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Rays of Dawn 
 
Rays of Dawn 
 
 By the 
 
 Right Rev. 
 Arthur F. Winnington Ingram, D.D. 
 
 Lord Bishop of London 
 
 THE MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 MILWAUKEE, WIS. 
 
 1918 
 
Printed in Great Britain 
 
 Gift from 
 
 Robert i^ Owen 
 
 Nov. 4, IdSl 
 
 
Dedication 
 
 to the two archbishops who appointed 
 me chief of the staff of the national 
 mission; to my brother bishops both in 
 england^ wales and scotland, who gave 
 me so cordial a welcome into their 
 dioceses; to the five secretaries who 
 worked so harmoniously together; to 
 the national mission council, to whose 
 loyalty and initiative the church owes 
 so much, i dedicate this book with 
 affectionate gratitude 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It has brought back many happy memories 
 to read over again and correct for the press 
 these sermons and addresses dehvered in such 
 various places, and especially is this true of 
 those delivered in the course of the National 
 Mission. 
 
 Why these particular ones survive out of the 
 many hundreds which were delivered, is often 
 a question of what the world calls chance. The 
 first long one was taken down in shorthand, 
 and it was delivered extempore to the Diocesan 
 Conference of the London Dioceses, but it is 
 a faithful summary of the message delivered 
 from one end of England to the other, and as I 
 read it over, I can see again the massed clergy 
 of the Diocese of Ely in St. Mary's, Cambridge, 
 the mixed gathering in Peterborough Cathe- 
 dral, and the great congregation in the beau- 
 tiful church at Grantham. I call up again 
 before my mind Leeds Parish Church, where 
 evening service was followed by a united 
 communion next morning, Durham Cathedral 
 vii 
 
Preface 
 
 crowded to the doors, Newcastle with all the 
 clergy of the Diocese at a great service, the 
 Chapter-house at Carhsle full of its clergy; 
 Ludlow Parish Church, Hereford Cathedral, 
 Liverpool Cathedral, Wolverhampton Parish 
 Church, Rochester Cathedral, Edinburgh 
 Cathedral, St. Alban's Abbey, and finally, 
 Truro Cathedral, all full of the clergy and 
 laity of the surrounding district ; while, in the 
 Dioceses which preferred their gatherings to 
 be in great halls, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Man- 
 chester, Oxford, Reading, Stratford, Colchester, 
 Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, Portsea, 
 and Plymouth, stand out in my mind with 
 special distinctness. 
 
 Of all the many outdoor addresses given in 
 London in the great Parks, and in my walk 
 through London, with stations at selected 
 spots, I have only found space for one address, 
 that given on Tower Hill (No. VH) ; and I am 
 able to give that, owing to the mere chance 
 that someone in the crowd was reporting for 
 the Christian World Pulpit, to which I make 
 acknowledgment for the report. It was given 
 under a fire of interruptions, as, on arriving at 
 Tower Hill, I found a demonstration in pro- 
 gress against the Church for the non-enlistment 
 viii 
 
Preface 
 
 of the clergy of military age ; old experience, 
 however, gained in East London of handling 
 crowds, came in useful on that occasion, and 
 the crowd gradually veered round in favour of 
 the Church. The sermons and addresses given 
 in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's survive 
 because they were written out for delivery in 
 those great buildings, but I must apologise 
 for the curt and often terse form of the appeal 
 in many of the other addresses, as they are 
 just cries from mind to mind and soul to soul, 
 in the course of my task of trying to win a 
 great City to the Feet of God. 
 
 I have called the book Rays of Dawn, as I 
 believe in each chapter there will be found 
 some thought to kindle hope and some en- 
 couragement to those in the night of sorrow 
 and desolation to look for the'"morning. 
 
 That there is a morning coming, I have no 
 doubt at all. " Heaviness may endure for a 
 night, but Joy cometh in the morning," and 
 the chapters in this book give the reasons for 
 my faith. I think I can see Rays of Dawn 
 appearing ; not only of the Dawn of Victory for 
 those who fight for the freedom of the world, 
 but also of the Dawn of a better day for all 
 mankind. Wickedness has sometimes to be 
 
 ix 
 
Preface 
 
 seen in all its naked horror before it can be 
 crushed, and it is only against the background 
 of deep darkness that true Light is seen to be 
 Light. It is in the hope that this book may 
 help others to believe in the Light, " Follow 
 the Star " through the darkness, and look for 
 the morning that I send out Rays of Dawn. 
 
 A. F. LONDON. 
 
 Lent, 191 8. 
 
PAGE 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I.— NATIONAL MISSION ADDRESSES 
 
 I. The Church's Call to the Nation . 3 
 
 11. Purifying the Nation ... 37 
 
 III. "What wilt Thou have me to do?" 51 
 
 IV. Realities — 
 
 I. the power of the cross . . 63 
 
 II. the strength and depth of the 
 
 bible . . . . • ^ 7° 
 
 III. THE church .... 80 
 
 V. Knowing the Lord .... 90 
 
 VI. The Conditions of Victory . .100 
 
 VII. Is the War an Argument against 
 
 God? . . . . . .110 
 
 VIII. The Road to Damascus . . .122 
 
 IX. Outspoken Witness . . . - 133 
 
 II.— THE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE 
 
 I. The Brotherhood of Capital and 
 
 Labour ...... 145 
 
 xi 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 II. Love Life's Chance . . . .152 
 
 III. Christ the Invisible King . . 162 
 
 III.— THE BRIGHTNESS OF DAWN 
 
 I. The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 177 
 
 II. Easter the Victory of Freedom . 189 
 
 III. Following the Star . . . 204 
 
 Xll 
 
I 
 
 NATIONAL MISSION ADDRESSES 
 
RAYS OF DAWN 
 
 THE CHURCH'S CALL TO THE NATION 
 
 Why is it that there should be a special call 
 addressed by the Church to the nation at this 
 time, and what is that special message and 
 call to be ? Now I honestly do not think 
 that it ought to be necessary to convince 
 any man who gives the subject any thought 
 at all that it was to be expected that the 
 Church should have some message to give to 
 the nation at this time. It seems to me 
 that the picture that you might obtain from 
 certain papers, even Church papers, would be 
 this : that the Church was an old gentleman 
 in a long coat, with his hands in his pockets 
 sitting over the fire, and that it takes two 
 years to get his hands out of his pockets and 
 another two years for him to get his coat off. 
 I repudiate entirely that idea. The Church 
 
 3 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 was meant to be an alert, mobile force, ready 
 for action anywhere and everywhere, and only 
 waiting for the pointing of the hand of God 
 as to what it should do and whither it should 
 go. That is our idea of the Church at this 
 time of crisis in our country's history, when 
 the nation has its back to the wall and is 
 facing a far greater crisis than it has had 
 to face for a thousand years. The idea that 
 the Church should at such a time stand by 
 and say nothing, I repudiate with all the 
 indignation that I can command. The Church 
 is the soul of the nation ; it has given the 
 nation the idea of its Parliament, and been 
 behind it at every critical moment in its 
 history. What that Church must say requires 
 a great deal of consideration, but my belief is 
 this, that its first duty is to breathe into the 
 nation just that courage and fortitude which 
 at this moment it needs. 
 
 Our Cause 
 
 Think for a moment what it is our nation 
 
 is really fighting for to-day. Nothing could 
 
 have been plainer than the statement made 
 
 by Sir Edward Grey* in the Press, which must 
 
 * Now Viscount Grey of Fallodoa. 
 
 4 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 have convinced everybody who may not have 
 been already convinced. Sir Edward Grey 
 said : " We were not responsible for this 
 struggle. We did our best to avert it, only 
 stopping short at the point of national dis- 
 honour. But one nation was determined to 
 have war, and has got it." They were deter- 
 mined on it, and we as a matter of fact in the 
 Providence of God seem marked out to pre- 
 serve the most precious things that can be 
 preserved in life. 
 
 And, first of all, we are fighting to preserve 
 the freedom of our own country. I can 
 imagine nothing more calamitous than that 
 the home of freedom should become a German 
 province. As I said, going up and down th6 
 lines in 191 5, I would rather die than see this 
 country a German province. We do not 
 cease to be citizens when we become clergy, 
 and I feel, at the bottom of my soul, that 
 every man of you would rather die than see 
 such a calamity befall the world. 
 
 But we are not only fighting for our own 
 freedom, but for the freedom of the world, 
 for the right to live for all those little nations 
 that look to us — and at one time seemed to 
 look in vain — to save them. I ventured to 
 
 5 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 say to the venerable Archbishop of Serbia, 
 when I led him by the hand in St. Paul's, 
 that we should never cease fighting till his 
 nation was restored and he was back on his 
 archiepiscopal throne. Yes, we are really fight- 
 ing, and it is a surprise to me that America * 
 does not see it, for the freedom of the whole 
 world. We are fighting for international 
 honour as the secret and condition of the 
 future brotherhood of nations. I pray from 
 the bottom of my heart for 
 
 "... the promised time 
 When war shall be no more." 
 
 We are not those who glory in war ; but 
 how can war ever be averted and international 
 peace secured unless one nation can trust 
 another nation's word ? It is for the sanctity 
 of treaties that our men are fighting and 
 dying to-day. 
 
 What, then, must be the first message of the 
 Church to the nation ? " On to the end " ; f 
 listen not for one moment to proposals for a 
 patched-up peace which will only mean that 
 
 * She now does with a vengeance. 
 
 f The Prime Minister has said this very day, January i8, 
 1918 : " We must go on or go under." 
 
 6 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 those children of ours now in the cradle will 
 have to do it all over again in a few years' 
 time. I believe that the right message was 
 given by Sir Henry Newbolt at the beginning 
 of the war : 
 
 " Ye that with me have fought and failed and fought 
 To the last desperate trench of battle's crest 
 Not yet to sleep, not yet ; your work is nought ; 
 On that last trench the fate of all may rest ; 
 Draw nigh, my friends ; and let your thoughts be high ; 
 Great hearts are glad when it is time to give. 
 Life is not life to him that dares not die 
 And death not death to him that dares to live." 
 
 I believe we have got to breathe that spirit 
 into the nation. I greatly value a word that 
 was sent to me by a friend ; I love to use it 
 every time I can ; I have it in big letters over 
 the door at Fulham. It is " Fortitude." 
 " Fortitude to the end," whenever that end 
 comes. And unless we are doing this through- 
 out the whole country we are failing the nation 
 at this great crisis of its history. 
 
 Rolls of Honour 
 
 Therefore I cannot help first of all asking 
 some very plain questions. Are we actually 
 
 7 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 backing up our boys and our men, and the 
 women they leave behind them, to the very- 
 limit of our power ? Do you clergy write to 
 every one that leaves your parish, do you 
 write to the chaplain of the regiment about 
 every Churchman you know who goes from 
 your parish ? Do you sit up late at night 
 writing to those in the trenches ? I should 
 have it upon my conscience if I did not answer 
 every letter I get from the trenches by return 
 of post — I get a good many. Do you make 
 the women who are left behind feel that they 
 have got a friend ? I am talking not only to 
 the clergy, because you will find out before 
 I have finished that in my view laymen have 
 to take a most important part in this Day of 
 God. Do you make the women left at home 
 feel that they have brothers and fathers and 
 friends here to look after them ? It is said 
 that some of these women drink very much. 
 Are we going to the utmost of our power to 
 stand by them in their anxiety and loneliness ? 
 A touching example of one of the things that 
 might be done has been given me by the 
 Rector of South Hackney. He has set up a 
 Roll of Honour in every street. I know that 
 every church has a Roll of Honour ; the 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 names of all those who have gone from the 
 parish, and are now fighting or have fallen, 
 are often read out every Sunday. But in 
 South Hackney the roll has been set up in 
 each street in the parish, and underneath the 
 names is a prayer for those at the front. The 
 people in the street are asked to learn the 
 prayer and say it daily. At each side of the 
 framed Roll of Honour vases are placed which 
 the people keep filled with flowers. Although 
 it is difficult to keep flowers in the gardens in 
 the district, those placed in the vases are 
 never touched. The clergy and people visit 
 the places where the lists are up, and a short 
 service is held, addresses are given to the 
 people on the subject of national honour, and 
 large crowds gather who are invited to a 
 special service in the church. In one poor 
 street the people willingly subscribed i5j". con- 
 tributed in a house-to-house collection to 
 provide the flowers. The only objection in 
 connection with this effort has been made by 
 one landlord who did not like nails being 
 driven into the walls of a house. The people 
 in the street told him, " You had better inter- 
 view the vicar, but he is 6 ft. 2 in. and you 
 are only 5 ft." Out of one slum street of 70 
 
 9 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 houses in this district l8o men have gone to 
 the front.* 
 
 As we have gone from diocese to diocese f we 
 have tried to take up all ideas that have come 
 to us from any parish or any Deanery, and 
 pass it on. I know there are Rolls of Honour 
 in the churches. Do not be content with 
 having them in church ; you might have 
 them in the streets as well. In such ways the 
 Church must show the people that it is sup- 
 porting the men at the front, that it is stand- 
 ing by them to the last. When they die we 
 die ; when they win we win. 
 
 Intercession 
 
 Again, what about the Intercession services ? 
 I have been told, and have received the inti- 
 mation with some dismay, that the Inter- 
 cession services have been dwindling away 
 as the war lengthens out. It may be true 
 or not ; it may be true in some places and 
 not in others. To all here, both clergy and 
 
 * Since this was written the Queen has visited this dis- 
 trict, seen the Rolls of Honour, and expressed her cordial 
 approval, and the example has been followed in nearly 
 every parish in London. 
 
 t This was a mission tour round thirty dioceses as Chief 
 of the Staff of the National Mission. 
 
 10 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 laity, I say, If it is so, what does it mean ? 
 It means that we are forgetting one of the 
 most important duties entrusted to us by 
 God : that of being His viceroys. I believe 
 that some of us scarcely realise the extra- 
 ordinary power of prayer with which God 
 has clothed man. " What is man, that Thou 
 art mindful of him ; and the son of man, 
 that Thou visitest him ? Thou hast made 
 him a little lower than the angels to crown 
 him with glory and honour." What is the 
 glory and honour with which man is crowned ? 
 It is the extraordinary power of being the 
 viceroy of God. As an old writer on prayer, 
 Andrew Murray, says in his School of Prayer, 
 " We are viceroys of God. God rules the 
 world through our prayers." That is to say, 
 He is looking to us to co-operate with Him, 
 to be fellow workers with Him, and when 
 St. Paul said, " God forbid I should sin 
 against God in ceasing to pray for you," he 
 was putting a far greater value on the power 
 of Intercession than we have been accustomed 
 to put upon it ourselves. 
 
 I want to ask this great body of clergy and 
 laity whether they cannot go back to their 
 parishes with a new conception of what a 
 
 II 
 
The Church's Call, to the Nation 
 
 viceroy of God is. If we diminish our prayers 
 we lessen God's power of acting through us. 
 It is in answer to these prayers that He acts. 
 If we are failing God, we are failing our sons, 
 we are failing our fighting men. We must go 
 back to intercession, so that instead of a less 
 there shall be a greater tide of intercession 
 than ever rising up to God. Some of you may 
 remember in a rather famous publication a 
 picture of a nun at her prayers. There she 
 is kneeling, a nun, looking such a frail obstacle 
 to oppose to the sin of the world ; but the 
 eye of faith sees that from that slight figure 
 there is radiating through invisible wires power 
 to every part of the world. If that is true of 
 one single figure, what about the prayers of a 
 united Church ? They would simply radiate 
 power throughout the whole world, power we 
 cannot see, but which we are promised shall 
 come down in answer to prayer. We are 
 positively sinning against God when we cease 
 to pray. I hope that there will be a great 
 revival of intercession in the diocese with 
 priests and people intent on radiating power 
 through prayer with far greater determination 
 and spirit ; and we have to get the same spirit 
 into the nation. 
 
 12 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 Moral Indignation 
 
 Again, I believe myself that burning indig- 
 nation against proved wrong is part of our 
 Christianity. I do not believe that Chris- ^j 
 tianity rightly understood condemns righteous j 
 indignation. St. Paul says : " Who is weak " 
 and I am not weak ? who is offended and I 
 burn not ? " He knew something about right- 
 eous indignation. It is the Christ in us that 
 makes us burn with indignation when we hear 
 of children ill-treated and women wronged in 
 a most terrible way. This burning indignation 
 is a part of Christ within us, Christ Himself 
 as when He cleared the Temple courts. On 
 the other hand, we must never mix up the 
 innocent with the guilty. I am thankful to 
 think that in East London righteous indigna- 
 tion at the sinking of the Lusitania was shown ; 
 but when it took the form of wrecking inno- 
 cent people's houses the Church protested, 
 and even sheltered some of those who were 
 in danger. Never allow the innocent to be 
 mixed up with the guilty. I believe that our 
 Lord's prayer, " Father, forgive them, for 
 they know not what they do," covered the 
 soldiers who, acting under orders, were crucify- 
 
 13 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 ing the Son of God. They did not know what 
 they did. We must let that prayer cover in 
 our minds those in the Zeppelins and sub- 
 marines who are acting under orders, and 
 would be shot if they did not obey. I do 
 not want the Church not to be full of indig- 
 nation against wrong ; I want it to be ; but 
 we must have the true Christian spirit, and 
 not mix up the innocent with the guilty. 
 
 A Bright View of Death 
 
 Then, again, it is the duty of the Church 
 in the war to keep very bright the hope of 
 the other life. 
 
 " Lest Heaven be for the greybeards hoary ; 
 
 God, Who made boys for His delight, 
 Goes in earth's hour of grief and glory 
 
 And calls the boys in from the night ; 
 When they come trooping from the war 
 Our skies have many a new gold star. 
 
 " Heaven's thronged with gay and careless faces 
 New-waked from dreams of dreadful things. 
 They walk by green and pleasant places, 
 
 And by the crystal water springs 
 Forget the nightmare field of slain 
 And the fierce thirst and the strong pain. 
 
 " Forget ! God smiles to see them merry, 
 For His own Son was once a boy ; 
 They never shall be old and weary, 
 
 But of their youth shall have great joy, 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 And in the playing fields of Heaven 
 
 Shall run and leap, new-washed, new-shriven. 
 
 " Now Heaven's by golden boys invaded, 
 'Scaped from the winter and the storm. 
 
