The Potter and the Clay

by Arthur F. Winnington Ingram

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.