contest or from other 
 causes. Such has happened before. When Roman 
 civilisation fell the clock was put back for no less 
 than a thousand years. The time was not all 
 wasted; paganism had to perish that something new 
 and better, something richer and more stable, might 
 gradually rise upon its ruins. But one can quite un- 
 derstand the pessimism and melancholy of the finer 
 minds of antiquity when they saw all that was dig- 
 nified and beautiful being swept under by anarchy 
 and savagery. I have always felt a great sympathy 
 for Julian the apostate, the emperor who strove so 
 vainly to resist the triumphant advance of Chris- 
 tianity. To him the new cult seemed rude, vulgar, 
 ugly, and irrational compared with the venerable and 
 dignified symbolism of the old Greek Pantheon it was 
 
WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 221 
 
 driving out. And so it was — at the time. It has 
 since gathered to itself much of the poetry and re- 
 finement of the less morally exalted faiths it de- 
 stroyed. What poor Julian and others who felt 
 like him did not see was that it possessed a principle 
 of vitality and creative energy they did not. 
 
 Has that principle still power enough to regener- 
 ate the world? We shall see. For the old, old al- 
 ternative is before us : either up or down, there can 
 be no standing still. It rests with ourselves to say 
 which it shall be. I do not myself believe, and never 
 could bring myself to believe, that the whole human 
 family could fail the purpose of Almighty God and 
 drop down into the Tophet of sheer jungle animal- 
 ism. But we are in danger of it: that is the point. 
 It is, to say the least of it, conceivable that our pres- 
 ent civilisation, which has been so largely material- 
 istic in spirit and aim, may go to pieces, and some- 
 thing entirely new have to replace it, and that might 
 take a long, long while. As it is, we have been 
 pulled up sharply, and will have to look to our foun- 
 dations. Will we come out of the war chastened and 
 purified, or will the various belligerents be like the 
 famous Kilkenny cats who fought each other tooth 
 and claw till at length there was nothing left but their 
 tails? What kind of a world will it be after the 
 nations have stopped killing each other and begun to 
 live again ? I ask very seriously, Can it be hoped for 
 that we may deliberately set ourselves to create a 
 
222 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 higher and better type of civilisation, albeit a simpler 
 and sweeter one, than that which we are breaking 
 up? Perhaps; it depends mainly upon whether Ger- 
 many can be compelled to learn the lesson properly. 
 We are seeing over again the fighting out of an issue 
 upon which hangs the future of all mankind. Ages 
 ago that issue was between Carthage and Rome; to- 
 day it is between Great Britain and Germany. Had 
 the mighty Hannibal and his Punic warriors pre- 
 vailed, a cruder, more sinister, more merciless mil- 
 itary despotism would have controlled the fortunes 
 of civilisation than what actually did prevail. De- 
 mocracy would have been snowed under in its first 
 faint attempts to assert itself, and there never would 
 have been an England or a United States of America. 
 Rome or Carthage, England or Prussia — which as 
 a spiritual ideal? We have all heard of the famous 
 Roman senator who never finished a speech, no mat- 
 ter what the subject, without adding as his final word : 
 " I am also of opinion that Carthage should be de- 
 stroyed." It is not Germany we want to destroy 
 but Prussianism, Kaiserism, with its blood-drinking 
 worship of the old pagan god Thor, upon whom it 
 has struck a Christian name. 
 
 And then? Well, then let us begin again and 
 make a better thing of life than we have been doing. 
 That ripe and rich civilisation which immediately pre- 
 ceded ours and had to die that ours might be born 
 might look a finer thing than what followed it for 
 
WILL CIVILISATION SURVIVE? 223 
 
 many hundreds of years, but it was not. Its gaze 
 was fixed on secular ideals and those only; and the 
 civilisation that does that is doomed. Cicero was a 
 cultivated gentleman who wrote with much com- 
 placency and eloquence concerning man's earthly lot, 
 and very vaguely concerning the mysterious beyond. 
 Francis, the little poor man of Assisi, hundreds of 
 years afterwards taught everybody he met to regard 
 earthly possessions as nothing and the soul as every- 
 thing. If Francis were invited to the Lord Mayor's 
 banquet to-day, and behaved as in his own day, we 
 should not know what to make of him. He would 
 take a big pepperbox full of ashes in his pocket, and 
 sprinkle it over the turtle soup and any other dish 
 they might set before him, saying as he did so, 
 " Brother ash is pure." He would not stay away 
 from the feast, nor rebuke any one else for eating 
 their fill; he would enjoy their company, and greet 
 all and sundry with the humble, charming, childlike 
 courtesy characteristic of him. But he did not be- 
 lieve in glutting his appetites; metaphorically speak- 
 ing, he sprinkled ashes over everything that the flesh 
 took pleasure in. And he lived in heaven always. 
 Hitherto the twentieth century has been with Cicero. 
 God grant the rest of it may be with Francis. Cic- 
 ero's world was startlingly like ours, much more so 
 than any of the centuries that lie between. It had 
 much the same kind of mentality and very similar 
 problems. Unquestionably the ordinary man of to- 
 
224 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 day, whether educated or not, would feel himself 
 more at home with the mind of that old world of 
 long ago than with that of the people of the Middle 
 Ages. We could converse with Cicero much more 
 easily than with St. Francis; we should understand 
 him better; he would be more our kind of man. I 
 am sorry to have to admit it, but it is so. Cicero's 
 utter secularity of outlook and uncertainty about the 
 future life represents fairly well the average mind 
 of to-day, whereas Francis is a stranger to it. We 
 may rhapsodise about the latter, but we do not get 
 anywhere near him ; we should probably shut him up 
 in a lunatic asylum if he were going about among 
 us just now as he did among his thirteenth-century 
 contemporaries. Brave, mysterious, mystical Rus- 
 sia would be much more likely to take him to her 
 heart. Oh, I wonder — I wonder greatly — - 
 whether the world after the war will have sense 
 enough to shake off most of its painfully acquired 
 secular wisdom, with all its direful train of results, 
 and go as healthfully mad again as the primitive 
 Christians and the thirteenth-century friars ■ — I won- 
 der and I long. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY CONTRASTED. 
 IS THE FORMER LESS EFFICIENT? 
 
 It is often and quite truly said that the present war 
 is largely a war of ideals, and that the cause of the 
 Allies is the cause of democracy against autocracy, 
 of liberty against bondage, of the reign of reason- 
 ableness and good will against bullying and brute 
 force. With certain allowances this statement is 
 unimpeachable. The war is indeed a war of ideals; 
 it would be wholly dreadful if the world were to be 
 governed by the Prussian jackboot system; it is not 
 too much to say that the victory of Germany would 
 really mean the victory of materialism in thought 
 and practice. On this side of the question the mys- 
 ticism of Russia, as Stephen Graham has been show- 
 ing us, is in more pronounced antagonism to the Ger- 
 man spirit than is that of either England or France. 
 But on the other side has to be set the fact that Rus- 
 sia is as much an autocracy as Germany, though with- 
 out Germany's scientific efficiency, and as much op- 
 posed to popular government in every shape and 
 form. Nevertheless with Russia on our side the 
 triumph of our united arms will ultimately mean the 
 triumph of the democratic principle, of the sover- 
 
 225 
 
226 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 eignty of the people, over that of irresponsible mon- 
 archical rule. This is almost inevitable; whereas 
 if we lose, the anti-popular elements in the internal 
 administration of the nations of Europe will be more 
 deeply rooted than before. Of course we shall not 
 lose, but we need to win very definitely and drastic- 
 ally to break the accursed alliance between imperial- 
 ism and militarism which has held mankind in dread 
 for so long. 
 
 "Before the face of God we swear: 
 As life is good and sweet, 
 Under the sun 
 
 This horror shall not come again; 
 Never, never again 
 Shall twenty million men, 
 Nor twenty, no, nor ten, 
 
 Leave all God gave them in the hands of one — 
 Leave the decision over peace and war 
 To king or kaiser, president or tsar." 
 
 I thank the American who wrote those lines. He 
 knows what is essentially at stake. 
 
 But this raises a nice point: So far, has the hour 
 of trial shown that democracy is as advantageous as 
 autocracy in the regulation of human affairs? Was 
 it so before the war, and has it proved itself to be so 
 in the war ? Is democracy as a form of government, 
 as a spirit or temper dominating our social arrange- 
 ments, worth conserving? Is it worth fighting and 
 dying for? Here is a moot subject for inquiry. 
 
 Let us be sure of what we mean by democracy. In 
 Lincoln's famous words, it is the government of the 
 
DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 227 
 
 people, by the people and for the people; but even 
 so it may take many forms. Aristotle would not 
 have believed it realisable in anything except a city 
 state, a state of perhaps no more than thirty thou- 
 sand citizens. He would have scouted the idea of 
 a democracy that ran to a hundred millions as in 
 the United States of America. And to him and his 
 contemporaries, citizenship, democratic or otherwise, 
 involved the subjection of a helot class of three or 
 four times the number, who were compelled to do 
 all the drudgery for the privileged citizens; he held 
 that a man could not be a proper citizen and have to 
 wait on himself. I wonder what our Labour M.P.'s 
 would think about that. It is clear that these city 
 states of old were not democratic at all in our sense 
 of the word, but oligarchies. 
 
 Our own ancient Anglo-Saxon tribes when they 
 originally came to these shores were small democ- 
 racies. The folk-moot was the assembly of all the 
 freemen in council, the men able to bear arms. 
 There were grades of rank, but all had a voice in the 
 direction of communal affairs. Serfdom developed 
 later, but even then the mediaeval manor was a cu- 
 rious anticipation of modern communism in certain 
 ways. It was a self-sufficing economic unit in which 
 the agricultural lands were carefully divided up 
 among the household to be maintained, and divided 
 in such a way that no one held any strip in perpetuity; 
 the holdings changed hands from year to year on a 
 
228 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 recognised system, so that the best and richest soils 
 came into the possession of each family in turn. 
 And every member of the little community, even the 
 widow and the orphan, had a universally admitted 
 right to a fair share of the produce of the harvest. 
 There were bad years, years of famine and flood, but 
 when they came all suffered together. This system 
 had to break up in time to make way for a larger 
 unity, but it seems a pity we could not get it back 
 in some of its best features. It was social democ- 
 racy in small. 
 
 It was a long time before anything like a na- 
 tional consciousness appeared, and longer still before 
 the democratic spirit extended to it. Our ancestors 
 lost the battle of Hastings and had to submit to a 
 foreign prince at the head of a comparatively small 
 invading army because the men of the midlands and 
 the north could not grasp the fact that what happened 
 to London and the south had anything to do with 
 them; in fact this inability to think and act as a 
 united whole has always been characteristic of our 
 race and is to-day. When centralised government 
 became established under kingly rule it interfered 
 very little at first with local customs and methods. 
 The one thing the English people would not stand 
 was direct taxation. We have to stand it now with 
 a vengeance. Nor did the central government con- 
 sider that it was its function to see justice done as 
 between man and man or even to keep the peace. It 
 
DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 229 
 
 allowed private warfare to go on, and within limits 
 it assumed that every individual must see to the 
 avenging of his own wrongs; all the State did was 
 to keep the ring, as it were, and see fair play. 
 When at length it interfered more in local matters 
 and was strong enough to insist on maintaining order 
 and the obligation resting equally upon all individuals 
 to obey the law, the question at once arose how the 
 local voice was to make itself heard in the councils 
 of the sovereign and his ministers. Obviously the 
 nation was too big a unit to permit of all the freemen 
 travelling to one central spot and taking an imme- 
 diate part in the general deliberations of the legisla- 
 tive authority. So the device of representation was 
 hit upon, and it is an odd thing to note in these days 
 that for generations the chief difficulty was to get the 
 various localities to send representatives at all. 
 
 Yet so modern democracy grew, for it should be 
 observed that it is from our English institutions far 
 more than from any other source that popular gov- 
 ernment throughout the world has sprung. Rather 
 more than a dozen years ago, when on a visit to the 
 United States, I went to see Mr. Roosevelt at his 
 home in Oyster Bay, and in the course of conversa- 
 tion he pointed out a fact that I have never since lost 
 sight of. It was this : he said that American democ- 
 racy owed its origin to two main forces, that of Eng- 
 lish Puritanism and that of the French essayists of 
 the eighteenth century, Rousseau and his kind, who 
 
230 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 made the way for the great Revolution which shook 
 human society to its foundations and culminated for 
 a while in the military despotism of Napoleon. 
 " But of the two," continued Mr. Roosevelt, " we 
 owe far more to the English pietists than to the 
 French idealists." I should say myself that wher- 
 ever you see real parliamentary institutions at work 
 on the earth to-day, coupled with the responsibility 
 of the administration to the people, you see the old 
 English folk-moot enlarged and extended to meet 
 modern conditions. This is its genesis, this is the 
 historic root from which it grew. 
 
