Stand Up, Ye Dead

by Norman Maclean

Though religion has been contemned, yet it cannot be denied that those forces which create abiding races and powerful empires are the very forces which have never been found to exist apart from the sanctions of religion. The development of the Roman Empire was profoundly influenced by its religion. To religion virtue owed its power, and from it patriotism drew its inspiration. And that religion claimed a supernatural origin—the source of its might was in the Unseen. When religion became a matter of public ridicule and the gods an 'object of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened,' and the philosophers 'concealed the sentiments of an atheist under their sacerdotal robes,' then the restraints of morality were flung aside and Rome went headlong to ruin. It was the same in Greece; the same everywhere. All religions have issued their commands: 'And God spake all these words, saying...' And so long as men felt the supernatural behind the mandate, they trembled and obeyed; when behind the mandate they discerned only superstition, they surrendered to their base desires. Morality can only be based on the Divine. Its commands are operative when these commands are recognised as those of the Moral Governor of the universe. If these commands do not affect issues beyond the grave, if they have no sanction in the eternal order, then there is no value in obeying them, and no crime in disregarding them. Rather is there a merit in flouting them—the mere products of ignorance and superstition. To despise them and disregard them was the mark of an emancipated and superior mind! Thus it ever came that first the supernatural vanished and afterwards morality vanished. And thus has it been also in our day.

The amazing thing is that men should ever have been blind to this—that, however much God may hide Himself at the end of other avenues of approach, at the end of this He stands forth clear before our eyes. There is nothing predicated regarding God which we cannot doubt and deny save this, that there is operative in the world a moral order conformity to which means life and disobedience death. It is thus with individuals and thus with nations. Let a man surrender to evil, and instantly nature begins to marshal its forces against him and digs for him the grave. The road by which humanity has marched is marked by the ruins of empires and civilisations upon which destruction came through the very same laws that we see working to-day, if we choose to look. Whatever race or empire surrendered to the base, sacrificed purity to sensuality, the good of the common weal to its own selfish ends, made selfishness and pleasure its aim, upon that race or empire, sooner or later, fell the consuming sword and the devouring flame. There is no sentence in all literature more pregnant than that which tells how the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. So it has been and ever will be. The whole forces of the universe are arrayed against evil, and carry on a ceaseless war against it. It is because of this divine surgery that humanity has been saved from a corruption which would have entailed the world's destruction. All history is the proof that there is a mandate which means life or death for individuals and nations. Along this road we can touch the hand of God and see the sword of His divine justice. Righteousness is the law of the world, the will of the Supreme Ruler who orders the universe that righteousness must at last prevail. The source of morality and all righteousness is—God.

II

It is manifest, then, that there is but one safety for individual or race, and that lies in getting into line with the Moral Order of the world—with God. But the startling thing is that though we have come through a discipline such as no generation ever experienced before, at the end of two years of it there is no sign that we have learned our lesson. The measure of our blindness is that politicians summon the nation to cultivate its brains that it may be saved, without ever a hint that salvation lies along the road of character and morality—the road that leads to God. (If salvation lay in the brain, the Greeks would have saved the world, for theirs was the greatest brain-power ever developed on the earth.) And even the Church is uncertain, and fails to summon the nation with clear and uncertain sound back to God. For it is manifest that there can be no penitence where there is no consciousness of transgression. There can be no return except for those who realise that they have strayed.

The first step, then, back to God must spring from the soul wakened to the realisation that it has sinned and that God is fighting against sin. But so far from the nation realising its true state, the amazing fact is that the nation is hypnotised with the sense of its own righteousness. It is only conscious of its own shining virtues. It has drawn the sword for freedom and in defence of little nations. It is waging a 'holy war.' Self-blinded, unable to believe that virtues such as shine on its face could suffer repulse, in days of humiliation and of defeat it has shouted 'Victory.' And from pulpit after pulpit the doctrine is propounded that this war is not a judgment of our sins; that to speak of war as a judgment of sin is 'antiquated.' The Church has thus cut itself adrift from the teaching of prophet and seer, and the Bible, which is aflame with the judgments of God upon sin, is but the antiquated record of unenlightened ages. Thus the conscience of the nation is narcotised. And it is manifest that a nation whose conscience is chloroformed can hear no call summoning to repentance. When the Church is blind to the sword of God flaming in the heavens, how can any expect the nation to behold it, and, beholding, to repent?

