In the day of battle;

Front matter

GfottteU Untueraitg Sitbrarg

Silfara, Nem loch

Cornell University Library

Introduction

BY THE BISHOP OF LONDON

This book is just what I expected it to be, when I asked my dear brother Bishop to write it for our edification this Lent. It is clear, pointed, and original.

It is about the war ; it has to be about the war, for the war is and must be in our minds and on our hearts morning, noon, and night ; but it gives us what ought to be our right attitude towards it, not complaining querulously about it, not glorying in it, as if war was a good thing in itself, but bracing us to meet it bravely, strongly, and in the fear of God.

I do not want possibly to misrepresent by trying to explain beforehand the strong and clear line taken by the Bishop ; the book will speak for itself.

I will only say for myself that after six months of war I keep coming round again and again to what I put before the diocese at the beginning ; it is " drinking the cup."

No words can exaggerate the horrors of war, or the iniquity of those who will turn out to have been responsible for it, just as nothing can exaggerate the crime of those who brought our Lord to the Cross.

vi IN THE DAY OF BATTLE

But "the cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it ? " He said ; and the cup drunk in that spirit redeemed the world.

So may this cup, if drunk in the right spirit, redeem and ennoble the world ; and it is to help us to drink it in the right spirit that the Bishop has written this book.

Every chapter begins with a sentence of the Lord's Prayer, and he will indeed be a dull reader who does not pray the Lord's Prayer with greater meaning after reading it. I write this short Introduction on " Innocents' Day," and who can help thinking of those young and blameless lives laid down so uncomplainingly in this war on the altar of sacrifice ? May this book comfort the many who mourn them and lead them to see, as one mother wrote so nobly after losing her greatest treasure, " It does not seem lonely to think of this noble band of young knights going forth into the other world together."

Their deaths have indeed ennobled and glorified the world. "This Lent," as the Bishop says, "may well be the most wonderful we have ever kept."

A. F. LONDON.

Feast of the Holy Innocents, 1914.

Author's Preface

This is only an attempt to seek the guidance of the Lord's Prayer with regard to the present war. The Prayer, in itself, cannot mislead us.

" There in truth we have the supreme rule and criterion of Faith, the divinely sanctioned Lex Credendi — no ready solvent, indeed, for theological controversies, but a law that lifts the heart to a higher plane, where it can abide in peace, unaffected by the alternations of intellectual light and obscurity." 1

Neither thought, nor feeling, nor will can go astray

under such direction. The freedom it gives us, the

gentle restraint it imposes, are exactly what God means

for us. Within its limits and confines we may indeed

walk at liberty.

I hope that most of what is written in these pages may find its justification in the Lord's Prayer.

H. L. S.

Christmas, 1914.

1 G. Tyrrell, Lex Credendi, Pref. p. xiii.

Contents

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Introduction by the Bishop of London .... v

Author's Preface ... vii

II

" Our Father which art in heaven." It is right, perhaps, to say something about a special trouble that is likely to come to good people at such a time as this. Not the trouble of ruined fortune, or home made desolate ; but the trouble that is felt when the foundations of our faith are shaken ; when words almost force themselves to our lips, words that we are afraid to say ; when thoughts are shaping within us, taking form and outline and substance that fill our hearts with fear ; when the old words of joy and trust falter upon our lips.

For a war like this revives in a dreadfully urgent form the age-long question of pain and suffering in a world over which faith assures us that God rules. So much has been written lately about all this that it seems quite unnecessary to touch on the wider aspects of this particular subject. We may take, as typical of the present position, the case of a religious man who has had his difficulties, and seems to have found his way out of them. He has come, it may be, to believe that a painless world would be a world not " regenerate but degenerate, poorer not richer " ; he has learnt, when he hears of great masses of suffering, to divide the suffering amongst the sufferers ; for each, it is clear, is bearing his own, and no more than his own, part of it ; the accumulated vastness does not make it worse. He has come to understand the purposes pain serves, and the good that comes of it. He sees it as educative, bracing, inspiring. He rises higher, and the infinite significance of the Cross of our Lord explains much that was dark enough before. The higher aspects of suffering — redemptive, vicarious — have become extraordinarily clear and appealing. He has arrived, God guiding him, at the position which many probably hold in the present day. The " overwhelming " mystery of pain and suffering no longer overwhelms. It is lifted and pushed away. It is explained to an extent that makes complete explanation a thing not past praying for. It has, like most difficulties, its hard, irreducible minimum that still holds out. But it no longer stands alone ; it is like many other things about which neither the head nor the heart asks further explanation until, as it is said, the "day dawn and the shadows flee away." It is my duty, he says, to bear pain if it comes, and I hope I shall be able to bear it ; it is my privilege to relieve pain wherever I meet it, and I am glad to be allowed to do so. We can never now think of God as indifferent to it, for He has borne it. Whatever else it may do, it no longer clouds our vision of God's love. It has ceased to work on that plane any longer. That is not, to use a very commonplace expression, that is not where it hurts !