 In a terrible world-struggle like the present, de- 
 mocracy is at a great disadvantage compared with 
 autocracy. It cannot easily maintain the secrecy 
 essential to vigorous and decided action, diplomatic 
 or military; it would be against its principles to 
 suppress the liberty of the subject as drastically as 
 is now being done in enemy countries. One of our 
 most cherished possessions is liberty of speech, and 
 another is the right of an accused person to a fair 
 trial. If either of these are suspended it can only 
 be under protest and within as small limits as pos- 
 sible; the German bureau knows nothing of such 
 limits. Then we are apt to be insubordinate, ill-dis- 
 ciplined, ineffective in our methods of organising our 
 resources; it is part of the price we have to pay for 
 the individual freedom of initiative, and still mo*re 
 freedom of inertia, to which we have so long been ac- 
 
DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 231 
 
 customed. Suppose our Government had proclaimed 
 universal service the day war broke out — which, as 
 we have seen, is involved in the very idea of Anglo- 
 Saxon democracy and is no innovation — we should 
 have been saved a world of trouble since. But it was 
 not done, for the simple reason that the step seemed 
 too drastic to take without the direct authority of 
 Parliament, and that meant interminable talk and dis- 
 cussion and more or less division of purpose. Ger- 
 many was not hampered so and never would be, hence 
 the German people cannot understand us and our 
 ways, and mistakenly think that objection to compul- 
 sion on the part of persons in this country means that 
 we are half-hearted about the war. Democracy in 
 America is perhaps in worse case, for it has devel- 
 oped a boss control of politics which is anything but 
 democratic in essence, and it is more subject to cor- 
 ruption and bribery than with us. But these things, 
 be it remembered, are apt in some degree to threaten 
 popular government anywhere ; they can only threaten 
 autocracy if the fountain-head is itself corrupt. It 
 has been said, and there is some truth in it, that the 
 best form of government for mankind would be a 
 benevolent autocracy if we have regard to no more 
 than the immediate happiness of the governed. Find 
 your benevolent autocrat, endow him with all the 
 wisdom and ability of the ripest statesmanship and 
 the unselfishness of an angel from heaven, give him 
 .unlimited scope for a few years, and then shoot him. 
 
232 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 For undoubtedly, as the late Mr. Gladstone warned 
 us, the possession of practically unlimited political 
 power always tends to demoralise. The Kaiser's 
 megalomania is a good illustration of this, and so at 
 the other extreme are some of the fractious strikes 
 among the workers in this country since the war 
 began. Democracy is always handicapped by the 
 fact that although in theory it affords opportunity 
 for the State to discover and use its best talent in the 
 public service, in practice it tends to lower the tone 
 of public life through the necessity under which 
 politicians labour of conciliating an electorate which 
 contains a large proportion of stupid people. 
 
 But if our thought is fixed on something greater 
 than mere immediate satisfaction, if we consider the 
 training of manhood as the object of government, 
 then democracy, with all its drawbacks, is preferable 
 to the best autocracy imaginable. For there is 
 nothing that evolves faculty and strengthens charac- 
 ter so much as a sense of responsibility, and democ- 
 racy encourages that. When sovereignty resides in 
 the people as a whole, and not in an individual or a 
 group, it must mean that each man is correspondingly 
 dignified by the knowledge that he is in some degree 
 arbiter of the destinies of all. By the law of gravi- 
 tation the earth draws the sun as well as the sun the 
 earth, and therefore every tiniest pebble on the 
 earth's surface in proportion to its mass is exercising 
 control upon the movements of the sun; so does 
 
DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY 233 
 
 every citizen exercise sovereignty in a democratic 
 state, and the knowledge that he possesses such 
 sovereignty should tend, on the whole, to develop a 
 loftier type of character than if it were wanting. 
 Men have to learn how to use liberty. Those new to 
 it mostly tend to confound it with license, whereas it 
 is just the opposite. Freedom is not caprice but self- 
 development in society. " I believe," said the Irish- 
 man, " that every man should do as he likes, and if 
 a man won't do as he likes he should be made to." 
 Some people's notions of freedom get no farther than 
 that. Freedom to obey the law of one's own being 
 is not and cannot be inconsistent with the well- 
 being of society at large; for what we individually 
 are we owe to society in great measure, greater prob- 
 ably than we ever stop to appraise. A man brought 
 up apart from ordered human society, even if he 
 could survive, would be little better than a wild 
 beast; his faculties would be utterly undeveloped 
 except those that were purely animal. Self-realisa- 
 tion is only possible within society, and therefore our 
 individual liberty, to be worthy of the name, must 
 never be incompatible with the liberties of others, or 
 with the good of the society of which we are individu- 
 ally members. As I have more than once remarked, 
 perfect anarchy and perfect socialism are one and the 
 same, and both represent the Christian ideal in human 
 relations : it is the service which is perfect freedom. 
 We are members one of another, and cannot attain 
 
234 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 to our full individual heritage apart from the 
 whole. 
 
 There is nothing the youth of our nation needs so 
 much as discipline, and I hope the democracy of the 
 future will see that it gets it. Perhaps from this 
 point of view universal military service would not 
 be such a bad thing, for at least it would train the 
 rising generation in habits of obedience and esprit de 
 corps which at present it sadly lacks. Democratise 
 the service sufficiently and there would be few dangers 
 attending it; we should not have to fear the domi- 
 nance of a military caste. And if all civilised states 
 became democracies there would be little likelihood 
 of our having to fear any more wars. Democracies 
 don't want wars ; they know too well who have to do 
 the fighting. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 
 
 The Bishop of London is reported to have said 
 recently that he knew of many cases in which people 
 had lost their faith in God and the goodness of life 
 through the horrors of the world war. That may 
 well be ; I know of a few myself. But I doubt very 
 much whether such faith was ever strong or well 
 grounded. I may be mistaken, and am far from 
 feeling uncharitable in saying this, but so far as my 
 experience goes I am inclined to believe that a good 
 deal of the so-called loss of faith is somewhat ficti- 
 tious. People who have not been in the habit of 
 paying much attention to spiritual things have sud- 
 denly discovered that their conventional religion has 
 failed them in presence of the appalling catastrophe 
 which has overwhelmed civilisation; and is it any 
 wonder? So much of our religion is wholly unreal, 
 a mere veneer of unreflective belief and observance 
 upon a thoroughly worldly and selfish mode of life. 
 Something was needed to break that up, and it has 
 come with terrific force. And, let me add, I have 
 come across cases of late in which not even the 
 excuse of conventionality can be pleaded. Persons 
 who have been frankly irreligious in practice, caring 
 
 235 
 
236 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 nothing about either God or heaven, and very little 
 about anything but their own gratification, are now 
 loud in their protests against belief in the divine 
 government of the universe. Omnipotent goodness, 
 they avow, would not have permitted the present 
 orgy of strife and slaughter. That is as it may be, 
 but a judgment proceeding from such a source does 
 not carry much weight. What does and should 
 carry weight is the conviction of those who have 
 hitherto done their best to live in terms of the highest 
 that has been revealed to mankind, and we all know 
 what that is whether we obey it or not. I have yet 
 to be told of a single instance in which a man or 
 woman of lofty Christian character has been deprived 
 of all consolation, robbed of all hope and trust, by 
 the advent of the universal calamity from which 
 we are suffering. The very fact that they could be 
 would be a sufficient demonstration that they had 
 been looking for their good in the wrong place. 
 
 But at the same time one does not forget that 
 there are those everywhere about us who are in 
 deepest sorrow and affliction, because of what is hap- 
 pening, and they include some of the noblest and 
 worthiest of our fellow-creatures. What comfort is 
 there for them, and how are they to find it? I write 
 with deep respect, not only to the mourners and the 
 broken in heart, to whom the war has brought per- 
 sonal loss and trouble for which there can never be 
 any earthly compensation, but to those whose ideal- 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 237 
 
 ism has received a shock, who have been rudely 
 awakened from dreams of a better and happier state 
 of human society in this world to a bitter realisation 
 of the truth that the forces of evil in human nature 
 itself are still too mighty to permit of such a prospect 
 for ages to come. Alas, for the castles we have 
 builded, the many fair hopes we have indulged of 
 social and individual felicity and abounding gladness ! 
 They have all been drowned in a torrent of blood. 
 
 I am not going to try to reconcile divine goodness 
 with the permission of human suffering. There is 
 much that might be said on that point, but when 
 we have said it all there still remains something 
 unexplained, something for which no argument 
 drawn from the stores of human wisdom will suffice. 
 Let us look to comfort only, for it can be gained, 
 without doubt. 
 
 In the first place, let us try to grasp the fact of 
 the supernatural order. Few people ever do that, 
 with the consequence that we are more or less the 
 victims of the fluctuations and accidents of sense. 
 We attribute (in a wrong way) far too much im- 
 portance to the natural order, as it is called, the plane 
 of physical experience and all that depends upon it. 
 But there is another order, a world invisible yet not 
 far away, with values of its own quite distinct from 
 those of the world we know so well, an order in which 
 things are exactly what they seem, and there is 
 no lack, no loss, no imperfection, but everything 
 
2 3 8 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 stands in its due relation to everything else and all is 
 harmony and bliss. That order is the real, and ours 
 — if it be right to call this ours any more than the 
 other — is the comparatively unreal. Remember, 
 I am talking about a simple fact, a fact as solid and 
 substantial as Europe or America. The modern 
 mind has largely lost sight of this supernatural order, 
 and yet it interpenetrates the natural order and is 
 influencing it all the time; in fact the natural order 
 is a sort of broken reflection of the supernatural. 
 Plato used to say that everything earthly was a type 
 or image of something that existed ideally in heaven. 
 We may call the supernatural order heaven if we like, 
 provided we are careful to recognise that it is the 
 real, the eternal, the all-complete of which this 
 earth-world is but the shadow. The relation between 
 the two is like that between a beautiful landscape 
 and its blurred image in a lake. Every ripple on 
 the surface of the lake disturbs and distorts the pic- 
 ture of the calm serenity above, though it is closely 
 related to it and affords us fleeting glimpses of what 
 the higher must be. Think of this. There is a 
 supernatural order, and it is the source of all our 
 idealism, all our notions of goodness, truth, and 
 happiness. Try to imagine a world in which nothing 
 needs to be improved upon because everything is 
 already exactly what it should be, a world in which 
 nothing ever goes wrong, and from which nothing is 
 missing that is needed for the good of its inhabitants 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 239 
 
 and the satisfaction of their desires, a world in 
 which by just being themselves people are giving and 
 doing their best for one another, and you have the 
 supernatural order. I repeat that it exists now and 
 has always existed ; it does not need to be made ; from 
 all eternity it is. 
 
 Its values, as I have just indicated, are not like 
 ours, though not totally unlike either. Here in the 
 flesh we are deceived by appearances. A scoundrel 
 like King Ferdinand of Bulgaria can make high- 
 sounding professions of fidelity and honour, and 
 these are accepted at their face value by the Germans 
 on whose side he is fighting; though if there be a 
 black-hearted rascal in existence I should think it is 
 he. But we are seldom, if ever, quite sure of motives 
 in one another's actions, or even in our own; there 
 is a lot of specious humbug in every grade of society; 
 human nature is given to pretending and being de- 
 ceived. Again, we suppose the possession of external 
 abundance to be desirable as well as power over our 
 fellows, and these are objects we contend about and 
 kill one another for. In other words, the world, 
 the flesh, and the devil can supply incentives and to a 
 large extent control human action ; they create values 
 which we know are not the highest. But in the 
 supernatural order it is different. There what we 
 are is all we have, and there is perfect correspond- 
 ence between the inner and the outer, between being 
 and seeming. As Southey has it — 
 
2 4 o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 "They sin who tell us Love can die; 
 With earth all other passions fly, 
 All others are but vanity. 
 In heaven ambition cannot dwell, 
 Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; 
 Earthly, these passions of the earth, 
 They perish where they had their birth. 
 But Love is indestructible; 
 Its holy flame for ever burneth; 
 From heaven it came, to heaven returneth. 
 Too oft on earth a troubled guest, 
 At times deceived, at times opprest, 
 It here is tried and purified, 
 Then hath in heaven its perfect rest. 
 It soweth here with toil and care; 
 But the harvest time of Love is there." 
 
