“Well, sir”—I have had this said to me a hundred times—“I am not a religious man.” If religion is really presented to the ordinary man as “tithes,” or for that matter as a “scheme of salvation,” or “sound church teaching,” it is no wonder that he stands a bit away from it. I in no way mean to suggest that all religion in the army is of this kind. But the broadly indisputable result of the preaching to which our men have been subjected is this: They have come to regard religion as an obscure and difficult subject in which a few people with eccentric tastes are interested, but which simple men had better leave alone. And the tragedy lies in the fact that the very men who think and speak thus about religion have in them something very like the spirit of Christ.
The padres themselves, the best and most earnest of them, are painfully aware that the ordinary pulpit sermon is remote, utterly and hopelessly, from the lives of the men, is in fact a so many times repeated essay on tithes. And the padres, again the best of them, are not content to be just padres. They feel that they ought to have a message to deliver, that they have one if only they can disentangle it from the unrealities which have somehow got coiled up with it. All the odd little eccentricities in the form of service and the recent fashion of spicing sermons with unexpected swear-words are just pathetic efforts to wriggle out of the clothes of ecclesiastical propriety.
But something more is wanted. It is of little avail to hand round cigarettes before reading the first lesson, or to say that God isn’t a bloody fool, unless some connection can be established between the religion which the men have and the religion which Christ taught.
There is another story which should be told for the sake of the light it gives on the way men regard the padres, or used to regard them. They are less inclined to this view now.
A chaplain, wandering about behind the lines, found a group of men and sat down among them. He chatted for a while. Then one of the men said “Beg pardon, sir, but do you know who we are?” The chaplain did not. “I thought not, sir,” said the man. “If you did you wouldn’t stay. We’re prisoners, sir, waiting to be sent off for Field Punishment No. 1.”
The story often finishes at that point, leaving it to be supposed that the padre was unpleasantly surprised at finding himself on friendly terms with sinners, but there is a version sometimes told which gives the padre’s answer. “It’s where I ought to be.”
I am not, I hope, over-sanguine, but I think that men are beginning to realise that the padre is not a supernumerary member of the officers’ mess, nor concerned only with the small number of men who make a profession of religion; that he is neither a member of the upper, officer, class, nor a mild admirer of the goody-goody, but—shall we say?—a friend of publicans and sinners.
It is a confusing question, this one of the religion of the soldier, who is nowadays the ordinary man, and his relation to the Church or the churches. But we do get a glimpse of his mind when we understand how he thinks of the clergy. He knows them better out in France than he ever did at home, and they know him better. He has recognised the “—— parson” as a padre and a good sport. That is something. Will the padre, before this abominable war is over and his opportunity past, be able to establish his position as something more, as perhaps the minister and steward of God’s mysteries?