Yet if the main verdict to which I have committed myself is to be radically accounted for, it is necessary to reach deeper reasons than any I have mentioned. I sympathise with those who have high hopes of the good effects of Church and Prayer Book and Bible-teaching reforms. Yet such are relatively superficial matters. The main reason for the comparative absence of religious revival among men at the front is that we all have been overtaken by the cataclysm of war in a condition of great poverty towards God.
VI
War, when it breaks in on peace, reveals in a fierce light the condition of men in peace. It would be ungrateful and disloyal not to acclaim the main sound heart of our country which this war has revealed. It would be treasonable to the great company of good men and true—not least out of the school and university world most familiar to the writer—who have risen to "the day" and have gladly given their all. Yet, after generous allowance for that, a great poverty of allegiance to God has been laid bare. Indirectly, in the answers made to the claims of duty, honour, service, and self-sacrifice, He has been acknowledged, but of direct devotion to Him as the one and pre-eminent reality there has been little. After all, can it be denied that the war has found us devoted rather to the idols of money, pleasure, and appetite than to God and His righteousness? We have had to be aroused from a great sensual preoccupation with worldly traffic. "As it was in the days of Noah," so in a measure it has been to-day: "as we ate and drank, and bought and sold and planted and builded, the flood has come upon us" and has all but swept us away. At home, as the thinly-veiled wantonness of some of our weekly illustrated papers reminds us in the field, it seems that a mass of self-pleasing and luxurious folk cannot yet find an escape out of the prison-house of Vanity Fair, though thousands bleed and die by their side. In the field, the mind and manner of a gross peace-life is kept alive by pictures of smirking nudities placarded in dug-outs and billets, and the farther back from the front one travels, as the hot breath of war grows more tepid, the more heavy grows the atmosphere of materialistic indulgence. That God minds is hardly thought of, for at home and abroad we have been carried into war in a peace-condition of great heedlessness of Him. And the strains and cost and dangers of war will not scare men out of their forgetfulness. The heart of man is incorrigible by fear. God, if He is little regarded in peace, is hard to come nigh to in war. If religion in peace and prosperity has not been full of His praise—of joy in Him, it is something to which adversity must drive men, and they think it as such a little disreputable, and many of the best men, richly gifted with manly excellences, tend to leave it on one side.
Yet "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." We can adopt the ringing note of St. Paul's defiance. For the Christian religion does not spring primarily out of human anxiety and need. It is not an expedient which may be left on one side till the hour of need arises. That many men should think thus of it shows that it has been widely forgotten, misunderstood, or never known.
VII
The Christian religion is salvation because it starts from what God is. Everything in it of human benefit and satisfaction is a bye-product flowing from the fact that it gives to men a focus for their devotion and attention not in themselves but in God. Its main motive is not self- but God-regarding. It draws men out of the entanglement into which they fall through temporising with their own needs, and constrains them to attend to God's need—His need of them. For the Christian, God is not some shadowy supreme Being at the back of the universe, or a name given to the sum of things. God is the Person Who made, and loves, and therefore wants His children. Hence Christian prayer primarily is grateful and loving acknowledgment of what God is, and only secondarily the expression of anxiety, or the "putting in" of this or that claim for what we want.
That is the conclusion which war experience drives home. The special strain and pressure of war cannot elicit from the majority of men the religion which is occupied with the saving of self. The spiritual law is that we find our life by losing it, not by saving it. In a vague and unexpressed way, as they show again and again by their cheerfulness and unconcernedness, hosts of men in this war have laid hold on this law. They have found a purpose to which to cleave, something to give themselves away for. Only it is hardly acknowledged, but rather lies below the level of mental apprehension and expression. It is the function of Christianity to raise this unacknowledging trustfulness and self-giving out of dumb subconsciousness, and to give to it speech, and to crown it with the glory of fully human self-devotion. It is its part to declare that it is God Whom they find in the offering of themselves, His love in which they can lose themselves, His purpose to which they can cleave, His will to be done—and that to give Him joy is the supreme end of man.
This is the religion which sustains in war, because possessed in peace. And it is so little prevalent—that is, so little in any one's conscious possession—in war just because God, and His love, and His desire have been so little in men's thoughts in peace. Let peace return—let the strain of war be lifted from a unit as it goes back into rest, or from an individual as he goes on leave, and the life of indulgence, without an object except self, threatens to repossess the soul. In the same way it is peace rather than war, health rather than sickness, youth rather than age, which really test the reality of our Christianity, when, without the shame of being driven thereto by need, a man can rejoice in God, and with full powers be made the instrument of His will.