 Would it not be delightful if we could get rid of all 
 false values at a stroke and live for truth and good- 
 ness alone ? To do that is to live in the supernatural 
 order, the spiritual order, and in so far as we even 
 try to do it we are living in and by that order now, 
 and will wake up to it by and by when we pass 
 through the gates of death. 
 
 Let me be careful here not to mislead any one into 
 the heresy of supposing that the natural order is 
 the seat of evil and the supernatural that of good. 
 It is not so. And our hope is that one day the lower 
 will be so entirely conformed to the higher, earth 
 be so invaded and possessed by heaven, that all our 
 troubles will disappear. That will be the fulfilment 
 of the petition in the Lord's Prayer: Thy will be 
 done on earth as it is in heaven. All I am insisting 
 upon at the moment is the reality of the supernatural 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 241 
 
 order. We ought to be consciously and consistently 
 living in it and for it. 
 
 And then what follows? Why, this: In perfect 
 being is all having. That sounds a strange phrase, 
 but I do not know what to substitute for it. I mean 
 that when we are what we ought to be we shall, in 
 virtue of that very fact, come into possession of 
 everything we ought to have. Not in this world 
 probably. Here in the natural order — disorder 
 would be a better name for it — the noblest are as 
 liable to pain and loss as the rest of mankind. Bel- 
 gian nuns were violated, priests were shot for carry- 
 ing letters from dying men to their relatives, heroic 
 and self-sacrificing men and women lost every stick 
 and stone of their possessions and were driven home- 
 less out into the world. I am daily in receipt of the 
 most pathetic communications from English mothers 
 who wonder if I could help them find out anything 
 about their boys at the front who have not been 
 heard of for a considerable time. Nothing more 
 moving has ever come my way than some of the 
 descriptions these good women give of their lost ones. 
 One can see how beautiful they were in their eyes, 
 and how fine in character too. " Heaven without 
 him would be no heaven to me," is a not infrequent 
 observation of mother or wife, and I can well believe 
 it. Consider all the sorrow thus pitifully expressed 
 or held in check by hope and longing. If I had no 
 
242 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 word for such as these I think I would never dare 
 speak in public or to write again. But here is the 
 word, and it is not mine only; it is the promise of 
 Him in whom the supernatural order became vocal 
 once for all. " Not as the world giveth, give I unto 
 you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it 
 be afraid." What is yours you shall have, and you 
 shall have it all. You shall have it because you have 
 the capacity for it and not otherwise ; you shall have 
 it because of what you are. We have to get up to 
 the highest level on which to possess, and then — 
 it is the law of the supernatural order — we possess 
 in a perfection of which nothing can ever rob us. 
 We learn, as Whittier says — 
 
 " The truth to flesh and sense unknown, 
 That life is ever lord of death, 
 And love can never lose its own." 
 
 Or as John Burroughs puts it in the simple little poem 
 he entitles " Waiting " — 
 
 " Serene, I fold my hands and wait, 
 Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; 
 I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, 
 For lo! my own shall come to me. 
 I stay my haste, I make delays, 
 For what avails this eager pace? 
 I stand amid the eternal ways, 
 And what is mine shall know my face." 
 
 If you love with a pure, unselfish love ; or if you are 
 living, not simply for the amount of wealth you can 
 heap together, or the amount of sensuous pleasure 
 you can wring out of existence, or for any of the 
 
THE SUPERNATURAL ORDER 243 
 
 other things that the world counts desirable, but for 
 exalted spiritual ideals; in other words, if you are 
 living for the values of the supernatural order, you 
 can no more be kept out of your heritage than the 
 summer could be stopped from coming by Act of 
 Parliament. Wait in quietness and confidence, and 
 you will see. The span of human life is not long at 
 the longest. 
 
 Moreover, you can know this as you go along. 
 One of the most wonderful things in life is the way 
 in which comfort comes to the heart that is stayed 
 upon the highest. Despair and unselfishness are 
 mutually incompatible. Viewing a disaster before- 
 hand you may say you could not bear it, that nothing 
 would be left for you but absolute, unrelieved black- 
 ness of misery if it befell; but when it actually comes, 
 dreadful as it may seem and terribly as it may hurt, 
 if you have been trying to meet it on the very highest 
 level of courage and faith, something — call it by 
 what name you like — presently invades your soul 
 and gives you peace and assurance of coming good. 
 'Tis a miracle, but true. And almost always a sur- 
 prise. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 KING OF ENGLAND 
 
 A few weeks after the war broke out I happened 
 to be in a certain London club and was shown one of 
 the club curios, a book in which bets were registered 
 between members, dating back to early Georgian 
 times and containing the names of not a few men 
 famous in our island story. But what struck me 
 most in looking through that book was an entry 
 only a few days old. It ran somewhat as follows : 
 11 Mr. so-and-so bets Lord somebody else (I don't 
 remember what amount) that as a consequence of 
 the present war there will not be a crowned head 
 left in Europe twenty years hence except the King 
 of England." This was an arresting sentence, not 
 because of the bet — gambling is one of the greatest 
 evils of the age — but because of the significance of 
 the assumption made by both parties to the wager. 
 The peer evidently doubted the disappearance of 
 reigning royalty; the commoner was sure of it; but 
 both agreed, so I was given to understand, that in 
 any eventuality British monarchy would survive. 
 All other thrones may be overturned, but that of 
 England stands for ever. It will be interesting to 
 see the result of that bet if we live long enough. 
 
 244 
 
KING OF ENGLAND 245 
 
 But why this confidence in the stability of our 
 monarchical institutions as contrasted with those of 
 any other country? Well, the difference mainly re- 
 sides in the quality of English kingship ; there is no 
 other quite like it, and most others are very unlike 
 it. In a memorable speech some years back, Mr. 
 Churchill spoke of our British royal house as the 
 most ancient, the most glorious, and the most securely 
 rooted in the affections of the people of any in the 
 world. There was not another, he declared, that 
 would not be proud to aspire to an alliance with it, 
 Just so: English monarchy was venerable ages be- 
 fore that of Prussia existed. When the greater 
 part of Europe was comprehended within the bounds 
 of the mediaeval Roman empire, England stood apart 
 and independent with its own race of kings. The 
 blood of Alfred flows in. the veins of George V; I 
 could trace the descent myself at a moment's notice; 
 it has never been interrupted, notwithstanding the 
 changes from one branch of royalty to another at 
 successive crises in the history of the crown. The 
 Hohenzollerns are of yesterday, and act like it; they 
 have all the characteristics of the parvenu. Even 
 the Hapsburgs, a far older and more illustrious stock, 
 are hundreds of years junior — as sceptred sover- 
 eigns — to the royalty of England. The dukedom 
 of Austria was a small affair compared with the 
 dominions of our Richard the lion-hearted at the 
 time of the third crusade, though every schoolboy 
 
246 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 knows of the treacherous manner in which duke 
 dared to lay violent hands upon king and put him in 
 ward till his English subjects ransomed him. Why, 
 even then English monarchy was between three and 
 four hundred years old — I mean the monarchy 
 of England as contrasted with the tiny county king- 
 doms of which it was formerly made up. Its Anglo- 
 Saxon rulers, as their coinage shows, often called 
 themselves " Basileus " in imitation of the style of 
 the Eastern emperors, and no doubt as a reminder to 
 the German descendants of Charlemagne in the West 
 that they considered themselves of more ancient 
 lineage than these, and owed no allegiance to the 
 pseudo-Roman empire — and which was not Roman 
 at all, but Teuton — which Charlemagne had pro- 
 fessed to revive. The gimcrack Austrian empire 
 of to-day is what remains of this Roman empire of 
 the West of long ago, and when the ancestor of the 
 present Francis Joseph resigned his crown to Napo- 
 leon in 1806 after the battle of Austerlitz he actually 
 forgot who he was supposed to be, head of the Holy 
 Roman empire, and described himself as — well — 
 what Francis Joseph is content to be now. But the 
 monarchy of England which overthrew Napoleon a 
 few years later at Waterloo was the same monarchy 
 that it had been without a break for over a thousand 
 years, and its princes were, as they still are, scions 
 of the same stock, the pedigree full and complete, 
 that had filled the throne of England from the days 
 
KING OF ENGLAND 247 
 
 of Egbert, save for such few interludes as those of 
 Harold, William the Conqueror, and Cromwell, the 
 old royal race going on all the time and resuming 
 possession after every such hiatus. With a record 
 like that, are we likely to be in a hurry to change or 
 to pay much respect to the mushroom kings and em- 
 perors of the Continent? 
 
 There are peculiar features in this monarchy of 
 ours too. No other race has them. Our very word 
 " king " is the old Anglo-Saxon " cyning," at once 
 son and head of the " kin " or family or folk. We 
 are the folk, and our kingship is the centre and sym- 
 bol of our national unity. King does not mean ruler 
 with us. The Latin " Rex " means that, and that is 
 what sovereignty usually means; it is what " Kaiser " 
 means as all the world only too sadly knows. But 
 our king is simply the head of the folk, the centre of 
 the family, the people of one blood and speech. He 
 is a freeman among freemen, and loyalty to the 
 throne means loyalty to home and all that the word 
 stands for. The territorial title is of later date than 
 the kingship itself. Not " king of England," but 
 " king of the English " is the older and truer desig- 
 nation. " King of the British race at home and be- 
 yond the seas " would accurately describe King 
 George's position to-day, to-day of all days when the 
 men of the folk are hurrying from the ends of the 
 earth to draw their sword for the motherland and 
 the brood she bore. Great Britain and Greater 
 
248 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 Britain throughout the world represent a democratic 
 ideal as old as our race itself. We could not be 
 made into anything like what Germany is, for we 
 have never been that in our whole history; it is 
 foreign to our genius as a people. The difference 
 is observable as far back as the days when the for- 
 bears of both races were savages pure and simple. 
 The Anglo-Saxon lived along the foreshores of the 
 North Sea; the High German, as he is usually called, 
 dwelt in the forests of the Fatherland. The Anglo- 
 Saxon never could be disciplined; the High German 
 could and can. The Anglo-Saxon moved in groups 
 and units, the High German in platoons. The 
 former had the defects of his qualities; he trusted 
 little to organisation and much to individual initia- 
 tive; adventure was in his blood and the sea his 
 natural element. He began his career in history as 
 a pirate, but soon outgrew it; the German, on the 
 other hand, is clumsily and brutally beginning it. Is 
 it not curious, this ages-long distinctiveness in the 
 characteristics of the two peoples? And it is be- 
 cause ours are what they are, and always have been, 
 that English kingship is what it is. It is we who 
 have taught democracy to mankind, and it is no ex- 
 aggeration to say that at this moment the only true 
 democracies on the face of the globe are those of 
 the English-speaking race. The British Islands are 
 a republic with an hereditary chief magistrate, our 
 king, and that is the secret both of the stability of our 
 
KING OF ENGLAND 249 
 
 institutions and of the fact that we have more indi- 
 vidual liberty than any other state in the world ex- 
 cept those to which ours has given birth. And ours 
 is a republic which we don't want altered in the sense 
 of having an elected President; we are better as we 
 are. There are no republicans in this country — 
 theoretical ones I mean — for the simple reason that 
 England as England began a republic and will con- 
 tinue a republic to the end, with one princely family 
 in the highest place of honour. There used to be 
 republicans, aggressive ones, in the years immediately 
 preceding the accession of Queen Victoria, and these 
 only existed because the crown had ceased to com- 
 mand respect owing to the moral deficiencies of those 
 who wore it; there have been none since, and are 
 never likely to be again, for our present king and 
 queen take the highest view of their duties and re- 
 sponsibilities and have set a standard in this respect 
 from which it will be difficult if not impossible to 
 decline. The gibe of the earlier years of the nine- 
 teenth century has lost its point — 
 
 " George the first a fool was reckoned, 
 A greater still was George the second; 
 But of the three, so I have heard, 
 The greatest fool was George the third. 
 When George the fourth to hell descended, 
 Thanks be to God the Georges ended." 
 