But then there comes the war, the greatest, the fiercest, the deadliest that the world has ever seen ; and war has horrors all its own. David, bidden to choose, chose anything rather than war. For, first of all, it is man destroying man. Human science and human industry produce weapons perfect for their hideous work. Human skill, trained to perfection, directs and uses them. It is no blind force ; it is deliberate, brilliantly skilful purpose. It means to do its worst, and does it. It may or may not adopt a deliberate policy of fear, of maddening, torturing terror towards defenceless non-combatants ; yet it leaves insanity behind it, as it drives feeble old age and helpless infancy wild with fear before its face. It finds out the tenderest place in human life and drives the sword into it ; the holiest, and profanes it. It ravages the beauty of God's world ; and touching, as at Rheims, the sacred home of a nation's faith, it destroys (as the French writer said) not a life but an immortality. And all the while it is not blind, not unreasoning. It is thought-out, planned-out, persisted in. It may or may not be sound reasoning ; but people feel not only the horror of it, but feel with a bitterness, not felt in other things, that God could stop it—" if He pleased." It would not need, they feel, some strange, unlikely interference with the course of nature ; they have been schooled not to expect that. No, but just a quiet act of wonder, a mighty deed, secret in man's heart, not the " breaking of the bow," but the blessed breaking of the heart of pride. " O, let the wickedness of the ungodly come to an end, but guide Thou the just." " Break Thou the power of the ungodly and malicious ; take away his ungodliness, and Thou shalt find none." They are not in the ordinary sense " Pacificists " ; they find no fault with those who, after infinite effort all in vain, bade England draw the sword. We could not, we cannot avoid it : but cannot God ? " Turn Thou us, O Lord, and so shall we be turned." And so, in spite of themselves, they find their faith in Him shaken ; and never more severely than when they are bidden, or bid themselves to set their thoughts on the foundation-truth of God's fatherly love ; and just as the Lord's Prayer falters on the guilty lips of one who cannot forgive them that trespass against him, so here, at the very outset, it falters on the lips of one who feels as though God had forgotten to be gracious, and had shut up His lovingkindness in displeasure.

" Our Father." They do not find it hard to use His other names of Power and Majesty and Awe ; but this, with its wealth of tender compassion, seems dreadfully difficult now. Fathers and mothers (and every one knows what war may mean for them) may feel that they have been misled. He bids us look within ourselves to learn what He is to His children ; and we try in all simplicity to do so ; and we cannot, no, not by way of discipline or chastisement or achievement of far-off purpose, imagine in ourselves the silence, the delay of help, the refusal to intervene which we seem to see in Him.

" He sitteth over all from the beginning." " He is King, be the people never so impatient." " He is working His purpose out." "The fierceness of man shall turn to His praise." Yes, but the heart broken in sorrow and in love asks more than this : not the promise of a future triumph, but some token of a present compassion. Omnipotence is not enough : it is splendid ; but it seems remote.

It is not wise, even in the bitterness of sorrow, to reject the ordinary considerations that have brought comfort to troubled souls. It is splendid to lay down one's life for one's friends. It is hard to think of a nobler use of life than to offer it as a sacrifice to God in the cause of justice and right. The blessed hope of eternal life and of the heavenly country and of the good things that God has prepared for them that love Him are not things which even passionate grief should refuse to think of. We are sometimes too distrustful of the ancient consolations. We conceive too readily that we know all about them, and say that they are no comfort to us. Sorrow's creed should include them, and not pass lightly over these unquestioned articles of its belief.

