Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

Is there a God, and can we actually lead men to experience him and to grow like him? Is there any power in Jesus to save a brute and a drunkard, a selfish worldling and a contented prig, not from a hell of fire after death from which he is snatched by some theological transaction, but from his degradation and meanness in the present, until he is fit to be a husband and a father, a patriot and a friend? Are the fruits of the Christian spirit "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, goodness, meekness, faithfulness, and self-control," the qualities of character which alone can make heaven anywhere, and without which a potential Paradise would be transformed into an actual hell? Are the wages of sin death, or does the good man simply lose a deal of fun and prove himself to be a foolish prig and superstitious other-worlding? Does death end all, or are there many mansions in the Father's house? Such are the great questions; and to them Christianity has very definite answers, capable of being tried out in experience. In the past much of so-called religion has seemed to thoughtful minds remote from the facts of life, unreal, a bit queer if not abnormal. If the flames of war are purging it from such unrealities and abnormalities, the facts which lie at the heart of the world's faith are being saved, yet so as by fire. The Christianity of the camp is no pious sentimentalism, no sweet dream or unvirile worship of a "gentle Jesus." It is a living, indubitable experience, full of strength and of joy. Men are fighting to the death a thought and a purpose in the German armies which Prince Lichnowsky, their own ambassador to the British Court, characterized as "perfidy and the sin against the Holy Ghost"; and in that fight they hunger and thirst for the power of a religion of the Spirit, which—however the battle of bodies and of brute force may be decided—in God's good time is bound to win the day.

The last effect of the war upon the work and message of the minister will be to furnish it with a new dynamic. As he returns from the battle with sin in the trenches, he will find in the same battle at home William James' "moral equivalent for war." The call to arms has revealed the fact, seen in the success of the Student Volunteer Movement, that the church has not sufficiently appealed to men's latent heroism. The ordinary individual has revealed an enthusiastic readiness for high adventure and an almost limitless capacity for self-sacrifice, qualities upon which the work and preaching of the average parish made practically negligible demands. There was a contrast as noticeable as it was lamentable between the pompous phrases of certain militant hymns, sung chiefly by the choir, and the lack of ethical passion and aggressive righteousness on the part of the pews. There was too little doing of brave deeds and too much flabby irresolution and orthodox laziness. Christianity seemed to act as a narcotic rather than a stimulant. Any preacher might say to any congregation with perfect safety, "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin."

For the chaplain fresh from the front all this will be changed. Not only will he be the flaming apostle of a new enthusiasm; his church will have been saved from the old lethargy and lukewarmness of Laodicea, the minds of his people purged from the dolce far niente pietism, which dreamed sweet dreams while the wreckers of the world prepared for war. For today religion stands revealed as the greatest of all adventures. Christianity is history's crowning crusade. The greed, the brutality, the imbecile and devilish lawlessness, which have revelled in an orgy of spiritual vandalism, are not peculiar to war. They have long been with us, in city and in country, in the slums and on the avenue, among peoples supposed to be civilized and enjoying the blessings of an era of prosperity and of peace. It was an amazed world, rudely roused from its comfortable slumbers, which found these forces organized for battle; it will be a bloody and dishevelled but determined and aggressive world that, when our men have laid aside their khaki, will strive to hold them in the ranks of an equally fearless and fighting army, which will never retreat from its trenches until these enemies of the world's peace and happiness are driven from the field. Men who hated dirt and discomfort, blood and vermin, have endured and laughed at them for the sake of their cause and their country. When the call comes to carry on the same fight in the homeland, such heroic souls will scarcely decline to sacrifice something of their peace and comfort, or to attack the forces entrenched in saloon and dive and political cave of Adullam, because in the struggle they may be shorn of delights and dollars, know the shame and agony of temporary defeat, and as victors find themselves with mire upon their garments and blood upon their hands. "Never was there a religion more combative than Christianity," wrote Bernhardi. That is false as the apostle of carnage meant it; but it is true to the disciple of Jesus, who has heard Paul's summons to don the full panoply of the Christian armor, and who so loves the Lord as to hate evil with the just but terrible wrath of the Lamb. Here is a new dynamic, an irresistible appeal, which should and must be utilized by the minister. If the Christian Church is an army with the greatest of fights on its hands, there will be a place for the soldier. With the church service of the religious slacker he may be pardoned if he declines to have anything to do.

