V
Such was the condition of the nation when the trumpet of judgment sounded and civilisation went reeling into the furnace. The slum-dwellers and the slum-infected were alike shaking back into paganism and the beast. For the time we have emerged from the greater horror of sin into the horror of war. But what is to happen after? Saved as by fire, are we to hug our slums again?
Surely it cannot be for the perpetuation on earth of life after this order, that five millions of men have arisen and faced death. If we are to be worthy of the price that has been paid for our deliverance, by a resurrection from the dead we must cleanse our souls and transform our slums. It is not for us as we are, or for our cities as they now are built, or for a State that denies to its children the decencies of life, or for the continued reign of that plutocracy that has darkened the windows of the soul—not for the continuance of these have our brothers died right joyfully in the glory of their youth. It was for another England, another Scotland—the kingdom of the heart's desire wherein shall be found no more either the slum-dweller or the slum-lover—that they fought and died. When we think of them we know what the early Christians felt when they said one to the other, 'We are bought with a price; we are no longer our own to do as we like; we are His.' And we—we are theirs. We must be worthy of them. We dare not any longer leave their children in noisome slums; we dare not any longer suffer our own lungs to inhale the vapours of the spiritual slum. To show that we are in some little measure worthy of the price paid for our life, paid for the Britain that shall be, we will arise and straightway rebuild—until our cities shall be the cities of God, and our straths and valleys shall be filled with the songs of happiness and love and praise. They will not then have died in vain!
CHAPTER VIII
BEHIND YOU IS GOD
The greatest need of our day is the reinforcement of the soul. Our mistake has been that we thought the supreme good was the development of the brain. We went on steadily increasing our power over the forces of nature, but we neglected to develop the soul-power which could control and direct the material power thus created. The result has been the greatest catastrophe in history. The industrial civilisation which we reared through the painful toil of a century, is passing in the smoke of the howitzer shells. And the end is not yet. Unless man becomes master of himself, it can bring nought but misery that he should master nature. The war of the future will be war in the air. From the experience of one or two air-craft raining destruction on a city one can imagine that dread future when thousands of air-ships and aeroplanes will rain bombs like hail on doomed cities. The old security of this sea-girt isle has vanished for ever. In the air there are no frontiers which can be fortified or guarded. Every fresh triumph of science will be only a new engine of destruction, a new weapon of devilry. Humanity will be driven underground, burrowing like rats. It is quite conceivable not only that civilisation should perish but that the world itself might be destroyed. The development of power, without the development of soul to control it, means ruin to mankind. The amazing thing is that men should to-day declare with passionate conviction that the future safety of England depends on the increase of that knowledge which has given us the poison clouds of chlorine gas, without ever a word to indicate that salvation can only come through the development of self-mastery and self-control—even through the soul. We have stood for two years in the centre of the maelstrom of human history, and have heard the hurricane of judgment sweeping through the world, but as yet we have not heard the still, small voice of God.
I
The lesson we have to learn is that the power of the soul must be enforced. And that can only come by laying hold upon God. The power that ever lay behind human progress, that worked out law and order and security, has in all ages been the power of religion—of God. But religion has been in our day a matter of contempt. It was merely a 'grotesque, fungoid growth which clustered round the primeval thread of ancestor worship,' more or less a 'pathological phenomenon closely allied with neurosis and hysteria.' There are few things more pitiful in human weakness than the contempt expressed by the scientist and the learned for that power of the soul which created the civilisation of which the contemners are the fine fruit!