The war and the soul

Contents

CHAPTER PA GE

I Religion and the War ....... i

II Prayers for the Dead 12

Introduction

In the autumn of last year the writer of the accompanying little dissertations on great themes was approached by the management of a Sunday paper in London with the request that he should contribute a weekly article to the columns of that periodical. He hesitated for some time before accepting the proposal, as he thought it hardly likely that the words of a preacher would have much value for such a constituency, and frankly said so. In reply the proprietors of the paper courteously assured him that he need have no misgivings about the matter, that they were quite well aware of the fact that the subjects in which he was most at home were not those usually discussed in popular journals, but that they believed there was a public which wanted them, and that to this end they were prepared to offer him what was practically a pulpit.

The connection thus begun has continued harmoniously up to the present, and is likely to do so for some time longer. Week by week these articles have appeared, are still appearing regularly, and are read by the vast circle to which this Sunday publication goes. Some of them have appeared in the New York American and other newspapers viii INTRODUCTION

in the United States. The experiment of including articles on definitely religious and spiritual subjects in secular journals is not so new in America as it is in England. Readers of American Sunday papers have long been accustomed to them.

Those that have been already published on both sides of the Atlantic, together with some that have not, have now been gathered up in volume form and are here presented to the reading public. There may be some who have already read most of them who may be glad to possess them as a book, and perhaps others who have not read them may prefer to do so in a book rather than the columns of a newspaper. This at least is the suggestion of many under whose notice they have come. The author's thanks are due to the proprietors of the publications in which they have appeared for permission to re-issue them in this more permanent form.

For the benefit of reviewers it should be stated that the following chapters are not in any sense a unity. They are printed almost exactly as they originally stood, and therefore necessarily retain the fragmentary and topical character of the weekly article. The Great European War dominates them all. They are not addressed to the intellectuals, but to simple people, many of whom have lost their dearest and best in the bloody strife that is going on. America is watching all this suffering with openly expressed sympathy and giving much practical sue-

INTRODUCTION ix

cour to the wounded and despoiled; therefore it is not unfitting that Americans should read words which were penned in the first instance for people who are passing through the furnace of pain and anguish into which Europe has been plunged by the wickedness of rulers. That these short essays deal with some of the great problems of life and death, of grief, and strain, and misery in view of the war and all it means to the world, is only to be expected. The writer undertook the work originally with this purpose in mind. Some of the pages were penned at the seat of war itself and within sound of the guns. They represent a serious attempt to give help and encouragement, and a certain measure of enlightenment, to persons who at present feel their need of these in the abnormal conditions which prevail. They are therefore sent out on their further mission in the hope that an honest intent may secure for them some amount of welcome and good will, and that critics will be merciful to their many faults.

Chapter I

A question which is agitating many minds at the present time is that of the possibility of any longer holding to belief in divine direction of human affairs in face of the appalling havoc wrought by the war. This is not what is ordinarily termed a religious question; it is being asked by thousands who are neither religious nor irreligious in the conventional sense. The majority of one's fellow-countrymen, if one understands them rightly, consists of persons who have a sort of respect for religion without troubling much about it; it is not until some special crisis occurs, some drastic interference with their ordinary modes of living, that they begin to inquire into the nature of their spiritual resources and what they are supposed to believe concerning them.

And this inquiry is going on now very seriously; or, rather, there is a widespread feeling of the utter insufficiency of religion, as commonly understood, to interpret for us the terrible situation in which we find ourselves. People are said to have lost faith, if they ever had it; Christianity is declared to have collapsed; and we are told that the worst of all ironies just now is to try to impress the multitude of bereaved with any confidence in benevolent superhuman agency.

One is constantly meeting with intelligent, cultivated people who take this attitude, not to speak of the unthinking many who do the same. " Where was God when my only boy was bayoneted in the face and left to bleed to death in agony? " cries one broken-hearted mother. " If prayer were any use, would the child I bore with so much anguish, and for whom I have never ceased to besiege heaven day or night, be torn to pieces by German shells, and shriek for death to end his torments?" wails another.

And if it were men only, and death only! But women, little children, the frailest, most sensitive, most refined have had to endure every extremity of horror and abasement, and are doing so still.

