Was there to be no end to that tramp, tramp of men yielding before death? Was the Empire reared by the heroism of generations to crumble under our feet? The ghastly deeds of shame—were they to come to our doors! We looked at our children, and they could not understand the light in our eyes. These deeds of hell—they might occur even now under the shadow of our hills. It was then that the word began to blaze in the heavens. And the word was—God.
We had built a new church in our parish, that those who built pleasant houses on the slopes, fleeing from the restless city that lay below, might have room to worship. But the desire to worship seemed to be dying of attrition. And the old church where the quarriers and farm servants assembled and worshipped in an atmosphere that on a warm day became so thick that one could cut it with a knife—that old church would have been quite big enough to hold all who came, for the instinct to pray seemed to be dying. And many, because the new church was now too big, regretted the old.
Then, suddenly, the new church was filled to the door. Men and women discovered the road leading down to the hollow where the church stands amid the graves of the generations. With wistful faces they turned towards it. While the bell rang they stood in groups among the graves. And if you listened there was but one word—war, war, war. Over and over again just that one word. Until the bell was silent, and they turned into the now crowded church.
As I sat there and cast a glance around me, I felt a sudden amazement. Those who never before had come down the steep brae when the bell was ringing were sitting here and there just as if they had been there every Sunday when the beadle, with head erect, ushers the minister to the pulpit and snips him in. (Though the church is new, the minister is yet snipped in by the beadle—a lonely prisoner there on his perch, and it is an uncanny sound to hear the click of that snip shutting in the solitary man.)
In the pew in front of me sat a burly man with a head like a dome. He never came to church. When I met him he would stand for an hour in the lane among the hawthorns explaining his views. Prayer was mere superstition. Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the universe in their grasp. To ask that one of these laws should be altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to ask that the universe might be shattered. Prayer was immoral, the asking for what could not be granted, and what we knew could not be granted. If he went to church it would be hypocrisy on his part.
And thus it came that when the farm servants came up the Gallows road on their way to church on a summer morning, they often heard the whirr of my friend's mowing machine as he mowed his lawn. It was the way he took of letting the parish know that culture could have no dealings with effete superstitions.
And yet there he sat in front of me with a hymn-book which he picked up from the shelf at the door, where such books are piled for the use of camp-followers. The tune of the opening Psalm was Kilmarnock, and my friend sang it in a way which showed that his mother had trained him well. Then I forgot him, but after a while something like a stifled sob in front of me brought him again to my consciousness.
The minister began to pray for the King's forces "on the sea, on the land, and in the air." My mind was playing round the words "in the air," for they were an intrusion into the familiar order—an innovation! Every invention of man seemed doomed to become a weapon in the hand of the devil. But the prayer went on—for the sailors keeping their watches in the darkness of the night that God might watch over them, that through their unfaltering courage our shores might be inviolate; for the soldiers now facing the enemy, grappling with death, that God might succour them, covering their heads in the day of battle. "Break Thou down the fierce power of our enemies," cried the minister suddenly, "that with full hearts we may praise Thee, the God of our fathers."