 Incidentally it may be remarked that our English 
 word " queen " only means wife or mother, the first 
 wife, the highest mother of the folk. And surely 
 
250 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 Queen Mary is exactly that. It is not as the fore- 
 most lady in the land that we think of her primarily, 
 though she is that in virtue of her exalted station, 
 but as the wife and mother to whose example all 
 British wives and mothers may safely look. Thank 
 heaven, it is not as a leader of society or of fashion 
 in dress that she yields her principal influence, but 
 as what her regal designation historically imports, 
 " quen " or queen of the family, the household, the 
 kin, the world-spread folk of our name and race. 
 And how many people know that English kingship 
 is not strictly hereditary but elective? We need not 
 even choose our king from the royal line. Once at 
 least our fathers chose a simple eorl or thegn from 
 amongst the nobility, if that be the word to use. We 
 have never had a " noblesse " in England as on the 
 Continent, a privileged order absolutely separate 
 from the commonalty, and we may be thankful for 
 that too. Harold was chosen king because we 
 needed a strong man to resist foreign invasion. 
 Again and again we have set aside the eldest son of 
 the reigning or deposed monarch — for we have not 
 hesitated to depose our kings on occasion — and 
 turned to a younger branch of the family. If hered- 
 itary right were strictly adhered to I suppose that 
 delectable person Rupprecht of Bavaria, one of the 
 most vicious haters of everything English, fighting 
 against us at the present time, ought to be allowed to 
 
KING OF ENGLAND 251 
 
 displace King George. It is absolutely funny to 
 think that a Jacobite society still exists in England, 
 and religiously decorated the statue of Charles I on 
 the 30th of January, the anniversary of that un- 
 fortunate prince's execution, which if logical con- 
 sistency means anything would like to send our reign- 
 ing family packing and crown Ruppecht in West- 
 minster Abbey with the Kaiser assisting! No, 
 thanks ; the wildest legitimist would draw the line at 
 that, I should imagine. Our present king reigns by 
 popular consent and not otherwise; and what else 
 does President Wilson do? There is an element in 
 the coronation ceremony at Westminster which is a 
 reminder of this. I mean the point at which the ap- 
 peal is made to the people to say whether they accept 
 the newly consecrated prince for their king, and they 
 reply by acclamation. 
 
 Another thing I might mention at this point is 
 that there is a certain sense in which our king is a 
 priest. He is solemnly appointed to his high office 
 by a sacramental act in recognition of the spiritual 
 quality of the functions he has to discharge. He 
 is literally " the Lord's anointed." He is as truly 
 a chosen minister of Christ as any man dedicated to 
 the service of the altar. Thus in a very real sense 
 he does reign jure divino, and I should be sorry to 
 think he did not. It would be a bad thing for Eng- 
 land and the world if the crown as the centre of our 
 
252 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 national life were regarded as having no direct rela- 
 tion to Almighty God. As Shakespeare has it in 
 Richard II — 
 
 " Not all the water in the rough rude sea 
 Can wash the balm from an anointed king: 
 The breath of worldly men cannot depose 
 The deputy elected by the Lord." 
 
 Where does Scotland come in? — some one may 
 ask. Where does Scotland not come in? I should 
 like to know. A complacently ignorant English 
 female exasperated me once by remarking that she 
 could not see why Ireland should not accept our 
 sovereigns as submissively as Scotland had done. 
 " It was the other way about; you accepted Scot- 
 land's," I replied. But she shook her head with a 
 superior smile as of one who knew; it made me want 
 to throw a book at her. And yet in a way she was 
 right. That shrewd old schemer, Henry VII, knew 
 what he was about when he married his daughter to 
 the Scottish king. Courtiers remonstrated that it 
 might result in a Scottish dynasty coming to occupy 
 the English throne. " The stronger will draw the 
 weaker,'' said Henry; and so it has proved. It is 
 said that there are more Scotsmen to-day in London 
 than in Edinburgh, so perhaps there is some force 
 in the sly taunt often levelled at them, that Scotland 
 is the finest country in the world to live out of, 
 judging by the way its sons praise it and come south 
 to push their fortunes. Anyhow, this royal mar- 
 
KING OF ENGLAND 253 
 
 riage united the two countries and also forged an- 
 other link with our ancient Anglo-Saxon royal house 
 which had married into that of Scotland. 
 
 It gave us the Stuarts, too, that most romantic 
 and unfortunate of royal races. And here let me 
 conclude with a fact to which reference is scarcely 
 ever made. The last representative of the Stuarts 
 in the direct line, Henry Cardinal of York, lived 
 till some years after the battle of Waterloo in re- 
 ceipt of a pension of £2000 a year from the British 
 Government. He was the brother of Bonnie Prince 
 Charlie. And in St. Peter's at Rome to-day the in- 
 terested traveller may notice a tablet inscribed to the 
 memory of British princes not named as such in our 
 history school books — " James the Third, Charles 
 the Third and Henry the Ninth, kings of England." 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 GERMAN COMFORT: TWO GREAT MEN CONTRASTED 
 
 The grand old man of science in Germany is Pro- 
 fessor Haeckel, and he has many admirers in this 
 country and throughout the world notwithstanding 
 the war. It is impossible to withhold a tribute of 
 respect from the vigorous worker, well over eighty 
 years of age, who has just issued one more book on 
 the fundamental themes which occupy all minds — 
 namely life, death, and religion. We also had a 
 grand old man of science till the other day — Alfred 
 Russel Wallace. He lived to be ninety, and retained 
 his mental fecundity and alertness to the end. His 
 name takes us back a long way too. He was one of 
 the greatest figures of the nineteenth century, con- 
 temporary with Darwin and co-discoverer with him 
 of the theory of Natural Selection, otherwise the 
 doctrine of evolution, with which Darwin's name will 
 be specially associated for all time to come. Do my 
 younger readers realise what an epoch-making event 
 the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species was? 
 It revolutionised the mental outlook of the entire 
 civilised world. It is not too much to say that it 
 had far more effect upon religious thought, for in- 
 stance, than Galileo's famous discovery (or re-dis- 
 
 254 
 
GERMAN COMFORT 255 
 
 covery) of the fact that the earth is a satellite of the 
 sun instead of the other way round. What a hubbub 
 there was, to be sure ! — I mean about Darwin's 
 book and its implications. Fierce conflict at once be- 
 gan and went on for many years between the cham- 
 pions of orthodox religion and the aggressive pio- 
 neers of the new scientific view of the universe and 
 its history. Thousands of pulpits thundered against 
 Darwin and his conclusions. The preachers and 
 theologians could not treat him as the Roman In- 
 quisitors treated Galileo, but if he had been the devil 
 himself they could not have cursed him more thor- 
 oughly. And now this period of controversy is all 
 but forgotten; it seems to us who read about it to 
 belong to some remote age. Religion, like every- 
 thing else, has adjusted itself to the new conditions, 
 finding they were not so very dreadful, after all. 
 Everybody believes in evolution more or less without 
 necessarily disbelieving in the supernatural and di- 
 vine. And only to think ! — the man who to a great 
 extent was the cause of this upheaval in ideas was 
 still living and active among us till just before the 
 war. Wallace did one of the finest and most gener- 
 ous things ever known in the history of new discov- 
 eries. He withheld his own treatise (which would 
 otherwise have appeared simultaneously with Dar- 
 win's) from the public on the ground that Darwin 
 deserved the full credit for the results attained owing 
 to the greater thoroughness of his research work. 
 
256 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 Wallace had arrived at the same results independ- 
 ently. 
 
 But I am digressing. What I really wanted to 
 point out was that greatest forward leap of science 
 in the Victorian age was due not to Germans but to 
 Britons. Darwin and Wallace made Haeckel pos- 
 sible. It is worth while remembering this now that 
 such prodigious and arrogant claims are being made 
 on behalf of German efficiency in all fields of human 
 knowledge and enterprise. To read what is being 
 written in the German Press, one would never gather 
 that the be-spectacled professors who are so busily 
 grubbing away in their laboratories in the endeavour 
 to invent something still more diabolical than poison 
 gas wherewith to discomfit the enemies of the Father- 
 land owed the original stimulus, of which they are 
 making such evil use, not to their own savants but 
 to ours. They are good copiers but bad originators. 
 
 And nothing could well be more striking than the 
 contrast between Haeckel and Wallace in regard to 
 their outlook upon life as a whole. A friend of 
 mine, himself one of the most eminent of living 
 scientific men, tells me that on the last occasion when 
 he went to see Wallace, which was not long before 
 the veteran passed away, he found him full of noble 
 enthusiasm concerning the future. It was almost 
 awe-inspiring, said my informant, to gaze upon the 
 lighted face of the aged saint, for such he truly was, 
 and hear him reaffirming with the most earnest 
 
GERMAN COMFORT 257 
 
 conviction his belief in the greatness of human des- 
 tiny in this world and worlds beyond, his assurance 
 of personal immortality and of all the wonders that 
 had yet to be revealed to the ascending soul on both 
 sides of the tomb. Glory upon glory, he declared, 
 awaits our growing race ; life upon life, triumph upon 
 triumph, joy upon joy. 
 
 Haeckel's swan song, on the other hand, is of the 
 saddest. He interprets the present and depicts the 
 future in the gloomiest and most sombre terms, and 
 even when he offers comfort and some measure of 
 compensation for the collapse and disappearance of 
 ancient ideals his words are more like a cry of de- 
 spair. Most of us remember the sensation caused 
 by his Riddle of the Universe, published a decade or 
 more ago, and translated into most European lan- 
 guages, including our own. That book exercised a 
 wide and baleful influence upon many who did not 
 know that science as a whole had already passed be- 
 yond the point indicated in its pages. Its author 
 avowed himself an uncompromising materialist, and 
 stated that God, Freedom, and Immortality were the 
 three great buttresses of superstition which science 
 must make it her business to destroy. He certainly 
 did his best to destroy them; and now he is at it 
 again, this time provoked thereto by the horrors of 
 the world war. The war, he says, has got rid of 
 religion for ever by reducing to an absurdity its doc- 
 trine of divine providence. In view of the deaths of 
 
258 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 such vast masses of people on the battlefield, in the 
 trenches, by aircraft, warships, submarines, in hos- 
 pitals and prison camps, all of them the victims 
 of blind chance, others spared by the same blind 
 chance, the foolishness of believing that the fate of 
 individuals as of the whole race is in the hands of 
 an omnipotent Being of benevolent purposes has 
 surely become apparent even to the most ordinary 
 intelligence. As for Christianity in particular, it is 
 put more completely out of court than almost any 
 other form of faith. The war has made an end of 
 the principle of loving one's neighbour as oneself, 
 and demonstrated the utter futility of pacifism; they 
 are seen to be nothing more than a mockery, and we 
 had best have done with them forthwith. How typ- 
 ically Prussian! Haeckel was born in Potsdam, be 
 it noted, and apparently has never got very far away 
 from it. Shade of Wallace, with your glowing so- 
 licitude for the helpless and down-trodden, and your 
 unquenchable faith in the essential goodness of the 
 human heart, what think you of this as the last word 
 of science upon all idealism? 
 
 What compensation, then, does the famous Ger- 
 man professor hold out for what he thus ruthlessly 
 sweeps away? Here it is : We are to be resigned to 
 our lot, to stop deceiving ourselves as to the beauty 
 and meaningfulness of life. Life has no meaning, 
 he maintains, and is certainly not beautiful; let us 
 cease to expect anything from it beyond what we al- 
 
GERMAN COMFORT 259 
 
 ready only too sadly know. We must have " brave 
 devotion to the Unavoidable," " the knowledge and 
 recognition of the eternity and indestructibility of the 
 Cosmos and of the courses of Nature in which the 
 individual unceasingly appears and disappears in or- 
 der to make way for new forms and new modes of 
 unending Substance." " What an inexhaustible 
 treasure-house of most noble enjoyment," he con- 
 tinues, " do these countless wonders of an eternal 
 process offer to the thinking man of Kultur ! " This, 
 says a reviewer, is the concluding sentence in a book 
 " which will bring but scant consolation to the many 
 who regard Ernst Haeckel as their teacher and 
 prophet." 
 
 Scant consolation indeed! I should like to know 
 what the weeping widows and bereaved mothers of 
 Germany get out of it as they think of their husbands 
 and sons sacrificed to their rulers' wicked lust of 
 power. It is all in keeping with the order which 
 we are told is being issued and enforced from Berlin: 
 " No mourning to be worn, and no sad faces to be 
 shown in the streets ! " Quite so ; how should there 
 be? Will not these fortunate survivors be able to 
 contemplate with joy the fact that their dead have 
 been blotted out " to make way for new forms and 
 modes of unending Substance " ? — which, we may 
 assume, will before long have the German eagle uni- 
 versally stamped upon it. What an inspiring pros- 
 pect for the relatives of those whom Haeckel's cal- 
 
26o THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 lous countrymen have just drowned in the Lusitania! 
 And, mark me, the spirit which produces this philos- 
 ophy governs also this vile deed. It is the ghast- 
 liest travesty of a faith that ever was given to the 
 world. 
 
