The Potter and the Clay

by Arthur F. Winnington Ingram

This, then, is His first design, but the clay will not take this design. There is a stubborn element in human nature determined upon War; there is a "throw back" to Paganism with which the Potter has to reckon. It is not His fault. To coerce, to crush Freewill is to crush His own Image in mankind, to make any kind of freely chosen goodness impossible. He must give up for the time, with what regret we can never know, His first design. He may see of the travail of His soul one day and be satisfied, but, for the present, He must bring in the "Gospel of the second best." He will bring good out of this evil; He will produce a bowl of unselfish service. The devil makes the War, but God will turn the devil's own weapons against himself, for He will produce a spectacle of unselfish service such as the world has never seen before.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are looking at to-day, what we are seeing portrayed daily before our eyes. We have never seen such a sight in our time before. With an unselfish devotion which has been the admiration of the world, the young men have flung themselves into the battle. To take our own nation alone, to imagine that five million men would have freely offered themselves for service would have been thought incredible in the year in which Sir Ian Hamilton delivered the interesting address to you, which I have read, on "National Service." Nor is it only the young men; there is not an idle young woman in London to-day, and I do not suppose there is in Birmingham; and as for the children, a little boy of nine shall speak for them. Asked whether he minded his beautiful home being turned into a soldiers' hospital, he replied, "I love having the soldiers here, Bishop." We can't go back to our old life after the War.

Even, therefore, without going further, as we are bound to do presently with the special teaching of the Christian religion, this conception of the Potter and the Clay relieves our minds of its worst fears. God does care for His human children; this slaughter of one man by another is not according to His first or even His ultimate design. He does not stop the mischief any more than He will pick off with His Hand obstacles placed to-night in the path of the Scotch express. He will not stop the wreck of it by main force, but meanwhile He is not inactive. The moulding Hand is hard at work; monuments of fortitude in matrons and wives, glorious specimens of unrivalled courage in their sons and husbands, issue from the workshop every day, and, to use the words of the Psalmist, "The fierceness of man turns to God's praise."

III. But now we have a more formidable task, and that is to meet the charge that the very existence, and especially the virulence of the War, constitutes a breakdown of historic Christianity. I have already admitted the force of the prima facie case which can be made out to sustain this argument, but a singular circumstance may well make us pause before we follow this specious, but, as I hope to show, shallow argument.

(1) Japan has always held a very detached view with regard to Christianity. Owing to local circumstances for a time a persecutor, our great ally soon became too enlightened to follow a policy of persecution, and when, later on, an alliance was concluded with ourselves, a natural admiration for the great Western Power which had become its ally led to at least a respectful attitude towards the religion which that ally at heart nominally and officially professed.

Then occurred the War, and here you might have expected the intelligent and clear-sighted watcher from a distance to have discovered the flaw in the religion which its great ally professed. It is an open secret that it has had the precisely opposite effect; never were the Japanese more favourably disposed to give a hearing to Christianity than they are to-day, and the reason is not far to seek.

They saw a great nation act up to the principles of the religion it professed.

If in those critical hours when the decision hung in the balance we had decided to abide in our sheepfolds and hear the bleating of the flocks; if we had decided to remain encircled by the silver sea and the mightiest navy in the world, and watch at a safe distance Belgium ravaged and the coast of France harried by the German Fleet, Japan would have assessed at its proper value the Christian sentiments which we officially professed.

But when it saw its great ally, practically unprepared, in the cause of the weak against the strong, in the cause of international honour, to defend the freedom of the world, fling itself into the battle, then it bowed its head in respectful admiration of a nation which did not wholly in vain profess to follow One "who, though He was rich, for our sakes became poor," and who, again, to use the striking phraseology of St. Paul, "being in the form of God, thought it not a thing to be snatched at to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation and took upon the form of a slave."

It may seem a paradox to say it, but Japan was clear-sighted enough to see the truth of it, that with all our inconsistencies and imperfections, the good old British race never did a more Christlike thing than when, on August 4th, 1914, it went to war. And surely Japan was right.