While I stood thus watching, the sun rose, and, above the plain clad in the hues of spring, the heaven brightened to full morning. Amazed, I saw that the stars had not gone in, but shone there in the blue.
And clear I heard the same Voice call: “Brothers! Behold! The Stars are lit for ever!”
FIRST THOUGHTS ON THIS WAR
(From Scribner’s Magazine, 1914.)
§ 1.
Three hundred thousand church spires raised to the glory of Christ! Three hundred million human creatures baptized into His service! And—War to the death of them all! “I trust the Almighty to give the victory to my arms!” “Let your hearts beat to God, and your fists in the face of the enemy!” “In prayer we call God’s blessing on our valiant troops!”
God on the lips of each potentate, and under a hundred thousand spires prayer that twenty-two million servants of Christ may receive from God the blessed strength to tear and blow each other to pieces, to ravage and burn, to wrench husbands from wives, fathers from their children, to starve the poor, and everywhere destroy the works of the spirit! Prayer under the hundred thousand spires for the blessed strength of God, to use the noblest, most loyal instincts of the human race to the ends of carnage! “God be with us to the death and dishonour of our foes”—whose God He is no less than ours! The God who gave His only begotten Son to bring on earth peace and good-will toward men! No supernatural creed—in these days when two and two are put together—can stand against such reeling subversion. After this monstrous mockery, beneath this grinning skull of irony, how shall there remain faith in this personal outside God, whom we can thus divide, appropriate, and invoke; how remain faith in the articles, the formal structure of a religion preached and practised to such ends? When this war is over and reason resumes its sway, our dogmas will be found to have been scored through for ever. Whatever else be the outcome of this business, let us at least realize the truth: It is the death of dogmatic Christianity! Let us will that it be the birth of a God within us, and an ethic Christianity that men really practise!
§ 2.
Yes! Dogmatic Christianity was dying before this war began. When it is over, or as soon as men’s reason comes back to them, it will be dead. In France, England, Germany, in Belgium, and the other small countries, dead; and only kept wonderingly alive in Russia and some parts of Austria through peasant simplicity. “Tell me, brother, what have the Japanese done to us that we should kill them?” So said the Russian peasant in the Japanese war. So they may say in this war. And at the end go back and resume praise of the tribal God who fought for Holy Russia against the tribal God who fought for valiant Austria and the mailed fists of Germany.
This superstitional Christianity will not die in the open and be buried with pomp and ceremony; it will merely be dead—a very different thing; like the nerve in a tooth, that, to the outward eye, is just as it was. That which will take its place has already been a long time preparing to come forward. It will be too much in earnest to care for forms and ceremonies. And one thing is certain—it will be far more Christian than the so-called Christianity which has brought us to these present ends. Its creed will be a noiseless and passionate conviction that man can be saved, not by a far-away, despotic God who can be enlisted by each combatant for the destruction of his foes, but by the Divine element in man, the God within the human soul. That, in proportion as man is high, so will the life of man be high, safe from shames like this, and devoid of his old misery. The creed will be a fervent, almost secret application of the saying: “Love thy neighbour as thyself!” It will be ashamed of appeal to God to put right that which man has bungled; of supplications to the deity to fight against the deity. It will have the pride of the artist and the artizan. And it will have its own mysticism, its own wonder, and reverence for the mystery of the all-embracing Principle which has produced such a creature as this man, with such marvellous potentiality for the making of fine things, and the living of fine lives; such heroism, such savagery; such wisdom and such black stupidity; such a queer insuperable instinct for going on and on and ever on!