 "Great God! I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn." 
 
 One of the most puzzling things to me about a 
 certain form of mentality which has its representa- 
 tives in this country as well as in Germany, is the 
 earnestness with which it preaches despair. I sup- 
 pose the people who are possessed of it are trying 
 their best to be honest with life and not to allow 
 themselves or others to be cheated with false hopes. 
 But why such proselytising zeal? One would think 
 they had good news to impart instead of bad, so 
 eager and tireless are they in exhorting us to forego 
 all brightness of outlook, all faith in ultimate good. 
 It reminds one of the sinister advice of the foul 
 fiend in W. B. Yeats's Countess Cathleen, who was 
 trying to persuade his victim to sell her soul to buy 
 bread for the starving in the wretched world where 
 she lived and suffered. As with some among our- 
 selves it was the spectacle of human woe that made 
 Cathleen, noble in purpose but bereft of hope, think 
 of driving a bargain with the powers of hell. Thus 
 spake her tempter : — ■ 
 
GERMAN COMFORT 261 
 
 "There is a kind of joy- 
 In casting hope away, in losing joy, 
 In ceasing all resistance, in at last 
 Opening one's arms to the eternal flames, 
 In casting all sails out upon the wind: 
 To this — full of the gaiety of the lost — 
 Would all folk hurry if your gold were gone." 
 
 Strange ! This is undoubtedly the mood of not a 
 few people at the present time. There is a certain 
 relief sometimes in letting go, as it were, giving up, 
 allowing misfortune to do its worst, refusing to be- 
 lieve any longer in possible alleviations or anodynes 
 for incurable grief. A kind of rest may be attained 
 in the very midst of hopelessness by this method, but 
 it is the rest of death. Neither man nor nation can 
 adopt it without being to all intents and purposes 
 finished with. Wallace or Haeckel, which shall it 
 be? Neither could claim to know much more than 
 the other about the essential facts of existence, but 
 how diametrically opposed are their deductions from 
 them! Mere cleverness is no passport to eternal 
 truth; the highest discloses itself rather to a certain 
 quality of soul, the teachable, tender and unassum- 
 ing. " I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and 
 earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise 
 and understanding, and hast revealed them unto 
 babes." None who has ever spoken with mortal 
 tongue could speak with such authority as He whose 
 words these are, and none has cast such a spell over 
 wistful, troubled minds. Our disillusioned, blood- 
 
262 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 stained age needs to hear them anew. There are 
 two modes of resignation to the ills of life. The 
 one admits the mastery of hell: the other waits the 
 victory of heaven. Therefore I would say to all who 
 care to listen : Do not lightly barter a beautiful hope 
 for a mocking nightmare. They are deceived and 
 deceivers who tell you they have any better reason 
 for declaring that the last word is with evil than the 
 blessed saints have for knowing it to be with good. 
 Live as the saints have lived and you shall know for 
 yourself, for they one and all speak with the same 
 tongue, and none of them has ever been afraid of 
 the worst that earth had to show. It is not true, 
 it is the very opposite of the truth, that the war has 
 done anything whatever to weaken, much less destroy 
 our confidence in the spiritual background of life. 
 All the baffling problems were here before in their 
 fulness that are here now. Death was just as in- 
 evitable, and we have all got to face it just the same 
 as if there had been no war at all. Why in the name 
 of common sense people should think that because the 
 dread activities of death have been dramatically 
 crowded into a few months, for a few hundred 
 thousand people out of the billions on the earth's 
 surface, instead of being spread over as many years, 
 therefore the consolations of faith have failed, it 
 would be hard to say. What was true before is 
 true still, and as dependable. The pains we endure 
 one by one, and brief at the longest, are no disproof 
 
GERMAN COMFORT 263 
 
 of divine benevolence. On the contrary, if we had 
 but eyes to see and ears to hear, they are the means 
 to blessedness, the discords that imply supernal har- 
 monies. It is not what the world suffers that should 
 lead men to doubt God, but what the world ignores, 
 despises, or betrays of what it dare not deny to be 
 highest and best if it could but attain to it. We are 
 like dreamers tossing in uneasy slumber: and the 
 morning is at hand. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE UNCAUSED CAUSE: THE MYSTERY OF 
 GOD AND MAN 
 
 Occasionally a point is raised in a letter which 
 strikes me as of more than merely personal interest, 
 and such is the case with one which lies before me 
 at this moment. It may be summarised briefly thus : 
 A spiritual view of life, such as one tries to advocate 
 from week to week even in the treatment of a secular 
 subject in the press, involves in one form or another 
 belief in God; and the great difficulty which most 
 people feel about belief in God is of imagining a 
 Being of limitless intelligence and power existing 
 right away at the beginning of things without a 
 maker and without having to grow, develop, or at- 
 tain — in fact, all complete and perfect from the 
 first. This, says one of my correspondents, is abso- 
 lutely inconceivable ; it does violence to all our expe- 
 rience and ways of thinking. We have to struggle 
 up to what we are ; so has everything else that lives ; 
 but here apparently is a Person, like ourselves but 
 immeasurably greater, who has had no such struggle 
 to go through: He just is. Neither in goodness, 
 wisdom, nor any other attribute has He had to ac- 
 quire anything. It has taken man a millon years to 
 
 264 
 
THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 265 
 
 learn to do things which God is supposed to have 
 been able to do without any learning from the foun- 
 dation of the world. How could such a thing be ? 
 There He is; where did He come from? A cause- 
 less cause, how can we account for Him? 
 
 This, crudely put, appears to be a perplexity to 
 many minds ; and in mentioning it here I am far from 
 wishing to enter upon a course of religious apolo- 
 getic. My only object is to show those who feel 
 it that the problem arises from our own limitations 
 and applies quite as much to our own being as to that 
 of the Deity; that there are plenty of things we have 
 to admit as facts without being able to understand 
 them; and that to those who really want to believe 
 in the innate spirituality of existence there is as 
 thoroughly reliable evidence for what one may call 
 the fact of God as for the fact of man or the fact 
 of the universe itself. I pass over, as not immedi- 
 ately bearing upon the issue, the far more commonly 
 stated difficulty of the silence of God in presence of 
 human woe or the consistency of divine benevolence 
 with such an awful catastrophe as the present world 
 war. Let us stick to the one point before us. If 
 that could be settled, perhaps the others would be by 
 implication. I will only remark in passing that to 
 the highest human perception God is never silent 
 and that His benevolence is never more clearly mani- 
 fested than in the very midst of pain and death. If 
 there is one special lesson which this Lenten season, 
 
266 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 with its many reminders of the cross and passion, 
 is meant to teach us, surely it is that. 
 
 I admit the mystery of the being of God, a mystery 
 utterly impenetrable by human reason. But what 
 is there that is not rooted in mystery? Let us recog- 
 nise that and it will carry us a long way. Life as a 
 whole is mystery — as Charles Dickens would have 
 said, is full of sacred and solemn mysteries — and it 
 is ours to adjust ourselves rightly towards it. You, 
 reader, who read these words, are as much a mystery 
 as your Creator. Have you ever thought of that? 
 Have you ever reflected upon the amazing fact that 
 there is such a being as you in existence at all? Go 
 back in thought to the beginning of time and ask 
 what intrinsic likelihood there ever was that in so 
 many ages you would appear? Beginning of time! 
 Even that is unimaginable. What beginning of time 
 could there be? Try to picture it and you will see 
 the hopelessness of the attempt. Time must be 
 boundless at both ends if there be time at all, and 
 the moment you begin to talk about boundlessness 
 time is clear gone, vanished, swallowed up in eternity. 
 Sir Oliver Lodge once gave a capital illustration 
 designed to show that the very notion of time is 
 part of the limitation at present imposed upon our 
 consciousness. A passenger sitting in a railway 
 carriage, he said, sees the various objects in the land- 
 scape through which he is travelling as a succession; 
 trees, fields, ponds, and houses move past his win- 
 
THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 267 
 
 dow one after the other. But let him get out and 
 stand on the nearest hill and he will see them all at 
 once; they are no longer a succession, though their 
 relation to each other is exactly the same as before ; 
 nothing is changed except his own ability to view 
 them as a whole instead of as parts of a whole. And 
 so, no doubt, it is with all our conceptions of change, 
 development, and the rest in regard to the entire 
 universe. The limitation is in ourselves. As Ten- 
 nyson makes the dying Arthur say in the Idylls of 
 the King — 
 
 " O me ! for why is all around us here 
 As if some lesser god had made the world, 
 But had not force to shape it as he would, 
 Till the High God behold it from beyond, 
 And enter it, and make it beautiful? 
 Or else, as if the world were wholly fair, 
 But that these eyes of mine are dense and dim, 
 And have not power to see it as it is." 
 
 Here at the beginning of time, let us say, is nothing, 
 nothing at all, no God, no man, no mind, no substance 
 of any sort. And then, a myriad, myriad aeons later, 
 we have a being who can write this article and an- 
 other being who can read it, two self-conscious be- 
 ings with all sorts of qualities and characteristics of 
 their own. Queer, isn't it? And my affirmation is 
 that it is every whit as inconceivable on a priori 
 grounds — from our purely human standpoint — as 
 the being of God. To put the matter whimsically, 
 if we did not know the existence of man to be a fact 
 we should pronounce it impossible, we should not be 
 
268 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 able to believe it. One might go further and say 
 the same about anything. Why should anything 
 whatever exist? The smallest grain of dust is as 
 great a mystery in itself as that there should be a 
 God to make it. A self-existent clod is as much a 
 mystery as a self-existent God. Nay, a far greater 
 mystery from a higher standpoint is that such a ruf- 
 fian as Von Tirpitz should be at large in a world that 
 ought to have learned by this time that nothing is 
 only what it seems, that matter is but the instrument 
 of spirit, and the soul of man the temple of the living 
 God. 
 
 Everybody believes in God. There is no differ- 
 ence between us in that respect. There are no 
 atheists except in practice. The only difference be- 
 tween believers and so-called unbelievers consists in 
 what they respectively believe about God. For when 
 we speak about God we all of us mean the power that 
 produced us and keeps us going, the power manifest 
 in the universal order to which we belong. The 
 blankest materialist believes in that power, only he 
 will refuse to call it God or to credit it with knowing 
 or caring anything about us. He will even rhapso- 
 dise about it sometimes and expatiate at length on the 
 wonders and glories of the world of worlds — they 
 all do it more or less. I think it was Tyndall who 
 said that the emotions evoked in him by the contem- 
 plation of the splendours and sublimities of the 
 natural order were akin to those experienced by the 
 
THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 269 
 
 Christian at his prayers. Very likely, seeing they 
 spring from the same root. The real question at 
 issue between the man who believes in God and the 
 man who says he doesn't is how much we are entitled 
 to affirm about the one power in which we all believe 
 and in which, in common with the rest of creation, we 
 live, and move, and have our being. The material- 
 ist will declare that it is blind and deaf and dumb; 
 that out there in the trackless void of space is no 
 mind higher than our own, on which our own de- 
 pends, no guiding intelligence within and behind the 
 flux of things in general. He will maintain that hu- 
 man self-consciousness is simply a freak of the cosmic 
 process, and a tragic freak at that. Our feeble, 
 glimmering lamp of intelligence is the only ray that 
 lights up the gloom of the universal darkness, a pin- 
 point of timorous awareness amid vast and terrific 
 eternal forces that will presently blot it out again 
 without knowing when it either came or went. And 
 I say that this is all one prodigious assumption. No 
 man is warranted in claiming to say as much. The 
 utmost he can reasonably say is that the whole thing 
 is mystery, mystery from beginning to end, as much 
 mystery in relation to the humblest creature that 
 breathes as to the infinite whence it derives. Reli- 
 gion is steeped in mystery, is a reverent recognition 
 of mystery, but it is also the testimony that the soul 
 can enter into relations with what lies within and 
 behind the mystery. It witnesses that the eternal 
 
270 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 is not blind, and deaf, and dumb; that it is the source 
 of all feeling, seeing, and knowing; and that it is as 
 possible to enter into communion therewith as for 
 one human heart to hold fellowship with another. 
 
 " The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains — 
 Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? 
 
 Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet — 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 It always comes back to that, our individual reaction 
 to the stimulus of that mysterious All in One which 
 the universe of universes cannot contain and which 
 the Christian calls God. It is a fact of experience 
 which any man may prove for himself if he has the 
 inclination. No one will be convinced of it by argu- 
 ment alone any more than he can be convinced of 
 the contrary. All that I am doing now in the way 
 of argument is to demonstrate that the rationality 
 is not all on one side. Reason affirms God in affirm- 
 ing the power behind phenomena, but it needs the 
 spiritual mind to discover and dwell with Him. 
 
