There was a period between the second and third year of the war, when it seemed that the guiding, shielding spirits of the planet were slowly being withdrawn—leaving only the mockery of goods, the chaos of multiplied things. But at the blackest, in the very hush of desolation, the new breath stole in upon us, a breath of lilacs on the chill, dank, wintry air. Many now stand arisen, waiting the flash that changes the world.... Five men were gathered in Stonestudy one evening; we talked of our parts, the best we could do in the clean-up. It was hard to look over the barriers at first; hard for an American to accept the fact that he dare not say what he thought, nor write what he thought. It was hard to realise that we were prevented from expressing what we thought, by the very forces that had drawn us into this deep trouble. We who are the distant generation of a party of pilgrims and voy We discussed. A country is superb when one is unconscious of it, we said. One's country should be like one's health, part of the song of life. Suddenly to find the freedom of the past unremembered, the freedom of the future unglimpsed, to hear the loathly low beat of talk from groups of frock-coated Appetites, with heavy half-dead legs and heads like pitching-quoits, settling our sacred future on the basis of steel and coal and margin and murder market; to feel ourselves clutched and borne forward with stub-nailed fingers in the stench of big business; black-garbed shopmen pointing the way to the ports, urging and shouldering other people's children to the ports of the gunboats, advising the efficacy of "Nearer My God to Thee," as a song for sinking ships,—we forgot at first in our own pain that this was merely the body of the Old strained to a cracking point by the resistless growth of the New. Presently we grew kinder.... In a way, the Old was the grim stepmother in whose house we learned how not to do most things; in whose kitchen we learned cleanliness, because of the vile example of her organic sloth; in whose walled garden we learned the peril and the passion of Quest, because we loathed her long snor No hatred now. Hatred is part of the Old. It has no part to unsteady the hands of the reconstructionists. This New Race has come up in strong soil. The Old nourished and fertilised all its vitalities. The new green beneath the litter of dead leaves cries out under the decay, "You are stifling me!" but the plan of it all is wiser, for there is warmth still in the humus of the old to protect the new and the frosts may not be finished. More and more as the sense of big cleansing and chastening came home to us, the everlasting principles of reason and order and beauty also appeared out of the chaos and the pain.... They were saying in Europe that this war was a war without morale. We believed it would be a war with morale before the destruction was finished. One of the cleanest dreams we had was that America would bring, with its guns and knives and instruments of flagellation, something of the almighty spirit of the human heart to light the blackness where the Pale Horse has passed. That's all morale is, and war without morale hasn't any cause or effect on the constructive side, 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 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 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. A picture of the chastened world. The child turned from the strange, sad human beings to the fairies that played upon the peasant hearth. The child's mother had rushed forth into the twilight to find a vision or a memory or a The nations are but names to fight for. These battle-lines are for humanity's soul. If America is fighting for humanity, let it be with surgical calm and healing in her hands. Hate spoils everything. The babe knows a room; the child knows a house and looks out into a street; the youth learns the street and then the city; the young man learns his country, but the man should learn the world. You can never be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity. The few who brought the real American impartiality to the European war in the first months, found themselves in the midst of the most challenging chaos that ever reared its head to the light. Profound and tragic impressions followed each other. It became icy clear that the greater nations, as well as the pawns of the Balkans and the Studying Europe in those dark days, the unprejudiced eye was in danger of having some truths torn down with the host of illusions. It was hard to hold fast to the fact that there was anything magic or holy about nations at war. Indeed, they seemed entities formed of groups of greedy men who wanted their way—in the main, groups of leaders devoid of vision and the spirit of fraternity, and careless of the welfare of the people, quite the same as many great commercial organisations.... The real enemies of any people are groups of men who want things for themselves. The real issue of the war has nothing to do with entities of this kind, nor with alliances of such entities, but with the painful groping consciousness of the peasant mind—its slow and torturous awakening to the fact that royalty in its utmost pomp and glow does not enfold God. The people must learn before they can be free. An American correspondent going home from the field in Europe "the long way around," met an old Persian Master on the road to Damascus. With the sage was his nearest disciple, also a Persian; in fact, the young man was so loved that he had been changed from discipleship into sonship. This young Persian became very devoted to the American. They stood together for a moment in silence, when the time for parting came. The old Master drew near and said: "It is good to see you place your hands together. To me it is a symbol of the marriage of the East and West, for the East and West must mate. Long ago the East went up to God and the West went down to men. The East has learned Vision and the West has learned Action. These two |
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