The War and the Gospel: Sermons and Addresses During the Present War

by Henry Wace

The Warning of the Tower In Siloam.

PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 25, 1914.

“I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”—Luke xiii. 1-5.

“Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” In these solemn words, twice repeated, our Lord affords us a flash of light upon the principles and methods of the Divine judgments, and utters a solemn warning; and I think that both the revelation and the warning will be found intensely applicable to the distressing sufferings and anxieties through which we and our country are now passing. Our Lord had been speaking about the severity of the Divine justice, and about the blindness of men in not foreseeing the approach of His judgments. “Ye hypocrites,” He said, “ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” and He warns them that if they fall into the hands of justice, they will not depart thence till they have paid the very last mite. At this mention of the Divine judgment, some who were present told Him of a dreadful act of violence which had recently occurred, of some Galilæans, “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” It would seem they were members of an extremely zealous sect of Jews, who objected to the custom which then prevailed of offering sacrifices in the Temple for the welfare of the Roman Government; and Pilate treated their conduct as treasonable, and had them slaughtered in the Temple while they were offering their own sacrifices. The object of the interruption seems to have been to ask our Lord whether these men had brought such a punishment upon themselves by unusual sin, and it may also have been intended to tempt Him to pronounce some censure on Pilate, and thus to bring Himself into conflict with the Roman authorities. But our Lord’s reply lifts the matter at once out of any personal or local bearings, and lays down a principle which applies to all such tragedies. “Suppose ye,” He said, “that these Galilæans were sinners above all the Galilæans because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” He drives the truth home by applying it to another recent tragedy, which might have seemed a mere accident. “Those eighteen,” He said, “upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” It is not for you, He seems to say, to be curious about the reason why these particular men have suffered in this way. What you should do is to learn that you are all liable to suffer in the same way, and that you will do so unless you repent.

Now, it will be seen that there is a momentous revelation contained in these words, respecting the real cause of such dreadful disasters as these two incidents illustrated. When He says, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish,” He clearly intimates that a Divine judgment is going forward in the world, which sooner or later brings suffering and destruction upon men in consequence of their sin. Even what we might call a physical accident, like the fall of a tower which kills eighteen persons, is a warning to men that they are liable to such a death at any moment, and that, therefore, they should repent and be prepared for it. It is an example of what may befall any of us, and of what will befall all of us in one way or another, unless we repent. If we look more particularly into the example of the men whom Pilate slaughtered, we shall realize that it has a peculiarly close application to our own day. These men, who were resisting the Roman Government, were examples of the vehement passions which were at that time surging among the Jewish people. Our Lord Himself was the victim of the fierce hatred of foreign influence which prevailed among the people. The priests and Pharisees said among themselves, “What do we? For this man doeth many miracles, and if we let Him thus alone, all men will believe on Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” And the High Priest, Caiaphas, replied, “Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” Thus it was that the passions of the Jewish people were worked up into such blindness and wickedness, that they committed the awful crime of putting our Lord to death; and then in forty years the prediction of our Lord was fulfilled, and the great mass of them perished in just such a slaughter as that which Pilate committed, the blood of the nation being shed in torrents in the Courts of the Temple, and amidst its sacrifices. These events—the massacre by Pilate, the murder of our Lord, the destruction of the Jewish people—were not separate and disconnected events. They were all the consequence of the sins and evil passions which our Lord denounced among the Jews of His time; and the disasters which the Jews suffered were the judgments of God’s righteousness upon those sins.

Now what this reveals to us is the constitution of that world of human society amidst which we live. The bedrock of it, the basis of its whole constitution, is the righteousness of God and His unwavering maintenance of His moral laws. As the Psalmist says, “Clouds and darkness are round about Him,” and we cannot follow in all respects His mysterious dispensations; but one thing we know for certain, that “righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” All His providential government of mankind is based on the assertion of right and the punishment and repression of wrong; and, as another prophet says, when you see God’s judgments in the world you may be sure that the object of them is that the inhabitants of the world may learn righteousness. But it is of the first importance we should realize how those judgments are for the most part executed. It is not, as a rule, by the special and visible interposition of God’s hand. There have been times, indeed, as on various occasions in the history of the Jews, such as the deliverance of His people from Egypt, when God manifestly interposed, by miraculous means, to punish His enemies and to deliver His people. But for the most part, and in the general course of history, the moral and religious laws which God has established in human nature are left to work out their natural consequences, and men are punished not merely because of their sins, but by their sins, and by the working out of their sins in their lives. The explanation of the chief troubles of mankind, and in particular of the wars and sufferings which have cursed the earth from generation to generation, is contained in that statement of St. James: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” When the men and women of whom a nation is composed give way to those lusts of which St. James speaks, to covetousness, jealousy, sensuality, and untruthfulness, they are gradually storing up the fuel of passions for some great conflagration, which arises in the natural course of things, as the consequence of some great public injustice into which they are betrayed. They thus rouse the indignation of other people, they commit injustices which must be resisted, and then the world is convulsed in some great war like the present.