 What is the matter with the world to-day is not 
 atheism: that is rubbish. It is indifference. Civil- 
 isation has got into the way of attributing more and 
 more value to material things as ends in themselves, 
 and that is the mischief. Material things are all 
 right if viewed in their proper perspective as the 
 means whereby spirit finds expression, but to allow 
 ourselves to be absorbed and mastered by them to 
 the exclusion of all question as to the kind of men 
 
THE UNCAUSED CAUSE 271 
 
 we are making thereby is fatal to true well-being. 
 That is modern civilisation's great blunder and the 
 main cause of the present war, especially on the part 
 of Germany. Through much tribulation we are be- 
 ing brought back to the simple principle that only in 
 goodness is there any real hope of permanent happi- 
 ness for mankind. We have largely ignored this and 
 are suffering accordingly. It would, I suppose, be 
 admitted by almost anybody that our astonishing 
 material progress in the last fifty years has not been 
 accompanied by any commensurate moral progress. 
 Labour and Capital were at each other's throats 
 before the war, and will be again after it if we do 
 not watch out. Blatant, selfish, soulless competition 
 in industry has had but one object — that of enrich- 
 ing the individual at the expense of his fellows; it is 
 going on still in many quarters where the war is 
 being taken advantage of to this end, despite the 
 glorious heroism of the thousands of men who have 
 come right out of it to spill their blood for a spiritual 
 ideal. And we shall never get rid of it till religion 
 becomes central in the national life once more and 
 throughout Christendom, and a purer, simpler faith 
 in God replaces our blind utilitarianism. We cannot 
 serve God and mammon. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 NOT KNOWING 
 
 " The most terrible thing in life," a friend remarked 
 to me once, " is our ignorance; we really know noth- 
 ing." One quite understood what he meant, al- 
 though the phraseology was somewhat ambiguous. 
 For what do we know in the sense of absolute knowl- 
 edge? Nothing whatever. All our knowledge is 
 relative to something we have to assume but do not 
 actually know. It is commonly taken for granted 
 that the only realities we can be sure about are 
 material ones, the objects cognisable by the five 
 senses. Your plain, practical man, as he regards 
 himself, is convinced that what he can see, hear, 
 touch, taste, and smell is sure and certain, indisput- 
 able, and that all beyond is guesswork. Never was 
 a greater mistake. The senses tell us nothing about 
 reality. We see pictures on the retina of the eye, 
 hear sounds, touch surfaces, taste flavours, and smell 
 odours; but as to what produces the pictures, sounds, 
 flavours, and odours we are totally ignorant, as ig- 
 norant as men were in the days of Noah. Science 
 deals with phenomena, not with what underlies 
 phenomena. The whole material world around us, 
 for anything we know to the contrary, may have no 
 
 2J2 
 
NOT KNOWING 273 
 
 more substantiality than a dream. All we know is 
 that there is something which is able to produce cer- 
 tain impressions upon our consciousness, and there 
 we stop; what that something is in itself we have no 
 means of finding out. 
 
 As a matter of fact, our assumption of the reality 
 of the external world has nothing to justify it; it is 
 only a habit; we are brought up to think that way, 
 and we just go on doing it in the ungrained conviction 
 that there is no other way of acquiring and inter- 
 preting experience. But there is. The Hindu, for 
 instance, instinctively does exactly the opposite. 
 Whereas we start by taking the world for granted 
 and not being sure about the soul, he starts by tak- 
 ing the soul for granted and not being sure about 
 the world. And his postulate is quite as reasonable 
 as ours — more so, in fact, for, when we come to 
 look at it, it does seem rather silly to be so certain 
 of the objective reality of rocks, and hills, and trees, 
 and not at least equally so of the mind that perceives 
 them. For what on earth could we possibly know 
 of these things except for their reaction on the brain 
 of the knower? They may be real or they may not, 
 but for us they only exist as ideas within our own 
 consciousness. As Amiel said in his famous Journal: 
 " Heaven, hell, the world are within us ; man is the 
 great abyss." And what an abyss! for we know 
 nothing about ourselves either — nothing ultimate, 
 that is. The late Father Tyrrell said in his Chris- 
 
274 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 tianity at the Cross-Roads: "We simply do not 
 know what our own spirits are"; and this is true; 
 he would be a bold man who would say otherwise. 
 Whence came we? whither go we? how stand we to 
 the eternal? These are the old, old questions which 
 men keep on asking and always will, and to which 
 no positive answer can be given by unaided human 
 faculty. The cynical Persian sage was about 
 right — 
 
 "Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 
 About it and about: but evermore 
 Came out by the same door wherein I went." 
 
 Mark, I do not say there is no answer to these ancient 
 questions; I only say there is none apart from divine 
 revelation; we by ourselves cannot discover it. 
 
 But my friend meant more than this when he 
 stated that our ignorance is the most terrible thing 
 in life. He was thinking of the mystery of the 
 world's pain, the sorrow for which there is no earthly 
 cure, the sad farewells without certainty of meeting 
 again, the wondering and longing that find no com- 
 plete satisfaction even in the best that earth can give. 
 Tennyson felt it when he sang — 
 
 "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
 Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, 
 In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 
 And thinking of the days that are no more." 
 
 Often and often in presence of a scene of wondrous 
 
NOT KNOWING 275 
 
 beauty, or listening to some piece of music exquisitely 
 sweet, or when deeply stirred by some great experi- 
 ence or event, I have felt my soul straining at its 
 bonds, as it were, and as if the scales were about to 
 fall from my eyes and I were just going to remember 
 something long forgotten that would make all things 
 plain, or realise something that would deliver me 
 from the dominion of delusion for evermore. Who 
 has not felt the same, more or less, in moments of 
 deepest feeling and highest vision? Alas, that the 
 shadow should close down again and the world grow 
 dark. And do we not all know the feeling of yearn- 
 ing sadness that comes over one, say, on gazing from 
 a mountain top over some fair valley bathed in sum- 
 mer sunshine or clad in autumn glory ? The contem- 
 plation of natural beauty can bring tears to the eyes 
 — why? Is it not because it makes us realise our 
 banishment from some higher and more perfect state 
 of being with which our truest affinities are? It is 
 the soul's heimweh, our homesickness for a land of 
 purer joys and more blessed loves than here. No 
 one has ever yet managed to explain what beauty is. 
 I think it must be the touch of the supernal, a break- 
 ing through into our low estate of that which is above 
 all change, and loss, and death, a sacramental reveal- 
 ing of the ineffable and all-complete. We glimpse it 
 without understanding, but we are conscious of be- 
 longing to it somehow, and like exiles we strain our 
 weary gaze towards the distant horizon beyond which 
 
276 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 is the place of our nativity, the spirit's true abode. 
 
 " Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, 
 When the moon is low and thin, 
 Into our heart high yearnings 
 Come welling and surging in — 
 Come from the mystic ocean, 
 Whose rim no foot hath trod — 
 Some of us call it Longing, 
 And others call it God." 
 
 Professor Carruth of Stanford University, Cali- 
 fornia, the author of the well-known poem which 
 contains this verse, has just written to me expressing 
 the sympathy and concern of our cousins across the 
 water at the tribulation through which we are pass- 
 ing in Europe. " What can it all mean? : ' he says. 
 I wish I could tell him; we don't know. Our best 
 beloved are passing from us through the red mist of 
 war, and our knowledge cannot follow them fur- 
 ther, our hands cannot serve them more. 
 
 Life's farewells derive most of their poignancy 
 from this fact: we do not actually know what has be- 
 come of our dead. We do not actually know, when 
 we definitely part from any one, what will have hap- 
 pened before we see him again, if we ever do see him 
 again. A mother once told me that to her dying day 
 she will never forget the clang of the garden gates 
 as her son walked down the path to go and push his 
 fortune in New Zealand. The agony of that mo- 
 ment! The pathos of it! He was almost all she 
 had in the world, and for all she knew that good-bye 
 was permanent so far as this life is concerned. If 
 
NOT KNOWING 277 
 
 she had known beyond all doubt, as she knows now, 
 that the boy would come safely home again into her 
 arms, the sound of the closing gate as he went from 
 her would not have rung like a knell upon her heart. 
 He is at the front now, and I warrant she is recalling 
 what she felt the last time he left her side to face the 
 perils of the great unknown. For what if he does 
 not come back this time ? She is a devout believer in 
 God and heaven, but perhaps, like thousands more, 
 she finds belief to be one thing and realisation an- 
 other. If we could only realise that as surely as the 
 sun is shining somewhere at this moment, so surely 
 are those we call dead living, active, conscious, lov- 
 ing as before, it would pluck the sting out of bereave- 
 ment; we should not grieve or be desolate any more, 
 much as we should long for a sight of the well-re- 
 membered face again and the sound of the voice that 
 once made music in our ears. We should miss our 
 beloved sorely but would not feel them so far away. 
 Can it be done ? I believe it can, and that is why 
 I write. It all depends on how closely we ourselves 
 live to the imperishable and divine — just that and 
 nothing more. We have got to have a soul above 
 sordid values and firmly refuse to submit to the 
 claim that things are only what they seem. Live 
 bravely and consistently for the spiritual, and the 
 material will lose its power to blind your vision. It 
 is not only a question of living nobly; many people 
 are trying to do that who do not get much consola- 
 
278 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 tion out of it. It is a question of living by what the 
 saints call faith. And do you know what that is? 
 It is not at all what many people make it out to be, 
 shutting your eyes and jumping, as it were, blindly 
 believing certain things which are from the nature of 
 the case unprovable. I will tell you what it is: it is 
 spiritual instinct. That does not sound much, but 
 wait a moment. That great French thinker, Henri 
 Bergson, has been telling us for a long time that 
 instinct and reason are not, as has been commonly 
 assumed, successive products of the same evolutionary 
 force, reason being the later and higher ; they are two 
 separate branches from the same trunk, and of the 
 two instinct is far more unerring than reason as far 
 as it goes. Reason gropes and fumbles, and is a 
 clumsy instrument at the best for its purpose, which 
 is to enable us to find our way about in this three- 
 dimensional material world of ours; it is not well to 
 rely on it too much when it becomes a question of 
 dealing with the deepest things. Instinct, on the 
 other hand, the instinct of a mother bird to build her 
 nest and rear her young, is of marvellous precision; 
 it always goes straight to the mark. It can and does 
 make mistakes sometimes, as when the mildness of 
 January and February this year misled the birds into 
 thinking spring had come when it had not; but on the 
 whole it is far more to be trusted than intellect in 
 getting at the roots of life, so to speak. I would 
 rather put the case this way: All our reasoning 
 
NOT KNOWING 279 
 
 really starts from intuition; and our higher instincts 
 or intuitions, call them which you will, are to be re- 
 lied upon, especially as we see the beautiful fruits 
 of character they can produce when obeyed to the 
 full. The fact that they transcend reason does not 
 mean that they contradict it. If instinct, or what 
 I thought to be instinct, told me the earth was flat 
 I should pay no heed to it, for reason tells me dif- 
 ferent. But when reason can neither prove nor dis- 
 prove those sublime findings of the soul on which 
 all that is good and great in human experience is 
 based, I bid it take its proper place and acquiesce 
 where it cannot deny. 
 