But if it asks for more, let sorrow learn at least as io OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN

much as this, that we wrong God if we let ourselves regard Him as an untroubled spectator of His world's misery and His children's pain.

" In all their afflictions He was afflicted." " There is no place where earth's sorrows are more felt than up in Heaven." The splendid assurance of the ancient prophet and the simple conviction of the popular hymn stand side by side. Each is clear that this must be so ; and it is not a figure of speech. It is, for you and for me, an ultimate truth.

The Cross is its supreme and universal witness ; for the Cross is not an incident in the life of a Saviour ; it is a manifestation of the very Heart of God. " When Reason cries, ' If God were the loving Father of whom you speak, He could not endure the misery of His children ; His heart would break,' we answer ' Yes, of course, it does break ; look at the Cross,' " 1

Readjust them as we will, there is still a tendency in our thoughts to ascribe to God the Son a tenderness of pity which we do not ascribe to God the Father. It is fatal to do that. What we acknowledge of the glory of the Father we acknowledge of the Son without any difference or inequality. And the fulness of the Divine Glory is the infinite perfection of the Divine Love ; and if love means suffering, God must suffer! He is not above all only, He is in all, through all, ever active, ever at rest — ubiquitous, unconfused. Spare us, you say, these terms of paradox. Yes, gladly, but they lie, 1 William Temple, "New Faith and Modern Thought,'' p. 169.

OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN n

we believe, at the heart of the pathetic difficulty that is troubling you. For though we see through a glass darkly we need not see through a distorting glass distortedly ; and we have a disastrously distorted idea of God's omnipotence, if it is to us the sort of thing that casts a shadow on God's love.

Try then to say, " Our Father." He is not far away ; He is with us in this stricken world of grief and terror and confusion and pain, His world which He has made, and pitied and redeemed.

St. Paul, 1 under an unjust suspicion of a certain hardness, could call God to witness, " Because I love you not ! God knoweth." God cannot appeal to another ; because there is no greater He must swear by Himself ! "Because I love you not?" "Yea I have loved you with an everlasting love."

Ill

Every one knows, of course, the saying often quoted, the saying of a saintly man, " I hope to say one fairly good Lord's Prayer before I die." He felt, no doubt, that his repetition of the great prayer was a deeper, ampler thing than it had been in times past He saw the promise of greater depth and amplitude in time to come.

What is our own experience in the use of it ? "Our Father," each of the two words may well set us thinking. For " Our " implies at once a wide comprehensiveness, and a real relation. It includes

1 2 Cor. xi. II.

ultimately all God's children, and it involves a real love and care for them. Faced with anything like a sharp inquiry as to what we mean when we utter it we should find it difficult to say, or we should have to own with shame the extraordinarily narrow compass of our real care for others. Honestly, we think very little about them ; or we see them vaguely through the medium of our own egoism. " Our " and " us " is only a very formal modification of the " my " and " me," which we might actually be saying, unless they were prohibited. Prayer moves uneasily, despondingly between a comprehensiveness that is without real content, and a narrowness of outlook, challenged by the very first syllable of the Lord's Prayer. "After this manner pray ye," and we come to grief over the first word !

Does the war, the time of unexampled strain and sorrow have any bearing on this ? Is it likely to help us, not only to pray the Lord's Prayer better, but to gain the spirit, the outlook, which the first words of that prayer involve ? There seem to be two ways in which the war and all that it means may tell upon us.

For first it may amount to a real dethronement, a real eviction of " self" from the place which, unconsciously perhaps, it has been allowed to occupy in our lives. The very shape of the Cross, we have been told, suggests the victory over self: it is simply " I " crossed out ; and indeed our selfishness must be of an exceptionally vigorous and " malignant " growth if it survives the discipline of times like these.

/ am ashamed, I have no time, it hardly occurs to me to think of myself. The words of course sound still self-conscious, as though the soul were not yet set free. But let the words alone ; and we may well thank God that the wretched little stronghold of selfishness is being threatened, invaded, knocked to bits by the severities of a time of great common sorrow and strain.