War, in fact, is the natural penalty by which, under God’s constitution of the world, the evil passions of men punish themselves. We may take an example from the physical world. The earth under our feet is held together, and affords us a sure foothold, by virtue of certain physical and chemical laws which are perpetually at work in it, such as the law of gravitation and the laws of chemical attraction. They are always working silently, and it is by means of the incessant action of those laws that the whole face of the earth is maintained from day to day. But from time to time, from some causes which we do not yet understand, something occurs to disturb their ordinary peaceful course, and then by their own natural action they produce some tremendous convulsions, like earthquakes or the eruptions of volcanoes. So it is with the moral world of national and international life. It is maintained in peace and stability, as a rule, by the principles of mutual trust and regard, if not of love, which are at the root of social and political life; but if falsehood and jealousy and covetousness accumulate in some part of the world, there is sure, sooner or later, to be a terrible convulsion and a devastating eruption of “blood and fire and vapour of smoke.” War is thus the outburst, the visible embodiment, of the passions behind it, of the accumulated sins which nations and generations have been indulging. We look with horror on war and all its miseries, and justly so; but what we ought to look on with more horror are the sins and wickedness and passions of which war is the inevitable result. People say that war is wrong, and of course it is wrong that there should be war; but the wrong in it is not the actual waging of the war, not at least the using of the sword, in the Name of God, to assert right against wrong; that is the bounden duty of the lawful authority. Where the wrong lies is in the passions which make the war, and which compel men to resort to so terrible a vindication of righteousness.

Have we not, I must ask, a glaring illustration of the profound moral principles thus asserted by our Lord in the present war? The means of communication in our day enable us to realize the feelings which are at work over the face of Europe amidst this terrible convulsion; and there is one fact which is appallingly conspicuous in that manifestation. That fact is the falsehood, the hatred, the violent imputations of evil motives, the overbearing ambition which are at work in the great nation—for a great nation it is—with which we are at war. As I will presently observe, I am far from acquitting ourselves of all blame in the matter. There was never a human struggle yet in which either side was perfectly free from blame; but as to the gross misrepresentations which are eagerly disseminated abroad respecting the motives and the conduct of this country, there can be no question whatever, and no adequate excuse. Whatever faults and errors we have committed, our statesmen have not been animated in the development of our Empire by greed and selfish ambition, or by a mere desire to be supreme over other nations. So far as our enemies are acting upon these ideas of our motives, they are absolutely blind; and there is nothing more terrible in the revelations which this war affords than that individuals and nations are capable of such absolute delusions, on so vast a scale, respecting one another’s motives and characters. It is plain that what has made this war is a total absence of that Christian charity between individuals and nations which St. Paul inculcates as “the very bond of all virtues,” and which is therefore the bond of all society. The most heart-rending thing, after all, is not that we are at war, but that Christian nations should be capable, in their daily life and thought, of such an absolute negation of those principles of moral life and faith which our Lord came to establish among us. Our Lord here warns us that unless men repent of this uncharitable temper, and of the sins associated with it, war can never be abolished, and we shall all perish in some fearful conflagration. At present the conflagration, like the tower in Siloam, has wrought its destruction mainly upon others than ourselves. A modern despot, indignant, like Pilate, at opposition to the claims of his nation, has mingled the blood of Belgian men and women and children with their sacrifices, with their ruined churches and desolated homes. But it is certainly not because a people like the brave Belgians were sinners above all men that dwelt in Europe that they have thus suffered. “I tell you, Nay,” our Lord’s Voice is heard in this text; “but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” Look to yourselves; ask yourselves whether there are or have been sins prevailing among you which, under the laws of God’s righteousness, must work out their evil consequence in your social and national life; and repent, lest ye likewise perish.

It is impossible, in dealing with this subject, not to express, as I have done, a deep indignation at the motives and the spirit which have been displayed by our enemies in this war. But we should miss the whole purpose of our Lord’s warning unless we applied it in the first instance, and in the main, to ourselves. Let us bear in mind that what has happened in Belgium and France might in conceivable circumstances, in the further development of scientific warfare, in the air as well as in the sea, happen to ourselves; and let us take to heart the clear warning of our Lord that the only way to avert such destructions, and to avoid perishing ourselves, is to repent, and from our hearts to cultivate among us those principles of charity, truth, righteousness and religion, which alone can keep human nature in peace.

After all, can we be sure that we are not partly to blame for this war by our own faults and failures? Have our statesmen, have we as a nation, been looking facts in the face and meeting them with faithfulness and self-sacrifice? Do not many among us ask whether this war would ever have been possible if we had realized our danger and our duty in time, and prepared ourselves, at whatever cost, to avert the danger? How far have we, and those who guide us, allowed ourselves to be diverted from the truth of our condition by sectarian and party passions and uncharitable class jealousies? Have we seriously laid to heart “the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions?” Is it compatible with the love of God and of Christ that those divisions should prevail so far as to lead to the curtailment of the Christian instruction of our school-children, and the secularization of property left by our ancestors for the hallowing of God’s Name and the promotion of Christ’s Kingdom? We have, moreover, been on the verge of civil war; and the very possibility of such war is proof enough, on the principles we have been considering, that some of the passions which lead to all wars have been rife among us. The possibility of that intestine war seems, in fact, to have been one of the considerations which encouraged the present attack upon us. Add to all this the social and personal vices, against which good men among us and great societies have been struggling for years, and have we not abundant reason to apply earnestly to our nation and to our individual selves the Lord’s warning: “Repent, or ye shall likewise perish?” For my part, I could wish that we were afforded an opportunity, by some solemn appointment of a Day of National Humiliation as well as Intercession, to search our consciences in the sight of God, and to unite in one great act of national repentance. But let us at least endeavour to discharge this duty of repentance and amendment for our own souls and in our individual lives; and we may then be assured that we are doing the best we can towards averting from our nation that suffering and ruin, which are brought so closely home to us in the miseries of our Allies.