When I was last in France some of our soldiers informed me of finding in certain bloody, filthy Prussian trenches they had taken no less than nineteen French and Belgian women and girls, stark naked, tied to posts, for their swinish captors to abuse as they pleased. Most of them were in a dying condition, some had lost their reason. Picture that, Englishmen, and ask what we should be feeling in this country should our wives and daughters ever be subjected to such an infamy, as they unquestionably would if the Huns succeeded in effecting a landing on our shores. Nearly a million helpless Armenians butchered amid every circumstance of torture, rape, and pillage ! And then to talk of God and Heaven! Are we fools?

Wait a moment. I am not over-anxious to defend religion as such; let religion go, if go it must — though I know it never can go while man exists. What I want is to find out what we poor creatures have to rely on in the struggle of life if the fundamental postulate of religion is a mistake and there is no higher consciousness than our own to know or care what becomes of us.

I am assuming nothing; I am only asking. Can we dispense with a spiritual sanction for human activities? Is it even conceivable that we could? By no means; and, what is more, I hold, and would be prepared to prove, that there never has been an hour in the world's history when the spiritual sanctions of human life were more apparent than now, all its horrors notwithstanding — nay, even because of them. We are getting down to realities if we ever did, delusions and deceits are being shorn away, and we are finding ourselves in losing all else. Let us try to see the problem in its true proportions, and I think we shall succeed.

Take the following propositions seriatim.

In the first place, the scale of the problem is not quite what it seems. We are apt to take for granted that if a million people suffer where only one suffered before the pain to be individually borne must be all the greater. But it is not. No person suffers a million times as much because a million others are suffering at the same time; we suffer one at once, and each bears his own share. No human consciousness can bear more than a certain amount of suffering, bodily or mental, and my point is that the problem of human anguish is not one whit greater because a million or a hundred million lives are affected than because one is. All the woe of all the battlefields in Europe to-day might be concentrated in time of peace into the bosom of one old woman dying of cancer in hospital. All the grief of all the homes bereaved could be summed up in the tears shed by any open grave where faithful love mourns the loss of its dearest and best; the sorrow is not one bit bigger in the one case than in the other.

Let me insist upon the point, for it is worth noting. I say that the problem of what is wrong with the world is not greater by one iota because of the war than it was before the war began; our imagination is more deeply stirred, and that is all. The question is not why things should be wrong on such a grand scale, but why they should ever be wrong at all, why any single pang should ever have to be endured by a human heart, why loss and terror, and the destruction of things dear and beautiful should ever have to enter into our experience.

And I think we can see behind appearances here. Why should we assume that it is God's business, so to speak, to see that we are made happy in this world? That is the crux of the whole matter. Without pausing to think it out, most people take the ground that the goodness of God ought to imply the felicity of His creation here and now; their great puzzle is to account for a divine benevolence which acts otherwise. But, I repeat, we have no warrant for this; it does not in the least follow that because God is good — granting for the moment that goodness, as we understand it, is an attribute of the divine nature — therefore there must be no pain or imperfection anywhere in the universe; in fact, there are not a few indications which point quite another way.

The object of life on this planet, so far as human beings are concerned, and perhaps all other creatures, too, is not happiness, but the development of latent faculty, the bringing out of the potentialities of existence as a whole. I grant that this is a prodigious assertion and one open to challenge, but I contend that no reasonable being can well doubt it if he have regard to history and experience. It is almost a truism to say that the highest kind of life, if we could realise it, must include all that we mean by happiness, but then we have not yet achieved the highest kind of life, or anything like it, and the very conditions of our earthly lot forbid that we should.

Let us get this one thing well into our minds, and it will clear the ground for a good deal else. I say that we are not put here primarily to be happy; there is a great deal of happiness in the world, but happiness at this stage of our evolution is not, and should not be, the first aim either of God or man in relation to humanity in the mass or the individual in particular. Perfect happiness, fulness of joy, will come later when we have got up to it, as it were, when we have reached the ultimate goal of all our strivings and attained to complete realisation of what we essentially are and what life itself intrinsically is.

