CHAPTER X
DOMINION FROM SEA TO SEA
No part of the Empire rendered the cause of the world's soul in the world war greater service than Canada. When the clouds of chlorine gas were let loose it was the Canadians who stopped the gap through which the torrent of destruction was flowing. And the question the wounded men gasped out of tortured throats and lungs was not 'Shall I live?' but 'Did the Huns get through?' In the great host that at last swept the wolves back to their lair, the Canadians were foremost. 'We pledge ourselves solemnly before God to keep faith with our fallen comrades,' wrote General Currie to Sir Robert Borden, and nobly did they fulfil the pledge. To-day when a citizen of the States begins to demonstrate how his countrymen won the war, a Canadian produces the official statistics from his pocket and shows how the ten millions of Canada gave more of their sons over to death and wounds than the total casualties of the one hundred and ten millions in the States. And it is not surprising that Canada should have a clear vision of the ideal of duty. The very name that their country bears lifts that young nation into the fellowship of the highest ideal. When a name was discussed for the new confederation an inspiration came to Sir Leonard Tilley as he read the eighth verse of the seventy-second psalm: 'He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth,' and on his initiative the name Dominion was adopted. Not for Canada alone but for the whole Empire that name sets forth the only ideal. The cry of 'World-dominion or death' can only be overcome at last by the watchword 'God-dominion and Life.'
I
It is difficult for men to learn the lesson of their own most bitter experience. Only when the Cross stands far back across the years does its meaning and purpose faintly gleam on the minds of men. It need be no matter for surprise that men who did not themselves stand in the breach of death should be unable to articulate the master-word of the future. That great word will be—Spirit. What the world gazed on for four years of woe was the triumph of the spirit. To the men who, footsore and limping, marched back from Mons, defeat was incredible—their souls knew not the word. And because victory, even as they retreated, was in their souls, they swept the enemy back from the gates of Paris. For four years in mud and misery and defeat the soul endured and triumphed. It was the greatest of all the soldiers of France who said to his body as it shrank in his first battle: 'Tremblest thou? If thou knewest the dangers into which I shall this day carry thee, thou wouldest tremble!' Often and often in these four years the poor worn suffering body said, 'I have had enough—enough of mud and vermin—I am fed up; I will do no more,' but when the call of duty came the soul said to the body, 'I will make you face it, make you go through with it'; and the soul compelled the body to charge into the very face of death. It was the spark of the Divine in the soul that enabled our brothers to conquer the shrinking of flesh and blood and so to conquer the foe. It is in the measure that armies are souls that armies conquer. And it has been the same at home in castle and cot-house. We have but to think of the wives and mothers.
'They let them go forth at the wheels
Of the guns and denied not. But then the surprise
When one sits quiet alone! Then one weeps, then one kneels,
God! how the house feels.'
However deeply the iron pierced, there was never a thought of defeat being even possible. And when the call came the women toiled in the factories, and the ammunition dumps were their spirit materialised. At home and in the battle-line the final destiny of every nation depends upon the soul.
II
Still more is the mastery of this word apparent when we consider the future destiny of the world. One result of the world's blood-bath is that all thoughtful men are asking, How can the world be saved in the future? And multitudes discuss the way of the world's salvation by a League of Nations or other method. By parchments and signatures the world is to be saved! All that is but the folly with which men have deceived themselves in all ages. The folly is apparent when we ask, Whence do wars spring? They spring from greed and lust and ambition—from the life surrendered to evil. We speak of the horror of war; what we should speak of is the horror of wickedness. For war is only a symptom, not the disease. What all these weary discussions about 'Leagues to make an end of war,' and the new watchword 'No more war,' aim at is the doing away with the symptom—leaving the disease to run its deadly course. To suppress symptoms without removal of the hidden cause is the way of death. What the nations must face is the disease and its healing!
