War is not only the Great Educator, it is the Great Revealer. Its marches and bivouacs, its battles, its commonplaces and surprises, its trials and its triumphs, are a singular school of experience. The various impacts upon man's psychological anatomy produce strange results. They seem like the blows of some Invisible Sculptor, producing out of commonplace material a hero and it may be a demi-god. The opening orchestra of shot and shell braces up the mind of the soldier and attunes it up to receive new sensitiveness. The bullets play strange dirges on the strings of life before they break them, and each dirge has its theme, some song of spiritual things. His gaze is towards the sky line and he sees strange things, a whole battery of lights each of which is in its way a revelation. The battle chorus crying to the night of long silence becomes a prayer, and the response is ever helpful.
The individual amid the thunder of his surroundings in the red surge of battle somehow never allows his soul to become obscured. It is taking impressions which later in the day as he sits by the camp fire cause him to think and to reach conclusions which leave him a different man from what he has been. We see this in the glow of the soldiers' letters to those he loves: he has come within the shadow of the Divine Reality as the wondrous book of Life and Death opens on the battlefield. The result is the Soldier's Gospel. It would cause the devotees of little Bethel to faint with its crude "superstitions" and absence of meaningless and stupid dogma yet its grip of spiritual things and Divine Aid would make the ordinary "go to meeting" Christian gape with astonishment. The soldier's simple faith, his willing endurance, his quiet heroisms, his silent self-sacrifice, though they call for no louder name than duty, are just those chords which link him to the Great Heroism which saw its culmination in Calvary. After all, deeds only are the words of love.
The Soldier's Gospel is a wonderful revelation: the world grows gratefully small as it appreciates its work, worth and effect upon the man. All the lights by which he steers sum up good citizenship rather than sectarianship. We had long ceased to cultivate the former.
"There goes a hospital ship," and a Commander of one of H.M. Patrols pointed out to me a transport full of wounded. We thought in pity of that array of maimed men, of silent suffering, of bandages, slings, crutches and artificial limbs, but suddenly there arose from the transport a mighty cheer of greeting and salutation to the white ensign. That was the reply of war's wreckage to those who pitied. It is a wonderful Gospel that produces this. But the invisible, while full of awe, does not daunt him, the soldier reaches out towards the rather unknown searching for light and finding it. Under fire means so much, it is filled up with so many experiences, you march through a lifetime in a few seconds, you get new views of the past years from another angle of vision. Shadow and darkness and doubt are lifted, the soldier is frank and honest, he is not hide-bound by petty superstitions, he is willing fairly to consider and weigh all sensations, visions and inner illuminations. He is not blinded with the dogma of either agnosticism or sectarianism, while his sense of humour saves him from many of the errors of the various "Christian" brotherhoods. Curious enough, the people who object to duty, who are unwilling to strike a blow for righteousness, invariably belong to some of the freak sects and are devotees of sectarianism in its narrowest meaning.
No doubt "Vicarious Suffering" the root doctrine of many sects in this country is responsible for the general shirking of duty on the part of so many men to-day. Men look to the ballot box for their meat in due season. They want all the privileges of citizenship without the responsibilities. The sects of to-day in teaching that the historic Christ took all our sins upon His shoulder have produced a type of sentimental immoralist who creeps under the shelter of the Cross, content that Christ should suffer in his place. So long as the Cross does not offend his eyesight, he is willing to find refuge in its shadow. Where selfishness reigns there is no vision. The gaze is upon gain, personal comfort, things entirely earthly. A man who is always looking at mud thinks in terms of mud. Just as a great naturalist confesses a loss of the finer sense of music, so there is the loss of the spiritual vision, for the spiritual sense is just as real as any other sense, but it can become useless and drop out of our life, if we do not value it and no longer use it. There are people with an artistic sense. There are more without it.
The doctrine of the atonement is used to promote the crude idea that to put our responsibilities upon others is more religious than facing them oneself. Christ's atonement is no isolated fact in history to make men cowards, but a sustained attitude of devotion in which every man and woman is to take a part. Instead of thanking Christ for hanging there upon the Cross in our place we should strive for the same courage, the same endurance, the supreme devotion to duty and the vision of Divine Aid will be ours perhaps in Angel form. To the brave in all ages has come the vision of higher things.