There are some things impossible even to omnipotence. " Father, can God do everything? " asked a small boy. " Yes," was the reply. " Well, then, can He make a stone bigger than He can lift? " was the next question put by the youngster. Here was a poser. Obviously omnipotence was not equal to such a task, for success in either direction would mean its own limitation in the other. And the same is true of higher issues. Not even omnipotence could declare the highest reach of nobleness without pain. The worthiest things, the sweetest and sublimest, in human character and achievement, require pain for their manifestation, and without pain could not be revealed at all. The things we most reverence in one another or in the mightly dead are things that have been born of sacrifice and struggle. Where were courage without danger, tenderness without hardship couching at the door, sympathy without suffering, glory and honour without peril and strife ? Look deep enough and you will see that there is not a single quality in the whole range of human excellence that is not somewhere, somehow, associated with the cross. I would rather see England great than England safe; I would rather our hearts' best beloved died to a man on the battlefields of Europe than live ignoble in the soul-destroying delights of sense indulgence; I would rather be the sorrowing mother of brave Nurse Edith Cavell, whom the Germans have murdered, than know my child a mere toy, a butterfly intent only on sipping the sweets of life, and with neither eye nor ear for its more austere ideals and demands.

Moreover, I do not for one moment believe that the world is less Christian than it was before the war, or less intent on spiritual things. The exact contrary is the case as far as my experience goes. I have more than once stated that if any man wants to be cured of religious pessimism, or any other kind of pessimism, he had better go to the front. If I had been an unbeliever before I went there I should speedily have been cured. There one sees things every day, almost every hour, to make one marvel at the greatness of the human soul. You will see hell wide open, it is true, but you will see heaven likewise. Such heroism, patience, self-devotion, cheerfulness under affliction, readiness to fling life away to save a comrade or a position — surely these mean more, and are worth more, than the immediate object of their exercise.

Was the commercialised Europe of a year and a half ago really a better Europe than the Europe of slaughter and misery in which we are living to-day? That it certainly was not. Sordid, covetous, materialistic it had become; now all its outward good is going up in smoke and flame, and we are thrown back, whether we will or no, on the vast eternities. Either life has nothing in it or it must be lived to higher ends than can ever be fully satisfied in this world. If we are wise we shall not hesitate in our choice of alternatives. This is no time for self-pity or for abstract discussions of the ways of God. The clarion call to high action has gone forth, and woe to the soul that disregards it; our punishment will be simply to drop out of the ranks of the advancing host of those who go to meet the splendours of God upon the cliff-tops of the morning.

It is trivial to ask whether heaven could or could not have prevented this war, just as it is beside the mark to question whether this or that human being was to blame for it. Here it is, and we have got to do the best we can in the new moral situation it creates. God is not responsible for any man's wickedness; and wickedness is wickedness, whatever comes of it. But when wickedness produces disaster on a grand scale or a small one we are entitled to say that that disaster could not have come about unless divine wisdom chose to make use of it for other and larger ends than any petty human will can either thwart or compass.

Christianity has not failed, whatever we may say of Christians. The Christian imperative is still here in all its pristine force ; it is we who are found wanting. If the Church of Christ is not rising to the full measure of her opportunities that is our own fault, not the fault of the divine Founder. The Pope has lost the greatest chance that any occupant of the Vatican has had since the Reformation; his silence so far in presence of such a flagrant moral wrong as the violation of Belgium, and now the wholesale destruction of the Armenian people by Germany's dastardly ally, is one of the most regrettable facts in all this period of upheaval and misery. But Roman priests on the battlefield have more than made up for the silence of their official head, and no other Church has been a whit behind them. When the Chief Rabbi of Lyons died holding the crucifix before the glazing eyes of a Belgian Catholic who took him for a priest, he exhibited more of the spirit of Christ, the spirit that will yet lift mankind out of this pit of horror into the light of eternal love, than any amount of ecclesiastical protestations would or could. The Church is not paralysed by the war, nor io THE WAR AND THE SOUL

is her faith shaken. She needs a more vigorous lead, that is all.