Everywhere it is so ! There on the battlefield, where some young life, that might have begun here at home to fall a victim to the selfishness of luxury or comfort or success, is winning by God's mercy the splendour of self-sacrifice; here in England where, while we go quietly about our work, our hearts are far away with those who have left us to stand for their country's defence ; here where, for very shame's sake, we dare not grumble at life's little troubles and petty inconveniences. Grumbling and complaining are, of course, at once the expression and the nourishment of selfishness ; it feeds and grows stout on such food. Imaginary slights, fancied injuries, we dare not so much as mention them. The times are too great, too solemn to find room for them. Little aches and little pains, little fads and little fancies ; they found voice, they claimed importance, we made vastly too much of them, before the war came and swept them all away. The strange little accomplishments on which we rather prided ourselves, and which helped, it may be, to make us critical and scornful of others ; the needs of the times find little use for them. They were well enough in their way, and there may be room for a chastened

H OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN

use of them when peace comes back. A great violinist, maybe the greatest of them all, is ready to sacrifice the exquisite skill of his fingers if only he may handle a gun ! The very phrases " my " and " mine " seem out of place. Good people are getting rid, as fast as they can, of their superfluities. The nation claims, and claims justly, to commandeer the property of individual citizens for the service of the nation as a whole ; and we ought to rejoice if anything of ours is really wanted for the nation's use. In all these ways, and in countless other ways, the hard and stubborn citadel of selfishness is being assailed. The most insanely self-centred person in the world is driven by sheer shame to think of others.

Nor is it merely in this eviction of self that the effect of a time of strain and sorrow is found. Never was it easier to extend the compass of our prayers ; not by the formal inclusion of other men and other needs, vaguely realized, faintly sketched, in listless prayer. No, for the old order, the order of our instinctive egoism, is actually reversed. For the first time, it may be, in all our lives, others come first ; they stand in the very forefront of our prayers. The defence, the comfort, the deliverance which we used to ask for ourselves we pray God to grant to them. That selfish urgency on our own behalf with which we used to weary God's patience has slipped away. God hears its tiresome voice no longer. We cannot, indeed, claim for ourselves the calm dignity of St. Ursula in the great picture at Cologne with half a city sheltered under her mantle ; but we are no longer thrusting ourselves on God's attention. We have sunk back into our proper places, good enough and too good for us, in the great host of His innumerable children. Almost to our own astonishment we find that we are simply anxious and concerned to press others to the front for defence, for success, for relief, for comfort, for the light of His countenance, for the comfort of His voice, for the healing of His touch. It was not so in the old days. Of course, when your wife was ill, or your child had to face an operation, you managed without much effort to think first of them ; but that was a little private matter, hardly to be compared with this. It was acute then ; it is chronic now. Whether it be a thought of the people over-the-way in their bereavement, or the sailors and soldiers in their peril, or the wrecked homes of the Belgians, or the sight of regiments off to the war, or the glimpse of a man who looks as if he had been wounded, your heart has room for them, and they find place not as pale phantoms, but as real objects of love and pity and pleading in your prayers, " Our Father which art in Heaven."

Need we lose these friends when the war is over ? Must self of necessity return to claim his old place in our affections and our prayers ? It need not be. No one can forecast the future ; but it is safe to say that the time of peace will afford abundant opportunity for the use and exercise of that thought and care for others which is almost inevitable in the time of war. Self slumbers now ; the opportunity of Jael in the old days is ours to-day. Drive through the very head of self the nail of a good resolution ; and pray God that what has been the sheer necessity of hard times may become the joy and privilege of happier and quieter days.

But war does more than assail the stronghold of self. It changes values, it breaks down barriers, it obliterates distinctions, turning to one great purpose the whole stream and current of human life. We see it on the map, where the firm lines of frontier are merely incidents on the passage of invading armies ; where some tiny eminence starts into sudden importance as the turning-point of an empire's fortunes. We see it strangely enough in finance, where, for two or three days of crisis and panic, it was impossible to say whether any security was secure, whether anything was worth anything, and movements were in progress which might end simply enough in " a mass of failures and a bundle of securities ; " 1 utter depreciation on the one hand, matched on the other by values enormously enhanced. It is traceable in the markets of the world. No one blames the merchants of our modern Babylon for the skill and industry with which they have met the insistent demands of a luxurious age. They are mostly to be pitied when they cry that "no man buyeth their merchandize any more — merchandize of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk and scarlet." 2

You see it, from another aspect, in the splendid comradeship of the army, where student and peasant,

1 Bagehot, quoted in The Round Table, September, p. 688.

2 Rev. xviii. 1 1 .

master and servant, are standing side by side; and where the special privilege of rank is the privilege of special exposure to danger. For the time at least all values are judged by their use for national service. Efficiency means efficiency for war. We need not assert that capacity for military service is the supreme capacity, that its fitness for war is the criterion of the nation's soundness. Great and splendid as the temper is that goes to make the good soldier — fearless, disciplined, patient, self-effacing, self-controlled — it may not be permanently supreme. We do not necessarily claim that it is ; but for the moment it is that which is required. For other forms of efficiency there is small demand. The greatest leveller, perhaps, short of death, is war.