 Stainless and simple as He made it, 
 
 God keeps the boy's heart out of harm. 
 
 The old wise Saints look down and smile. 
 
 They are so young and without guile. 
 
 " Oh, if the sonless mothers weeping, 
 The widowed girls, could look inside 
 The country that hath them in keeping 
 Who went to the great war and died. 
 They would rise and put their mourning off. 
 Praise God, and say ; ' He has enough.' " * 
 
 Now words like these, beautiful as I think 
 them, give what I call a bright view of 
 death. We have not risen to the spirit of our 
 responsibilities, of our glorious privileges, if we 
 have not in some way, however simple, brought 
 home this bright view of death to the nation 
 in the war, if we have not shown that death 
 is not the ultimate calamity and the end of 
 all. The career of some brilliant boy, with a 
 great future before him, is not finished when 
 
 * Reproduced from Flower of Touth : Poems in War Time, 
 y. 6d. net, by the kind permission of the author, Katharine 
 Tynan, and of the publishers, Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson, 
 London. The poem can be obtained separately, price 2d. ; 
 profits to Dublin Red Cross Hospital. 
 
 IS 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 he is taken away in what we call the very 
 middle of his career. Do let us believe, and 
 make people believe, that his career is not 
 finished but only beginning. " He asked life 
 of Thee, and Thou gavest him a long life, 
 even for ever and ever " — to believe this is to 
 abolish Death. 
 
 But then we pass to the second duty of the 
 Church. 
 
 Where Repentance comes in 
 
 Not only is this nation of ours in the war, 
 but also it is under the war. We cannot, 
 indeed, merely call the war a punishment for 
 our sins, for if we had been more sinful, 
 adding covv^ardice to our other faults, we might 
 have avoided it altogether. It does, indeed, 
 come straight out of the sin of Europe as '> 
 whole ; but in this matter the special guilt 
 attaches to Germany, and not to us or our 
 Allies. Our cause is just. Some people 
 imagine that to say this is inconsistent with 
 calling the nation to repentance. But there 
 is no reason for so thinking. When you are 
 called to a great honour do you or do you 
 not become more aware of your own infirmity ? 
 
 i6 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 I have been called to be Chief of the Staff of 
 the Great National Mission from one end of 
 England to another, and I am therefore all 
 the more acutely conscious of my own in- 
 firmities, sins, and shortcomings. That being 
 the case, as Canon Scott Holland pointed out 
 in the Commonzvealth, if we believe in the 
 righteousness of our cause, if we believe we 
 are called to safeguard the wonderful gifts 
 Christianity has brought to the world, we are 
 called to repent. To put it in my own words 
 — I do not want to put words into Dr. Holland's 
 mouth which he would not use — I think of 
 that splendid metaphor of the Old Testament, 
 the " polished shaft." That is what a Chris- 
 tian should become, a " polished shaft," a 
 shaft placed in the quiver of the bow of God 
 for use in the day of His wrath. The more 
 we believe that, the more certain we have to 
 be that the shaft does not break in His hand. 
 There is always a possibility that the shaft of 
 His own choosing, the bolt for His quiver, 
 may break in His hand in the day of trial. 
 
 It is because I believe so intensely in the 
 
 righteousness of our cause that with all the 
 
 more force of conviction I go up and down 
 
 England preaching the mission of repentance 
 
 c 17 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 to the nation. It was left to a great admiral 
 and a great general to say the two things that 
 wanted saying to-day. One of our admirals 
 said, " When England looks out with humbler 
 eyes and prayer on her lips, then she can begin 
 to count the days towards the end " ; and it 
 was Sir William Robertson who said, " I fear 
 that even yet too many of us are putting an 
 undue amount of trust in ' Chariots and 
 Horses.' We may confidently rely upon our 
 Sailors and Soldiers fighting bravely, and count 
 upon having abundant ammunition, but we 
 must not stop at that. A serious determination 
 on the part of the nation to seek and deserve 
 Divine help would, we may hope, enable us 
 to take a true perspective of the war, and it 
 would undoubtedly furnish valuable help to 
 our gallant Sailors and Soldiers at the front." 
 Therefore we have to face the question. What 
 is the duty of the Church to a Nation under 
 the war ? And, although I begin in order of 
 thought with the nation, you will find that in 
 order of action we begin with the Church. 
 Let us quite frankly face some of the sins of 
 the nation which might make it break in the 
 hands of God. 
 
 i8 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 National Sins 
 
 (i) First of all we said, and we still say it, 
 that just before the war we were on the brink 
 of three tremendous evils. We were on the 
 brink of civil war. No one could see how 
 it was to be avoided. We were on the brink 
 of a bitterness betw^een men and women such 
 as few of us had ever seen before. We were 
 on the brink of an industrial strife which would 
 have been the greatest ever known in our 
 history. It is absurd to say it was no one's 
 fault ; some broken fellowship or brotherhood 
 must have brought us within measurable 
 distance of three such perils. We are posi- 
 tively mad if we as a nation waste this lull 
 in our domestic quarrels not to find out what it 
 was that was wrong, and eradicate the cause. 
 
 (2) Secondly, was it not also true when the 
 Worcestershire clergy, who went into retreat, 
 sent us out that warning note from the Wor- 
 cestershire Beacon ? From the Worcestershire 
 Beacon in the time of the Armada was sent out 
 a flare which went through England. From 
 the Worcestershire Beacon has gone out a 
 warning that the nation was forgetting the 
 majesty of God. Ask yourselves whether it 
 
 19 
 
The "Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 was not so. Was Sunday being better kept, 
 or worship being better attended, or family- 
 prayer observed ? On these points we are 
 convicted of sin. 
 
 (3) What about the national drink bill ? 
 I know I am a teetotaller, a tainted person, 
 as I suppose every teetotaller is. Therefore 
 I will speak to the most unconverted non- 
 teetotaller among you, if there is one ; I will 
 put it upon the ground of national economy. 
 We were told we were all called upon to save 
 every penny. We are all in our little way 
 doing our best to economise, and, while we 
 are doing this, it is from the point of view of 
 national economy a disgrace and a danger that 
 the national drink bill should go up by leaps 
 and bounds. It rose in the first year of the 
 war from 160 to 170 millions, and it rose 
 in the second year from 170 to 181 millions, 
 while we have before us the example of our 
 two Allies, Russia and France. Russia, with 
 its splendid sacrifice, lost ninety millions of 
 revenue by a stroke of the pen. Already that is 
 largely recouped by the savings of the people.* 
 
 * This was written before the debacle in Russia, and the 
 limits placed by the Government of Great Britain on the 
 amount of beer brewed. 
 
 20 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 In France not only has the sale of absinthe 
 been prohibited, but the landed proprietors, 
 who have a right to make and sell intoxicating 
 liquor, have surrendered that privilege. On 
 the other side, the drink in our country be- 
 came at one time a national danger. We are 
 simply fooling away this great Day of God 
 unless we face our drunken habits. No doubt 
 the Liquor Control Board has done great good 
 in reducing the hours of the sale of drink, and 
 thus showing that drunkenness can be reduced 
 by regulation and legislation. That is what 
 we temperance people have said for years. 
 The Government is waking up to the fact that 
 this drink evil is a national danger with which 
 they have got to deal. We shall be mad if 
 after the war we allow the old hours of sale 
 to come back. Unless we repent of this 
 national sin of drink, we are not following the 
 call of repentance, and therefore not of hope. 
 (4) Take even a more difhcult point to put 
 before you, the ravage in this nation of lust. 
 Some of you may have been wakened up by 
 the Report on contagious diseases, and it will 
 have surprised many decent people to find that 
 ten per cent, of the population are affected. 
 Apart from that we are not going to stand by 
 
 21 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 while this goes on. We are nothing if not a 
 fighting Church. The Church is no mere 
 debating society, but really a fighting force. 
 If people in London think we are going to 
 tolerate an open moral sewer in London, they 
 are making a great mistake. If music halls 
 are still to be known as places of assignation, 
 if we are going to allow things to be put before 
 young people in cinema shows to injure their 
 minds, then they have yet to learn what the 
 power of the Church is. The Church in the 
 old days fought to the death through unpopu- 
 larity and persecution for real principles. I 
 am afraid sometimes we are getting too much 
 at peace with the world. You may soon be 
 called upon to act. I am trying negotiation 
 first. If that fails I shall call upon the whole 
 Christian community of London, to see whether 
 we Christians are going to be masters in our 
 own house or not.* 
 
 (5) Well, then I will take another national 
 sin : yes, I must call it national sin. Why do 
 you suppose we were given this tremendous 
 empire of ours ? It is being blind to the 
 history of empires to imagine that it was given 
 
 * Since this was said, a considerable improvement has 
 been attained in all these directions. 
 
 22 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 to us for ourselves. The Jews imagined this, 
 and they went down ; and the Roman Empire 
 went down for the same reason. We have to 
 ask ourselves why we were given this tremen- 
 dous empire throughout the world. There is 
 only one answer : we were given this empire 
 throughout the world, we were given this 
 tremendous power, that we might be able 
 to spread the Gospel throughout the world. 
 Let us face the truth about this. Have we 
 done it ? By tremendous efforts, by ceaseless 
 speeches and sermons, we have managed to 
 accumulate one million a year to spend upon 
 foreign missions. What is the result ? Five 
 millions a day on war ! That is all. You 
 have only to put the two things side by side : 
 one million a year to spread the Gospel, five 
 millions a day on war ! There is only one 
 thing that can ever stop war in this world, 
 and that is the spread of the knowledge of the 
 Lord, " They shall not hurt or destroy in all 
 My holy mountain, saith the Lord." When 
 and why ? When " the earth shall be filled 
 with the knowledge of God as the waters 
 cover the sea." Therefore, if we are given 
 back our empire which has been threatened, 
 do let us realise that we must follow this call 
 
 23 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 in the future. There must be a new mis- 
 sionsLvy spirit. We must realise that our empire 
 is a trust, and we must discharge that trust 
 with perfect fairness towards all other religions. 
 We must deal with Mohammedans and Hindus 
 in India with absolute consideration for their 
 faith. But we want a new missionary spirit 
 breathed throughout the nation, so that it may- 
 realise the need of discharging effectually one 
 of its greatest duties. 
 
 The Church to repent first 
 
 These are five things at least of which the 
 nation must repent. But who is to bring the 
 nation to repentance ? A self-complacent 
 Church ? The nation will never take any 
 message of repentance from an unrepentant 
 Church. The vicar of one of our churches 
 was spoken to by a churchwarden after the 
 morning sermon, which had been on the 
 National Mission. " I am all for the National 
 Mission now," the churchwarden said. The 
 vicar said, " I did not think you were very 
 keen about it." The other replied, " I thought 
 you were going to stand in your pulpit and 
 say, ' Repent, repent, repent.' But, now I 
 
 24 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 understand you are going to be the first to 
 repent, I am all for the National Mission." 
 He did not mean to score off his vicar. What 
 he meant was this, that as a member of the 
 nation he was not going to sit down and have 
 an unrepentant Church asking the nation to 
 repent. They know too much about us. 
 They are not going to take such a message 
 from us ; but will only take it from a Church 
 that will lead in repentance. Therefore, before 
 we preach the message of repentance to the 
 nation, we dare not but look into our own 
 hearts, and set our own house in order, and see 
 what the Church has to repent of. 
 
 (i) First of all it has to repent of one signal 
 failure which has been shown up during the 
 war. It has not failed altogether. Its sons 
 in glorious numbers have gone out to do their 
 duty. Look at the choirs and the Men's 
 Society, the Church Lads' Brigade, the Scouts ; 
 their elder members have all gone. But where 
 we have failed is this : we have failed in bring- 
 ing home to the manhood of the nation as 
 gathered in our great battleships and camps 
 the sacramental religion outlined in the Prayer 
 Book. We are bound to face this. Why are 
 there only twenty on a great battleship who 
 
 25 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 are regular communicants, even under a most 
 popular and well-beloved chaplain ? Again, 
 in a camp of five thousand men there are often 
 not more than about twenty regular weekly 
 communicants. And yet seventy per cent, of 
 the men in the Army and Navy are returned 
 as members of our Church. It is a disgrace 
 to the Church that this state of things should 
 exist. I am not going to blame anyone out 
 there. The fault lies in the want of training 
 in the parishes. It is quite true that many 
 more young men are pouring in now to be con- 
 firmed. I confirmed two hundred in the short 
 fortnight I was at the front in 1915. In the 
 camps now they are coming out to be confirmed 
 in a very encouraging way. We have to find 
 out the way to train our people in the religion 
 of the Prayer Book. I was rather struck the 
 other day by a story from Egypt of a chaplain 
 who was in despair over his brigade. He could 
 only get a handful of men to go to Holy Com- 
 munion until they came to Egypt. Then 
 hundreds came forward to be prepared for 
 Confirmation. The reason was this. They 
 had seen the Holy Communion service for the 
 first time in the desert, and when they saw 
 people like themselves going up to receive the 
 
 26 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 Communion they asked : " Why should not 
 I receive it ? " " You are not confirmed," 
 was the reply. " May I be prepared ? " " Oh, 
 yes." So hundreds came to Holy Communion 
 because they had seen a Communion service 
 for a neighbouring regiment in the desert. 
 Well, now, that is the first thing which we 
 must face. 
 
 (2) The second thing we have to repent of 
 is that we are entirely out of touch with the 
 world of labour. God forbid we should ever 
 become Court Chaplains to King Demos and 
 flatter the working man. At the same time, 
 it is a very striking thing, and a cause for 
 searching of hearts, that the Church of the 
 Carpenter is largely disregarded by the car- 
 penters of to-day. Can it be because we come 
 so much from the more leisured class and look 
 to the rich for subscriptions ? Whatever the 
 reason, it is certainly worthy of notice that 
 we have very little influence on the world of 
 labour to-day. 
 
 (3) And, thirdly, are we ourselves a brother- 
 hood ? Are we a loving, harmonious brother- 
 hood for the world to see ? A bishop of one 
 of the African dioceses says he dreads the day 
 when the post brings the Church papers from 
 
 27 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 home, with their bitterness and party spirit, 
 which upset the minds of the missionary- 
 priests. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves, 
 if we are going to preach the Gospel of brother- 
 hood to the nation : Are we a brotherhood 
 ourselves ? Unless we repent of the lack of 
 brotherliness which is so often shown in the 
 Church, we shall preach no effective Gospel 
 of Union and brotherhood. We must first be 
 united and brotherly ourselves. 
 
 I almost hesitate to bring in my next two 
 points, but I must. I put them before every 
 diocese I visited, and, therefore, I must put 
 them before my own. 
 
 (4) The sin of sloth ! Can it be said that 
 in some parishes in the London diocese nothing 
 is being done ? If so the whole diocese ought 
 to be ashamed of it. We have got to ask our- 
 selves at this Mission whether there are any 
 parishes in which little or nothing is being 
 done. If so, the laity are to blame as much 
 as the clergy. They ought not to allow the 
 clergy to do nothing, while they ought not, on 
 the other hand, to leave them to do all the 
 work themselves. Are we guilty ? We are 
 the only people who are left to ourselves, and 
 are on our honour about our work. The fore- 
 
 28 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 man will ask questions if any man comes late 
 to a City warehouse, while we, as a Church, 
 are left to our honour as to loyalty in our work. 
 " Work while it is day, for the night cometh 
 when no man can work." Are we carrying 
 out that command ? 
 
 (5) Then, again, it is a most unforgivable sin 
 of the Church to be dull. It is positively mis- 
 chievous. The Church is daily to be inspired 
 by the life of the Spirit, and the gift of the 
 Spirit is warmth and love. A young man came 
 home from the front the other day and wrote to 
 someone : " The old parish church is as dull as 
 ever. I cannot stand it now. I am off to the 
 Y.M.C.A." God bless all good work that is 
 being done by that and other organisations 
 among our soldiers. But if we are going to 
 sit down under the Church of the living 
 God being less attractive than any Y.M.C.A. 
 in the world, we have not done our duty. 
 We have to ask ourselves if we are not holding 
 the people. Why is it ? Are we dull ? Have 
 we lost interest in our own Gospel ? Are our 
 services unattractive ? This Mission has got 
 to go very deep. We have got to scrap every- 
 thing that is in the way of the spreading of the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
 
 29 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 Who is to begin ? 
 Now who has got to begin the repentance of 
 the Church ? Undoubtedly the bishops. If 
 the laity are not going to take a message of 
 repentance from an unrepentant clergy, the 
 clergy will not follow the lead of unrepentant 
 bishops. A clergyman said long ago when I 
 became a bishop, " I want my bishop to come 
 to me straight from Jesus Christ." I was 
 always grateful to him for saying that. We 
 were speaking about bishops' incomes and 
 houses ; but, whatever the argument was, he 
 said a thing which has helped me enormously 
 all these fifteen years. " I want my bishop 
 to come to me straight from Jesus Christ." 
 If there is anything in our position, houses, 
 incomes, in our motors, in anything we have, 
 which is preventing us from coming straight 
 from Jesus Christ, that thing has got to be 
 scrapped in this Day of God. And mind you 
 we are going to do it. We are going to begin 
 with a devotional meeting at Lambeth. If 
 it is shown to us by the Spirit of God that 
 we must alter the whole system, I can promise 
 we are ready to do it.* 
 
 * The Committee of the National Mission which deals 
 with Redistribution of the Finances of the Church has not 
 yet presented its report. 
 
 30 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 Next the clergy must place their heads 
 in dust and ashes. Once at a very solemn 
 time in some cathedral, perhaps St. Paul's, 
 kneeling at a great service, every clergyman 
 here heard these words said : " Receive the 
 Holy Ghost for the office and work of a 
 Priest in the Church of God. . . . Whose sins 
 thou dost forgive, they are forgiven, and whose 
 sins thou dost retain, they are retained." 
 
 Now you clergy are bound to ask : How far 
 have I fulfilled that commission ? There was 
 a young woman who saw an ordination for 
 the first time, and she said to someone : " Do 
 you mean to say that every clergyman I have 
 ever met has been through that ? " We 
 should always be showing that we have been 
 through it. 
 
 What Lay Priesthood involves 
 
 Now I come to the laity. Do you realise 
 that every one of you is also meant to be a 
 priest ? I believe the doctrine of the priest- 
 hood of the Church is very little understood. 
 If it was rightly understood, there would be 
 scarcely any Nonconformists, and a great deal 
 of our own divisions would be bridged over. 
 There is only one High Priest in Heaven and 
 
 31 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 earth — Jesus Christ Himself. But the whole 
 Church is the Body of Christ, the Body of 
 that Priest. We who are ordained priests 
 (so-called) are the organs of the priestly Body. 
 All this is beautifully described in Dr. Moberly's 
 Ministerial Priesthood. That is the Catholic 
 doctrine of the priesthood. What is involved ? 
 Why, that all of you laity — I am speaking now 
 of men and women — all of you are priests. 
 Though you did not have those solemn words 
 that were said to ordained priests said to you, 
 you, too, came to your confirmation and this 
 was the description of the first Confirmation. 
 " Then laid they their hands on them, and the 
 Holy Ghost fell upon them. For as yet He 
 had fallen upon none of them." The Holy 
 Ghost did fall on you. At that moment 
 you were ordained priests ; therefore, all these 
 years since your confirmation, to say nothing of 
 baptism, you have been expected not merely 
 to criticise the clergy or take a general interest 
 in Church work or merely to give subscriptions 
 to some parish fund, but you have been 
 expected to do five things. You are bound to 
 ask yourselves whether you have been doing 
 them or not. It is to do your special work 
 every day and not to carry over one day's work 
 
 32 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 to the next ; to offer up daily your sacrifice of 
 prayer and praise ; every day by intercession 
 to run in between the living and the dead ; 
 to keep every day a holy day ; to serve as a 
 witness. Europe was converted by witnesses 
 unknown to all but God ; witnesses 
 
 "... that rest 
 In God's still memory folded deep." 
 
 Each layman every day must ask himself, 
 " How many have I brought to Christ ? I 
 am to be a priest too ; I cannot get out of it. 
 I shall be judged as a priest. Have I in any 
 way failed to discharge in full the priesthood 
 of the laity ? " I believe, and I say it with 
 all affection, that many of you when, perhaps 
 in the quiet hours at St. Paul's and other 
 places, you face that question, will say, " God 
 be merciful to me a sinner." 
 
 Signs of Hope 
 
 But this is not to be only a Mission of 
 Repentance, but also a Mission of Hope, and to 
 my mind if only we can get enough penitence 
 we shall have plenty of hope. 
 
 I find the greatest sign of hope is in the 
 growing penitence and humility in the Church. 
 But, then, secondly, look at the splendid out- 
 D 33 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 burst of service we have seen. We often hear 
 great truths from children, and I heard one 
 from a little boy whom I visited. His mother 
 had turned her beautiful home into a hospital. 
 There were fifty wounded soldiers in it. The 
 little boy, instead of complaining of having 
 his home turned upside down, said, " Mother, 
 we cannot go back to our old life after the war, 
 can we ? " I believe myself that is the feeling 
 not only of boys but of those girls of ours who 
 spend long hours and hours in hospitals nursing 
 the sick, or looking after canteens or doing other 
 bits of war work. They are not going back to 
 the old life they led before the war, idle and 
 purposeless. They have tasted another kind 
 of life and they will not lose the taste of it. 
 We surely are not going back to our old life 
 after the war. 
 
 Then, again, what a wonderful thing it is 
 that everybody is becoming more and more 
 conscious that every man is born to be a 
 Christian. This is coming out in numberless 
 ways. I get many letters from the front illus- 
 trating this. I found one day a young fellow 
 waiting for me at 9.30 p.m. at Fulham. He 
 wanted to be confirmed the day before he 
 went back to the front. I took him in for the 
 
 34 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 night and confirmed him at an early morning 
 service. That shows the earnestness of some 
 of these young men. Another said, " We did 
 not allow much bad language on the Peninsula, 
 I can tell you ; it was very different from 
 Egypt." This change is going on among our 
 boys ; it is becoming plainer every day. 
 
 Mr. Horace Hutchinson, in writing his little 
 book From Douht to Faith, is an instance of the 
 way in which laymen are witnessing. The old 
 shyness and reserve has to be broken down, 
 and every man who is really converted has 
 to be a witness to the Christ in whom he truly 
 believes. But, further, every man was born 
 to be a Churchman. Bible-reading and 
 prayers at home do not lead to the development 
 of the highest Christian character. It is a 
 grand foundation, a grand start. But man 
 was born for a society ; born to lose himself 
 in order to find himself. Our boys, our soldiers 
 at the front, are losing themselves to find them- 
 selves in the great cause of our country. It 
 is becoming plainer and plainer that man is 
 not only born to be a Christian, he is born to 
 be a Churchman ; born to lose himself to find 
 himself in a great Church. . 
 
 It is then with tremendous hope that we 
 
 35 
 
The Church's Call to the Nation 
 
 launch this great effort. We want to put a 
 vision before ourselves. " Where there is no 
 vision the people perish " ; where there is a 
 vision the people revive. This is the vision : 
 " They shall teach no more every man his 
 neighbour, and every man his brother, saying : 
 Know the Lord : for they shall all know Me, 
 from the least of them unto the greatest of 
 them." 
 
 There is no reason why this should not be 
 true : " They shall know Me," God says, 
 " from the least to the greatest." 
 
 Take hold of this vision ; be not disobedient 
 to it. Be content with nothing less than a 
 new nation, a new Church, and at last a new 
 world. 
 
 36 
 
II 
 
 PURIFYING THE NATION* 
 
 " He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." — Mal. 
 iii. 3. 
 
 After two and a half years of war, we have 
 arrived at the real test of our fortitude and 
 courage; a wave of pessimism, please God, 
 only a temporary one, is passing over the 
 nation at home, though not, and this is to be 
 noticed, over the soldiers in the field or the 
 sailors at their respective bases. 
 
 " The advent of Rumania into the war " 
 (so the talk runs), which was once thought to 
 be about to shorten it, bids fair now, so we 
 are told, to lengthen it by supplying the enemy 
 with much-needed supplies. The successful 
 extension of long-distance submarines is en- 
 dangering the food supply of the nation ; 
 nowhere have we yet been very successful, and 
 Kut and Gallipoli have lowered our prestige 
 throughout the East. 
 
 * An address delivered in Westminster Abbey on Advent 
 Sunday, 1916. 
 
 37 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 And as always happens in all wars in all 
 nations, a disappointed nation turns upon its 
 leaders, and armchair Napoleons tell us day 
 by day exactly what ought to be done. 
 
 But more formidable than this growing dis- 
 trust with the leadership of the nation, is a 
 latent disbelief in God Himself. " He really 
 ought to be doing something to help us at 
 last ; , of course we were bound to pay for our 
 foolish mistakes about the peaceful designs of 
 Germany ; we see now of course, our mad 
 folly in not listening years ago to the old soldier 
 who was allowed to utter disregarded in the 
 wilderness his only too well justified warnings, 
 and was told by some that he ought to have 
 his pension taken away for his pains ; but we 
 have surely paid for this folly now ; we have 
 raised five million men by voluntary enlist- 
 ment, and have given the precious blood of 
 our nearest and our dearest, surely if we are 
 fighting for the freedom of the world and are 
 standing by the weak against the strong, and 
 for international honour, and for the principles 
 of chivalry in war, and if there is a God Who 
 loves these things. He ought to be doing some- 
 thing soon. The enemy grows more ruthless, 
 more merciless every hour ; thousands of 
 
 38 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 defenceless Belgians are carried into slavery ; 
 innocent merchantmen and even trawlers are 
 sunk every day, and yet God does nothing." 
 
 But has it ever occurred to those who ask 
 these questions so bitterly now, to ask them- 
 selves quite frankly : " How much they them- 
 selves trusted and served God in the days 
 before the war ? " 
 
 In a striking letter quoted by Mr. Burroughs 
 in his book 7he Valley of Decision I find this 
 extract ; the letter was written from the 
 trenches : 
 
 " The man who has come out here with a 
 little faith, learns here to see the God he 
 loves more clearly than ever before. 
 
 " The man who has brought no faith 
 with him spends his time cursing the war, 
 swearing at everything, fretting and worry- 
 ing. ... I cannot honestly say that men 
 often find their Saviour for the first time 
 in the trenches, although perhaps an old 
 love for spiritual things, long forgotten, 
 is stirred up within them. Certainly in 
 the hour of death, I think their thoughts 
 turn to the possibility of a future life. 
 
 " But the man who comes out loving 
 
 39 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 God finds, when for the first time in his 
 life he feels that any moment may be his 
 last, that love spreads into a supreme 
 trust." 
 
 And again he says : 
 
 " The huge trust which springs up in 
 moments of peril will in a large number 
 of cases leave men strong, keen and earnest 
 Christians if and when God brings them 
 back to the safety of their homes." 
 
 Now, as is often the case, these letters from 
 the front, give us much food for thought at 
 home ; is any such " huge trust " in God 
 rising at home ? if not, why not ? 
 
 (i) Is it because we have not got even that 
 minimum of faith and love, of which the 
 writer so humbly and modestly speaks ? 
 
 What right has a man who has never prayed 
 to God before the war for years, or a woman 
 who has made her own comfort and pleasure 
 her god, to expect God, while they have not 
 changed, to make them His special favourites 
 and the choice instruments of His Will ? 
 
 Nay ! How can we expect a nation, however 
 righteous its cause, at once and without repent- 
 
 40 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 ance or amendment, to be fully used and 
 blessed by God. 
 
 There is a striking sentence and response 
 which occurs in the service for the Consecra- 
 tion of a Church, As the parish priest brings 
 up the vessels for consecration, the Bishop is 
 directed to say : 
 
 " Be ye clean which bear the vessels of the 
 Lord," 
 
 and the priest answers : 
 
 " I will wash my hands in innocency, O 
 Lord, and so will I go to Thine altar." 
 
 I believe myself fully that we have as a 
 nation been called to " bear the vessels of the 
 Lord " ; I have said a thousand times, and 
 I say it again, that we as a nation never did 
 a more Christlike thing than when we went 
 to war in August 1914 ; I believe that we bear 
 on high as a sacred trust the vessel of a world's 
 freedom, purity and honour. 
 
 But is it consistent with this to have ten 
 per cent, of the nation afflicted with a disease 
 which ultimately comes from immorality ? Is 
 it consistent with this to have the streets of 
 London so dangerous that the very boys who 
 
 41 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 have come across the seas to fight for us find 
 here sometimes their ruin ? 
 
 " I will wash my hands in innocency, O 
 Lord, and so will I go to Thine altar." Have 
 we even begun to say it yet ? The only help 
 you get from the prophets of the people 
 amounts to this : " You can't be too particular 
 what the boys do of an evening, when they 
 are fighting so bravely for us," whereas it is 
 just because they are so gloriously gallant and 
 brave that we want to save them from a worse 
 fate than death. 
 
 (2) " But these things all happen when men 
 and women are drunk or have been drinking." 
 
 Is it really supposed that God, Who has 
 told us that " No drunkard shall inherit the 
 Kingdom of God," is likely to accept this as 
 an excuse from those who are called to " bear 
 the vessels of the Lord " ? 
 
 I have not forgotten my mid^iight march 
 through Westminster a year or two before the 
 war. In an hour I had collected from the 
 public-houses in the immediate neighbourhood 
 of the Abbey a number of men, mostly young 
 and all half intoxicated. Thank God those 
 late hours are stopped now, and must never 
 be allowed to be reintroduced again. 
 
 42 ^ 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 But even since the war began, in August 
 191 5, the Rev. F. B. Meyer wrote to the 
 Times : 
 
 " If only people who may resent this 
 letter would spend a week-end in a-certain 
 broad thoroughfare with which I am 
 familiar, they would, like Dante, have a 
 vision of hell — jars and bottles of liquor 
 are passed from hand to hand in the open 
 street. The pavements are covered with 
 groups engaged in drinking, fighting and 
 screaming till one or two in the morning. 
 Sunday is thus inaugurated and con- 
 cluded." 
 
 But it is not only possibly bigoted Bishops 
 or leading Nonconformist Ministers who speak 
 like this. Mr. Alfred Booth, Chairman of the 
 Cunard Line, addressing a Liverpool audience 
 in December 1915, said : 
 
 *' The most glaring example of a form of 
 consumption which we could perfectly 
 well dispense with is the drink traffic. I 
 am not thinking now of the Temperance 
 side of the question. Important as that 
 
 43 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 is, we have got far beyond that now. I 
 am thinking of the demand which this 
 trade makes upon the services of our 
 ships, our railways and carts and of our 
 labour. Thirty thousand tons a week of 
 barley and other produce are brought into 
 this country for the brewing and distilling 
 trades. Think of the demand which this 
 makes on the depleted resources of our 
 mercantile marine. Then all this stuff, 
 together with the larger quantity which 
 is grown at home has to be carted and 
 hauled by rail to the brewery or distillery, 
 and then brought back again and dis- 
 tributed to the consumer. In addition 
 to this, 6000 miners are kept permanently 
 employed getting coal, and 36,000 tons 
 of coal have to be sent every week to 
 these breweries and distilleries. Taken in 
 the aggregate the services absorbed by 
 this trade are on a gigantic scale, and 
 (notice this) the net result of it all is a 
 decrease in national efficiency. I say in 
 all seriousness," says Mr. Booth, " that, 
 if we are to be able to maintain our armies 
 in the field, we shall before very long have 
 to choose between bread and beer." 
 
 44 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 That is the opinion of a business man, and 
 there is no good blaming the Government ; 
 it has been said that every nation gets the 
 Government it deserves, and it is perfectly 
 clear that, until public opinion is altered, the 
 Government dare not take stronger measures. 
 At present, as it w^as in the days of Isaiah, 
 " The people love to have it so, and what shall 
 there be at the end thereof ? " 
 
 (3) For can it be yet said that as a nation 
 we have wholly come back to God ? 
 
 It is quite clear that " if there is a God, He 
 is everything " ; Mr. Burroughs, in the book to 
 which I have referred, finely quotes Browning 
 in this connection : 
 
 " Religion's all or nothing ; it's no mere smile 
 O' Contentment, sigh of aspiration, sir — 
 No quality o' the finelier tempered clay- 
 Like its whiteness or its brightness ; rather stuff 
 O' the very stuff, life of life, and self of self." 
 
 Either Paul is mad or Festus ; if Paul is not 
 mad, then Festus is — Festus who left out God, 
 or who patronised Him or argued about Him, 
 to pass the time of day. 
 
 And yet how many Festuses have we had ! 
 How many may be among you who read these 
 words ? '* Well ! I vote that there is a God," 
 
 4S 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 said a well-meaning man to encourage me after 
 a lecture in the open air in an East End Park. 
 And that dumb instinct for God has not been 
 silenced by all the secularist arguments or the 
 long reign of a materialistic gospel of comfort ; 
 it is always there, and it is the hope of the 
 future. 
 
 But could God, if He had judged by out- 
 ward signs have known in recent years that we 
 voted there was a God ? Was His Day more 
 or was it less observed ? Was He more or was 
 He less openly worshipped ? Did He control 
 the national life ? 
 
 In a noble letter quoted in the Press, written 
 by Blake and Deane to the Speaker, during 
 Cromwell's first Dutch War, these words 
 occur : " We dare not in this great business 
 to promise anything for or to ourselves, because 
 it is God alone Who giveth courage and con- 
 duct with opportunity and success in the day 
 of His salvation." 
 
 Have we had the same open acknowledgment 
 of God in our nation's life in recent years 
 before the war ? It is for that reason that I 
 would recall your minds to the great picture 
 of God in the book of Malachi : " He sits as 
 a refiner and purifier of silver." The trial 
 
 46 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 goes on ; the fire burns ; the heat is great, 
 but it is not purposeless ; the silver is there 
 all right and there is going to be a great use 
 made of it, but it still needs to be purified 
 and refined. 
 
 We cannot remember too often the words 
 of the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand 
 Fleet, Sir David Beatty : " When the nation 
 turns to God with humble heart, and prayer 
 upon its lips, then we may begin to count the 
 days towards the End ! " 
 
 I hold this picture of God to be specially 
 appropriate to-day. 
 
 (i) Because it recognises the beauty, the 
 value of what has been revealed in the war. 
 Officers can find no language adequate to 
 describe the patience, endurance and courage 
 of our men ; I asked the heads of the great 
 City firms, when we held a memorial service 
 for the hundreds of City clerks who had given 
 their lives, if they did not feel like men who 
 find a " treasure hid in a field " ? They little 
 realised the heroes they v/ere breeding in their 
 offices. 
 
 The silver has come out also in the service 
 and loving sacrifice of our girls ; there is not 
 an idle girl in England to-day, and as for the 
 
 47 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 fortitude of our mothers — I speak as one who 
 lives among the mourners — it is too beautiful 
 for words. 
 
 Already the great Furnace of Affliction has 
 purified the silver, and in the glowing metal, 
 God already sees a reflection of Himself, the 
 sacrifice of Calvary is being reproduced every 
 day. 
 
 (2) In the second place, this picture of God is 
 so encouraging because it reveals God at work. 
 
 He is not idle or forgetful, or uninterested ; 
 " He is not on a journey," nor is He an absentee 
 landlord of His world ; He is in the thick of it 
 all as ever, but, as ever. He is obliged to work 
 by the laws He has laid down for Himself 
 in dealing with the children of men ; we are 
 told that the Son of God Himself on earth 
 " could do no mighty work because of their 
 unbelief " — before He came into the world at 
 all, He had to wait for the fulness of time, 
 and the great Advent itself will only come 
 when the times are ripe. 
 
 But He hopes on, and works on ; little by 
 little the dross is purged away ; the silver 
 becomes clearer ; this is a Day of God which 
 is to change the world for ever, and the process 
 must not be hurried. 
 
 48 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 Church and nation must humble themselves 
 before His cleansing Hands, and there is nothing 
 that He cannot do with a humble Church and 
 a GoD-fearing nation ; we may change the 
 Government or not ; we may reconstruct the 
 Cabinet, but no change will avail, unless as a 
 nation we put God first ; and no difficulty 
 can be so great out of which God cannot lead 
 a humble and GoD-fearing nation. 
 
 (3) But what is true of the nation is true of 
 you and me. I have just come from a great 
 gathering in one of our London theatres, and 
 it was touching to hear two actors, a professor 
 of art, and a great singer all bear their witness 
 to the need of the human heart for God. 
 
 He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver, 
 and part of the silver treasure which He longs 
 to purify and use for Himself is the human 
 heart and love and powers of each living soul. 
 
 Do you wonder that the trial is so hot, the 
 loss so terrible, the anxiety so wearing that 
 you have to bear ? Look up and see the 
 object of it all ; He sits as a refiner and purifier 
 of silver ; the fire is never allowed to be too 
 hot ; there has no temptation taken you but 
 such as is common to man and, if you look 
 round, there is always the way of escape that 
 
 E 49 
 
Purifying the Nation 
 
 you may be able to bear it ; He doesn't send 
 the war, but He uses the war ; He turns evil 
 into good ; He breathes upon the flame lest it 
 scorch you up. 
 
 But more than that, He has sent His Son to 
 be in the fire with you. 
 
 There is a story in the Old Testament 
 which will never die ; there were three mortal 
 men cast into the fire, and the fire was heated 
 sevenfold more than it was wont to be heated ; 
 but they came out to the astonishment of the 
 world, and even the smell of fire had not passed 
 over them. 
 
 What was the secret ? 
 
 There had been a fourth with them in the 
 burning flame, and the form of the fourth was 
 as the Son of God. 
 
 50 
 
Ill 
 
 "WHAT WILT THOU HAVE ME TO DO?"* 
 
 " And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what 
 wilt Thou have me to do ? " — Acts ix. 6. 
 
 The conversion of St. Paul is one of those few 
 events in human history which have really 
 moved the world ; in the first place it is an 
 absolutely certain event, so certain that — as 
 is well known — it convinced of the truth of 
 Christianity one of the leading deists of the 
 eighteenth century ; there certainly was a 
 man called Saul and he certainly became the 
 character whom w£ know as St. Paul. But it 
 is not only the certainty of the event which 
 is so moving, but the touching character of 
 it ; I never get tired of thinking of the great 
 and dazzling light — " a light that never was 
 on land or sea " — and the extraordinary 
 romance of the voice which spoke and which 
 rang in St. Paul's soul until the end of his 
 
 * An address delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, Nov. 19, 
 1916. 
 
 51 
 
* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 life, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me ? " 
 " I am Jesus, Whom thou persecutest." 
 
 But of course the special characteristic of 
 the great event was its permanent and lasting 
 character ; the man himself became a changed 
 man ; his old ideas, his old prejudices, his old 
 conventionalities were blown away as by the 
 bursting of a shell ; his very first question shows 
 the practical character of his conversion : 
 " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " and 
 to the letter and to the death this wonderful 
 man lived out his own conversion ; he saw 
 at the first instant that this stupendous experi- 
 .ence must lead to action, nor did he once 
 shrink from the difficult and dangerous action 
 which he was instructed to take. 
 
 Now we have just arrived in the National 
 Mission at the critical moment. As chief of 
 the staff of it, I have finished my tour round 
 thirty dioceses of England at Plymouth and 
 Truro ; nine times a week in open air and 
 crowded hall or great church have I spoken 
 in London since the beginning of the Mission ; 
 hundreds have done the same ; three hundred 
 priest messengers have been sent forth from 
 St. Paul's Cathedral and their work has been 
 supplemented by laymen and women ; the 
 
 52 
 
' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 same is going on from one end of the country 
 to the other ; very moving accounts come in 
 from all over the country ; often in London 
 the messenger arrives at the parish without his 
 name being divulged, and gives his message for 
 two or three or four days to a people which 
 have been previously prepared by weeks of 
 prayer and intercession. Men who have not 
 previously been known as great preachers have 
 thrown themselves on the Holy Ghost, and 
 the Holy Ghost has honoured their trust. 
 Some of the most remarkable impressions have 
 been made by those who have been looked 
 upon up to now as men of only average 
 attainments and powers. 
 
 But now comes the question — What is going 
 to be the outcome of it all ? I have said it 
 a thousand times and I say it again now : 
 " If we are going back to the old England 
 and the old Church of the time before the 
 war, then not only will that Mission have been 
 in vain, but our men and boys will have died 
 in vain ; for the war to cease now and at once 
 civil war in Ireland to break out ; the suffra- 
 gette outrages to be resumed ; * and the great 
 
 * One of these three is settled ; please God, the other 
 two will not lag far behind. — ^January 1918. 
 
 53 
 
'What wilt Thou have Mc to do?' 
 
 industrial strife, only just averted by the war, 
 to begin at last, if that is to happen, then the 
 great day of opportunity w^ill have passed over 
 our heads in vain. " If thou hadst knovi^n, 
 even thou, at least in this thy day, the things 
 which belong unto thy peace, but now they 
 are hid from thine eyes " — ^would be uttered 
 over our country, as it was uttered with tears 
 over Jerusalem two thousand years ago. 
 No ! we must recognise that : 
 
 " Our world has passed away 
 For wantonness o'erthrown, 
 There's nothing left to-day 
 
 But steel and fire and stone ! " * 
 
 and it really does seem very like blasphemy 
 against the Holy Ghost, to have all these 
 hours of prayer, these fervent invocations of 
 the Holy Spirit, and then to allow the National 
 Mission to degenerate into a harmless way of 
 spending the autumn for those who are not 
 allowed to go to the front. 
 
 The Nation, the Church and the Individual 
 are bound, if they have seen the light and 
 heard the voice with St. Paul to also ask with 
 him : " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " 
 
 (i) Let us take the nation first, 
 * Rudyard KipUng. 
 
 54 
 
' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 The nation acted up to its highest and most 
 glorious traditions when it went to war in 
 August 1914 ; and since then it has shown a 
 grit and a power of initiative and a service and 
 self-sacrifice which has astonished the world, 
 and not the least the enemy which had dared 
 to count upon the British as a decadent race. 
 
 So far we are all agreed. 
 
 But now what shallow critics fail to see is 
 that it is the greatness of our vocation which 
 induces Repentance ; it is only aspiration which 
 makes anyone sorry that they are not better ; 
 when we see the glorious role assigned to us 
 by God in averting the degradation and 
 slavery of the human race (what has happened 
 in Belgium now is proof positive of this), and 
 the trampling under foot of small nations and 
 the " right to live " for Serbia, Belgium, 
 Montenegro, Poland, Roumania, then it is 
 that every true patriot deplores as he never 
 deplored before — the broken fellowship which 
 led to the evils of 191 4, the " hidden scourge " 
 which affects our population, the ravages of 
 drink in the nation ; the overcrowding of the 
 slums in our great cities and the thousands in 
 the country who live without any open ac- 
 knowledgment of God. Here we are, called to 
 
 S5 
 
* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 a long and hard struggle to see the war through 
 to the bitter end (for never must we leave it 
 to be done all over again by our children) ; 
 called to sacrifice our every comfort and even 
 what we think necessities in ordinary times, 
 while our men are daily sacrificing their lives ; 
 called when the war is over, to shine like 
 a great star with an overwhelming influence 
 in the world we have never had before, and 
 because we are called to do this, therefore we 
 are all the more bound as a nation to ask : 
 '' Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ! " 
 How can I be worthy of this position ? If 
 what we say and do and think is to influence 
 the whole human race, as what the British 
 Empire of the future says and does and thinks 
 will influence the whole world, then can we 
 be too careful that the religion we practice is 
 the true religion, that the morality we profess 
 reflects the will of God, and that the social 
 condition of our own country shall be at least 
 some reflection of the human brotherhood 
 without which the world at large can never 
 be a kingdom of God ? 
 
 " What wilt Thou have me to do ? " We are 
 bound to ask it first as a nation, and a voice 
 seems to come at once from Heaven : " Come 
 
 S6 
 
* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 back to God as a nation ; know Him in your 
 homes ; worship Him in the houses set apart 
 for the glory of His Holy Name ; abolish the 
 false double standard of morality for men and 
 women which has obtained too long ; let rich 
 and poor work together in loving brotherhood ; 
 let Capital and Labour cease their eternal 
 wrangle ; I gave to the children of men plenty 
 of land, plenty of water, plenty of food and 
 plenty of air ; start again to see if human 
 mismanagement and greed need always spoil 
 the distribution ; it is the law of human life 
 to work, but the fruits of industry are quite 
 sufficient to sustain you all. 
 
 " What will I have thee to do ? Accept for 
 the first time in the history of the country, 
 the full Christian law of love, and you shall 
 have a brotherhood at home which shall con- 
 vince the world of the beauty and reality of a 
 Kingdom of God on earth." 
 
 (2) But is the Church to do nothing ? Why ! 
 as you know, we have said from the beginning 
 of the National Mission, that the Church 
 must repent first, and for the same reason as 
 the nation, because of the glorious thing which 
 it might be. 
 
 The Church has in many ways come out 
 
 57 
 
' What wilt Thou have Mc to do ? ' 
 
 splendidly during the war ; it has poured out 
 its choirs, its guilds ; its servers ; four thou- 
 sand clergy offered as chaplains during the first 
 week of the war ; thirty priests in the Navy and 
 Army have already * given their lives, besides 
 those who have been wounded. But because 
 we have done this, are we not also to say unto 
 the nation : " What wilt Thou have me to 
 do ? " 
 
 There is dawning before the Church of this 
 country the most glorious prospect ; always 
 Catholic really, she has discovered to the full 
 her Catholic treasures, while still passionately 
 Protestant against the claims of domination 
 from Rome. 
 
 As Bishop Lightfoot said in his last sermon, 
 " Under the Church which has unbroken 
 orders in one hand and the open Bible in 
 the other, Christendom will one day be 
 reunited." 
 
 She still has her unbroken orders and the 
 open Bible, and is showing herself to-day a 
 true missionary force. If she had always led 
 the mission work of the country as she leads it 
 now, the millions of Wesleyans would be in the 
 
 * Up to the end of 191 5. This has now risen to over 
 sixty. 
 
 58 
 
* What wilt Thou have Mc to do ? ' 
 
 Church of England to-day. Why should they 
 not come back ? * 
 
 Then again the great Russian Church is 
 looking with love and affection upon the 
 Catholic Church of its great ally ; Bishop 
 Bury's wonderful reception in Russia in 191 5 
 was meant to express something far more than 
 affection for himself, and although there are 
 no signs of it at present, we cannot believe 
 that the millions of devout Roman Catholics 
 are going to continue for ever that official 
 attitude towards the great Eastern Church and 
 ourselves which has for so long rent the seamless 
 robe of Christ. 
 
 But, if Bishop Lightfoot's prophecy is ever 
 to be fulfilled, then the Church must also ask : 
 " What wilt Thou have me to do ? " As an 
 outcome of the Mission a strong committee 
 is already about to be appointed to work out 
 the whole matter of Church Reform. The 
 bishops themselves are only too ready to change 
 anything whatever in their own manner of 
 living which the Church may consider hinders 
 its work, and a ruthless hand should be laid 
 in this great day upon scandals of administra- 
 
 * Conferences are being held with this object this very 
 month, January 1918. 
 
 59 
 
' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 tion or method, which have retarded too long 
 its efficiency and power. What the Holy 
 Spirit shows the Church in this tremendous 
 day that it should do, and that without fear 
 and favour it must do. 
 
 (3) But then comes the really personal ques- 
 tion, and for each one of us to ask : " What 
 wouldst Thou have me to do ? " It is only too 
 sadly easy to talk at large as to what the nation 
 and the Church are to do, but no one is really 
 touched by the Mission who does not ask : 
 " What wilt Thou have me to do ? " And here 
 the great complexity of such a congregation 
 makes an answer difficult to suggest. The 
 youngest choir boy present must have some 
 mission resolution in his mind : " I will try 
 to keep my thoughts from wandering in church. 
 I will sing — as Jenny Lind said — ' I will sing 
 for Jesus Christ.' " 
 
 But what of the business man among you, 
 tired with his week's work ? Well ! I can tell 
 you what one business man has resolved to 
 do — to give up manufacturing what he now 
 understands from the Mission does harm to 
 the world ; and the sacrifice will cost him some 
 hundreds a year. Again, a partner of a great 
 manufacturing firm said to me the other day, 
 
 60 
 
* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 " A far larger proportion of the profits of all 
 industries must go to wages than ever have 
 gone before ; but of course it must be matched 
 by the giving up of the doctrine, as economically- 
 unsound as it is morally indefensible, that the 
 workman restricts himself to a certain rate of 
 output laid down by his Union." 
 
 The new country that is to be can only be 
 produced by sacrifice, as the world was re- 
 deemed on Calvary by sacrifice, and as it is 
 being saved by sacrifice on the battlefields of 
 Europe to-day : 
 
 " No easy hopes or lies 
 
 Shall bring us to our goal, 
 But iron sacrifice 
 
 Of body, will and soul." 
 
 But, if the world is to be saved eventually 
 from war altogether the world' must be con- 
 verted ; " They shall not hurt or destroy in 
 all My holy mountain," when the earth is " filled 
 with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters 
 cover the sea," but how can it be done ? 
 
 Others must say : " I will give up then my 
 well-paid post here and go out to India or 
 China as a teacher or a medical missionary ! " 
 
 These were the kind of resolutions which 
 followed the first day of Intercession for 
 
 6i 
 
' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 
 
 Foreign Missions. These are the resolutions 
 which must be made again to-day. 
 
 Some may have to begin at the beginning : 
 " I will begin to pray again, I will come and 
 be confirmed, I will come back to my Com- 
 munion ; I will start Family Prayer ; I will 
 cut off this cursed temptation which has spoilt 
 my life." 
 
 All I plead for now, in what must be a 
 compressed appeal in the midst of a long service, 
 " For God's sake, decide on something ; " let 
 there be something to show for being allowed 
 to live in a day of God, and when the Great 
 Day comes at last, may it find in a changed 
 nation, a changed Church and a changed 
 character the marks of the Fire which has been 
 sent from Heaven in answer to prayer during 
 the National Mission to purify and cleanse the 
 world. 
 
 ^2 
 
IV 
 REALITIES * 
 
 I. The Power of the Cross 
 
 " God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom the world is crucified 
 unto me, and I unto the world." — Gal. vi. 14. 
 
 The Cross 
 
 There is one thing which has come to its own 
 during the war and that is The Cross. 
 
 It is not too much to say that before the 
 war the language about the Cross was losing, 
 to many, its reality ; the old language was 
 being used but : 
 
 '* It was all a tale of little meaning, 
 Though the words were strong." 
 
 Some even of the clergy felt it hard to speak 
 in the same moving way as they felt the 
 
 * Addresses delivered at St. Martin's in the Fields, 
 Advent 1916. These addresses, given in the dinner hour to 
 the large congregations all of whom have to return to their 
 offices on the stroke of time, are necessarily given in a short 
 and compressed form. 
 
 63 
 
Realities 
 
 subject demanded, and gradually a gospel of 
 social betterment or rational philosophy took 
 the place of the old preaching of the Cross. 
 But what a difference these two and a half 
 years have made, and just as again and again 
 the cross or crucifix is the one thing left 
 standing in the chaos and ruin of France and 
 Belgium, so the one thing left standing in this 
 welter of war is the Cross. 
 
 I. And this has come about for several 
 reasons. 
 
 (i) In the first place, the alternate gospel 
 of scientific advance and Rationalist philosophy 
 has proved the most disastrous failure. 
 
 It is an old story upon which we need not 
 dwell again ; it was a very attractive gospel 
 and it was leading away many in this country, 
 but Cardinal Mercier could tell us better than 
 anyone, all that it was able to do in his beloved 
 Belgium ; it has gone to its grave amid the 
 execration of the civilised world. Whatever 
 else may be going to save and ennoble mankind, 
 we shall never hear again of the Superman, 
 nor imagine that scientific progress is by itself 
 going to save the world. 
 
 (2) But, by itself, this would not have been 
 enough, if the contrary gospel had not sud- 
 
 64 
 
Realities 
 
 denly shown a stability and inspiration amid 
 the falling debris of materialism, and against 
 the background of a world in flames. Nothing 
 has made great neutral nations like Japan 
 believe in the reality of the Cross, as seeing 
 our nation live up to its profession. The expect- 
 ation that heathen nations would talk about the 
 break down of Christianity was natural but 
 has been proved absolutely false. 
 
 (3) Then came the advent of the war and 
 the world had plenty of opportunity of 
 watching the Cross at the opening of the war, 
 and testing its effect. 
 
 A great cross was carried by a priest in 
 front of every Russian regiment, and the motto 
 given by the Czar was the motto of the Cross : 
 " Greater love hath no man than this, that 
 a man lay down his life for his friends." 
 
 What result has this had ? Not a woman 
 or child touched, not a church injured, not 
 a civilian interfered with as the great Crusade 
 entered Poland. 
 
 While, at the other side of Europe, the 
 sober pages of the most self-restrained man 
 in Europe, Lord Bryce, reveals to a horrified 
 world the results of an anti-Christian gospel 
 of " Might is Right." 
 
 F 65 
 
Realities 
 
 (4) The months pass on, and tale after tale 
 of heroism is sent home, and at last the most 
 moving tale of all, the pictures of what our 
 men are bearing to save the freedom of the 
 world. 
 
 And Sir H. Newbolt has told us in words 
 which cannot be surpassed what these pictures 
 have done. 
 
 "O living pictures of the dead, 
 
 O songs without a sound, 
 O fellowship whose phantom tread 
 
 Hallows a phantom ground, 
 How in a dream have these revealed 
 
 The faith I had not found ! " * 
 
 In Other words the Cross to a thousand 
 households becomes intelligible ; the precious 
 blood of their dearest boy mingles with the 
 Precious Blood which flowed in Calvary ; 
 again the world is being redeemed by precious 
 blood. " Christ did what my boy did ; my boy 
 imitated what Christ did " they say. 
 
 (5) In a flash the Cross becomes the only 
 true consolation for mourners — even the life 
 after death would be not enough if their dear 
 one had not nobly and worthily died, and if 
 
 * These lines refer to the effect of the first film matinees 
 of the Somme battle. 
 
Realities 
 
 they die by the side of the Son of God, they 
 die nobly indeed. 
 
 " I am so proud of my husband," said a 
 young widow who was in this church on 
 Saturday at the Memorial Service, and she 
 is proud really because he died for his friends. 
 
 (6) But the comfort goes much deeper than 
 to the mourner — it is the one thing which 
 saves everyone's faith in God. 
 
 As you receive the boys into your arms from 
 the trenches and lay them down in their agony, 
 the one thing which enables you to look up 
 to God and bless Him and not curse Him is 
 the Cross. 
 
 " He suffered too." " I thirst," He said. 
 He too lay upon the hard ground. 
 
 He is no crowned Apollo who never dipped 
 his finger in the world's anguish, but " a Man 
 of sorrows and acquainted with grief." 
 
 If there are here to-day some who are dis- 
 tressed about the war, who are losing their 
 faith, who have lost the light of their eyes — 
 I pray them to look up to-day and see standing 
 among the ruins and shining with a strange 
 mysterious light, the Cross. 
 
 To-day, if never before, " The Cross of 
 Christ is more to us than all His miracles." 
 
 67 
 
Realities 
 
 II. But, if this is so, as we look into the past 
 or face the present, still more clearly does the 
 Cross shine out as we peer into the future. 
 
 What is going to be the outcome of it all ? 
 
 What is even going to enable us to win 
 the war ? 
 
 We are checked at every point by human 
 selfishness, class suspicion, and a long-cherished 
 notion that a man's life consisteth in the 
 abundance of things which he possesseth ; we 
 look forward to a new country, a new empire, 
 a new Church, and a new world. Let us face 
 the fact at once, there is no possibility of 
 getting any of the four, without the Cross. 
 
 (i) A new brotherhood is impossible in 
 this country without immense sacrifice, the 
 employers giving up perhaps as much as a 
 third of their profits to wages, and wage- 
 earners giving up the false economic doctrine 
 that you can make money by restricting output. 
 
 But it is only when each class face facts at 
 the foot of the Cross that we shall ever melt 
 down this deep-rooted suspicion. 
 
 The beautiful brotherhood in the trenches 
 must be reproduced at home. 
 
 (2) Nor can there be a new Church until 
 all self-will and prejudice are eliminated and 
 
 68 
 
Realities 
 
 every dividing principle really looked at as it 
 was seen on Calvary. 
 
 (3) A new empire can only be attained 
 when thousands forego the comforts of home 
 to go out to build up new homes in Canada 
 and Australia, and priests in peaceful vicar- 
 ages at home go out with them to give them 
 the Word and Sacraments. 
 
 (4) There can be no new world until, not in 
 ones but hundreds, men and women will go out 
 and teach the outcasts in Madras or the milhons 
 in China. 
 
 III. But there are many grounds of hope 
 that this may be so. 
 
 (i) Man finds he is born for the Cross. 
 " I was never so happy in my Hfe," wrote a 
 man who had tasted the joy of service for the 
 first time. 
 
 (2) The wonderful cheerfulness of the 
 wounded and suffering. 
 
 (3) The mysterious strength given to the 
 mourners. 
 
 (4) The strange change which has come over 
 men not impressed at home. 
 
 In the midst of the surrounding darkness, 
 the Cross is in the field, and when we all have 
 really followed the Cross, not only will victory 
 
 69 
 
Realities 
 
 crown our arms, but there will at last dawn 
 upon an astonished world, the new kingdom 
 Christ and our boys have died to win. 
 
 REALITIES 
 
 II. The Strength and Depth of the Bible 
 
 " Thy righteousness standeth like the strong mountains ; 
 Thy judgments are like the great deep." — Ps. xxxvi. 6, 
 
 The great danger of being too near a thing 
 is that you cannot see it in all its proportions, 
 and the still greater danger of being too 
 familiar with a thing is that you often fail to 
 see how great it is. Take, for instance, the 
 mountains and the sea. If you live very near 
 a great mountain, you cannot see it in its true 
 proportions at all. You might easily be per- 
 suaded that a little hillock which you could see 
 at a distance from your window was as big as 
 the mighty mountain under which you habitu- 
 ally dwelt. And so again with the mighty 
 sea. I have known people who have lived by 
 the sea who have lost all sense of its mystery 
 and majesty; they are too busy to notice its 
 varying colours ; they ignore its marvellous 
 depths and its hidden wonders, and because 
 
 70 
 
Realities 
 
 they see the children paddling in the waves 
 on the beach, forget that it is the same sea 
 which, roused to the grandeur of its full 
 wrath, can wreck an Armada, and save the 
 freedom of the world. 
 
 I am led to make these reflections by trying 
 to find some parallel to what the Bible means to 
 us, and it is of course the very reflection made 
 by the Psalmist all those hundreds of years 
 ago : " Thy righteousness standeth like the 
 strong mountains ; Thy judgments are like 
 the great deep." 
 
 I. The Bible has all the strength and virility 
 and grandeur of the mountains, and all the 
 depth and variety and saltness of the sea, 
 and yet to thousands all this is lost upon them 
 because they are so near to this mountain and 
 so famiUar with this sea. Let me ask you at 
 once — how constantly do you read the Bible ? 
 When you do read it, do you feel as you do 
 when you are looking at a glorious mountain 
 view or drinking in fresh draughts of Hfe from 
 the invigorating sea ? and if not, why not ? 
 For if there is one thing which has come to 
 its own, during the war, it is the Bible. 
 
 (i) Its warnings have come true. 
 
 The Psalms have had a new meaning to 
 71 
 
Realities 
 
 thousands of us. We had grown to take little 
 interest in the description of overwhelming 
 pride, the cruelty of it and its inevitable fall, 
 until we saw a proud nation make a bid for 
 the empire of the world and so nearly succeed 
 that we brace ourselves, as the Psalmist did, 
 upon the thought of the far greater strength 
 of God. 
 
 Or we hear the denunciations of those " who 
 add sin to sin," " who rob the hireling of his 
 wages," " who go down to Egypt for help and 
 put their trust only in chariots and horses." 
 But it is not until we find ourselves crippled 
 in our righteous cause, by those who add 
 Drink to Lust and Lust to Drink ; by the broken 
 fellowship in the nation which leads to per- 
 petual war between Capital and Labour, and 
 by the thousands in the nation who never 
 worship or acknowledge God at all — it is not 
 till then that we know the Bible is right in 
 its warnings. 
 
 (2) We have found in it inspiration to make 
 us play the man. You won't find a word in 
 the Bible about war being glorious for its own 
 sake, but you will find that the Bible from end 
 to end incites you to take your stand by the 
 weak against the strong. It is a strong and 
 
 72 
 
Realities 
 
 virile book ; the New Testament virtues of 
 meekness and unselfishness presuppose and are 
 superadded to the Old Testament virtues of 
 courage, fortitude and perseverance in a noble 
 task ; Christ Himself was the most perfect 
 and knightly character in the whole history 
 of Chivalry, and the one shadow that never 
 darkened his splendid feat of arms was fear. 
 
 No wonder the soldier has taken his Bible 
 into battle as the soldier's special friend. 
 
 (3) But, if its strength and virility have 
 shone out, so has its power to comfort. While 
 it is the soldier's trumpet, it is the mourner's 
 pillow. There has been many a Bible these 
 past three years wet with happy tears. 
 
 " The souls of the righteous are in the hands 
 of God, there shall no torment touch them ; 
 in the sight of the unwise they seem to die and 
 their departure is taken for misery, but they 
 are in peace." 
 
 " I am the Resurrection and the Life ; he 
 that beheveth in Me, though he die, yet shall 
 he live, and whoso trusteth and believeth on 
 Me, shall never die." 
 
 " Those who are alive shall not prevent 
 them that are asleep, for the dead in Christ 
 shall rise first ; then shall we who are alive be 
 
 73 
 
Realities 
 
 caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and 
 so shall v\ie ever be with the Lord — wherefore 
 comfort ye one another with these words," 
 
 We do comfort one another with these 
 words, and we pillow our heads on these 
 promises and assurances, and as we do, God 
 giveth His beloved sleep, and but for the 
 Bible there would be no rest at all for the 
 tortured soul of man. Truly " God's right- 
 eousness standeth like the strong mountains," 
 and never did we realise till now the truth of 
 its warnings, the manliness of its teaching and 
 the strength of its comfort. 
 
 IL But, if the righteousness of God which 
 is portrayed in the Bible is like the strong 
 mountains, His judgments recorded in it are 
 like the great deep. 
 
 (i) It is only familiarity — fatal familiarity 
 which has bred contempt — which prevents us 
 from seeins: this wonderful fact that the Bible 
 is like the ocean in this special respect, that 
 while it is shallow enough for children to wade 
 in and enjoy, it is deep enough for the most 
 learned to get soon out of their depths. 
 
 People sometimes thoughtlessly laugh about 
 Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, for- 
 getting that the Bible was meant for the 
 
 74 
 
Realities 
 
 childhood of the world. Would a^ chapter on 
 protoplasm have been more useful for that 
 purpose ? 
 
 " Picture, prove, persuade," are supposed to 
 be the secrets of eloquence. First " picture " 
 and it is the vivid pictures in the Bible which 
 give it its eternal charm to the childhood of 
 the world. While, on the other hand, you 
 will see an old scholar hke Bishop Westcott 
 or Dr. Swete still toiling on with unexhausted 
 interest, trying to fathom the depths of the 
 unfathomable truth which lies hid in the book 
 which contains the Word of God. 
 
 Here is the whole secret, it contains the 
 Word of God ; all difficulties raised about the 
 Bible forget this fundamental fact ; it is written 
 by men ; it is written by many men ; it is 
 written in sundry times and in divers manners, 
 and therefore it is coloured by the prejudices 
 and even mistakes of the men who wrote, but 
 all the time the Spirit of God used them ; 
 they spoke as moved by the Holy Ghost, and 
 therefore deep and unfathomable as the depths 
 of ocean, Hes the Truth of God which it 
 contains ; His judgments are like the great 
 deep. 
 
 (2) But, if it is at once as shallow and deep 
 75 
 
Realities 
 
 as the ocean, so also does it show the ocean's 
 changing colour. 
 
 You have seen the ocean smiling like a merry 
 child — one of the most famous descriptions in 
 an ancient poet speaks of the " unnumbered 
 smile of ocean" — you have seen it frown in 
 angry froth and foam ; you have seen it still 
 with an impenetrable peace. 
 
 But so also with the Bible ; there are no such 
 ringing notes of joy as you will find in the 
 Bible : " When the Lord turneth the captivity 
 of Sion , then were we like unto them that dream. 
 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and 
 our tongue with joy." 
 
 But let the impenitent sinner try to push 
 on his way Hke Balaam, then Hke an angel 
 with the drawn sword in his hand stands the 
 Church with the Bible in its hand ; he finds 
 " the Word of God sharper than any two-edged 
 sword, smiting asunder to the joints and 
 marrow." 
 
 (3) But we have not fully appreciated the 
 likeness of the Bible to the great deep, if we 
 leave out the salt which while it dashes into 
 the eyes sometimes and makes them sting, is an 
 enduring element which keeps the world fresh. 
 
 " I always read out a bit of the Bible in my 
 
 76 
 
Realities 
 
 school," said a schoolmaster to me years ago, 
 " it seems to keep the air fresh." 
 
 " Let your speech be always with grace, 
 seasoned with salt." 
 
 " Have salt in yourselves and be at peace 
 one with another." 
 
 Nowhere shall we get the salt into ourselves 
 better than studying the Bible. 
 
 III. Now how do we stand with regard to 
 the Bible to-day ? 
 
 (i) Do we really imagine that the Bible is 
 " played out " ? Never was the Bible stronger 
 than it is to-day; just because we know now 
 better when the books were written ; just 
 because the intellect of Europe has been 
 fastened on the Bible for the last fifty years, 
 all the more clearly do we know to-day, how 
 strong is it as a mountain, and how deep as a 
 deep ! 
 
 Many mistakes have been purged away, but 
 always mistakes which men made about the 
 Bible, not mistakes in' the Bible itself ; many 
 misunderstandings have been cleared up, but 
 you are yourselves making the misunderstanding 
 of your lives, if you think that a single criticism 
 has really touched a vital truth. 
 
 (2) Or are you one of those who affect to 
 
 11 
 
Realities 
 
 despise tKe Bible because you are a good 
 Churchman ? This distinction between the 
 Church and the Bible is a wholly modern 
 thing ; the Church brings us the Bible in 
 its hand as its most treasured possession; it 
 existed before the Bible because it was members 
 of the Church who wrote the Bible, and the 
 Bible describes with touching clearness the 
 beginning and early struggles of the Church. 
 
 But the idea that in later days we were to 
 be split up into Church Christians and Bible 
 Christians is a modern and totally erroneous 
 idea. " The Church to teach, and the Bible 
 to prove " is the motto of the Church of 
 England, and nothing may be taught as 
 essential to eternal salvation except what may 
 be proved by certain warrant of Holy Scripture ; 
 there is no other branch of the Church which 
 reads in public four passages of Holy Scripture 
 in her daily services, and Dr. Liddon was 
 surely right in calling them " letters from 
 Heaven." 
 
 (3) No ! what we want more than anything 
 else to-day, is not criticism of the Bible, but 
 study of it, intellectually and devotionally ; 
 intellectually, so as to be saved from foolish 
 mistakes, and above all devotionally. What we 
 
 7« 
 
Realities 
 
 need is to get down upon our knees with it, 
 and meditate upon its height and its depth ; 
 what will help us in life and comfort us in 
 death will be to read again and again its 
 warnings, its hopes, its promises ; to take the 
 Bible into the heart is not only to take in a 
 fount of English undefiled, but a strength of 
 character and a depth of vision which can be 
 received in no other way. 
 
 (4) And above all, it is our bounden duty to 
 multiply, translate and send throughout the 
 world the book which, taught by a loving 
 and believing Church has meant to thousands 
 nothing less than life from the dead. 
 
 No doubt for a time there was a prejudice 
 against the British and Foreign Bible Society 
 in the minds of some Churchmen ; and if it 
 was really imagined that the Bible was meant 
 to do its work without the living voice, that 
 prejudice might be justified. But it is the 
 handmaid of every Missionary Society in the 
 whole world ; its work is wonderful. 
 
 It has translated the Scriptures into every 
 known language, and it is as the necessary 
 handmaid of all the Societies that I commend 
 its work to your generosity to-day. 
 
 79 
 
Realities 
 
 REALITIES 
 
 III. The Church 
 
 " That He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, 
 not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing ; but that 
 it should be holy and without blemish." — Ephks. v. 27. 
 
 There are few more mischievous distinctions 
 which have been drawn in recent years than 
 the distinction which has been drawn between 
 the Church and the Bible. Every instructed 
 Churchman simply loves his Bible ; he finds 
 in it the grandeur and width and strength of 
 a mountain ; the health-giving power, the 
 versatility and the depth of the sea ! The 
 righteousness of God described in it, standeth 
 like the strong mountains ; His judgments like 
 the great deep. 
 
 But the fact remains that the Church is 
 the body to which Christ trusted the task 
 of converting the world — it was to preparing a 
 Church He devoted the greater part of His 
 ministry, and it was with almost a cry of joy 
 that He exclaimed when at last He had found 
 a rock on which He could build, in the few 
 who at last really understood — that He cried, 
 " On this rock I will build my Church, and the 
 gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." It 
 
 80 
 
Realities 
 
 was the Church which He addressed with His 
 latest breath " Go ye into all the world and 
 preach the Gospel to every creature " 
 
 But alas ! it was a Church very different 
 to anything we see in the world to-day • it 
 was to be a Church without spot or wrinkle 
 or any such thmg ! It was to be a united 
 Church, so united that the world was to be 
 Trrt °^*^^.U--ty of God by the Unitv 
 of the Church ; ,t was to be so loving that all 
 the heathen were to say, "See how these 
 Christians love one another ; " it was to be so 
 generous that no one could really look on 
 anything as his own, when any brother lacked 
 what he needed ; so missionary that the only 
 two ap ues in a certain place were sent away 
 without complaint on a missionary journey 
 
 In a powerful book I was reading the other 
 day, a chapter was headed " Wanted-a 
 Church, and I beheve that the title expresses 
 n a paradox the need of to-day; it is one of 
 the discoveries of the war-that what the 
 world needs is a Church. 
 
 I. There can be little doubt that if there 
 had been in the world such a Church as this- 
 
 (I) In the first place, there would have been 
 no war at all ; so great by this time would have 
 
Realities 
 
 been the influence of such a Church that the 
 pagan Gospel of " Might is Right " could not 
 have grown up, as it has grown up, in its 
 presence. 
 
 (2) If in spite of it war had broken out, 
 such a Church would have made impossible 
 the horrors of it which have scandalised 
 humanity ; its intervention would have meant 
 something very different from the feeble 
 remonstrances of the Pope, from the apparent 
 endorsement of crime by the Lutheran Church 
 of Germany, or from the powerlessness of the 
 protest of our own Church which naturally 
 has been only able to affect and keep Christian 
 and chivalrous the conduct of our own soldiers. 
 
 (3) In all probability, such a Church would 
 at least have made war impossible for the 
 future. " They shall not hurt or destroy in 
 all my holy mountain, when the earth is filled 
 with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters 
 cover the sea " — such a united, loving, generous 
 and missionary Church would not take long 
 to convert the world. 
 
 II. And therefore we are bound to ask 
 to-day, How are we to recover this glorious 
 Church, without spot or wrinkle or any such 
 thing, of which the world caught a glimpse 
 
 82 
 
Realities 
 
 for a few short years, but which has vanished 
 like " a dream when one awaketh " ? 
 
 (i) The first and most obvious thing which 
 must happen is that its divisions must be 
 healed. Instead of being a symbol of unity and 
 a proof of the oneness of God, it has become 
 a synonym for discord and a field for perhaps 
 the most bitter and unscrupulous quarrels 
 which have divided the world in its long 
 history ; the odium theologicum is the worst 
 hatred of all. It is a trial to the faith of 
 many, that one nation like Germany to enforce 
 its idea of unity under German influence 
 should have been allowed by God to have 
 plunged the world into chaos, but I confess 
 it is even more a trial to my faith that the 
 Roman Church should have been allowed by 
 God to try to enforce precisely the same 
 claim spiritually, as Germany makes physically 
 (bolstered up by documents believed for two 
 hundred years to be genuine, now known to 
 be forgeries), and so has broken up the 
 Church and plunged it into chaos ! 
 
 Neither can be successful, for the spirit of 
 nationality is as strong in Churches as in 
 nations, but it is undoubtedly this persistent 
 claim which breaks up the peace of the 
 
Realities 
 
 Church to-day. Few will deny that in saying 
 this I lay my finger upon the one real rock of 
 offence ; the difference between East and 
 West of the Procession of the Spirit from or 
 through the Son is quite capable of mutual 
 explanation ; the return of the separated 
 bodies to the scriptural order of the Episcopate 
 is quite possible with a little mutual give and 
 take. 
 
 But the one unauthorised claim which, while 
 made, will always rend the seamless robe of 
 Christ, is the claim that one branch of the 
 Church is the whole Church, and that no 
 ministry is valid which does not owe its 
 authority to and claim its sanction from the 
 Bishop of Rome. 
 
 It really is enough to make the angels weep 
 to think of what the Church might have been 
 to-day, with all the stately ceremonial of Rome, 
 the gorgeous music of the Russian Church, 
 and the simple piety of its peasant members ; 
 the doctrinal strength of the Presbyterians, the 
 fiery zeal of the Wesleyans ; the intellectual 
 keenness of many of the Congregationalists and 
 Baptists ; and the mission fervour and spiritual 
 devotion of the Anglican Church as it is to-day, 
 all poured into one channel of molten glory 
 
 84 
 
Realities 
 
 to change and ennoble and purify the world : 
 Truly the world is hungering for a united 
 Church. 
 
 (2) But it would not be enough to have it 
 united — it must renew its youth — it must be 
 always young. It must have " no spot or 
 wrinkle or any such thing." No jealousy 
 among its members must mar its working ; 
 no self-seeking, must lower its priesthood ; 
 there must be no bad spots in it where no work 
 is being done ; there must be no wrinkle of 
 ugly despair or hopelessness ; it must be always 
 to the end " as a bride which adorneth herself 
 with her jewels " and with the face of the 
 morning. 
 
 Who will give the Church back her youth, 
 her hope and her love ? Who will burn up 
 the long past of misunderstandings, and all 
 the bitter party spirit of to-day, and give us 
 back the Church as she left her Lord's Hand 
 and as she will have to be if the Bridegroom is 
 to come again to claim His Bride ? Truly 
 the Holy Spirit with His recreating power 
 must begin upon the Church. Only a re- 
 created, rejuvenated Church can revive the 
 world. 
 
 (3) But there is even more to seek than 
 
 8s 
 
Realities 
 
 union and mutual love, the glorious Church 
 must be unworldly. " My Kingdom is not 
 of this world." It has to be in this world ; 
 it has to grapple with all the problems of this 
 world ; it has to be sunk in the world as leaven 
 is sunk in the dough, as salt is laid on the meat, 
 but it is never to take its tone from the world ; 
 it has never to lower its moral teaching to the 
 talk of the smoking-room, its religion to the 
 religion of the society drawing-room. 
 
 It is never to be a sphere for a successful 
 career but always a field for lowly service ; 
 its idol is never to be the " popular man " ; its 
 hero is to be the selfless, deserted and often 
 for a time unpopular priest. 
 
 The Church of the parish is not to be run 
 like a successful concert-room but to be like 
 its Master among rich and poor " as one that 
 serveth " — serving with a crown of thorns. 
 
 (4) But there is one more note of a glorious 
 Church, essential to its glory, and that is, it 
 must be missionary. 
 
 It is never really still, though outwardly 
 calm ; it thirsts for men like its Master ; you 
 must not be able to glut its spiritual hunger 
 or tire out its zeal ; it rests by the well but 
 even then there is the Samaritan woman, and 
 
 S6 
 
Realities 
 
 even to the quiet place apart the multitude 
 find their way. 
 
 III. Now with an urgency probably greater 
 than anv other to-day, the question must 
 be faced how can we produce, or restore or 
 recreate for the world, this glorious Church, 
 without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. 
 
 (1) First, by believing in its possibiHty. It 
 may take a long time ; so far as this country 
 is concerned, the reuniting of all the separated 
 bodies into one body is an immense step 
 towards their reuniting with the mother 
 Church of England which once they left ; 
 the war is joining us in bonds of mutual re- 
 spect and admiration vdth the Russian Church, 
 which knew little of us before. 
 
 When once we have realised what conquering 
 the sin of the world really means — perhaps the 
 realisation of the danger will draw us together 
 against a common foe. 
 
 (2) And having believed, for instance, in 
 unity, let us work together to bring it about ; 
 let all things be said or done in charity. Let 
 no one think that what I have said about the 
 Roman theory being the rock of offence was 
 said from want of charity. I have the pro- 
 foundest admiration for the devotion of Jesuit 
 
 87 
 
Realities 
 
 missionaries ; for the humble and devoted 
 lives of individual Roman Catholics ; I have 
 no doubt that they honestly believe what they 
 are told ; w^e must never despair that by 
 charity and mutual explanation, the truth may 
 one day prevail. 
 
 (3) We must determine that so far as our 
 own particular parish is concerned the Church 
 has no spot or wrinkle or any such thing ; that 
 so far, say, as our deanery is concerned every 
 force for good is recognised and owned, and 
 that with regard to the next parish, we " look 
 not every man on his own things but every 
 man also on the things of others " ; and that 
 the diocese is the unit of the Church, not the 
 parish. 
 
 (4) We must pray for a missionary spirit 
 and pray for it together ; it is the corporate 
 life of the Church which wants reviving ; the 
 Church is too often a collection of individuals ; 
 the diocese a collection of individual Churches. 
 One reason that I am going round the diocese 
 myself, deanery by deanery, is to ask the 
 Church, as it has knelt in corporate penitence, 
 now to take corporate action to save the world. 
 
 Let our prayer be " Come, Holy Spirit, 
 fill the Church again. Remember not the 
 
 88 
 
Realities 
 
 sins and offences of our youth, but according 
 to Thy mercy, look Thou upon us, O Lord, 
 for Thy goodness " ; in order that so, when 
 the great Advent of Christ comes at last, 
 the Church of His love, gathering up her 
 splendid limbs and with her face towards the 
 dawn, may rise in all her youth and strength 
 to meet Him. 
 
 89 
 
KNOWING THE LORD * 
 
 " They shall teach no more every man his neighbour and 
 every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord ; for they 
 shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest, 
 saith the Lord." — Jer. xxxi. 34. 
 
 The war has given us many revelations and 
 inspired us with many hopes. It has revealed 
 (i) That no man can live without God. 
 " Nothing does any good out here but prayer, 
 and trust in God. War is a great purge," 
 writes a young man home from the trenches. 
 When a man is face to face time after time 
 with instant death, things take their true 
 proportions — God and the soul, the soul and 
 God — they are the only realities in the world. 
 (2) But so also has a great revelation come to 
 those at home. When the dear boy has gone, 
 the only thing which seems to matter is whether 
 we shall see him again ; when the widowed 
 wife looks in vain for the letter which never 
 comes, there is one longing in her heart to 
 
 * A rallying cry at a Church Army service. 
 90 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 know that her husband is aHve ; that he still 
 loves her ; that she will see him again. 
 
 All the things which occupied so much time 
 and thought in the old days — social functions, 
 dress, petty little ambitions — seem lost in the 
 distance ; if the Lord alone can restore me 
 my beloved, let me learn to know the Lord. 
 
 (3) But the revelation has not been solely our 
 need of God, the war has revealed how few 
 have really found Him. When we are told 
 that the most successful chaplain in the Navy 
 has twenty communicants on a ship of a 
 thousand men, or ask the chaplains in charge 
 of the great camps at home how many they 
 have Sunday by Sunday at the Holy Com- 
 munion, or study the percentage of those who 
 attend Church in any district out of the 
 population of the parish, we cannot deny 
 that we have at present failed to make the 
 people, in the full sense, know the Lord. 
 
 (4) But may we not go further and say that 
 the war has revealed to us all how little we 
 ourselves have known the Lord. 
 
 Are there none of you whose faith is going 
 down like a pack of cards under the stress of 
 the war itself ? Are there none saying that 
 God is dead ; that Christianity has broken 
 
 91 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 down ; that the righteous have been forsaken ; 
 that their seed are, as a matter of fact, begging 
 their bread ? or asking, " What about the 
 unoffending Belgians, and the brave Serbians ? " 
 What about the discomfort and poverty which 
 on some, though not all, the war has entailed ? 
 
 Yes, no doubt, the war has been like one of 
 those great flash-lights we see so often in 
 London, piercing through the darkness, and 
 reveahng things as they are, death, life, God, 
 the soul. Faith, Hope, Love — we see the only 
 things which abide when everything else is 
 burnt up, and have to lament our scanty share 
 of what turns out now to be the true riches. 
 
 But this very fact is the first of the new 
 hopes which are springing up to-day. 
 
 (i) The very recognition of the facts is the 
 first hopeful sign ; if it is true that God 
 resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the 
 humble, then the very self-abasement, the 
 humility which have come over nations. 
 Church and individuals, is the best sign. 
 
 When we talk of national repentance we do 
 not mean that we have not an absolutely 
 righteous cause, but that in order to be used 
 effectively by God in it, we must empty our- 
 selves, and begin again. 
 
 92 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 (2) Then again, when we really face the 
 matter, we see no real reason why all should 
 not know ; the most unlikely men have been 
 converted in the trenches — " few of us do 
 not say a prayer," occurred in a letter the 
 other day — what we believe is that all can 
 know the Lord ; we have sat down too long 
 under a few handfuls of devout people in 
 every parish " knowing the Lord," we have 
 despaired of the hundreds who never go to 
 Church, but we are going to despair no longer ; 
 it is faithless not to believe that all can know 
 the Lord from the lowest to the greatest. 
 
 (3) Think of the effect on London of such 
 a thing as this. There are many who are 
 most anxious that this Mission shall not leave 
 out the social side, but social evils would 
 vanish, the old cruel enmity between class and 
 class, the perpetual fight between labour and 
 capital, the misunderstanding creeping in before 
 the war between men and women, the curse 
 of drunken homes, the ravages of lust, would be 
 a nightmare of the past if all should know 
 the Lord. We know what it is perhaps to 
 have one man or one woman in our acquaint- 
 ance who is like Jesus Christ, what evils fly 
 in his presence, the lion lies down with the 
 
 93 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 lamb and the Httle child leads them, the devils 
 fly out of souls, the selfish become unselfish; 
 the wild beast of lust crouches in his presence* 
 is shamed into Love, and why ? 
 
 Because he knows the Lord — he bows before 
 the invisible ; there is One who, not having 
 seen, he loves, and therefore round about him 
 Heaven is begun. 
 
 (4) Think of the Hope for the World. — To 
 have everyone like that, to have a kingdom of 
 Christs, to haye chivalry and charity the rule, 
 and not the exception, this is the vision which 
 is once more dawning on the world. A 
 kingdom founded on Force is seen in all its 
 native hideousness to-day, it has been given 
 its full chance and the Europe of to-day is 
 its result. Once again there has loomed up 
 before the prophet's eye a kingdom founded 
 on Love. " They shall not hurt or destroy 
 in all my Holy Mountain ; for the earth shall 
 be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as 
 the waters cover the sea." 
 
 This, at any rate, is the vision which inspires 
 the National Mission. It may be summed up 
 in these propositions : 
 
 (i) To know the Lord is to be a changed 
 man or woman. 
 
 94 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 (2) For all to know the Lord is to have a 
 changed world. 
 
 (3) All are capable of knowing the Lord, 
 for they were made for the Lord and the Lord 
 exists for them. 
 
 (4) The Church exists to make the vision 
 come true. 
 
 No one imagines that the whole nation can 
 attain to this in a moment, but we can at 
 least make a determined beginning at once and 
 sound a call to repentance and hope. 
 
 And there are many things to encourage us. 
 (i) Every priest once meant and vowed to live 
 a life of unwavering devotion. 
 
 The Holy Ghost fell upon him, and is in 
 him still. This Mission is not to be accom- 
 plished by great missioners who are to 
 revive the Church ; the Church is to revive 
 itself. 
 
 Back to his vocation, back to his ordination 
 vows, back to the Holy Spirit, invoked over 
 him at his ordination, must come each of 
 the twenty thousand priests of the Church 
 of England, some of whom may seem to have 
 drifted far away. That has been already the 
 experience where the Mission has begun ; men 
 who were thought dead and lifeless, and who 
 
 95 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 were out of heart, have become again " prophets 
 of God." 
 
 (2) But this is only the beginning, the Church 
 is not the clergy ; you all received in your 
 Confirmation the priesthood of the laity — 
 and never yet have the confirmed of England 
 come to their own. There is only one High 
 Priest, Jesus Christ, but the Church is the 
 Body of that Priest, and the whole Church 
 is priestly. Claim and assert that priesthood ; 
 offering daily the sacrifice of prayer and praise, 
 pleading the one sacrifice, consecrating every 
 day, living to save, the lay priests of the 
 Church are to exercise their priesthood at 
 last. 
 
 Already we have seen a little cameo picture 
 of what may be done. 
 
 The Pilgrimage of Prayer was carried out 
 in one diocese by twenty ladies, who, carrying 
 their packs on their backs, walked from village 
 to village, and stayed with the villagers. Set- 
 ting up the Cross, they spoke simply and 
 straightly to the hearts of the villagers, and 
 the touching response they received is only 
 an earnest of a harvest still to be reached 
 when fifty thousand lay priests do the same. 
 (3) But our ground of hope goes even deeper 
 
 96 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 than this — it is grounded on the latent Chris- 
 tianity in the hearts of the EngHsh people. 
 
 I know all that can be said on the other 
 side, the few at present who attend Com- 
 munion, the low standard of life which obtains 
 among vast masses of men collected together ; 
 but there is another side to it altogether : I 
 have marched with a brigade through England 
 whose presence was pronounced a blessing 
 by the clergy of the county town where we 
 were billeted, and against whom no single 
 crime would appear on the crime sheet. 
 
 Again, the officer who commands a Brigade, 
 made up of our Church Lads' Brigade Old 
 Boys,* has not had one crime against them, and 
 their early morning Communions are a sight 
 to see. - "• 
 
 But what man who really knows the Hves 
 of our London poor will not witness to the 
 latent Christianity among them ? People 
 smiled at the speech of a layman the other 
 day who noted how readily the common 
 soldier would sing hymns ; others scoff at the 
 crowded Harvest Festival and Midnight Ser- 
 vice as superstitions. But when it comes to 
 
 * Terribly was this Brigade cut up later on in action, 
 but it covered itself with glory. 
 
 H 97 
 
Knowing 'the Lord 
 
 some crisis in their Hves, you find that the 
 Christianity believed in this country for so 
 many years has filtered down into the hearts 
 often of those who never go to Church or 
 Chapel. 
 
 (4) But one great hope is in the Power of 
 God the Holy Ghost — without Him, no 
 national call could go home at all, and that 
 is why we must prepare the Church to give 
 the call by gathering at the feet of Jesus 
 Christ in the Spirit. 
 
 Each parish might well have a parochial 
 retreat before the autumn, that so with 
 renewed faith and power, the band of those 
 whose hearts God has touched may go forth 
 and bring in the others. 
 
 (5) And, lastly, our hope is a truer fellow- 
 ship, " It came to pass that those that knew 
 the Lord spake often one with another." 
 
 We can overdo this national reserve of 
 English men and English women. We must 
 be bolder and more outspoken in our witness — 
 this is the aim of the Laymen's and Laywomen's 
 Christian Crusade. If Christianity is seen to 
 mean more to those who do profess it, it is more 
 likely to impress, by the attractiveness of its 
 power, those outside its influence to-day. It 
 
 98 
 
Knowing the Lord 
 
 is then with such a vision we start upon our 
 work to-day : it is said that where there is no 
 vision the people perish, but out of the misery 
 and sorrow of the war a vision has been found 
 at last which shall make the people live — " all 
 shall know the Lord from the least to the 
 greatest." To fail in so great a cause as in 
 the effort to^make that vision a reality is to 
 fail gloriously ; to succeed is to gain the 
 crown of life. 
 
 99 
 
VI 
 
 THE CONDITIONS OF VICTORY* 
 
 " Till the day dawn, and the shadows flee away." — Song 
 OF Sol. ii. 17. 
 
 There are two views possible of the spirit in 
 which we should enter upon a New Year in 
 war time. 
 
 In the first view the year opens with nothing 
 but clouds and thick darkness. Not only is 
 the night of war still upon us, but there is not 
 even a streak of dawn. " More and more crimes 
 have been committed by our enemy, and God 
 has not raised a finger to punish them. There 
 has been no such crime for a thousand years 
 as the slow and deliberate extermination of the 
 Armenian race, and the misery of the Serbian 
 refugees is beyond description. We ourselves 
 have made mistakes in policy and strategy 
 
 * Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday morning, 
 January 2 (Day of National Intercession), 1916. 
 
 100 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 which have lost us the confidence of the world.'* 
 (This is the view of a pessimist which I am 
 describing, not my own view.) " We would not 
 believe that war was coming ; and when it 
 did come, so little were we prepared that we 
 were turning out one shell a day to the hundreds 
 of the enemy. Even since we learnt the truth 
 our efforts to redress the balance have been 
 defeated and delayed by strikes, by clinging 
 to old Trade Union rules, and by the desire 
 of employers and employed to make as much 
 out of the necessities of the country as they 
 can. Our best and brightest boys are dead. 
 One father was seen in a railway carriage in 
 tears — which he tould not control. At first 
 no notice was taken by the passengers, but at 
 last a kindly fellow-passenger asked him very 
 softly the cause of his grief. ' I am very 
 sorry,' he said, ' to give way, but my five 
 fine boys are killed, and I have just left my 
 wife, as a consequence, in a lunatic asylum.' 
 As in the days of the last plague in Egypt, 
 there is scarcely a house in which there is not 
 one dead. Christ is betrayed again, and no 
 hand is uplifted to save Him. Judas is again 
 out on his fell errand, and now, as before, it 
 is night." 
 
 lOI 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 No one can deny that this view of the ex- 
 treme pessimist has something to say for itself. 
 Few things are less helpful to-day than un- 
 thinking optimism. As a merely short view 
 of the- situation it is unanswerable. 
 
 But in St. Paul's Cathedral we have no right 
 to take short views. We meet under a great 
 dome which speaks of eternity, of the magni- 
 ficence, and the patience of God. We are 
 worshipping in the Mother Church of an 
 Empire whose " flag has braved a thousand 
 years the battle and the breeze." We have 
 no right to be content to be less hardy, less 
 brave and less determined than our forefathers ; 
 and still less have we the right to dishonour 
 the cross which gleams at the top of this 
 cathedral, the cross round which the martyrs 
 died. And when we peer into the New Year 
 from the vantage ground of St. Paul's Cathedral 
 the outlook becomes a very different one. The 
 facts recounted by the pessimist need not be, 
 and in many cases cannot be, denied ; but 
 there is one important Person left out of sight 
 in the whole purview of the situation — and 
 that is God Himself ! God Himself in His 
 unconquerable strength and in His dazzling 
 splendour ; God by whom all things were 
 
 102 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 made in heaven and in earth — marvellous in 
 His power, far-reaching in His judgment, but 
 most v^^onderful of all in His humility ; God 
 who speaks to us from the manger at Christmas, 
 and from the Cross on Good Friday, but whose 
 restrained majesty only bursts forth in full 
 splendour upon Easter Day. 
 
 It is God who makes all the difference. 
 What does God think about it all ? — that is 
 the only question worth asking.. God has no 
 favourites. He is not the special God of the 
 British Empire any more than He is of the 
 German. He is the God of all the earth. No 
 individual can escape His eye and no nation 
 His judgment. His rules for the governance 
 of the world are well known, and, up to a 
 point, have been fully revealed ; and, when we 
 understand them, a flood of new light is poured 
 upon the future. 
 
 In the first place, it is part of His education 
 of the world that He never lets a nation or 
 individual off the consequences of their mis- 
 takes or does their work for them. To do so 
 would be to treat them as slaves, and not 
 children ; as puppets, and not men. The 
 moment we understand this, the idea that we 
 are under the ban of God, because we have 
 103 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 not yet won the great war, is nothing short 
 of absurd. 
 
 Our youth was not trained to serve — in 
 spite of the repeated warnings of the last great 
 soldier we buried in this cathedral ; therefore 
 we had to train them after the war had begun. 
 The Navy was trained, alert, efficient, ready; 
 therefore it rules the sea. This is exactly in 
 accordance with the first law of God's govern- 
 ance of the world. If there has been a miracle 
 worked at all it has been the escape from a 
 worse disaster than we have ever yet had. 
 No general really knows, or can tell you, what 
 stopped the avalanche sweeping over Paris. 
 And, as far as our own country is concerned, 
 the really astonishing thing has been the 
 raising of three million men in eighteen months 
 by voluntary enlistment. The surprise has 
 been the outpouring of service both of men 
 and of women from the heart of a nation which 
 its enemies thought was lost in comfort and 
 wrapped in ignoble ease. 
 
 In the main nothing has happened which 
 must not have happened when an unprepared 
 nation, in however good a cause, met one 
 which has prepared for the same struggle for 
 forty years. What has happened is exactly 
 
 104 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 what we should expect. The inevitable has 
 happened ; and it is not part of God's plan in 
 governing the world to stop the inevitable. 
 
 But if that was all it would indeed be only 
 negative comfort. The positive comfort is 
 this — on one condition of which we will speak 
 in a moment — God has never allowed devilry, 
 lust, and tyranny finally to triumph in His 
 world. Heaviness may endure for a night — 
 and often the night is very long — but joy 
 cometh in the morning. 
 
 " The slow hours of darkness drag on their leaden way, 
 But day dawns at last and the shadows flee away." 
 
 We may then have serene and absolute 
 confidence that while the God revealed in the 
 Bible still lives, those who first betrayed and 
 then ravished Belgium, those who sank the 
 Lusitania, those who stood by while seven 
 hundred and fifty thousand Armenians were 
 done to death will be at last defeated. 
 
 And what is the one condition ? That the 
 nations which are to be the instruments of 
 God's judgments are worthy to be weapons 
 in His hands. That is why we have days of 
 penitence and prayer. As God reaches down 
 His hand to His quiver to find the weapon for 
 105 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 the bow which He has made ready, He must 
 find a weapon which He can use. Are we, as 
 a nation, such a weapon ? That is the ques- 
 tion for us to-day. There is a fine description 
 of the ready weapon in a chapter of the prophet 
 Isaiah : " He has made me Hke a poHshed shaft ; 
 in His quiver has He hidden me." Are we 
 such a pohshed shaft ? " He has prepared for 
 Himself the instrument of death, He has bent 
 His bow and made it ready." But what if 
 we break in His hands ! What if He cannot 
 send us, in the crisis of His great Day, straight 
 to the goal ! Have we nothing to repent of ? 
 Are we in a position to say : We thank Thee, 
 O God, that we are not as other nations are, 
 or even as these Germans ! What about our 
 national Drink Bill ? What about the moral 
 state of our streets in darkened London ? 
 Worse than it has been for twenty years. 
 What lies at the root of this eternal dispute 
 between Capital and Labour ? 
 
 No, the truth of the matter is this. If the 
 one Day is to dawn, another must dawn too. 
 The Day of Victory, if it is to come, is part of 
 a larger Day. Our sons would have died in 
 vain if the war was over and we went back 
 to our old life again. We are apt to forget 
 
 1 06 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 that before the great war began we were on 
 the verge of civil war at home, and of an 
 industrial revolution which some men thought 
 would have been on a scale unknown in our 
 history. A boy, one of five sons serving his 
 country, wrote home to his mother, after a 
 terrible time in Gallipoli : " I think God is 
 waiting for England to learn many things 
 before the war will end, and she is so very, 
 very slow in learning. Once she does, and 
 realises her duties to the world as well as to 
 herself, then, and then only, do I think peace 
 will come." 
 
 It is to help the nation to learn these things, 
 and so shorten the time that the Church is to 
 undertake a national mission to the nation; 
 and it is to gird ourselves for this great task 
 and to prepare ourselves spiritually to accom- 
 plish it, to which she will devote the great 
 proportion of the coming year. 
 
 But there is one set of people to whom the 
 thought of God changes the outlook more 
 than any other, and that is the mourners of 
 the world. If their boys are really dead, and 
 dead for ever, then there is nothing to relieve 
 the darkness of the night. But if God is God, 
 then we can trust them to Him to have a 
 107 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 glorious, full, and interesting life before them 
 beyond the grave. 
 
 " As they come trooping from the war, 
 Our skies have many a new-gold star." 
 
 As one by one on the battlefield or in the 
 hospital the light of their earthly life fades 
 from their dear faces, it only seems to us that 
 upon each of them the day is really breaking 
 whilst the shadows flee away. As Archbishop 
 Laud said in his last prayer before his execu- 
 tion : " What is death but a little mist, a little 
 vapour ? Lord, I am coming as fast as I can." 
 
 It requires, then, no foolish ignoring of 
 plain facts to enter upon a New Year in a 
 hopeful spirit ; it requires only faith in God, 
 faith in God which first produces penitence, 
 then inspires action, then draws out sacrifice, 
 and then breathes fortitude into the soul. 
 
 In such a faith let the nation rise from its 
 knees after these days of penitence and prayer, 
 and with head erect pass on to the mighty task 
 which lies close to its hand in the coming year. 
 
 "God is; 
 God sees ; 
 God loves ; 
 God knows. 
 And Right is Right ; 
 And Right is Might. 
 
 1 08 
 
The Conditions of Victory 
 
 " In the full ripeness of His Time, 
 We shall see the plan sublime 
 Of His beneficent intent. 
 Live on in hope ! 
 Press on in faith ! 
 Love conquers all things, 
 Even death." * 
 
 * AWs Well, by John Oxenham. 
 
 109 
 
VII 
 IS THE WAR AN ARGUMENT AGAINST GOD ? * 
 
 My subject is this : Is the fact of the present 
 war an argument against a good God ? 
 
 I have often given reasons why we beheve 
 in a good God. I point first of all to Nature. 
 I have said that you might as well expect a box 
 of letters to throw themselves into a play of 
 Shakespeare as to expect atoms to throw them- 
 selves into the universe. There is the mark 
 of mind in the great universe which we see. 
 Secondly, I have showed that the Being behind 
 the world is more than a clever devil ; we 
 see the character of righteousness. I point to 
 the conscience in every man, the conscience 
 that tells the difference between right and 
 
 * An open-air address delivered on Tower Hill in con- 
 nection with the National Call to Repentance and Hope. 
 This address was delivered to a great crowd at first very 
 hostile owing to the exemption of the clergy from combatant 
 service by Act of Parliament, but when many questions 
 were asked and answered, the speaker was finally cheered 
 off by the crowd. 
 
 IIO 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 wrong as surely as the eye tells us the difference 
 between black and white. That shows that 
 the power behind the world is righteous. 
 
 Then I take the New Testament. I ask 
 how it is that the cross came to be at the top 
 of the dome of St. Paul's in what we consider 
 the greatest city in the world. Glasgow men 
 no doubt think Glasgow is the greatest, 
 Montreal people think Montreal. But I ask 
 you, Why does the cross, the old gallows, 
 stand above this the greatest city in the world ? 
 There is only one answer. He who died on 
 the old gallows of the cross rose again the third 
 day, and that has changed the badge of shame 
 into the badge of glory. If, then, the New 
 Testament is true, God is not only clever, not 
 only righteous, but God also is love. There- 
 fore there is a righteous, loving, mighty Being, 
 with whom we ought to be in touch every 
 day of our lives. 
 
 Does the war contradict this ? Is the war 
 really a breakdown of Christianity ? Does the 
 occurrence of the present war prove that there 
 is no good God at all ? 
 
 I am constantly asked this question — Why 
 does not God stop the war ? Why did God 
 ever let the war come at all ? Well, I am going 
 
 III 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 to meet this question quite fairly. First of 
 all, Is the present war a breakdown of Chris- 
 tianity ? Secondly, Does it prove that God is 
 not a good God ? 
 
 (i) Now, let me take the first. I entirely deny 
 that this is a war between Christian nations. 
 I entirely deny that Germany from this point 
 of view is a Christian nation at all. There 
 are many individual Christians in Germany, 
 many devout, good people; but I judge a 
 nation, whether it is Christian or not, by the 
 policy which directs the conduct of that 
 nation. And I will venture to say that if any 
 of you take the trouble to read the books which 
 directed the policy of Germany you will see 
 that it is not a Christian policy at all. If you 
 want to find complete opposition to Christ, 
 you take the " gospel " of the superman, which 
 would trample the weak underfoot. If you 
 want something absolutely opposite to the New 
 Testament take the German War-book. 
 
 It is said that those outside see most of the 
 game, and I believe that that is a true saying. 
 Certainly, if you would expect a nation, a 
 clear-sighted, clever nation to look upon this 
 war as a breakdown of Christianity that nation 
 would be Japan. Japan does not at present 
 
 112 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 profess Christianity as a nation. Now, what 
 has been the effect of the present war in Japan ? 
 They have never looked in such a friendly way 
 on Christianity as they have during this war, 
 because they have seen their great Ally, 
 England — they are very proud of being the 
 Ally of England — they saw their great Ally 
 hesitate for twenty-four hours as to whether 
 it would do the Christian thing or not. They 
 saw their great Ally hesitate for twenty-four 
 hours as to whether it should remain within 
 the silver circle of the sea, safe behind its 
 mighty Navy ; Japan watched to see whether 
 we really believed in the Christianity we had 
 professed for so many years. And when they 
 saw their great Ally fling aside questions of 
 its own safety and take its stand beside poor 
 little Belgium, it saw this nation do the most 
 CHRiST-like thing it has done for a thousand 
 years. Therefore, Japan has been ready to 
 give a far more patient hearing to Christianity 
 during the past two years than ever before. 
 
 Then I will take another case. There was 
 a brilhant young American called Butters — 
 you may have seen his name in the papers. 
 He was rich, he had every prospect before 
 him ; he had no call of patriotism to urge 
 I 113 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 him to fight for England ; he was not an 
 EngHshman ; but he volunteered. From the 
 outside he watched what was going on, and he 
 saw this was a contest, as he said, between a 
 power which is evil on the one side and the 
 principles of right, freedom and justice on the 
 other. And that young American, all honour 
 to his memory, laid down his life for our 
 cause. 
 
 Well, then, as I have said, these outsiders * 
 see most of the game. And I entirely, there- 
 fore, refuse to say that when it is a contest 
 between the German War-book, between such 
 principles as " might is right," and the prin- 
 ciples for which the Allies are standing, I 
 entirely refuse to say that this contest repre- 
 sents the breakdown of Christianity. We 
 on our side are fighting for what we believe 
 to be right ; and never could we as a people 
 be more disgraced than if we had not taken 
 our stand on the side of freedom and justice 
 on the 4th of August, 1914. 
 
 (2) Now I come to the second point. Does 
 this great contest — and I know how terrible it 
 is by seeing something of it with my own eyes 
 during six services a day held under shell fire 
 
 ♦ This was before the United States came into the war. 
 114 
 
Is the War an Argument against God? 
 
 in 191 5 — does this prove that there is no good 
 God ? I am going to ask you a question in 
 return. Do you beHeve, or do you not beheve, 
 in free-will? I used to debate this with my 
 friends in East London — and how fond they 
 were of arguing. They can talk in Spitalfields ! 
 I would have, perhaps, five hundred working- 
 men ; they would begin by thinking it would 
 be better if we were bound to go right, like 
 clocks or puppets ; then later they would 
 decide that with all its risks it is neverthe- 
 less better to be free men, better to be 
 free to go right, or free to go wrong. Some 
 people argue that there is a kind of inevitable 
 necessity which constrains you to do this or 
 that ; but let a man steal your dinner four 
 days running and you will have something 
 to say about necessity ! We know that we 
 have all got free-will ; and we agree on the 
 whole that it is a good thing that we have 
 got free-will. You cannot have your bread 
 buttered on both sides, and if you have the 
 free-will to go right you have also the free-will 
 to go wrong. That applies to each man ; it 
 applies also to each nation. God will not stop 
 a man going to the devil if he is determined 
 to go ; or stop a nation going to the devil if 
 
 "5 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 it is determined to go. Tliis freedom of 
 will then puts a great responsibility upon 
 us all ; for it is part of our most GoD-like 
 attribute. 
 
 Now comes the point. If some villainous 
 fellow puts- six sleepers on the railway to-night 
 in front of the Scotch express, please God we 
 will catch him afterwards and give him the 
 punishment he deserves ; but God will not 
 stretch out His Almighty hand and remove 
 those sleepers — there will be an accident. And 
 if a nation is determined to have war as Ger- 
 many was determined, God is not going to 
 stop that war from coming. God respects the 
 free-will of the individual and of the nation. 
 In other words, if a man or a nation sets out 
 to go to the devil, there will be persuasion, 
 there will be pleading with it ; but if the 
 nation is determined, or if you are determined 
 to go to the devil, to the devil both you and 
 it will go. Judas, we are told, went to " his 
 own place " ; that is what we are told in the 
 Scriptures. And in passing I cannot help 
 saying to my brothers here, Do you know 
 where you are going ? Because your eternal 
 future depends upon the use you make here 
 of your free-will. 
 
 ii6 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 There is a picture in the Bible of the potter * 
 and the clay which is the best picture of God's 
 attitude towards the war that I know. Some 
 people speak as if the potter had power over 
 the clay irrespective of the nature of the clay. 
 You go to a potter and see him at work. That 
 is what Jeremiah was told to do. So he went, 
 and he saw a potter at work in his shop. Did 
 he find that the potter could do what he liked 
 with the clay ? Why, the clay defeated him 
 repeatedly. But when he could not do one 
 thing with the clay he then set about doing 
 another. When the potter tried, for instance, 
 to make a porcelain vase, but could not, he 
 then made a useful bowl instead. 
 
 That is a picture, my people, of God's deal- 
 ing with human nature. The first design of 
 the potter is universal peace. God absolutely 
 hates war ; God made of one blood all nations 
 of men ; His design for us was that we should 
 be living in unity with one another. But He 
 is defeated if a great nation is determined on 
 war. So God turns to the second best. He 
 has drawn out in consequence of the war 
 a glorious outpouring of unselfish service 
 
 * This is drawn out in The Potter and the Clay, published 
 by Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., Ltd. 
 
 117 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 such as we had never seen in our time 
 before. I was talking to a mother who has 
 lost her husband and three of her five sons in 
 the war ; after a short prayer with her she 
 said : " I would not have it otherwise, Bishop, 
 because this has ennobled the whole nation." 
 Yes, and that is the sort of woman that ennobles 
 a nation. 
 
 I have here a little description given me by 
 a padre who was in the thick of the firing the 
 whole time. It is a description by a Middlesex 
 lad of an open-air service on his last evening 
 before he went into battle. Then he con- 
 cludes : " Our padre is a grand chap ; he's 
 with us everywhere." That padre I have just 
 seen to-day. 
 
 Then here is a letter in pencil received this 
 morning from a padre who is also a captain, 
 and who has come back, having been seriously 
 wounded in saving no less than seven men. 
 Here in a daily paper is a picture of his tunic ; 
 there a picture of his inside steel waistcoat 
 under his tunic, which saved his life ; he saw 
 a bomb about to explode ; he flung himself 
 on that bomb and was almost torn to pieces 
 by the explosion. I am going to see him in 
 an hour's time on my way back. Well, he 
 
 ii8 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 risked his Hfe saving seven men, and he was a 
 parson. That is the answer to the people who 
 say our curates are cowards. 
 
 God has brought out the fortitude of 
 our splendid women and the courage of our 
 gallant men ; He has produced as a great 
 Potter a wonderful bowl of universal service. 
 Thus God has wrought good out of evil. This 
 is the devil's war, but God has turned the 
 devil's weapon against himself. 
 
 So I will finish with these last few words. 
 How is God going to finish this war ? God 
 is going to finish, first of all, by the right hand 
 and brave hearts of our boys — God bless them ! 
 I see many of them on Salisbury Plain before 
 they start for the Front, and I saw their 
 splendid courage as I went along the firing- 
 line in 1 91 5. Therefore, I say that we at 
 home have to be worthy of our defenders. 
 