It is with nations as with individuals! How can a man protect himself against a thief. He can do it in three ways. He may (1) use force; or (2) he may make an agreement with the thief—enter into a treaty with him; or (3) he may endeavour to reform the thief. The first method is militarism and, whether in the form of armies or policemen, is costly and uncertain. The second only protects so long as the thief finds it convenient or in his own interest to keep it. Neither a burglar nor a robber-state can be warded off by treaties. The third alone provides a certain protection; the only safety is that the thief experience a change of spirit—be, in short, converted. 'Admirable,' said Cardinal Fleury, when a scheme for 'perpetual peace' was submitted to him; 'admirable, save for one omission—I find no provision for sending missionaries to convert the hearts of princes.' The day of princes is over, and the day of democracy has come. The first requisite of perpetual peace is that the nations of the world experience a change of heart and spirit—should repent. But in all the schemes for ending war there is no suggestion of sending missionaries to convert the world's democracies. France has 'extinguished the lights of heaven which none shall rekindle'; England, if the number of worshippers in the churches be any gauge, is rapidly sinking back into paganism; and across the Atlantic the United States is resolved to live unto itself alone, separating itself from the perishing nations; while on the Continent of Europe there is but one ritual: 'We did no wrong: we did not begin the war.' Missionaries to convert the democracies of the world—they are needed in legions. But such a need is not in all the thoughts of the orators. They can only think of forming leagues to abolish the vultures that swoop down on the carcases. They cannot realise that the only way to make an end of the swooping vulture is to make an end of carcases. Unless the world experiences a spiritual and moral renewal, any league that would secure it peace in the midst of its depravity would only secure its moral doom. It is manifest then that the only way to abolish war is to bring the body into subjection to the spirit. The way of salvation is the way of spiritual renewal. Love does not kill or poison, and humanity's feet need to be guided into the way of love. Along that road there is but the one guide: He who said 'I am the way.... Love as I have loved you.' The measure of that love is the Cross. And that is why the way to salvation leads through Calvary.... Peace will only come when the kingdoms of this world shall submit to that kingdom of the soul whose dominion is from sea to sea. 'I find a hundred little indications to reassure one that God comes,' writes H. G. Wells. 'The time draws near when mankind will awake ... and there shall be ... no leader but the one God of mankind.' But though Mr. Wells writes sentences so vital as that, yet when one asks him what God is—he is silent. Is He holy and righteous? Though Mr. Wells' God is but an abstraction, yet the truth remains. The coming of the Kingdom of God is the one hope of mankind—that Kingdom which Jesus preached. And the entrance into that Kingdom is by way of repentance and love and faith. When the soul of the world awakes to that, the day of deliverance shall have dawned.
III
This, then, must be the goal of human effort, to bring the nations of the world into such a unity of spirit that war will no longer be thinkable. But we, as a nation, can only do this if we ourselves bring our lives into conformity with the laws of righteousness. It is manifest that no amount of oratory will enable us to raise the world to any higher level than we have attained ourselves.
The first duty, then, is to see that we base our own lives on righteousness. The problem is how to bring to bear on the human heart those motives that will move it irresistibly towards righteousness. That road is not easy to travel and the choice of it means effort and travail. It means a battle against selfishness and self-seeking—a battle long-drawn-out. Why should men choose that conflict rather than ease and self-indulgence? There can be no reason save this: that God wills and enjoins righteousness. But does He? We know very little about God, and the strange thing is that the more knowledge that comes to us regarding Him, the more mysterious He becomes. But there is one thing that we do know with absolute certainty regarding God, and it is this—that all down the thousands of years of recorded history the power of the Unseen Ruler of the universe can be traced fighting against iniquity, burying corrupt nations under the avalanche, digging the grave for tyranny and corruption. The history of the world is the history of God making an end of crime. The way to destruction has been the way of iniquity. That God should have so ordered the universe that the stars in their courses fight against the Siseras, that all its forces are at last arrayed for the destruction of evil, is the proof that God is righteous and holy and that the passion in His heart is that His children should be righteous and holy. The world, as God means it, is the school for the training of men and women in goodness—and so in the image of God.... It is only the call of the Unseen Ruler as He summons His children to bring their lives into unison with Himself, that can turn the feet into the way of righteousness. There is no impelling force equal to the choice of good rather than evil except this—that God wills goodness. No other motive save that can turn the faces of men towards the heights.
IV
The greatest of all questions then is this—how most efficiently to bring that motive to bear upon the nation. It is in the early and plastic years that the destiny of individuals is fixed. If anywhere, it is in our schools that our children shall learn the things out of which are the issues of life and death. What atmosphere shall we surround our children with in our schools? is the supreme question. 'To educate without religion is only to produce clever devils,' declared the Duke of Wellington in his downright way. And as a nation we have made sure of everything being taught—except religion. No government-inspector ever asks about it!