Who, as a matter of fact, in the presence of it is likely to stand upon ceremony, to claim exemption, to make much, or indeed to make anything of social position or pride of birth ? It is not as though it simply levelled us and taught us each his place. It is not a dead levelling. For while it makes short work of artificial distinctions, and draws us closer to one another, it sends through us all the hallowing and quickening influences of mutual sympathy and mutual service.

Oh, let no one forget or undervalue one at least of the special privileges of a time like this. There is a formality in polite society called an Introduction. Very likely in these days of diminished convention its rules are less rigid than they were in the Victorian age. Then, indeed, they were inflexible. You longed

C to know some one ; you wanted very much to speak to him ; but you had to wait for an introduction ; and often when the formality was accomplished you were disappointed. He was not what you expected. There was less in common between you than you supposed. War is a time when formalities are easily dispensed with. It breaks down barriers. All sorts of prejudices, distinctions, mistrusts, conspire to divide men and to make mutual approach an awkward and uneasy thing ; but in sorrow and anxiety heart goes out to heart. You need no formal introduction to one whose pride, whose anxiety, whose grief is identical with yours. Bad news, it may be, has come to the village. The blinds are drawn at the Hall, standing in its stately reserve behind the park gates ; and the blind is down at the cottage too ; and the whole place is still and quiet as in the presence of the dead. For two lads, the one from the cottage, the other from the Hall — the Squire's son and the labourer's — have given their lives for the country, and have fallen in the war. " Your lad and mine," " my lad and yours." Who would think at such a moment of the sort of things which distinguish the one from the other ? Each has done his best, each has served his country ; they have passed together into the presence of God ; and the labourer's wife and the Squire's are just two women, weeping for their children, refusing to be comforted, because they are not. 1 And so it comes about that war, with all its train of suffering and distress, may yet bring us nearer to one another than 1 Jer. xxxi. 15.

everwewere before. St. Paul speaks of God as "shutting all men up in unbelief in order that He may have mercy upon all." * So here in another sense He has shut us all up in the darkened house, the sunless room of anxiety and sorrow common to us all. He would make us know one another — high and low, rich and poor. " Our Father " in the fulness of its significance, the breadth and the tender constraint of its embrace, may still remain an ideal, high above us, in a world of many distinctions rather wilfully and cruelly emphasized in past times. But we are learning to think less of them, and more of that which is common to us all. God makes us recognize our need of one another, even as He makes us feel our need of Him.

Here is one little instance of the influence, levelling, uniting, inspiring, which a great sorrow exerts. It occurs in the Times of October 8. Describing a Mass for the Dead celebrated in the Cathedral Church of Nancy, the writer, after drawing a picture of the solemn and pathetic beauty of the scene, goes on to say —

" In all this there was nothing different from what must always be seen in any country at a time of national mourning. But there was something else. It was a time and an occasion, not only of national mourning, but of national pride. And it was also an , occasion and a proof of national unity. In the choir, just within the rails of the chancel, was the prefect of Meurthe and Moselle. To an Englishman that may not seem in any way remarkable. But the 1 Rom. xi. 32.

French congregation knew what his presence there meant. It was probably the first time for at least fifteen years that a prefect, wearing his official uniform, has taken part in a public religious service. That is what has been done for France by the war and the sacrifice of its soldiers' lives. The paralyzing influence of political differences and hostility has been swept away. The dead have not died in vain. The war has brought to bear on the life of the country a healing and unifying influence, and the thunder of the guns, which met the congregation as they went out into the sunlight, with the sound of Beethoven's march echoing and thundering behind them, meant something more than a menace to the foe and (as it was easy to think) a parting salute to the dead. It meant and means new life for the nation." 1

1 The Times, Oct. 8, 1914.