This obsession that we are not living in a great day of divine judgment is all the stranger when we consider that every day of our lives is a day of divine judgment, and that we are ever standing at the bar of the great assize. No sooner does a man sin than judgment begins to operate. Let him surrender to intemperance, and the judgment of disordered nerves and enfeebled frame is immediately declared. And so with every violation of the divine order. And the judgment ever operative against the individual is also ever operative against the nation. It requires but little thought to see how the national sins brought on the nation the judgment of these dread days.

For what was it that brought down upon us the cataclysm of war? It was the degeneration into which the nation had fallen. Like all empires we had risen from poverty, through hardship and discipline, to riches, and in days of luxury we lost our soul. We gave ourselves to pleasure and self-indulgence. We worshipped at one shrine—that of Mammon. We refused to bend the back to discipline or to exercise ourselves in enduring hardship. We annexed a fourth of the world's surface, but we were determined that we would have the world without paying the price. With an army equal in size to that of Switzerland we were holding against the rest of mankind an Empire which included most of the world's riches. Our rulers knew of our danger, but they dared not summon the people to arms, because whoever did so would risk office. Those who were on the watch-towers saw the enemy mustering, but they gave no warning, for the spoils of office were dear. Prophets arose to warn us, but we meted out contempt to them. That was our fashion of stoning them. (We have, however, improved upon the chosen race, for the very men who stoned them are already rearing statues in their honour!) Crowds of thirty thousand would assemble to shout and gamble over football matches, but the few days requisite for the training of our Territorial forces were not to be endured! We ceased to produce the population that could possess the vast territories we held. We could think of nothing but the vapourings of politicians who sacrificed the State to their faction. When Europe was an armed camp and Germany was piling up armaments, we were preparing for civil war in Ireland. Vision and genius were dying among us. For the devotees of Aphrodite and Mammon are blinded to the stars. A nation which sinks into degeneration, and which, holding the world's wealth, refuses even to prepare to guard its riches, is loudly inviting the robber. Germany concluded that we were degenerate and a negligible factor. Does any one think that, if we had begun to prepare after Agadir, there would have been war? If Germany had for one moment thought that the British fleet would have been arrayed against it, and that Britain would have marshalled five millions of men to fight to the death, there never would have been a war. It is not enough to say that in that case the war would only have been postponed, for a war averted is not necessarily a war postponed. Pendjeh and Fashoda might at least teach us that.

Do not let us blind ourselves to the facts. One source of this war is in ourselves. We bewail the horrors of war; what we ought to bewail is the horror of sin. For war is only a symptom of the hidden disease, as raving is the symptom of fever. And one of the sources of the blood and tears that overwhelm the earth is our sin. The horror of the battlefield pales before the horror of sin in our streets, sweeping souls to death. Our surrender to pleasure, our pursuit of vanity, our sacrifice of the State to party, of the race to our ease, our refusal to make the sacrifice that would make the Empire secure—these are the conditions which made war inevitable and which evoked it. As alcohol and the drunkard's palsied limbs are cause and effect, sin and judgment; so the national sin and the horrors of war are cause and effect, sin and judgment. Only the self-blinded are unable to discern that they are living in a great day of judgment: judgment on Germany for its greed and lust and covetousness: judgment on Britain for wasting at the shrine of self-indulgence that wealth committed to it for the serving and the uplifting of the world. And if the Church cannot see the divine judgment, then it cannot call the nation to repentance. For the nation, unconscious of wrong, will but say along with the Church: 'I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing.' After the war it will rush down the slope faster than ever before. The real fact is that the vision of God is hid from us by the mists of our sin. We cannot imagine the sword of the divine judgment unsheathed over the world, for a sword hanging from heaven must be gripped by some hand. And if there be no hand of God, how can there be a sword of His justice?

III

The one way of salvation for the human race is that of conformity to the righteous will of God. On the side of those who seek to walk along that road all the forces of nature fight; against those who resist the will of God all the forces of the universe are marshalled. Those who would conquer must walk with God. To return to God is the only hope. Let us try and realise the truth of this.