IV

MISSIONARY WORK THE ONLY FINAL CURE FOR WAR[5]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only one nation wanted war, as the pathetic want of preparation of every other nation proves to demonstration; only one nation has set at naught the Christian principles which have slowly been gaining ground in the conduct of war; and only one spirit has produced the war, and that a spirit avowedly and in so many words passionately opposed to the Spirit of the New Testament.

And, therefore, it is the grossest injustice to lay the blame on religion for what has been produced by its avowed opposite, and to talk about the breakdown of Christianity for what is due to the revival of avowed paganism.

II. But I can imagine my distressed brethren saying: "The answer is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Why, after nearly two thousand years, has Christianity not progressed farther? Why is not the world more completely Christian? Why was the wild beast left among the flowers? Nay, why is the wild beast still so active in our midst? Why did the Drink Bill of our country go up eight millions in the first six months of 1915? Why have the scenes in the streets of darkened London been worse than they have been for twenty years? You do not meet me fully," he says, "when you prove that it was not Christianity which produced this war; what I want to know is why it was not strong enough to stop it."

And my answer shall be given to that, not in anger, but in sadness: "And have you during this last twenty-five years fought the wild beast yourself in this great city? Have you yourself practised strict self-denial to the point of sacrifice, in dealing with the drink question, to help the weak brethren for whom Christ died? Have you crushed down the wild beast of lust in yourself, and grappled with the haunts of vice, as many in London have done for twenty-five years? Have you seen that there is a Mission Church among every eight thousand people as they have come into London, and given of your substance to plant one? Have you done your best to see that every sailor that goes from our ports is a Christian, and that every trader who trades throughout the world, and every bank clerk who has been to work in Berlin or Paris, lives up to his religion? Have you given every available penny to spread the Gospel, the failure of which you now deplore, throughout the world? Or have you spoken of 'sending money out of the country,' of the uselessness of Christian servants, and repeated the travellers' tales about Missions of those who have never visited a missionary station in their lives, when you have been asked to support Mission work abroad?"

Then, until you have done that, I refuse you the right to speak of the weakness of the religion which you have failed to support. It is only promised that "they shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain" when "the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."

But what if we have never really attempted to fill the earth with the knowledge of the Lord? What if we have only very feebly attempted to know this ourselves? What if, as a consequence of spending less than a million a year on Foreign Missions, we are now having to spend five millions a day on a war made necessary by the neglect of our Christian duty?

No one believes more absolutely than I do in the righteousness of the present war; as I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity, for freedom, for international honour, and for the principles of Christianity. I look on everyone who fights for this cause as a hero, and everyone who dies in it as a martyr; but, at the same time, I believe that if every Christian throughout the world had fully risen to his responsibilities and had fully lived up to his Christianity, for the last hundred years, we might have done more to avert it. You cannot say more than that. Slavery was undoubtedly as much opposed as war to Christianity, but it took eighteen hundred years to abolish that; it may take another eighteen hundred years to abolish war. We must not hurry God, but we must not fail to help Him; we can hasten the kingdom. It is no good praying "Thy kingdom come" by itself; we must also make it come, and the only sure way to make the kingdom come, and with the kingdom the extinction of war, is to spread throughout the world the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

We were beginning to find this out before the war.

A striking pamphlet by Canon Holland, "The White Man's Burden," has been published by the great Society which for two hundred years has tried, amidst much indifference, apathy and discouragement, to propagate the Gospel throughout the world. He showed how our skilled and devoted Governors and statesmen throughout the world found after a time that their ability and hard work reached a point at which they could go no farther.

For instance, quite naturally their system of education broke down the old beliefs of India; quite naturally the ideals and ideas of freedom and personal responsibility which they taught produced a desire among individuals also to be free, and a longing in every nation to realise itself. The great statesman rubbed his eyes; he couldn't quarrel with this result of his own teaching. But who was to bind this transformed nation with new cords? where was he to find the new restraints to take the place of the old ones which had been broken through from sheer life and vigour? Where were the new wine-skins to hold the new wine?

And, pathetically, even before the war such men were turning to the religion which they had been partially taught at their public school, but which in their blindness they had half despised, as having no bearing on a practical workaday world; but, lo! practical common sense had broken down; could the secret be, after all, in what they had heard in their Confirmation preparation, in that school sermon to which they had only half attended, in the prayers which they had said rather as a matter of form ever since they were taught them at their mothers' knees?

From end to end of the world the revelation was coming, and, as one of those who has borne this white man's burden, Lord Selborne, in his preface to the pamphlet, endorses what it says. There is only one set of rules which will hold the new nation, and only one set of wine-skins which will hold the new wine; and that is the rules of God's Commandments as interpreted and extended in the New Testament, the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount; and the only wine-skins which will hold the new wine are those produced by the Gospel of the Incarnate, Risen, and Ascended Christ, with the miracles which He worked believed, and the Sacraments which He gave accepted and used. "Let the new wine be put into new wine-skins, and both are preserved."

All this was before the war. But since the war began, just as you see against the dark thunderclouds the brilliancy of the sunshine, which even lights up those clouds and turns them into a glory and a radiance themselves, so all that was chivalrous and noble in Europe has suddenly leaped to light. Christianity has been rediscovered. Censors have been converted by reading soldiers' letters. Many a man who professed himself an atheist has now seen what Christianity really means. "Even an atheist must have believed if he had seen my father die," wrote a young officer of a father who was buried yesterday. "Could you sing me a hymn?" asked a young officer, dying in the last battle, of the chaplain, who in the very thick of the shells and the bullets was at his work. And, with his arm round him, the chaplain sang with him "Jesu, Lover of my soul," until he died.

In this great Day of God, things are beginning to appear as they are, and not as they are represented. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." That simple and sincere Christian, the Czar of Russia, went to the heart of things at the beginning of the war, when he gave that as the motto of the war to his troops; and every boy since then, who, as depicted in the picture entitled "The Great Sacrifice," has laid down his life, with his dead hand resting on the foot of the crucifix, has sealed with his life the great saying of Sir Henry Newbolt:

"Life is not life to him that dares not die,
And death not death to him that dares to live."

It comes round, then, to this: the Advent picture is not a mockery; it is not a mirage in the desert; it is a true picture let down from heaven to cheer us to-day with a prophecy of what some day shall be.

Let that picture at once encourage us while it shames us.

As we watch it, away with all those foolish old sayings about "not believing in Foreign Missions," "sending money out of the country," "converting Whitechapel and Bethnal Green before we attempt China or Japan"; for the knowledge of the Lord—before war can be no more—is to cover the whole earth as the waters cover the sea.

But, on the other hand, let it encourage us:

"Far out of sight while sorrows still enfold us
Lies the fair country where our hearts abide,
And of its joys is nought more wondrous told us
But these few words—We shall be satisfied."

We may behold the land, although it may seem at present "very far off."

Once crush for ever the revived paganism, which perhaps for the last time has challenged the supreme claim of Christ to His own world; when that is in the dust, once astonish the world by the beauty of a chivalry and Christian manhood which shall be seen by contrast to be as day compared to night, and light to darkness; once "placard Christ" through every tribe in Africa and Asia, and preach Him effectively in every island of the sea; and as the last hand slipped down in death the flagstaff of the Black Flag at Omdurman, so shall the last hand at last be lifted, in this world, of one man against a brother-man in fratricidal strife, and the great picture shall be true at last:

"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain": for at last the earth is filled with "the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea."