THE WAR AND RELIGION

It was not until I had had a little correspondence with the Secretaries that I decided upon the subject for my address as "The War and Religion." I was very anxious not in the slightest degree to violate any canon expressed or unexpressed with regard to the subject of these addresses, and I think I can assure any in this audience who may have their doubts upon this matter that they will leave the hall without having their consciences offended in the slightest degree, even if they may profoundly disagree with the conclusions to which I may come. And I am encouraged in saying this by a little incident which occurs every year. I am Visitor of Queen's College in Harley Street, founded entirely by the influence of Frederick Denison Maurice, and it is my pleasant duty to give the girl members of it an annual address. My subject, at their special request, is always Religion; and although quite a large proportion are Jewish girls, I find that they look upon me in after life as quite as much their friend as the others, and come to me in their troubles, and they prefer that I shall speak to them out of the deepest convictions of my heart, rather than offer them some trite and colourless observations which mean nothing.

After all, there is great truth in the proverb that "the shoemaker should stick to his last," and it cannot be entirely without purpose that apparently about once in five years an ecclesiastic is brought on to the scene here in his plain and sober raiment amid the glittering galaxy of Generals and actors and scientists and other distinguished men who in other years fill this distinguished office. I have this summer had the high privilege of visiting every battleship, battle cruiser, and most of the smaller ships of the Grand Fleet of Great Britain, and the thousands of sailors I addressed instantly caught the idea that of course I came to represent "Religion." I told an East-End story which appealed at once to the lower deck, so many of whom come from places like Bethnal Green, Poplar, Stepney, and similar localities at Portsmouth and Chatham. A rather shy East-End curate, on knocking at a door, heard a voice from the wash-tub at the back ask in a shrill voice, "Well, Sally, who is it?" and was rather depressed to hear Sally shriek back, "Please, mother, it's religion." But, as I told the sailors, my invariable advice to such a man is this, "Don't be ashamed of representing religion; you were not dressed in a pudding hat and a dog collar and a long black coat to talk about the weather."

I make no apology then for plunging at once into the question of "The War and Religion." It is very striking to notice the different way in which the War has affected different minds with regard to religion. While I have had some poor young widows throw down their Bibles and (for a time) give up their prayers when their husbands were killed, I have found others who in their sorrow have found the comfort and force of religion for the first time; again, on the battlefield, while some express themselves coarsened by the "beastly work," as they express it, which they have to do, others write, "Nothing does any good out here but prayer and trust in God; we all feel it. War is a great Purge." Or again, "There are no atheists out here; there are few of us who do not put up a prayer in the trenches."

1. Let us look then first at the case against religion, and then the special case against the Christian religion as deduced in many minds by the existence of the present War.

(1) I take Religion, as the word implies, to be a TIE which binds us to someone, and I am further assuming that to have any religion worth the name, that "Someone" must be good and just and Righteous.

Well, now, can we not easily see what a strong prima facie case could be made out against the existence of a really strong and good and Righteous Supreme Being in the light of the appalling suffering and the at present unpunished wickedness on a gigantic scale which is being witnessed at the present time.

"Why did God ever allow the War? and if there is a God, why does He not stop it?" is a question which is dinned into my ears from morning to night by anxious mothers and even by men who have not had time to think very deeply over the mystery of God's dealings with mankind.

For nine years I used Sunday by Sunday to lecture and answer questions in the great East London Victoria Park. I can imagine the questions they are asking now. "Either He cannot or He will not"—this was always the favourite dilemma on which they sought to impale me about the suffering in East London. "Either your God cannot stop it or He will not." "Either He is a tyrant who gloats in it all or He is a weak ruler who has no control of His world."

And these questions, which were difficult enough to answer then, are intensified in their point to-day. It is difficult to select out of the horrors which have passed before our eyes one worse than another, but probably the most hellish thing done on earth in the last five hundred years has been the attempted extermination of the Armenian race; even as described in the restrained pages of Lord Bryce, it has more tragedy than any battlefield, for there at least men die in the heat of battle for what they think a great cause, but here, in cold blood and with every circumstance of bestiality and lust, women and children were slowly done to death. And yet "God does nothing." This is the accusation. No thunderbolt comes from Heaven; the brave Russians do something to avenge the hideous crime, but God—where is God? He is like the ancient gods described by Tennyson—

and all this cry from sinking ships and praying hands is to Him

(2) But if the case against religion at all is strong owing to the War, still more is the War supposed to be fatal to the Christian Religion. Here into the world it came two thousand years ago with a great flourish of trumpets about "Peace on earth, good will to men," and what is the result?

After two thousand years, the bloodiest war which has yet taken place on earth; waste of treasure beyond counting every day, and waste of something much more precious than material treasure, the precious blood of the best manhood of the world. I have received their broken bodies into my own arms in the front dressing stations; I have consecrated the graveyards where their dear bodies lie. I know that tens of thousands of those who would have been the fathers of the future race of mankind are lying beneath these little crosses in Flanders or Gallipoli, and that many a maiden will die childless to-day, because those who would have been husbands in the fair days of peace are buried now in a soldier's grave.

And all this—and here lies the bitterness of the accusation—started by the great Christian nations of the world. The Mohammedan Turk joins in as the war goes on, but then only under the influence or domination of a Christian Power. "Could you ask," cries the triumphant opponent of the Christian religion, "for a more complete proof of the breakdown of your Christianity than the spectacle of Europe to-day?"

II. It is clear then that we who stand for religion, and especially those of us who stand for the Christian religion, have got our work cut out for us to-day to answer these accusations. I want the men and women whose work lies largely in other spheres to enter into our difficulties. We are asking people not only to pray, but to pray more earnestly and with greater faith and hope; we are not sitting down with Buddhist resignation under the inevitable. "If it rains, it rains, and if it doesn't rain, it doesn't rain," was represented to me as the philosophy of the Indian troops whom I had the honour of entertaining for a week in my grounds at the Coronation of King Edward VII. On the contrary, we are in the midst of a great National Mission of Repentance and Hope; we have the fullest intention of winning the nation to God; we are adopting as our text the saying of that grand old man, Lord Roberts, "We have the guns now, and the men and the ammunition; what we want now is a nation on its knees."

We have indeed our task cut out for us, and I hope that it may at least be of some intellectual interest, if not some spiritual profit, to the thinking men and women here to hear the arguments upon which we rely.

(1) In the first place, we definitely repudiate the picture of God as the arbitrary ruler who can do exactly what He likes; at least we repudiate this as the revealed picture of the way in which He has willed to act in His relation to mankind.

Probably the passage in the Bible which has given the greatest colour to this idea, and which certainly is largely responsible for the distortion of Christianity which is associated with the name of Calvin, is the picture of the Potter and the Clay. "Shall the thing formed say to him that made it, why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the Potter power over the clay, to make one vessel unto honour and one into dishonour?" This is the passage from St. Paul's writings which is most widely quoted in this connection. At the first blush this seems to confirm our worst fears; but when we trace this illustration of the Potter to the original passage in Jeremiah we find an absolutely different picture; the potter is a patient, resourceful person who, so far from having arbitrary powers over the clay, is being defeated at every moment by the refractoriness of the clay with which he has to deal. He attempts to make, let us say, a porcelain vase, but the clay will not respond to his efforts; there is a flaw in the material, or the clay is not of the kind to make such a design possible; he starts again with his "Gospel of the second best," and this time he succeeds in making a humbler but useful bowl. Or again, in the course of his work, something goes wrong, and "the vessel becomes marred in the hands of the potter"; but even now he is not defeated; he tries again—to use the words of Jeremiah—"he makes it again another vessel, as it seems good to the potter to make it." This is the real picture of the potter, and it is a touching picture when you consider that it is meant for all ages to describe the dealings of God with the human race, of which we ourselves are members.

Of course, the question entirely hinges upon what God meant mankind to be. We used to discuss this question in East London Sunday after Sunday—"Did He mean mankind to be like clocks, bound to go right, like puppets who would dance to the strings which He pulled; or did He mean them to be what we call human fallible men, who might go right or wrong, but who in any case had the freewill to do either?"

And it is a striking testimony to the common sense of a great working-class audience that, while they started with a predilection in favour of being made to go right, after an afternoon's discussion they invariably came to the conclusion that with all its risks it was better to be men and women; that forced goodness was no goodness at all, and that if God did wish to have as His companions in eternity companions worth having, He could have done nothing less than endow them with freewill.

Now, if this is so, it is obvious that the metaphor of the Potter and the Clay has a great bearing on the question of "The War and Religion."

Let us assume, as we are bound to do, that the first design of the Great Potter was a porcelain vase of universal Peace. He made men of one blood in every nation of the earth; he loves to make men "of one mind in a house." Work and trial were to be part of man's lot, but not War. The idea that War is in itself a glorious thing may be the doctrine of Treitschke or Bernhardi, but cannot, I believe, be found in the Bible.

This, then, is His first design, but the clay will not take this design. There is a stubborn element in human nature determined upon War; there is a "throw back" to Paganism with which the Potter has to reckon. It is not His fault. To coerce, to crush Freewill is to crush His own Image in mankind, to make any kind of freely chosen goodness impossible. He must give up for the time, with what regret we can never know, His first design. He may see of the travail of His soul one day and be satisfied, but, for the present, He must bring in the "Gospel of the second best." He will bring good out of this evil; He will produce a bowl of unselfish service. The devil makes the War, but God will turn the devil's own weapons against himself, for He will produce a spectacle of unselfish service such as the world has never seen before.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are looking at to-day, what we are seeing portrayed daily before our eyes. We have never seen such a sight in our time before. With an unselfish devotion which has been the admiration of the world, the young men have flung themselves into the battle. To take our own nation alone, to imagine that five million men would have freely offered themselves for service would have been thought incredible in the year in which Sir Ian Hamilton delivered the interesting address to you, which I have read, on "National Service." Nor is it only the young men; there is not an idle young woman in London to-day, and I do not suppose there is in Birmingham; and as for the children, a little boy of nine shall speak for them. Asked whether he minded his beautiful home being turned into a soldiers' hospital, he replied, "I love having the soldiers here, Bishop." We can't go back to our old life after the War.

Even, therefore, without going further, as we are bound to do presently with the special teaching of the Christian religion, this conception of the Potter and the Clay relieves our minds of its worst fears. God does care for His human children; this slaughter of one man by another is not according to His first or even His ultimate design. He does not stop the mischief any more than He will pick off with His Hand obstacles placed to-night in the path of the Scotch express. He will not stop the wreck of it by main force, but meanwhile He is not inactive. The moulding Hand is hard at work; monuments of fortitude in matrons and wives, glorious specimens of unrivalled courage in their sons and husbands, issue from the workshop every day, and, to use the words of the Psalmist, "The fierceness of man turns to God's praise."

III. But now we have a more formidable task, and that is to meet the charge that the very existence, and especially the virulence of the War, constitutes a breakdown of historic Christianity. I have already admitted the force of the prima facie case which can be made out to sustain this argument, but a singular circumstance may well make us pause before we follow this specious, but, as I hope to show, shallow argument.

(1) Japan has always held a very detached view with regard to Christianity. Owing to local circumstances for a time a persecutor, our great ally soon became too enlightened to follow a policy of persecution, and when, later on, an alliance was concluded with ourselves, a natural admiration for the great Western Power which had become its ally led to at least a respectful attitude towards the religion which that ally at heart nominally and officially professed.

Then occurred the War, and here you might have expected the intelligent and clear-sighted watcher from a distance to have discovered the flaw in the religion which its great ally professed. It is an open secret that it has had the precisely opposite effect; never were the Japanese more favourably disposed to give a hearing to Christianity than they are to-day, and the reason is not far to seek.

They saw a great nation act up to the principles of the religion it professed.

If in those critical hours when the decision hung in the balance we had decided to abide in our sheepfolds and hear the bleating of the flocks; if we had decided to remain encircled by the silver sea and the mightiest navy in the world, and watch at a safe distance Belgium ravaged and the coast of France harried by the German Fleet, Japan would have assessed at its proper value the Christian sentiments which we officially professed.

But when it saw its great ally, practically unprepared, in the cause of the weak against the strong, in the cause of international honour, to defend the freedom of the world, fling itself into the battle, then it bowed its head in respectful admiration of a nation which did not wholly in vain profess to follow One "who, though He was rich, for our sakes became poor," and who, again, to use the striking phraseology of St. Paul, "being in the form of God, thought it not a thing to be snatched at to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation and took upon the form of a slave."

It may seem a paradox to say it, but Japan was clear-sighted enough to see the truth of it, that with all our inconsistencies and imperfections, the good old British race never did a more Christlike thing than when, on August 4th, 1914, it went to war. And surely Japan was right.

The fallacy of the argument with regard to the breakdown of Christianity from the War lies in the words "Christian nations."

Is a nation a Christian nation which adopts as its governing policy a pagan doctrine? There may be plenty of individual Christians in the nation, as no doubt there are, thank God, in Germany, but no one who has ever cursorily studied Treitschke or Bernhardi, or the utterances of the governing class of Germany, who have imbibed the teaching of such leaders of thought, can imagine that the nation which has prepared for this War for forty years, which has prayed for this Day and longed for it, is really in this sense a Christian nation.

We are getting tired, terribly tired—at least I am—of hearing of these wretched men who have succeeded in indoctrinating a great and powerful and efficient people with a virus which has turned them into a curse instead of a blessing to the world. I only bring them in as part of my defence of Christianity. I say it is a monstrous misuse of language to talk of the breakdown of Christianity when what has produced the War is the exact contrary to Christianity. There is no such precise contradiction to the doctrine of the Cross as the doctrine of the Superman; there is no such absolute contrast to the principles of the New Testament as the German War Book.

You can say, and justly say, that in failing to convert the German nation, Christianity has so far failed in its world-wide mission, and this I readily admit; but so has it failed at present to convert the wild tribes of Central Africa and the millions of Chinese. All that we claim is that the principles of Christianity, when accepted and lived up to, change the face of the world; and we Christians protest in the strongest way that a nation which avowedly acts at a great crisis on anti-Christian principles is not in this sense a Christian nation at all.

(2) But we go further than this; the progress of the War has opened the eyes of other watching neutral nations besides Japan, as to the value of Christian principles in the conduct of War.

No one, I suppose, would deny that the whole idea of the Hague Conference, and the rules which it issued for the conduct of War, were a product of Christianity. It was thought two years ago that, while the Christian religion might not have so far progressed in the world as to render War impossible, at least that it would never be disgraced by the murder and violation of women and children, by ill-treatment of prisoners and non-combatants, and the sinking of innocent merchantmen and trawlers.

Just as in the origin of the War Christianity justified itself, so it has done in the conduct of it. Mr. Washburn has described the humanity with which the great Russian advance in Poland was conducted—not a church damaged, except by accident, not a civilian injured; whereas, while the world lasts, the names of Louvain, Aerschott, Lusitania, Cavell, and Fryatt will cry shame on the apostles of mere Kultur.

(3) But, on the other hand, let it not be supposed for a moment that I am speaking as if our own nation had no national sins to repent of and no open sores to cure in this great Day of God.

I am myself "Chief of the Staff" of the great Mission of Repentance and Hope which has already begun.

Short-sighted people ask to-day, "If we have a righteous cause, what have we to repent of?"—but the true answer is, "Because we have a righteous cause, therefore we must repent." I have spoken of metaphors from the Old Testament, but there is a fine simile to which I have not alluded, the simile of the polished shaft. "He has made me like a polished shaft; in his quiver hath He hid me." I fully believe that we are such a polished shaft in the Hand of God to-day; that He feels down for the polished shaft which He has prepared by years of discipline and dearly bought freedom, in order that He may save through us the Freedom of the world; but what if we break in His Hand, as nations have broken before? What if our drinking habits, curtailed, it is true, for a time by drastic regulations, but still producing a drink bill of 181 millions, what if the ravages of lust in our nation, as shown in the statistics published by the recent Commission, what if the constant neglect of God Himself, so rot the polished shaft that it breaks in the Hand of God?

It was not a Bishop—it was one of our leading Admirals—who wrote: "Until England is taken out of her self-satisfaction and complacency, just so long will the War continue. When she looks out with humbler eyes and prayer on her lips, then she can begin to count the days towards the end."

It is to bring the country back to God, because it has a righteous cause, which is the object and aim of the National Mission, and I bespeak for it your co-operation in Birmingham, as well as your earnest prayers.

What we aim at is a new England, a new British Empire after the War, with all its old characteristics, with its old humour, and its love of life, its vigour and its brightness, but sober, pure, God-fearing; and beyond the Empire we look for a new Heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.

