Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

But if the war kills some and discredits others, the credit page in the ledger looms large. The experiences and tasks of the present can hardly fail to make the manliest among us still more virile and vigorous. They will purge the leaders in every profession of all softness and sentimentalism, and lift them above a great danger in peace times, that of living a

ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart.

No sane and unprejudiced mind, possessing first-hand knowledge of the ministry, accepts as a representative of the profession the clergyman of the stage comedy and the popular novel. He may be a "sport," in the biological sense; but it would be equally easy to find as ludicrous and despicable examples in law, medicine or business. So far as the average, normal type is concerned, this popular clerical clown is a wretched caricature, possessing humor because endowed with the exaggeration and distortion of a political cartoon. But removing all such weaklings from the discussion, and granting that there are no more lax fellows, lolling through life, in the ministry than in any other profession, there is, as Donald Hankey points out, a certain directness and sternness in camp and military life which is singularly invigorating and even Christ-like. It stiffens a man's back to shoulder heavy burdens, trains the eye to face steadily and without flinching disagreeable and terrifying duties. It tenses muscles with great and glorious resolves. It girds up the loins for a race the issues of which are life and death, throttles any idea of sneaking sinuously through the world avoiding large and costly obligations, and at the end of the day's labor demands visible and tangible results. If any minister was in danger of becoming what Horace Greeley called "a pretty man," or what Holmes described as "a wailing poitrinaire," his experience as chaplain and as soldier will effectually cure him. We should have more prophets after the order of Amos as well as of Hosea when the men who have been under fire come home.

Such men will increasingly merit and possess the respect of laymen and of soldiers. Their lives have been knit together in the fellowship of suffering. Their bodies are inured to the same hardships, their faces lined with the same grim marks of dangers laughed at and of conquered pain. In the democracy of the trenches the sons of the Pilgrims and the immigrant sons of the slums have come to know and to understand one another. The pagan, illiterate dock-hand has fought shoulder to shoulder with the teacher of religion, trained in the first universities of our own and other lands. When such laymen attend plays like "The Hypocrites" or read novels like "The Pastor's Wife," they will never be persuaded that the clerical cartoons represent reality. Each will recall days in the dugouts and nights in the hospitals, when they came to know a different type of minister, a "beloved captain," who marched through the mire with song and laughter, and crept with them through the darkness and shadow of death in No Man's Land. An almost irresistible attraction will draw them to the churches of such ministers. To their leadership they will be inclined to render obedience; to their messages they will listen with respect. No scoffing jests at the minister will be allowed to go by them unchallenged. For the first time in their lives they have been brought into touch with the preachers of religion, and their hearts have burned within them while they talked with these disciples of Jesus by the way.

Furthermore, they will seek them out in the intercourse of ordinary fellowship. For the ministers have shown themselves friendly, approachable—no wan ascetics, no unhuman monks or superstitious other-worldlings, but jolly good fellows in camp life, sane and wholesome counsellors in times of perplexity, comforters in the hours of sorrow, efficient and tireless fellow workers; in brief, the best type of men among men. With such a minister there will be no social uneasiness, no camouflaged conversation during a pastoral visit or upon his entrance into the club. When he opens the front door, the father will not be so apt to call, "Mother, the dominie has come to see you!" It will be no longer the pastor who wishes to meet and to know the male parishioner; the male parishioner will be equally eager to meet and to know the pastor. One soldier phrased the difference in this way: "Well, sir, I like our services out here, and the church is all right; but our parson at home, sir—! You couldn't go to church or have anything to do with him!" All this will come to the minister as a reward for having realized the picture as painted by an English chaplain. "I like to think of the parish priest as fulfilling the Shakespearean stage direction—'Scene: a public place. Enter First Citizen';—for his ministry should mostly be spent neither in church nor in the homes of the faithful, but in public places; and he should be the First Citizen of his parish, sufficiently well known to all to be absolutely at home with each.... And so the word 'parson' will revert to its old proud meaning of 'persona,' and the priest will take in his parish a position analogous to that of the best chaplains in the army." That is the gift which true ministers have always coveted. Many have already won it, turning from the fascination of their studies "to waste time wisely in the market-place, gossiping like Socrates with all comers." After the war many more will possess it, having gladly paid the price.

To the spiritual practitioner, moreover, will have come increased skill in that most difficult of all arts, personal work. He will have had daily hospital training in ministering to the souls of men. He will speak their language, even their lingo, rather than what is to multitudes the unintelligible patois of the seminary Canaan. He will know not only his own theories but their difficulties and experiences in regard to a belief in immortality and the practice of prayer. Like Jesus at the well, he will have learned the method and value of gaining a point of contact in teaching. Formerly it was easy to discourse from the pulpit concerning the being and nature of God and to champion theories of the atonement. The prophet of the regiment will have learned what is far more difficult and more necessary—to persuade a man to follow the teaching and to practice the friendship of Jesus. That is his task, and he will have become efficient in its accomplishment—so to bring modern prodigals to themselves that they loathe the far country, and arise, and go home to their Father's house.

