Victory out of Ruin

by Norman Maclean

THE SUPREME NEED

'To me through these thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sat gazing.'—THOMAS CARLYLE.

Many eager hearts looked for the redemption of mankind to come out of Armageddon. Aceldama has been cleansed, but redemption seems to tarry. And nobody need be surprised. Out of filth and mud and horror the cleansed soul does not emerge. There was a king long ago who saw ten horrible plagues succeed each other until at last the first-born lay dead—but he was the same until the sea overwhelmed him. And man is the same in all ages. Cataclysms do not work renewal. Miracles do not regenerate. Not even the millions dead will mean a new earth or a new Britain. That new Britain of the heart's desire will only come if men and women whose souls are quickened will arise and make their world anew. The world's supreme need is not reorganisation, but a new spirit.

I

The pathos of humanity is that men are ever the victims of illusion. After Waterloo, when a conflict that waged for a quarter of a century ended, our fathers hailed the millennial dawn. But, alas! Peterloo succeeded Waterloo. The nation was seized with the passion for riches. To get rich quick the nation had to be reorganised on an industrial basis, and the people were swept out of the green of England and out of the straths and valleys of Scotland into sunless, airless cities. A population that formerly lived in cottages was now piled into barracks. In mills above ground and in mines beneath little children were set to labour. Social conditions were created that destroyed two hundred babies out of a thousand in the first year of life. These conditions still continue. The pages of the Press in these last days show how horrifying they still are. There are streets in our cities which are sacrificial altars on which the little children are offered to the social Moloch.... These things came after Waterloo. The cannon-fodder of war became the cannon-fodder of industry. The small minority that got rich quick were balanced by the vast multitude who got poor quick. And for four generations the ugly streets have presented the spectacle of files of men begging for work—begging for permission to exist! To-day the files wait for the dole. The folly and the greed have worked out the inevitable consequences. History goes on monotonously repeating itself.

II

And just as a hundred years ago men thought they were going to make a new and better world by reorganisation, so also is it to-day. On all hands the cry is reorganise. In Paris and in Glasgow it is the same. In Paris they are to save the world from all future bloodshed by a treaty. That childlike faith in treaties!—they have forgotten that treaties were unable to save even one fragment of Europe eight years ago. But this time the treaty is to be so very big that it will save. But, alas! no treaty is of value beyond the truth in the soul of its signatories—and of that there is never a word. No treaty can exorcise greed, ambition, and lust out of the heart—and it is from these wars spring. If the hearts of the nations be not changed, one more mirage will be added to the many humanity has pursued across the burning sands, strewing the barren desert with bleached bones.

In London or Glasgow or Hamilton or Fife it is the same. There also the new earth is to come through redistribution. Society will be differently organised. The voice that to-day cries, 'What is yours is mine,' will to-morrow shout victory. The day of material good will come through the maximum of pay for the minimum of work. The new order will banish all our ills. But the question emerges—How is the new order to be worked? If the new order is to bless humanity it must be guided and administered by men of truth, unselfishness, and honour. Unless there be such, then the mastery of capital will be only succeeded by the tyranny of the mob. None asks how such men are to be found. The hope of the new world lies not so much in better machinery as in better men. The men in the Cabinets adjusting the map of the world and the men in the shipyards and the mines are alike in this, that they forget that man's supreme need is regeneration and not reorganisation.

III

It is on that ultimate fact—that the supreme need of the day is a new spirit—that the Church seeks to fix the attention of the nation. The Church has only one purpose—to make God blaze forth once more before the eyes of men. In that alone lies the salvation of the future. The great host of the toilers may adopt the watchword 'Brotherhood,' but that is only half a truth. A brotherhood that knows nothing of a common fatherhood will not stand the day of strain. The Church therefore proclaims the full truth that the brotherhood of men only realises itself in the Fatherhood of God. To the nations seeking a unity by way of parchments, the Church must also proclaim that there can be only one ultimate unity for nations—the only unity that will stand all strain—the unity of the Spirit. The Church has the one message for warring nations and for warring classes: 'One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren.' The Church alone can bring home to the hearts of men that the way of honour is that of service, and the path of greatness that of sacrifice. Looking back on that long road by which humanity has marched forward even to this hour, it is strange to think how the great days on which the epochs turned have not been the days of mammon-worship or of military glory, but the days on which the Cross suddenly blazed forth in the heavens, as it did to Constantine, when the summons rang—'By this sign conquer.' It was then that men set their faces to climb upward, realising that the greatest thing a man can do with his life is to lay it down. And not by a cross blazing in heaven, but by millions of crosses round which the winds moan and sigh on earth, does God summon us to-day. It is that summons the Church would sound. By the spirit of self-sacrifice, by the law of love—by these alone can the world be saved.