Why for ever shall we have bitterness between class and class? Why for ever, when this accursed Prussian spirit of militarism is laid in the dust for ever, shall we have the constant menace of War? Why should there not grow to be a spirit of brotherhood in the world, when not only class and class, but nation and nation, shall agree to share the good things with which God filled the kindly earth which He has provided as a home for His children?

(4) But it would be impossible to leave the subject of the War and Religion without alluding to the part religion plays in throwing a bright light on Death. I have no doubt that I am speaking to many to-day who have given their best and brightest in this greatest cause ever fought on earth, who, to paraphrase the famous words of Ruskin, "will never see the sun rise without thinking of those graves it first gilds in Gallipoli, and who will never see the flowers bloom in spring without thinking over whose dear bodies bloom to-day the wild flowers of Flanders." When I, an unmarried man, think to-day of my own spiritual sons, dear to me as if they were my own boys, who have month by month gone to their death, or come home maimed for life, it is almost more than I can bear, and I can do something more than merely sympathize with the father and mother who have given one, two, three, and I have known even four sons in the same cause. I do more than sympathize: I feel with them; I suffer with them.

And so with all the young widows whose life's hopes have been cut short in an instant. I live in the midst of the mourners every day. But could I do any good, ladies and gentlemen, without religion?

I am absolutely certain that I could not. It is a mistake, even with religion, to speak as if death was not death, and pain not pain. One of the most touching things ever said to me was this: "We come to you, Bishop, because you do not underrate human sorrow."

Underrate it! Why! my wonder and admiration is that they bear it as bravely as they do. Never again to have the cheery letter; never again in this world to see the dear face; never again to feel the loving arms around them and the strong embrace.

But, while religion does not pretend to do away with pain and sorrow, it is the one thing which makes it tolerable, which lights up the darkness of death.

"As Christ died for the world, and my two boys have died in their humble way for the world, may I not consider," wrote a brave Colonel who had lost his two boys in one week, "that Christ looks upon them as His comrades in arms?"

I need hardly say what my reply was. Why! to my mind, the world is being redeemed by precious blood again, and this precious blood mingles with the Precious Blood which flowed on Calvary, and becomes part of the redemption of the world.

Nothing really cheers the mourners as much as to feel that their beloved ones have made a noble sacrifice, and have not made it in vain. And with that, religion brings in the blessed hope, nay, certainty, of seeing them again.

How many have I cheered this year with Miss Katharine Tynan's poem called "The Flower of Youth"?—

The poem is too long to quote in full, but it ends with these beautiful lines:

But we have no certainty of this without religion, and, as I am conscientiously bound to say myself, without the Christian religion.

It is very interesting and very helpful that scientific men, one of whom is so leading a light in Birmingham, believe that on scientific grounds they have reason to believe in an existence beyond the grave, and in the continuity of personality. It used to help me greatly in contesting the assertion that all scientific men were opposed to all the tenets of religion; but as one who has often to be with the dying, as well as the mourners, I should like to bear witness to the extreme value of the belief in a real resurrection from the dead, such as the Christian Church has commemorated for two thousand years at Easter.

I should feel it quite out of place, of course, to argue with regard to its truth here and now, but to a simple mind—and, of course, religion has to be adapted to simple minds throughout the world, which largely outnumber subtle ones—a single great Event has ten times the power of any amount of theory; and there cannot be a doubt that it is a belief in the Central Fact of the Christian religion which is as a matter of fact redeeming the world of mourners from despair to-day—nay, more than that, filling them with a bright and radiant hope, and a glorious fortitude to hold on with the courage of their own soldier sons or soldier husbands "until the day dawns and the shadows flee away."

Well then, I must just leave the matter there. I have never written such a long address in my life, and don't expect ever to do so again; but then it is only once in one's life one has the honour of being President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute.

I hope that I have made at least my main points clear. We who stand for Religion are not afraid of a discussion on "The War and Religion." We do not for a moment think that the War has disproved the truth of Religion, and still less of the Christian Religion; on the contrary, we believe that it has demonstrated its value and brought into clearer light its hidden depths; and we go further—we say, that if War is to cease, we must have not less but more religion, for we hope to see an old prophecy one day fulfilled, "They shall not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountains, for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the seas."

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR WELLS GARDNER, DARTON AND CO., LTD.