Stand Up, Ye Dead

by Norman Maclean

The greatest danger threatening the race is, as we have seen, that of racial suicide. The mentally developed have made the devitalising of life a code of conduct. Unconscious of sin, they have made sin a science. For the race that sets its face towards this goal there awaits nought but ruin. The problem is how to save the race from the coffin.

A great many remedies have been proposed, but almost all of them are not only futile but pernicious. A system of bounties to parents for each child would be no inducement to the classes which have already surrendered to this degeneration. Such a policy would only encourage the further multiplying of the poor and the unfit. And the remedy is not to be found in the multiplication of agencies for the preservation of child life. The conservation of the child in the slum will not compensate for the destruction of the child in the mansion-house. A policy which aims at the survival of the unfit cannot enrich the race. Such methods are to be commended, but they are mere palliatives. When the bone needs to be scraped, it is futile to go on applying poultices.

The true remedy is in the realisation of God and in the return of the nation to Him. It is when the soul is awakened to God that men realise the heinousness of sacrificing life to selfishness. For God is the fountain of life; and it is not merely the physical life that is atrophied by racial limitation. The blow is in reality aimed not at the race but at God.

For from God all life proceeds, and the whole universe is the process of His self-realisation. The glory of earth and sea and sky are the glory of the outgoing of the divine energy. But the highest of all the processes of the divine self-realisation is in man. In the world there is nothing great but man; and the world is enriched for God by His children. There is no limit to His creative energy, no failure in His imagination, for each new life is different, and each fresh and new. In His children God realises Himself as love and tenderness. They are the only things that can love and laugh and cling. The music of their joyous merriment is God's best anthems. Each new human life is a temple of the Holy Ghost. Through them the divine life grows more and more. And to each is committed some separate element of the divine treasure, for each is as different from others as if it alone were created. When men, then, set themselves to suppress human life, they are setting themselves to suppress God. It is the great tide of the creative life that they set themselves to dam. The joyousness of the creative genius that ever creates but never repeats itself, they bring to nought. They deny to God on earth the temples for His indwelling. Only when the soul realises God thus brooding over the face of the world, thus waiting for the fulness of the divine enrichment, will men realise the heinousness of life-suppression. Lives based on the code of morals which prefers coffins to cradles are lives which fight against God, and as such are doomed to be ground to powder by His judgment. When God, the source of all life, is once realised, then the soul of the life-destroyer must shrink back in horror and dismay. 'Woe is me, for I am undone,' will be the cry of his lips. Men can conquer their fellows, but there is only the devouring of hell for those who fight against God. When God ceased to be a reality, the destruction of life was but a natural sacrifice to our ease. There being nothing higher than ourselves, then to ourselves let us sacrifice even life. When God in His divine majesty will again shine forth before the soul, and the eyes behold the Divine Life everywhere waiting its realisation, then human life again shall become precious and desired, and the race will measure its felicity by the multitude of its children. The silent terraces will again ring with joyous voices. The race, with its fountains of life overflowing, will again go forth to vivify the earth.

If only the world were realised as of God, all our difficulties would vanish. Think what it would mean to the man who has devoted a whole parish to his own recreation. The green places where little children called to each other are covered with pheasant coops! The places where children could grow in health are given over to birds. Let such a man once see that the world was created that love might increase and be multiplied, that on it God might realise His creative energy in the highest form, and he will be stricken with shame and convicted of sin. Childhood and innocence he has vanished from his land that his ears might hear the whirr of the flying of grouse, and that he might have the joy of killing. When the vision of God arises upon him he will abhor his selfishness and set himself to repair the desolation that has been wrought. He will have no rest until the green places again are filled with the glory and the radiance of life. The slums will be emptied and the now silent places peopled anew, when the nation realises again that God created the world to be the home of His children.

In this return to God is the solution to be found of all our difficulties. For in this return is the discovery of our common sonship, and of the law of love.

We are at present divided into classes with warring interests waiting for peace to begin the strife again. The body-politic is fissiparous and there is nothing to bind it together in the unity and consistency of steel. Here is the element through which the disintegrated elements can be united into a weapon that can win victories. At the feet of God there comes the knowledge that all we are brethren, and that the one law is love. It is love that unites. It is love that bridges chasms and throws down dividing walls. Love does not throw doles to the perishing, it gives itself. Love never says, 'You carry my burden,' but rather, 'Let me carry your burden.' To the eye of love, man is no longer a mere crank in the great machinery of labour, a unit in the vast mass designated the 'lower classes'—he is a brother. And love will not give a brother over to be the prey of vice, or surrender him as a victim to monopolies that destroy him. Love will sacrifice and fight for the brother's life. The remedy for all our ills lies here—in our return to God.

IV

To many the preaching of repentance is the dreariest of all things. It is but the voice summoning them to the impossible—to mourn for sins of which they are unconscious. They cry out for life—and they are offered tears.

But far from being compact of all weariness and sorrow, repentance is the most thrilling of all that the soul can experience. It is the essence of all romance. For what is it but this—the turning back to God. And in turning to God comes the vision of the glory of life. The eyes are illumined with radiance when they behold no longer processes and laws—but God. Who can compute that enrichment when suddenly the veil is rent and from some hill-top the eyes behold no longer meadow and moorland and the gleam of waters afar, but the Life behind them all—God; and everything created, the green sward and the clouds swimming in glory, the mist-caressed mountains and the great sea heaving in all its waves, become but one vast transparency through which God flashes His splendour on the enraptured soul. And in this return to God the soul is ever led on from glory to glory. That is the alluring power of Christianity. The Shepherd of souls leads us ever on until we come to the Cross and realise that the God of heaven and earth is the God of sacrifice; that His love stoops to agony that He may save. And onward from the Cross He leads until on our enraptured hearts there rises the vision of the Cross abiding still in the heart of God, and our eyes behold over all the universe the sheen of that love which still stoops to death that it may save. As we tread the way back, and go on ever nearer to the hidden fire, we feel the flame of His love filling all our being. And beauties undreamed of leap into light at each bend of the road. To come to God is to journey from death to life. The world has nothing great comparable to this.