There is only one point more that ought to be mentioned. Protestantism in general has had little comfort to give to mourners, for it has been so sadly silent regarding the fate of our dead. Once the grave has closed over their dust we have been supposed to be able to do no more for them and to be ruthlessly cut off from all connection with them, direct or indirect. May it not be that this war will bring us back in a more definite and helpful fashion to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints? Our dead are not only not dead, but more alive than we. To some extent they must need us still; the shock of passing out of the physical body cannot have changed them very much; they want us, think of us, long to know that they are followed by our loving thoughts and prayers. If they were helped in this way while in the body they can be helped even more when out of it. Perhaps they need such help all the more because of the momentous transition to a new sphere and new adjustments. Thought travels swiftly, and helps or hinders according to the intensity we put into it even in the flesh ; how much more potent must it be when the flesh has been discarded! Hopeless grief on our part can only distress and hamper those who have gone, and they probably know of it quite well; but earnest, faithful, persevering, loving prayer

RELIGION AND THE WAR n

can reach to comfort them and cheer them on in their new venture of soul.

Let all who have loved and lost think of this and set to work to bridge the gulf of death accordingly, and it will bring healing to their own wounded hearts. Nay, more, I think they will find that ere long some sure conviction will come to them from the mysterious beyond that what they are doing is known and responded to by those on whose behalf it is done, and that they in their turn are sending back waves of heaven's tender grace and power to bless and strengthen their bereaved on earth.

Chapter II Prayers For The Dead

A letter just received refers to the statement with which the previous chapter concluded, about prayers for the dead. The writer wishes I would say more about this. He says that in his heart he has really believed in it all his life, but has always been taught that it was both useless and wrong. Once a person is dead, it is said, his fate is fixed and you can no more alter it by praying than you can alter the seasons or the tides. Even to wish to do so is impious and a questioning of the decrees of God. All the same, this writer adds, he has always longed to do it and never more so than to-day, when the world-war is making such havoc among human relationships. Will I give him some justification, some real authority, for believing in the efficacy of prayer for the departed? he requests.

I wish the writer of this letter could have seen what I saw yesterday. It will be long past the date before these words are printed, but yesterday was what the French call " The Day of the Dead." Near where I am staying is a fairly large church, and in and out of this, all day long, the stream of worshippers has been pouring without intermission.

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 13

They are still doing it to-day, though in a somewhat less degree, and they will keep on doing it while the war lasts. Yesterday was All Souls' Day, to give it its ecclesiastical designation in England, as elsewhere throughout Christendom. Here, especially in view of the war, it seems to mean something very much more real and comforting than it does to most of us at home.

What a yawning gulf ordinary Protestantism makes between the living and the dead, to be sure ! — or, rather, between those still in the flesh and those who have done with it. Not so the devout Catholic, simple-minded, earnest and sincere. To him, to her, the soul who has passed through the portals of death has not passed beyond the reach of loving care and tender sympathy. The loved one is not less, but more responsive to the loyal, helpful solicitude of those left behind, and perhaps, for a time, may need it more.

I sat in the church for a good while and watched those people come and go. It was an experience never to be forgotten. All were in mourning; all had lost some one near and dear either on the battlefield or in the ordinary course of nature. I judged, and I think I was not mistaken, that the war was uppermost in their minds, that the grim reaper had gained most of his harvest of late from the battlefield so far as this company was concerned.

There were no young men present; they were all at the front. There were plenty of old men, old soldiers many of them looked, stumping bravely along with military stride and bearing; old women leaning on sticks; grey-haired matrons with weeping eyes; young widows carrying their babies or leading their little children by the hand; boys in their teens, some of them already in soldier's garb or what approximated thereto; girls, troops of them, with subdued and reverent mien.

Most were kneeling before the dimly lighted altar. Some of them, the veterans especially, stood erect, their lips moving in devoted entreaty to the holy Presence they believed to be there before their eyes. For it should not be forgotten that to these people, in the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, is vouchsafed a visual revelation of the actual presence of the Lord Christ Himself. Who shall say they are wrong? Since the war began, I have realised in French churches as I never did before, the devotional value, the practical helpfulness, of the reservation of the sacrament of the altar. It makes all the difference between a dead building and a place that is a sanctuary indeed, wherein worshippers feel that they are in immediate contact with the supernatural and divine.