Another gain will be that of a deeper appreciation of denominational coöperation and an enlarged scope for the practice of it. Sectarian rivalries and ecclesiastical trivialities vanish in the trenches. Man-made walls between Christian brethren are crumbling. Petty partisanship becomes first ridiculous and then wicked in the light of the universal church's ambition. "We need a standard so universal," writes H. G. Wells, "that the plate-layer may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the Chinaman, 'What are we two doing for it?' And to fill the place of that 'It' no other idea is great enough or commanding enough, but only the world Kingdom of God." The same buildings are now serving congregations of Jews, Protestants and Romanists. Instant calls come when rabbis, priests, rectors, and representatives of every hue in the rainbow of Protestantism minister to men of other creeds and of no creed. Partisan politics in the field of pure religion are seen to be essentially irreligious; and chaplains of every ilk and kirk are working together like "Bill" and "Alf," two cockney soldiers, one of whom had lost a right arm and the other a left. They always sat side by side at the C. C. S. concerts "so as we can have a clap," as "Alf" put it. "Bill puts 'is 'and out, an' I smacks it with mine." Such men cannot come home and take part in the heresy trials and ecclesiastical hecklings of men whom at heart they recognize as Christian brethren. It is perfectly safe to prophesy that there will be more of church unity, and possibly more of uniformity, so far as this is desirable, when these apostles of hundreds of churches come home from the war.

With this enlarged coöperation will come also an enlarged ambition. The pastor who has been plodding along the familiar ways of an uninspiring parish will never be content to suffer his people to travel in the old ruts or to countenance out-worn and inefficient methods. That way, he now knows, lies ministerial melancholia and the present situation, something far worse than Lear's madness. His task, and that of his people, is nothing less than to transform their portion of the world into heaven. Singing and praying about it are good and necessary; but in the words of the old negro spiritual, it is perfectly patent that "Eberybody talks 'bout heaben ain't a-gwine dah," and the work of the church is to see to it that they go. Some of the strongest and most venturesome among the clergy, unwilling to turn back to the safe life after the thrill of the trenches, will seek adventure in pioneer work in our own land and abroad. Home missions will come as a challenge to men inured to danger and hardship. Foreign missions will have a new and poignant meaning for all the world. We knew before that the bubonic plague in Calcutta was a menace to San Francisco; we know now that the cult of militarism in a single group in Germany can crucify mankind. No chaplain will ever settle down into a parish as if it were a "pent-up Utica." No cultivation of individual piety will atone for the failure to Christianize society, leaven industry with the principles of Jesus, and convert from its Machiavellian heathendom and Bismarckian brutality the diplomacy of the old-time state. Nothing less than the ambition to take the world and its kingdoms for Christ can ever satisfy his soldiers; not, like the Central Powers, in order that they may be enslaved and exploited, but that they may know the fullness of joy and of freedom, and possess the true riches of that divine life which is life indeed.

Almost of necessity the experience at the front will simplify and vitalize the minister's message. For many all discussion of the future of unbaptized infants, and premillenialism, and the verbal inspiration of the Pentateuch had long ago lost interest. In the minds of others, matters regarded by some earnest Christians as of vital importance, like the Virgin Birth and the physical resurrection of Jesus, had ceased to function. To them Jesus would still be the unique Son of God, the divine Saviour of the world, whatever the method of his human generation; and he would still be alive, their unseen friend and present helper, whether or not his body had remained in the tomb. Belief or disbelief in such articles of faith would never transform a demon into a saint or a saint into a demon. Even to those accepting them, they had no visible effect upon character or upon the course of ordinary daily life. No soldiers ever asked about such scholastic problems as they faced going over the top on the morrow. In the hospital they never mentioned them, as they lay lonely and fearful on their beds of pain. But they did ask, or long to ask, had shyness not prevented them, about the treasures for which the heart hungers and to which religion alone holds the key.

"Dear Sir," wrote a wounded soldier to the chaplain of his battalion; "I often used to wish that you would talk seriously and privately to me about religion, though I never dared to ask you, and I must admit that I seemed to be very antagonistic when you did start." "I wish you'd tell me what you think about it, padre," said another. "Is there anything really afterwards?... I'd like you to tell me as man to man what you really think about it. Do we go on living afterwards in any sort of way or—!" He struck a match to light a cigarette. A gust of wind, which carried a gust of snow round our legs, blew the match out again. I daresay it was that which suggested his next words: "Or do we just go out? I know the creed," he went on. "... But that's not what I want. I want to know what you really believe yourself, as a man, you know."