If any one concludes that we were a group of religionists gathered in Stonestudy that night it will be well to point out that this planet will be a whole lot more religious before war ends, and no one will be louder about it than the trade-mind everywhere.
War brings death, and death enforces the faith of the human heart, and faith is one of a trinity (as we learned in Sabbath School and variously since) that inclines the heart of man to God. You take a loved object from the Seen and place it in the Unseen (thousands each day the soldiers pass) and faith is born of the agony of separation. The human heart forces a bridge across the abyss from the Seen to the Unseen. It's the old story of the bereaved turning to God. Saints are thus made—thus tenderness and purity come to be.
Within the next ten years there will be heroisms before our eyes—heroisms such as seers and saints and sages have dreamed of as the consummation of the human heart. And those who have lost most and mourned most will read the eternal joy of the Plan from the Book of God's Remembrance.
When you see the remnant of a race of people crying out that there is no God—then you begin to know what war means. When a country has given its tithe of human blood, or one in five is gone—then you begin to know what an Austrian woman meant, when she spoke of the "horrible grinding of war and the answer of the women to man's cries of pain afield." ... When peace brings a worship of materials and a dulness that cannot look beyond existing institutions—the end is war, and after that a sitting in black upon the ground.
We didn't know what death meant before this war—but many have learned. The very word death has the sweetest sound of all uttered names to many a lonely heart to-day. We didn't know enough about death. We had the habit of thinking this was all. The end of such thinking is war, and after that, a sitting in black upon the ground.
When your heart is cleft in twain and one part stays on this side, and the other over the dim borderland—there's a straining of eyes into the Unseen, a picture making out of the creative materials of human spirit. Life of the soul begins again—out of pain—always out of pain.
We have not yet learned to accept life from the higher masters, Joy and Beauty. We still learn through Pain. We forget the meaning of death, even as we gather our things of death about us, and war comes along to remind us again. Always those who answer to Master Pain must look to death to find their relation to God. The faith that comes with peace at last to the human heart, is energised by a love that crosses the abyss of life and death.... A grand old teacher, Master Pain. When we know all his lessons, and take his hand from our shoulder, and touch it to our lips (for we shall know well his wonderful work when the time comes for us to part with him), then we shall find that he is not a black man at all—but a Sunburnt God....
Four at a supper table—a little child, its young mother, and the old father and mother of a grown son, who has just died for France. The old man's eyes roved from the child to its mother, back to the old woman, and lingered there, something rough and deep and wise in his look. The child suffered vaguely. There was much suffering in the house.... The young mother asked coldly if they could feel him in the room. Then just as coldly she asked if there were a God. Then she ran from the room with a cry like a night animal. The silent child began to weep. The old man and the old woman stared at each other and wondered what their daughter-in-law meant about him being in the room.