What a picture it was! One wished an artist could have been present to seize and perpetuate it. It grew dark; there was a storm raging outside and had been all day, but it seemed to have made no dif-

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 15

ference to the numbers present. There was one candle, and one candle only, to light the gloom, and that was placed on the floor at the foot of the altar steps. The lamps glimmering in the chancel above it supplied the only additional illumination there was. Here and there one caught a quick breath, a murmur, a sob, a sigh as the feelings of the bereaved became wrought to a pitch of intensity. There was no other sound but that of feet passing softly to and fro as individuals entered or left the church. Now and then a faint gleam would fall upon a rapt, upturned face — for the worshippers were kneeling anywhere, not in serried ranks, but in the aisles, near the doors, on the ground close up to the altar itself — anywhere — all in black, all silent, all praying with one set purpose, one intention of love and faith. It was impossible to be there without being moved by it. There was a strange, unearthly power in the very atmosphere.

Would any one tell me that the exercise upon which these people were engaged was all in vain, that heaven neither desired nor heeded it, and that the trust and affection that prompted it were utterly deluded as to the object they sought to achieve? Be it remembered, this, after all, is the faith of the majority of Christendom, the faith that the communion of saints still continues after the shock of death. It has antiquity on its side, and, though greatly abused in pre-Reformation days, satisfies such a natural instinct, and is such a solace to the bereaved, that it is a pity Protestants everywhere should not be encouraged to return to it forthwith.

If, as seems likely enough, the disembodied soul feels somewhat bewildered at first in its new environment, as we are told many do; if it has entered that new sphere through the din and excitement of battle or fresh from the pain and weakness and delirium of days and weeks in hospital; if it longs for the old faces and the old fellowships of the earthly home, and feels, as we may be sure it cannot but feel, the impact of the grief and sorrow of those who mourn its loss — surely the best thing one could do on this side, both for that soul and for ourselves, would be to send through nothing but earnest prayers that it may rest in peace. I say " it," but I ought to say " he " or " she," as the case may be. Our dead are not gone far; they have only begun on the other side where they left off here. If they needed us before they need us now, and we need them. The body as the medium of communication is struck away, but that is all. Thought, feeling, memory, goodwill are all what they were before — perhaps even stronger, for the hindrance of the corruptible flesh is gone and the spiritual can go straighter to its mark. If we can help one another by prayer while we are still on the physical plane, there is no reason, either in logic or the nature of things, why we should not con-

PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD 17

tinue to do so even more effectually when some of us have done with the body of our humiliation and passed out of sight.

Death is only a bend in the road of life.

Chapter III

WAR SUFFERING. WHY DID GOD REFRAIN FROM STOPPING IT?

Another correspondent takes exception to a statement in the opening chapter: u When wickedness produces disaster . . . that disaster could not have come about unless divine wisdom chose to make use of it for other ends," etc.

He says he can understand the death of a heroine like Miss Cavell, or one of our brave soldiers, having lessons to teach to those around them and to us at home; but if they had to go through the infamous torture and degradation to which French and Belgian women were subjected, as stated above, it would revolt us to have to believe that God permitted it for some purpose of His own.

The statement, to which this gentleman says he cannot subscribe, ought not to be considered apart from its context. I am writing far away from my home and my library, and cannot quite recall the precise words used in the paragraph to which reference is made, but I know what I think about the matter and will try to say it.

We are not entitled to draw a line in this way between one kind of suffering and another, and affirm

WAR SUFFERING 19

that one is divinely permitted for a good reason and the other not. Deity cannot be responsible in the former case and helpless in the latter. Relatively speaking, all suffering, bodily or mental, is evil — that is, it would have no place in a perfect existence. It may have a purpose to serve — indeed, we may be sure it has — in the making of that perfect existence, but no one could say existence is perfect while suffering remains. But there is no escape from the proposition that what God permits He causes. He is an efficient cause, as the logicians say, of any event or series of events if He does no more than let them take place even if other wills set them going.

The Kaiser is an efficient cause of the present war, allowing for the moment that he did not actually start it. I am afraid he did. I am afraid he meant to do it; but even if he did not, even if other people planned it more directly and remorselessly, he is responsible for it if only from the fact that one word from him could have prevented it and that word was not spoken.