What a waste it all is and what a travesty—this pumping of facts and figures into the weary, jaded brains of little children. Only five per cent. or so of the people are capable of benefiting by a long process of education—yet everybody must be confined in dreary barracks from five to fifteen years, learning things that will never be of use and are straightway forgotten. We ordained that all the children should be taught, but in our usual blundering fashion we never settled what we should teach them. The child looks out on a world of wonder, and proves its wisdom by peopling every grove and every hill with fairies. For the child the world is spiritual. And it comes to us and asks how came it and why came it? But our legislators decreed that, so far as they were concerned, the child should be taught geography and the names of rivers and hills, but not about the God who made the rivers and hills and the world; botany, but not about the God who made the grass and the flowers; physiology, but not about the God who fashioned man; dates of kings and of battles, but not about the God whose providence is written over all history; about laws, but not about the Source of all law—the divine commands that regulate human action. The only part of man that the educators considered was the brain. If they intellectualised the race they deemed that the millennium would come. They did it. But the millennium is further off than ever. They caused all the people to go through the mills where knowledge was ground out; they learned to read and write. The only consequence was that they became the victims of every charlatan. They turned their arithmetic into roguery and their literature into lust. They became the victims of the gamblers and the betting touts. They pursued the missing words and became the disciples of demagogues. And salvation has tarried though the brain has been nurtured. Yes! there has come a vast progress! London in the next war can be completely destroyed by spraying it with gas bombs—in eight hours! Education, with God left out, will, then, have come to its fruition!
V
National education will only become a means of deliverance from evil when our schools shall have been transformed into the nurseries of goodness. For after all, what we need is good men and women. Clever men are as common as berries; what the world cries for is men who can be trusted, men whose motive will be the welfare of others and not their own. 'His fame was immense,' was the verdict on a Roman patriot; 'his private property was so scanty that there was not enough to pay the expenses of his funeral. He was buried at the public cost. The matrons mourned him as they mourned Brutus.' Ah! the terrible thing is not to die poor but to die with a character no man honours. To train our children to love and desire goodness is our need. The history of the ages is the proof that goodness cannot flourish apart from religion. And the Bible tells the story of the dealing of God with men—of the evolution of religion. It is that which constitutes the supreme value of the book.
But no book has suffered more at the hands of its friends than has the Bible. The Bible is an Eastern book, and it is filled with glowing metaphors and parables. Dull, unimaginative Western minds said: 'These are literally true, and unless you believe them so you are lost.' The writer of the beautiful book of Jonah wrote a story rebuking the narrow spirit of the Jews, and his book has become the citadel of all the narrow souls who see nothing in it but the whale. Children should be taught that science and religion cannot contradict each other, because they both are revelations of the one God; that the Bible is full of poetry and parables which the writers never meant that any should mistake for treatises; that the slaughter of the Canaanites and the psalms of cursing are no more of the essence of religion, than the Stuart tyranny the essence of Scotland; that the serpent in the garden and Jonah in the whale are parables; that religion, in short, is a flowing and deepening river and not a stagnant pool. But religion as too often taught in our schools is only the teaching of things which the growing boy discovers to be untrue. So far from doing good, it is the destruction of religion.
When the Bible is taught as the record of the evolution of the revelation of God, it will move the hearts of men towards goodness while time endures, for it enshrines the figure of Him who based a Kingdom on love and meekness—a Kingdom that endures for ever, because no guns can fight against a Spirit, nor any frontiers bar it. The education that has not this as its base may produce the chlorine gas—but it will never produce that goodness which alone maketh great. But the course is so crowded that something must be jettisoned. And as inspectors take no note of religion—let it be thrown overboard. Its total omission in Secondary Schools is declared necessary, because the syllabus is too crowded already! It is as if a man having a ship laden with dross were offered some nuggets of fine gold and answered, 'My ship is overloaded already, I cannot take more.' But he wouldn't be such a fool. He would throw everything overboard, if need be, to make room!
VI
In the last year of the Great War a new Education Bill was passed for the Northern Kingdom, and provision was made for everything but the teaching of religion. At every election the voters who desire that religion be continued must have another spell of sentry-go to secure it—all except Roman Catholics and Episcopalians! Truly we are of the race of the Bourbons. The expense of teaching has been trebled; the futility of what is taught remains as before. I heard the Chairman of an Education Authority being asked whether provision was made in the schools for teaching the children the scientific facts about alcohol. He replied that the syllabus was too crowded already! Alcohol has claimed more victims from humanity than all the wars and famines of all the centuries; and yet our children were not to be taught the truth about it because the syllabus was so crowded! What is it they teach that could compare in value with the truths of temperance and self-discipline? Through a course of training so expensive that the countryside is well-nigh bankrupt because of its cost, the children pass and they go forth into the world unwarned of the rocks and shoals on which the millions have perished.... That, at this time of day, we should shut the doors of our schools against the knowledge of God, in whose love alone men can find their healing, and against the teaching of truth and temperance, which alone can make children grow in character and goodness, seems possible only on the supposition that we have been bereft of our judgment. 'If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts,' said Carlyle, 'all or most of them, there will be seen for some length of time, perhaps for some centuries, such a world as few are dreaming of.'