T. R. Glover in "The Jesus of History" has said that the Christian conquered because he out-lived and out-thought and out-died the pagan. It is beginning to dawn upon the ministry that we must out-fight him, if he is to be conquered in our day. The clergy have seen their opportunity pictured in the words with which John Masefield in "Gallipoli" has told the story of the final attack upon Suvla Bay. "There was the storm," he writes, "there was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which this death and agony ... had led. Then was the hour for the casting off of self, and a setting aside of every pain and longing and sweet affection, a giving up of all that makes a man to the something which makes a race, and a going forth to death resolvedly to help out their brothers high above in the shell bursts and the blazing gorse." The thousands who are responding to that call are the priests of today and the prophets of tomorrow. They can cry to us, with their fellow soldiers, living and dead, in the words of Lawrence Binyon:

O you that still have rain and sun, Kisses of children and of wife, And the good earth to tread upon, And the mere sweetness that is life, Forget not us who gave all these For something dearer, and for you! Think in what cause we crossed the seas! Remember, he who fails the challenge Fails us, too.
Now in the hour that shows the strong— The soul no evil powers affray— Drive straight against embattled Wrong: Faith knows but one, the hardest, way. Endure; the end is worth the throw. Give, give; and dare, and again dare! On, to the Wrong's great overthrow! We are with you, of you; we the pain and Victory share.

VI
[THE EFFECT OF THE WAR UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION]
LUTHER ALLAN WEIGLE

The term "religious education" stands for two ideas that are ultimately one: for the inclusion of religion in our educational program, and for the use of educational methods in the propagation of religion from generation to generation.

Over seventy years ago, Horace Bushnell pointed out the folly of reliance upon the revival method of dealing with the children of Christian homes, and urged the educational method of Christian nurture. He did more than any other one man to determine the present trend in religious education. Yet his work was prophetic; it took fifty years more of "ostrich nurture," as he called it, to reveal to Christian people generally the full truth of his position.

The past twenty years, however, have witnessed a great movement among the Protestant churches of America toward clearer aims and better methods in religious education. A situation had developed that bid fair to let religion drop out of the education of American children. Changed social, economic and industrial conditions had transferred to the school many of the educational functions once fulfilled by the home, and had wrought a change in the forms of family religion. The public schools had become increasingly secular in aim, in control, and in material taught. The development of science and philosophy in independence of religion had made it possible for college students to get the idea that religion is not a significant part of the life and culture of the time. The Sunday school, indeed, was at work, teaching children of God and his will. But its curriculum was ungraded, its teachers untrained, and its instruction limited to one period of half an hour in each week.

Roughly speaking, the beginning of the present century may be taken as the date when the Christian people of America began to awake to the danger involved in this situation. As early as the late eighties, President W. R. Harper, then Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature at Yale, had organized the American Institute of Sacred Literature, and had begun to publish a graded series of Inductive Studies in the Bible. In 1900, under his leadership, the University of Chicago published the first of its present series of Constructive Studies, which provides text-books for a graded curriculum of religious education. In 1903, the Religious Education Association was organized, its membership drawn from the whole of the United States and Canada, and its purpose declared to be threefold: "To inspire the educational forces of our country with the religious ideal; to inspire the religious forces of our country with the educational ideal; and to keep before the public mind the ideal of religious education, and the sense of its need and value." In 1908, the International Sunday School Association authorized its Lesson Committee to construct and issue a graded series of Sunday school lessons in addition to the uniform series which it had issued year after year since 1872. In 1910 the Sunday School Council of Evangelical Denominations was organized, a mark of the more definite assumption by the several denominations of responsibility for the educational work of their Sunday schools and for the training of teachers. In 1912, the Council of Church Boards of Education came into being, which has devoted its energies thus far mainly to coöperative effort in behalf of Christian colleges and for the religious welfare of college and university students generally.