 It is good not to know now many things that one 
 day we shall know ; and that is where faith comes in. 
 If you absolutely knew beyond all cavil that it would 
 pay you to tell the truth when you were tempted to 
 lie, or that you would come home safely and be held 
 in high honour for having volunteered for the war, 
 there would be nothing noble either in telling the 
 truth or pretending to risk your life in your country's 
 cause. All that is fine and exalted in human char- 
 acter and conduct is the fruit of this not knowing for 
 certain — that is, it is born of faith. To know for 
 certain what lies beyond death would not necessarily 
 make any one a better man; what does make him a 
 better man is the way in which he rises to the occa- 
 sion when death has to be faced or sorrow to be 
 borne. I once asked from the pulpit how we should 
 
280 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 individually behave, the many hundreds of us gath- 
 ered there, if we knew positively that we had only 
 twenty-four hours to live. The man who drove me 
 home that night is, or was, the proprietor of a large 
 motor-car establishment, but like millions of his 
 countrymen he is now at the front, driving motor 
 wagons for the army. He had evidently been im- 
 pressed by my question, and as we went along he 
 discussed it. Finally he said, with conviction: 
 " Well, supposing I was as able to attend to business 
 as I am just now, I should go down to the garage as 
 usual." I believe he would, and he was right. For 
 what more do we know about the future than that; 
 and what more do we need to know? If we could 
 see the glory of the invisible world as it is round 
 about us at this moment, there would be no atheists ; 
 but perhaps there would be no saints either. For 
 saints are made, as all high worth is made, by spir- 
 itual ventures, by battle, effort, struggle, sacrifice; 
 and the essence of these things is our ignorance of 
 the issue. We have to scale the heights without see- 
 ing the summits, believing we shall get there in the 
 end ; and it is with heaven to see that we do. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 
 
 In the previous chapter I have tried to show that 
 our ignorance of the great issue of life is one con- 
 dition of the development of the finest fruits of char- 
 acter. It is the mystery that surrounds us and which 
 veils the future that makes great actions great. If 
 we could know with mathematical certainty exactly 
 why we have to suffer this or that, or exactly what 
 will be the outcome of the deeds we do, there could 
 be no such thing as nobleness in conduct. It is just 
 because we don't know, in the sense of complete 
 demonstration, but have to act without knowing — 
 that is, by what alone is worthy to be called faith — 
 that we can rise to sublime heights of moral and 
 spiritual achievement. We are seeing that abun- 
 dantly in the sacrifices of the present world war. 
 Conversely, one might have added, it is because of 
 our comparative ignorance that we sorrow as we do. 
 We cannot escape it, being limited as we are. But 
 if we knew, absolutely knew without a shadow of 
 doubt, precisely what is going to happen to us all 
 " when this passing world is done " ; or, to put it bet- 
 ter, if we knew things as a whole precisely as they 
 are at this moment in seen and unseen combined, 
 
 281 
 
282 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 there would not be much left to trouble about; weep- 
 ing eyes would soon be dried, weary hearts would 
 cease to ache. 
 
 Another aspect of this theme presents itself to 
 my mind : our ignorance of each other. If we really 
 knew each other, what a difference it would make to 
 life! I am not suggesting it would be altogether 
 good if we did. Here, too, we have to earn our wis- 
 dom, and it is well that we should; it is part of our 
 discipline that we should come to fuller knowledge 
 through patience, forbearance, charity, mutual serv- 
 ice ; we cannot jump into perfect fellowship, perfect 
 all-round understanding; it has to be sought for, 
 gained, and won as part of the world process by 
 which we are being educated for the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 But let us try to envisage the situation for a mo- 
 ment, and then consider what we ought to do with 
 reference to it. Here are a couple of instances of 
 what I mean. A father writes to me stating that it 
 is months since he heard from his son at the front, 
 and that he does not know for certain whether the 
 boy is dead or alive except that he has not yet seen 
 his name in the casualty lists, which he scans care- 
 fully every day. And he adds this pathetic fact: 
 Every day he goes down to Victoria Station and 
 stands for some hours wistfully watching the trains 
 come in with their freights of wounded and of men 
 home on leave, in the vain hope that his son may be 
 
OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 283 
 
 among them, and always he has to go back to his 
 lonely lodging sad and disappointed. For there is 
 something of a tragedy behind this experience. The 
 family is divided. Husband and wife separated 
 years ago, and the children have been brought up 
 as was inevitable under the circumstances. Perhaps 
 the father is a little trying — who knows ? perhaps 
 he is one of those unfortunate people who cannot ex- 
 press themselves well even to their hearts' best be- 
 loved; perhaps his children have never suspected the 
 depth and wealth of affection of which he is capable. 
 But my point is that if this soldier son only knew, 
 what very likely he does not even guess, what pain his 
 father suffers on his account, and how he yearns to 
 hear from him, how, in fact, he thinks of little else, 
 the desired letter would soon be forthcoming. 
 What a surprise he would probably get if he knew 
 how his father thinks and feels, if he could only read 
 this outpouring of a long-pent-up experience ! And 
 he is not the only one who would get a similar sur- 
 prise if the secrets of all hearts could be revealed. 
 
 The second instance is more personal to myself 
 but is illustrative of the general disability above 
 described. My position at the City Temple brought 
 me into contact with all kinds of people from all over 
 the world. A chance remark in a sermon which 
 found its way into print would sometimes bring me a 
 visit from a person who had to travel hundreds of 
 miles in order to make it. I say a chance remark, 
 
284 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 but are there any such? God does not always take 
 His human instruments into His confidence when He 
 utters a message by them to other souls. Again and 
 again I have found that an observation to which 
 one attributed no importance has been taken by a 
 hearer or a reader as a direct word for their particu- 
 lar problem. And so, no doubt, it was, but it was 
 not the preacher's word, it proceeded from a higher 
 source and was intended for that mind in which it 
 found lodgment. One such case was as follows. A 
 young fellow asked for an appointment and came to 
 see me. I did not much care for the look of him 
 when we met. Long experience of the stories of 
 cadgers had made me suspicious of individuals who 
 began by telling one that they had reformed after a 
 downfall and only wanted a little money to make a 
 new start. This chap did not get on with his tale 
 very well, and did not seem to me to have a proper 
 appreciation of his position. He had made free 
 with his employer's money to pay gambling debts and 
 had suffered a term of imprisonment for it — an old 
 story and with no redeeming features about it. He 
 was not a weak-looking man either, and somehow 
 gave one the impression of being callous. So I 
 hardened up, kept silent, withheld sympathy, and 
 listened coldly while the rambling narrative went on. 
 Suddenly, without warning, the lad stopped, his lip 
 quivered, he looked at me helplessly for a moment, 
 and then broke down. He did not try to resume 
 
OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 285 
 
 speaking, which was wise as it happened; he simply 
 held out a letter to me, and I took it and read it. 
 It was a wonderful letter, thumbed and dirty from 
 being carried in the ex-convict's pocket, and read and 
 re-read. It was written by the girl who loved him, 
 written before he came out of prison, to tell him that 
 she still believed in him and would share his lot 
 through thick and thin. She had been as good as her 
 word, waiting for him at the prison gate for hours in 
 the darkness and cold of a winter's morning on the 
 day of his discharge, and had been his good angel 
 ever since, keeping him from utter ruin and despair, 
 and nerving him to fight the almost hopeless fight 
 back into respectability and a footing in life. How 
 wrong I was ! How little I knew the man before 
 me ! How I had misjudged ! What has become 
 of him since I do not know, but I would give a good 
 deal to know. I saw him with different eyes in an 
 instant, and all that in his demeanour previously told 
 against him now told in his favour. 
 
 Yes, if we only knew ! We are so desperately 
 afraid of being taken in, and not without good rea- 
 son. But we are far too ready with our contempt; 
 few merit it, and none are entitled to show it. I won- 
 der why it is that harsh judgment is so much more 
 readily indulged in than kind. In most any society 
 you will hear people's motive canvassed cruelly, often 
 mercilessly, and the worst possible construction 
 placed upon them. And even at the best we are 
 
286 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 curiously dumb in our relations with each other; we 
 do not positively know what any one else is feeling 
 or thinking. We cannot tell what the inside " feel n 
 of any common experience is to those who share it 
 with us. " The heart knoweth its own bitterness, 
 and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy." 
 
 "We are spirits clad in veils; 
 Man by man was never seen; 
 All our deep communing fails 
 To remove the shadowy screen. 
 Heart to heart was never known! 
 Mind with mind did never meet! 
 We are columns left alone, 
 Of a Temple once complete." 
 
 We are all more or less lonely; it cannot be helped; 
 it is in the nature of things at our present stage of 
 existence; individually we are islands in a sea of 
 mystery, and as far as I know there is only one boat 
 which can sail that sea, and that is love. Mere 
 propinquity does little or nothing to reveal us to each 
 other. We may be the veriest strangers and yet be 
 in daily association. Often the very last person to 
 whom you can disclose yourself is your nearest rel- 
 ative. It might utterly astonish parents sometimes 
 if they could see their children in other company. 
 And is it not easily possible to go through life with- 
 out having your real self drawn out by congenial 
 companionship? Millions of people, especially 
 women, live habitually in a state of self-repression; 
 and the average Englishman is far more frightened 
 of letting any one peep inside his soul than he is of 
 
OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 287 
 
 facing German guns. It is a rare thing, rare indeed, 
 that some great emotional crisis brings to the sur- 
 face that elusive something which is oneself, as dis- 
 tinct from every other being that has ever lived. As 
 Lord Houghton says — 
 
 "We live together years and years, 
 
 And leave unsounded still 
 Each other's springs of hopes and fears, 
 
 Each other's depths of will : — 
 We live together day by day, 
 
 And some chance look or tone 
 Lights up with instantaneous ray 
 
 An inner world unknown!" 
 
 Unknown even to ourselves probably. Every island 
 in this sea of mystery is but the summit of a mountain 
 which goes down for miles beneath the waters ere 
 it mingles its being with all the rest. We shall never 
 know ourselves as we are till the day comes when we 
 know as we are known. Faber, the great Roman 
 Catholic hymn writer, said no more than the truth in 
 the striking statement on this subject which he has 
 left on record: " Most frequently men look new in 
 dying. Death discloses whole regions of unexplored 
 character. Life has not by any means drawn us out 
 as it might have done. We all go to our graves un- 
 known, worlds of unsuspected greatness. In truth, 
 life is but a momentary manifestation of us. The 
 longest life is too narrow for our breadth. We are 
 capable of a thousand positions, but life has only 
 placed us in two or three. " 
 
 It is an old proverb that love is blind; it would be 
 
288 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 truer to say that it is love only that can see. We 
 find each other with the heart and not otherwise. 
 I wish the word love were not so slippery and capable 
 of so many meanings in the English tongue. I am 
 guilty of no sentimentality in using it now, for I am 
 thinking less of particularistic affection than of the 
 good will which every human being may entertain 
 towards every other, and must, or he will never know 
 himself, let alone anybody else. I listened yesterday 
 to an address by a great churchman, one of the ablest 
 it has ever been my privilege to hear. At the close 
 the speaker said that no man could love to order. 
 I questioned the observation then, and do so still 
 more now. We cannot love to order in the sense 
 of experiencing the same passion of attachment to 
 people indiscriminately that we feel for two or three; 
 but we can love to order, and ought to do so, in the 
 sense that we can be in charity with all men, can 
 refuse to withhold sympathy even from the erring 
 and the weak, or to be suspicious and censorious in 
 our dealings with mankind at large. In so doing we 
 should only be rendering obedience to the greatest 
 teacher the world has ever had when He said: " A 
 new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one 
 another." There is a French proverb, " To know 
 all is to forgive all." And I should think there is 
 none truer. If we could only see people as they 
 really are we might often pity but we should never 
 scorn. But as we cannot at present see people as 
 
OUR MUTUAL IGNORANCE 289 
 
 they really are, however hard they may try to make 
 us, the best we can do is to learn to discover with the 
 heart what is hidden from the head. That other 
 French proverb, " I cannot understand, I love," con- 
 tains a wealth of wisdom, and incidentally the solu- 
 tion of all humanity's problems. Shall we get back 
 to it after the war? 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 THE AGES OF FAITH AND THE AGES OF REASON: 
 NEW-OLD AND OLD-NEW 
 
 An acquaintance asks me to state more clearly what 
 I meant in saying some time ago that the world in 
 which Cicero lived was much more like ours than that 
 of St. Francis, the little poor man of Assisi, twelve 
 hundred years later; and that although the spirit 
 of the twentieth century hitherto had been with Cic- 
 ero, I earnestly hoped that as a result of the war 
 the rest of it might be with Francis. I willingly com- 
 ply with the suggestion, for the contrast to which it 
 makes reference is both striking and instructive. 
 What I meant was that the kind of mentality which 
 was dominant in the civilisation of Cicero's age was 
 one with which we should feel at home. The gen- 
 eral outlook on life was very similar to ours; we 
 should without much difficulty understand men like 
 Cicero and his contemporaries, their ways were so 
 like our own. On the other hand, people like Fran- 
 cis would puzzle us completely; we should not be 
 able to get near them at all, so to speak; their as- 
 sumptions, ideals, beliefs, ways of expressing them- 
 selves, were all widely different from ours. We 
 should think them mad, or they would think us mad ; 
 
 290 
 
AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 291 
 
 and the question is, which of us would be right, 
 if either? I hold and maintain that, with all its 
 drawbacks, it would be better to assimilate our- 
 selves to the mental attitude of men like Francis 
 than that of men like Cicero. We have had too 
 much of the one and not enough of the other. 
 I wish to see our ordinary mentality changed, not 
 in the direction of being either more or less clever 
 than our forbears, but of being simpler, more child- 
 like, more open to influences from the unseen and 
 readier to take them for granted, less governed by 
 purely secular desires and aims. That is all: now, 
 to illustrate. 
 
 Two thousand years ago southern Europe was the 
 seat of a civilisation which in certain ways has never 
 been surpassed. The world has made no real ad- 
 vance in the cult of the beautiful since then either in 
 art or letters. The Acropolis at Athens was as fine 
 in its way as anything we are building now, finer 
 probably. We have never produced more glorious 
 sculptures than those of Pheidias or Praxiteles; one 
 does not need to be an expert to appreciate that. 
 None of our men of letters in modern times have 
 created a greater literature than that of Homer, 
 Plato, Virgil, Horace, and perhaps Cicero himself. 
 Any reader of this page who cares to get Dr. Samuel 
 Dill's Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius 
 out of a library and read it will find that the society 
 of that day was startingly like ours in many ways. 
 
292 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 It had its millionaires, like Mr. Carnegie, who were 
 expected to make huge public benefactions, endowing 
 institutions and the like; it had its proletariat, trade 
 unions, and strikes. Of course it had its smart set 
 and week-enders, with their town houses, country 
 houses and seaside villas, pet dogs, yachts and motor 
 cars — the word slipped out, I ought to have said 
 chariots. There were no football matches, but 
 crowds of about the same size, vast assemblages, 
 used to gather to watch men fight in the gladiatorial 
 contests. There were public baths and gentlemen's 
 clubs, and I know not what else. There was even 
 a sort of substitute for a daily paper with all the news 
 and gossip in it. Two years ago this month I was 
 in Italy, and went to look at two interesting spots — 
 Pompeii and Ostia. Both are still in process of ex- 
 cavation, having been buried under debris for ages, 
 the former by a sudden disaster, and the latter by 
 the lapse of time, its inhabitants having deserted it 
 through loss of the trade by which they made their 
 living. Pompeii was a place of retirement for the 
 rich, a centre of luxury; Ostia was a prosperous sea- 
 port with a hard-working population. It felt very 
 queer to look at those two cities as their walls and 
 streets had been laid bare by the pickaxe and shovel. 
 They were very different from each other. It struck 
 me as I gazed upon the silent tokens of Pompeii's 
 unblushing sensuality and riotous pleasure-seeking 
 that it pretty well deserved its fate ; it was about time 
 
AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 293 
 
 it should be blotted out. It shared the lot of Sodom 
 and Gomorrah in more ways than one. And yet, 
 I thought, how like our own palaces, theatres and 
 music-halls are the elaborate buildings of this city of 
 the dead. The very drainage system anticipated our 
 modern sanitation (I don't think they troubled much 
 about drains in the days of St. Francis), and of all 
 things in the world they actually had central heating ! 
 At Ostia one saw on the quays the offices formerly 
 occupied by the trade union officials, and where they 
 used to meet the employers' representatives when the 
 discussions took place about the standard rate of 
 wages or the expulsion of blacklegs. In no sense 
 can we be said to have invented anything new in the 
 modern organisation of labour as compared with that 
 of these dockers and merchants' clerks of old. 
 They had a very vigorous municipal life, too, and 
 statues and inscriptions setting forth the virtues of 
 deceased mayors and aldermen (of course they did 
 not call them that, but it came to the same thing), 
 and there were hints that the woman question was 
 a sore point then as now; suffragettes of sorts had 
 been at work. And then the elections, the parties, 
 the quarrels between public men, the caucuses, the 
 candidatures! Gentlemen who thought they would 
 do well on the Town Council issued their election ad- 
 dresses and asked for the support of the ratepayers 
 in our good, enlightened British style. There they 
 all were, just as if it were yesterday. One felt that 
 
294 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 if Cicero had come up the street one might have 
 asked him the nearest way to the Underground. But 
 then one remembered that Cicero would probably 
 not have been walking up a street in Ostia ; it would 
 be like looking for the editor of the Spectator 
 amongst the costers' barrows in Whitechapel. Cic- 
 ero belonged to the intellectuals and took his exercise 
 in the Forum in a thoroughly decorous manner, no 
 doubt. Did he not once say that no shopkeeper 
 could be a gentleman? And how eloquently he 
 wrote about the dignified joys of old age and about 
 death as " coming into harbour," and what a poor 
 show he made when death actually overtook him in 
 his own garden in the person of the imperial execu- 
 tioner! For all his polite moralising, Cicero's in- 
 terests were wholly of this world, and he had the 
 vaguest ideas of the beyond. But one would not 
 have been surprised to meet the Right Hon. Will 
 Crooks in Ostia at the beginning of the Christian 
 era ; it would just be his setting — the working man 
 part of it, anyhow, the plutocratic part would be the 
 haunt of the makers of huge war profits. 
 
 Now let us jump a thousand years or more nearer 
 to our own time. What a change ! Here is a world 
 of unfamiliar features indeed, though it is that of 
 our own ancestors and partly occupied our own soil. 
 Look at the Gothic cathedrals newly reared with 
 their pinnacles soaring to heaven, then as now the 
 greatest triumph of the builder's art, the last word 
 
AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 295 
 
 in architecture, sacred poems frozen into stone, as 
 they have been fitly called. We see them now after 
 the wear of ages, but what must they have been 
 originally? Surely the people who could plan and 
 erect such structures as these to the glory of God 
 must have possessed something worth our while to 
 recover. The life of the community centred around 
 the altar. The nave of the parish church was the 
 place where the affairs of the parish were transacted, 
 the social meeting-place — hence, perhaps, the rea- 
 son for the rood screen to shut off the inner sanctuary 
 from the place of conversation and discussion. 
 Canon Jessopp tells us that probably the villagers 
 themselves helped to build the church with their own 
 hands; fancy them doing it now! Mr. Chesterton 
 has said somewhere that a cathedral is of more im- 
 portance to national well-being than a factory. Our 
 forefathers certainly thought so, but do we? Noth- 
 ing could better typify the change that has passed 
 over the world since the days when the Gothic cathe- 
 dral was new than the fact that the factory has come 
 to usurp its place. It speaks of utilitarianism in ev- 
 ery line, the general uglification and sordidification 
 of life, if I may be permitted to coin a word — slums, 
 sweated industries, overcrowding, and all the rest 
 with which we are only too familiar. I do not want 
 to idealise the past; I think I know too much of his- 
 tory for that. The age of St. Francis was a rude, 
 violent, ignorant age in many ways, but it had the 
 
a 9 6 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 sense of the eternal, that is what I am driving at. If 
 a people's buildings are the expression of its soul, 
 then the soul of the thirteenth century was nearer 
 God than ours. The unseen world was every whit 
 as real to the men and women of that period as the 
 seen is to us, and occupied the foreground of their 
 thoughts; we have turned matters just the other way 
 round. What we need to get back is not their super- 
 stitions but their childlike faith. Until the war 
 broke out I should have said that we were more hu- 
 mane than they, had outgrown their cruelties and 
 brutalities, but Zeppelin raids, Belgian and Serbian 
 atrocities, Armenian massacres and the like have 
 taught us better. We cannot boast of any superior- 
 ity now over the ancients in these respects except to 
 say that we are more efficient in our butcheries, more 
 expert in the invention of infernal machines for de- 
 stroying human life, and less scrupulous in employing 
 them. There was such a thing as the Truce of God 
 in the Middle Ages; where is it now? 
 
 How should we ever understand a man like St. 
 Louis (King Louis IX of France), who went to war 
 over the very same ground as our troops are now oc- 
 cupying in the near East, but with a different motive? 
 He went to wrest the tomb of Christ from the fol- 
 lowers of Mahomet; Germany makes common cause 
 with them against the rest of Christendom. Join- 
 ville tells an amusing story (amusing from our point 
 of view, not his) about the voyage of the king and 
 
AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 297 
 
 his crusading army through the Mediterranean to 
 Egypt, and how they were caught in storm after 
 storm and could make no headway. The sailors 
 saw that a mountain on the north coast of Africa 
 kept pace with them hour after hour, and at last they 
 cried out in terror that the phenomenon was due to 
 enchantment by evil spirits. The only thing to be 
 done was to carry the Blessed Sacrament in solemn 
 procession round the deck with the priest chanting 
 a Litany the while; so poor Joinville, who was ter- 
 ribly seasick, was routed out of his hard bed, and 
 half led, half carried in that procession behind his 
 king with the object of getting rid of the invisible 
 makers of storms who were hindering their progress 
 so grievously. We can picture the comic spectacle 
 — the cockleshell of a ship pitching and rolling, the 
 priests in their vestments staggering along with their 
 sacred burden, feebly twittering their lay, the pious 
 king following, and behind him a stumbling, jum- 
 bling company of mail-clad knights and their re- 
 tainers, green and white with mat de mer but having 
 to keep their place in the ranks somehow. There 
 would be terrible catastrophies at intervals, we may 
 be very sure ! And no one could be surprised to 
 learn that at the third time round the menacing 
 mountain had disappeared! Of course it would; 
 anything would that was assailed by such intrepid 
 devotion as that. But before we laugh let us be 
 quite sure that we really know more of the spiritual 
 
298 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 universe than those simple-minded adventurers did. 
 Read the Little Flowers of St. Francis, and then 
 ask if picture theatres and Council schools — - or the 
 most up-to-date German scientific education, with its 
 utter destruction of the spirit of reverence in pres- 
 ence of the holy mysteries everywhere surrounding 
 us — have done so very much for our betterment, 
 after all. Take the quaint account of the little boy 
 " very pure and innocent " who slept near St. Francis 
 and tied the cord round his waist to that of the saint 
 so as to know when the latter got up to pray in the 
 night. " And coming close up to the place where 
 Saint Francis was praying, he began to hear much 
 discourse; and drawing nigher for to see and learn 
 what it was he heard, he beheld a marvellous light 
 that shone round about Saint Francis, and therein 
 he saw Christ and the Virgin Mary and Saint John 
 the Baptist and the Evangelist, and a great multi- 
 tude of angels, speaking with Saint Francis." We 
 are so clever nowadays that we know that boy was a 
 liar and never saw anything of the sort, and that all 
 the other wonderful tales about St. Francis and his 
 doings are false likewise; that Brother John's ecstasy 
 at Communion, when " straightway the form of the 
 bread vanished, and in the Host appeared Jesu 
 Christ the Blessed One, incarnate and glorified " was 
 pure delusion; that the fierce wolf of Agobio was 
 never converted, and that the fishes and the birds 
 never listened to sermons, however eloquent. But 
 
AGES OF FAITH AND REASON 299 
 
 at the risk of offending all my readers, and losing any 
 respect they ever had for me, I confess that I am 
 sceptical of the scepticism, and that in any event I 
 wish we had the state of mind back again that could 
 so believe, seeing God in everything, and with their 
 belief living lives of simple, humble, self-crucifying 
 goodness and love. 
 
 Lucretius was a contemporary of Cicero, and an 
 equally clever man, an uncompromising atheist and 
 materialist, like nearly all the intellectuals of his day. 
 There was plenty of churchgoing, by the way — if 
 that be the right name for it — and the clever people 
 were greatly amused thereby. Fashionable ladies 
 thronged the temple of Isis, for instance, and made 
 valuable offerings at the shrine to obtain the favour 
 of the goddess for their lovers. Spiritualism and 
 fortune-telling had their votaries, and I daresay 
 Cicero himself had his palm read at a drawing-room 
 meeting now and then. I am quite sure Lucretius 
 would not. He hated supernaturalism in all its 
 forms. The following is from Mr. Mallock's trans- 
 lation of his great poem On the Nature of Things — 
 
 "O peoples miserable! O fools and blind! 
 What night you east o'er all the days of man, 
 And in that night before you and behind 
 What perils prowl ! But you nor will nor can 
 See that the treasure of a tranquil mind 
 Is all that nature pleads for, for this span, 
 So that between our birth and grave we gain 
 Some quiet pleasures, and a pause from pain." 
 
 Really, it is very like what Haeckel is saying to-day, 
 
300 THE WAR AND THE SOUL 
 
 only that one has never known the great German 
 savant to break into poetry. Poor Lucretius ! He 
 committed suicide fifty years before Christ was born. 
 Is it clear now why I earnestly wish that in the years 
 following the war we might shake off the spell of this 
 soul-killing secularity of temper and get back to the 
 simplicity and trustfulness of the wonder-working 
 child-man, who always described himself as " Christ's 
 poor little one, Francis " ? 
 
 THE END 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: 
 
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