 I believe myself that this outburst of man- 
 hood in the nation is in a thoroughly righteous 
 cause. And we at home have to make our 
 country worthy of its defenders. I believe 
 myself that we are instruments in the hands of 
 God to save the freedom of the world. But 
 we must not break in God's hand. God 
 stretches down His Hand in the day of His 
 
 "9 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 wrath to find a polished shaft in His quiver — 
 that is our country ; but what if the poHshed 
 shaft breaks in two ? 
 
 We have no right to have such a Drink Bill — 
 j^l 8 1 ,000,000 spent in drink ! It is a disgrace 
 that a Royal Commission Report should have 
 to say that ten per cent, of the population is 
 affected with a foul disease simply the result 
 of man's immorality. It is a disgrace that 
 there should be so many bad characters in our 
 great music-halls every night. And it is the 
 devil's own lie that a man cannot be moral 
 and live a healthy life. The more moral you 
 are the healthier you are. We have to nail 
 to the counter the lies against morality. If, 
 then, I am talking to any young fellow here 
 who hesitates between a moral and immoral 
 life, I could bring the evidence of a hundred 
 of the greatest physicians and surgeons in 
 London to show that no man suffers in health 
 by living a strictly moral life. 
 
 Before, then, we preach to other people, 
 let us bear in mind that we have plenty of 
 sins at home ; and we must repent of those 
 sins if we are to be fit instruments in the hands 
 of God. 
 
 So now from end to end of London, and 
 120 
 
Is the War an Argument against God ? 
 
 throughout the country, we want to call the 
 nation to its knees — not in humihation for the 
 war, for our cause is that of freedom and 
 righteousness, but to ask God to help us to 
 put away our sins. We call the people to 
 repentance and hope, that out of this great 
 conflict may come forth a new London, a new 
 England, and a new world. 
 
 121 
 
VIII 
 
 THE ROAD TO DMIASCUS * 
 
 '* When it pleased God, Who separated me from my 
 mother's womb and called me by His grace, to reveal His 
 Son in me." — Gal. i. 15, 16. 
 
 The Conversion of St. Paul was probably the 
 greatest human event which ever happened 
 in the history of the world. I say human 
 because it cannot of course be compared to 
 the Incarnation, the Atonement and the 
 Resurrection of our Lord. But of human 
 events it was the greatest, (i) First because of 
 its unexpectedness. When the witnesses at the 
 martyrdom of Stephen laid down their clothes 
 at the feet of a young man whose name was 
 Saul, the feared and ruthless persecutor of all 
 Christians, would they have beheved you if 
 you had told them that this very man would 
 be the greatest missionary of that faith ever 
 
 * Preached in a very poor parish in East London called 
 St. Stephen's Old Ford. 
 
 122 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 known ? (2) But not only was there its un- 
 expectedness. The event itself was so great 
 because of its immediate and permanent 
 results. 
 
 Its immediate result was to rescue the 
 Christian Church from being strangled in its 
 birth by Jewish tradition. " Judaism," it has 
 been well said, " was the cradle of the Christian 
 Church and almost became its grave." It was 
 St. Paul who with his vigorous intellect and 
 independence of character prevented the 
 Christian Church being confined to those who 
 carried out the Jewish rite of circumcision. 
 
 But, if the immediate results were so great, 
 what shall we say of the permanent results ? 
 It is not too much to say that the conversion 
 of barbarous Britain into Christian England, 
 is entirely, under God, due to the conversion 
 of St. Paul, and rightly year by year in the 
 great Cathedral dedicated to his name, do we 
 commemorate the great event which changed 
 the surface of the world, and equally rightly 
 do you have in Old Ford side by side a St. 
 Stephen's and a St. Paul's. 
 
 (3) But we have not even yet touched the 
 crowning significance of this great event, and 
 that is the wonderful hope for the world, for 
 
 123 ^ 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 the country, for the parish, and for the 
 individuals which it contains. 
 
 It is one of the signs of the times that one 
 of our leading newspapers {The Times) on each 
 Saturday has now a thoughtful article on 
 religion. The writer of one of these articles 
 points out the hope for the world contained 
 in the conversion of St. Paul. 
 
 " The Conversion of St. Paul provides 
 material for the theologian and the psycho- 
 logist ; but it has no less a value for every 
 student of human affairs. He is bidden 
 by the memory of this event to take into 
 his reckoning the unforeseen and incal- 
 culable movements of the human person- 
 ality. The story must sober all who 
 boldly write the history of the future ; 
 they may know many data, but they do 
 not know, as some think, what is hidden 
 in the depths of some human personality, 
 or, as others believe, the mysterious appeal 
 and travail of the Holy Spirit. What 
 new turn may be given to the energies of 
 this man or that, they do not know; but 
 that may be a decisive factor. This man 
 may fail us, for there are conversions froni 
 124 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 good to evil ; but that man now a " per- 
 secutor and injurious " may save the 
 Church, or the nation. The Feast of the 
 Conversion of St. Paul teaches all men 
 that in the future of mankind there will 
 be factors which at present are unknown. 
 The prophet of good cannot be over- 
 presumptuous, but he need not despair. 
 
 " Neither the friends nor the foes of 
 the Christian Way in the Days after the 
 Crucifixion could have foretold the one 
 determining fact, which was to break 
 down the barriers of race and set the 
 Faith in the heart of the world. To 
 them Saul of Tarsus was a terrible force, 
 destined to work along a certain line till 
 the end. Something happened. He said : 
 ' It pleased God to reveal His Son in me ' ; 
 others have sought to interpret the change 
 without calling in the Unseen ; but in 
 any case something happened, and a new 
 and unforeseen turn was given to the 
 life of the Church and to the spiritual 
 history of mankind." 
 
 Now it seems to me that we want just 
 such an encouragement to-day. The National 
 
 125 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 Mission, while it has deepened and spirituaHsed 
 the Church and (certainly in London) has given 
 a witness on the side of morality which has 
 resounded through the world, has to a great 
 extent failed to touch the outsider, thousands 
 are still untouched by the Gospel message ; 
 the war with all its glorious sacrifices, including 
 those who perished in the great explosion,* who 
 laid down their lives as truly for their country 
 as those who have died in the trenches, has 
 left many far better off than they were before, 
 and as yet unmarked by the Cross, and what 
 we want to-day is some sign in the sky that we 
 really may soon look for some great change 
 which may yet give us a new Heaven and a 
 new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 
 
 Such a sign we have in the wonderful con- 
 version of St. Paul, this unexpected, marvellous 
 event which has changed the whole outlook 
 of the world already, which promises an even 
 greater change in the future. 
 
 In order to realise the grounds of hope in 
 our own lives, in our country, in our parish, and 
 in the world, we must look more carefully to 
 see what happened to change Saul into St. 
 Paul. 
 
 * This happened not far from the district of Old Ford. 
 126 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 (i) In the first place, the whole thing was 
 an Act of God's. In our English legal phrase- 
 ology an Act of God is reserved for some stroke 
 of lightning or earthquake, or terrible catas- 
 trophe which happens in the world, but this 
 is a terribly misleading use of the phrase, it 
 leads people to think that God glories in 
 destruction. 
 
 It would be, for instance, most misleading 
 to say that the great explosion in the East End 
 of London this week was an Act of God's ; 
 those who died, died in the service of God ; 
 the glorious Chemist died as Christ died, 
 giving his life for his people, but it was not 
 God's Will that this long-planned and care- 
 fully prepared war was launched upon the 
 world by Germany ; it was rather the act and 
 will of the devil, and our heroes and heroines 
 have died in fighting the works of the 
 devil. 
 
 No ! an Act of God is an Act of Love, and 
 when it pleased God to reveal His Son in Saul 
 and turn him into St. Paul, this was a true 
 Act of God ; the flash of light was a flash of 
 love, and it was a voice of love which cried : 
 " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me ? " 
 
 Do we believe in God ? 
 127 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 Are we looking for the Hght ? Are we 
 Hstening for the voice ? 
 
 That is the first condition of any miracle 
 taking place. 
 
 Saul, blind and mistaken as he was, was con- 
 scientious ; he was an honest man ; he believed 
 in God ; He was anxious to spread the 
 Kingdom of God. And therefore he was, in 
 the frame of mind in which God could reveal 
 His Son, and God did reveal His Son and 
 could make His revelation clear to him. 
 
 Now it is possible that the conversion of 
 some of us is simply waiting for us to have 
 the humility and open-mindedness and con- 
 scientiousness of Saul. 
 
 If we are quite satisfied with ourselves ; if 
 we are looking to our own efforts, our own 
 talents to carry us along ; we shall go on our 
 way to Damascus, but no light will shine and 
 no voice will sound. 
 
 Do remember that you are nothing, and 
 can do nothing, but that God is everything, 
 and can do everything. 
 
 God can change you from the self-centred 
 man with no inspiration into an apostle of 
 love ; He can change you from the middle- 
 aged cynic into the devoted Christian worker ; 
 
 128 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 He can change you from the secret drinker, or 
 the hidden sensuahst into the glory and self- 
 control and purity of a child of God. 
 
 " With man it is impossible, but not with 
 God, for with God all things are possible." 
 
 (2) But then comes the second stage and 
 the essential second stage — " Lord, what wilt 
 Thou have me to do ? " 
 
 True religion is always practical ; it is much 
 more than " morality tinged with emotion." 
 
 What practical steps can you take this New 
 Year? 
 
 Ought you to join a Bible class ? Be con- 
 firmed ? Give up that bad friendship ? Come 
 to church again regularly ? Return to Com- 
 munion ? Have something practical in your 
 mind when you say, " Lord, what wilt Thou 
 have me to do ? " 
 
 (3) And when the vision opens out, obey 
 it. 
 
 One of the most beautiful of St. Paul's 
 own descriptions of his conversion was given 
 in his words to Agrippa : •' I was not dis- 
 obedient to the heavenly vision." Can you 
 catch even a fleeting vision of yourself — very 
 different from what you are to-night — a man 
 of prayer, of witness, of service ? then follow 
 
 K 129 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 the gleam and obey the vision, and you too 
 will be a new man. 
 
 (4) But if this is true of the individual, it 
 is true also of the parish. 
 
 It is only God Who can change the parish. 
 It can only be changed by an outpouring of 
 Love working through men and women. 
 
 Love can do anything ; it was the love in 
 the Cross which changed St. Paul — " He loved 
 me," he said, " and gave Himself for me." 
 Dear brothers and sisters who have been 
 gathered in love by the ministry of the dear 
 old Vicar and by the present Vicar and his 
 colleagues : 
 
 It is only love which is going to convert 
 this parish. 
 
 Elisha failed to heal when he sent his staff, 
 but when he personally came and stretched 
 himself over the child, he healed him. 
 
 When shall we learn that it is only personal 
 self-sacrifice and love of the people one by 
 one which will convince them that we really 
 love them and therefore that God does ? 
 
 Never despair of anyone. 
 
 That man " now a persecutor and injurious " 
 may be the very one to save the Church and 
 nation. 
 
 130 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 (5) And if we are not to despair of the 
 parish, let no one despair of our nation. 
 
 yVe have done wonders in the war in many 
 ways ; who would have thought that five 
 millions would have volunteered, that thou- 
 sands of girls at risk of their lives volunteered 
 for dangerous work ? why despair then of the 
 complete conversion of the whole nation ? 
 Why despair of having a really sober nation, 
 of deliverance from the bad traditions which 
 infect one-tenth of the nation with a fatal 
 disease, of an end of the eternal war between 
 Capital and Labour ? If Saul could be 
 converted, why despair of a living brotherhood 
 in the nation at last ? 
 
 (6) And so, with regard to the future of the 
 world : 
 
 In speech after speech, sermon after sermon 
 in these last two and a half years have I pointed 
 out that there is only one hope for permanent 
 peace for the world, and that is by the accept- 
 ance by the whole world of the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ : " They shall not hurt or destroy 
 in all my Holy Mountain, when the earth is 
 filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the 
 waters cover the seas." 
 
 As we then approach the great Anniversary 
 131 
 
The Road to Damascus 
 
 of the Conversion of St. Paul, let us expect 
 great things this year. 
 
 It does please God to reveal His Son in 
 each of us ; it is His great longing and desire 
 that w^e each of us may " see Jesus," and by 
 letting Him live in us reveal Him to the world. 
 
 Look then as you have never looked before 
 for the great Light ; listen as you have never 
 listened before for the Voice which speaks — 
 the still small voice in the conscience, the 
 resounding voice with which He shakes the 
 Heaven and the earth to-day ; pray as you 
 have never prayed before, for the revelation 
 of the Son, and with a force and a thoroughness 
 and an unexpectedness which will again astonish 
 the world, Saul the persecutor shall become 
 Paul the Apostle, the Road to Damascus shall 
 be trodden by converted men or women, the 
 great miracle shall happen again, and a new 
 parish, a new country and a new world dawn 
 at last. 
 
 132 
 
IX 
 
 OUTSPOKEN WITNESS* 
 
 " I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ; for it is 
 the Power of God." — Rom. i. i6. 
 
 There is no doubt that St. Paul had every 
 temptation to be ashamed of the Gospel ; to 
 the ordinary cultivated men of the day who 
 would have ordinarily been his associates, the 
 Qospel seemed sheer foolishness, not to say 
 bad form. It would be almost like a member 
 of the Athenaeum announcing to his fellow- 
 members that he had joined the Salvation 
 Army ; there would be a look of mild surprise, 
 and what would be harder for a cultivated 
 man to bear, the knowledge that, behind his 
 back, people would freely say that he had gone 
 off his head. 
 
 Again, as a Jew, he knew that the Jews 
 would look upon it as sheer blasphemy ; 
 the Cross was an awful stumbling block to 
 them ; how could you reconcile the doctrine 
 
 * Preached somewhere in the West End of London. 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 of the Cross with the Jehovah of the Old 
 Testament or with the current belief of a great 
 and glorious Messiah who was to chase away 
 the Romans and make Jerusalem the centre 
 of the world ? While, on the other hand, to 
 the Romans with their great ideas of law and 
 order, and their contempt for slaves, it seems 
 nothing less than madness to go to Rome and 
 preach that the Saviour of the world had 
 been gibbeted on the Cross like a criminal or 
 a slave. 
 
 And yet none of these things daunted St. 
 Paul ; none of them made him ashamed of the 
 Gospel, and that was because he knew the 
 Gospel was true ; after all, " seeing is believing." 
 
 The whole idea of Zeppelins is so novel, the 
 difficulty of dealing with them obviously so 
 great, that someone who had been away for 
 twenty years might easily come back to England 
 and hold the view that it was impossible for a 
 great ship to be over London dealing death, 
 and impossible for a small aeroplane to get 
 near enough to destroy it. But the answer of 
 thousands in London, probably of many in this 
 congregation, would have been : " My dear sir, 
 I saw it, I saw the great flaming thing come 
 down." So it was with St. Paul, he had seen 
 
 134 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 and he had heard and he had put to the proof 
 what he had heard, and he had found it come 
 true, and therefore, naturally, he was not 
 ashamed of it. Notice the four stages : 
 
 (i) He saw a light above the brightness of 
 the sun, and it was " a light which never shone 
 on land or sea." 
 
 (2) More awful still — he heard a voice, 
 speaking to him as if he was the only one in 
 all the world : " Saul, Saul, why persecutest 
 thou Me ? " Could tjiis be the voice of Him 
 whom these poor Christians he had hounded 
 to death had said with their last breath 
 had risen again ? Good God ! it was ! The 
 voice spoke again : " I am Jesus whom thou 
 persecutest." 
 
 (3) He had seen ; he had heard ; he had 
 yet to suifer. '* I will show him how great 
 things he must suffer for My Name's sake.'' 
 And in his suffering, as so often happens, he 
 finds the promised strength : " Let this thorn 
 in the flesh depart from me," but the answer 
 came, " My grace is sufficient for thee, for 
 My strength is made perfect in weakness." 
 What supported him, he found supported 
 others ; he never found it fail ; it was the one 
 key which opened every lock ; souls which 
 
1 
 
 ,.'aI 
 
 Outspoken Witness "-2| 
 
 were untouched by his old philosophical argu- 
 ments went down before the Cross, minds 
 which were unhumbled by a display of power, 
 bowed low before the Incarnation ; he had 
 seen the Zeppelin fall ; much more than that 
 — he had seen Satan like lightning fall from 
 Heaven. 
 
 (4) And therefore, notice, he knew. It must 
 have been pathetic to him, to have all the old 
 arguments used against him which he had used 
 so often once himself, " that such a belief was 
 not for the educated, that it contradicted the 
 unity of God, that the whole thing was undig- 
 nified and of course impossible ; " for all the 
 time there was singing in St. Paul's soul the 
 glorious fact that it was all absolutely true, 
 that the worst shame was the highest wonder, 
 and for the rest of his life God forbid that he 
 should glory save in the Cross of his Lord 
 Jesus Christ, by Whom the world was crucified 
 unto Him and He to the world. 
 
 Nearly two thousand years have passed since 
 then, but the world is still asking for the 
 power of God ; it is still asking for something 
 which shall tame human passion and produce 
 a new Heaven and a new earth wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness ; so far as this Church 
 
 136 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 and nation is concerned, we are pledged in 
 the National Mission to find it or die in the 
 attempt ; to go back to the old world of 
 broken fellowship and despair of being able 
 to grapple with human passion, is to have made 
 our boys die in vain. 
 
 Everything else has clearly failed : 
 (i) Culture was tried in certain quarters, and 
 the result was the most appalling outbreak of 
 vice in Berlin before the war and since the war ; 
 it has been shown at its true value in Belgium, 
 Poland and Armenia. 
 
 (2) But Germany is not the only place 
 where health lectures and ethical teaching 
 were being substituted for the teaching of the 
 Christian Faith, with what results on Juvenile 
 Crime we all know. 
 
 (3) Repressive measures have been put into 
 force by excellent and well-meaning men. 
 
 Many of these have helped ; the music-halls 
 will no longer harbour prostitutes, and the 
 restriction of hours for selling drink has de- 
 creased drunkenness, but no one can imagine 
 for a moment that mere repression and punish- 
 ment is going to work the revolution for which 
 the world is longing. 
 
 Where are we to look for the power ? and 
 
 137 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 who can doubt that if St. Paul stood here 
 to-day — he would say, " There is only one 
 power — the Gospel — I tried it in Corinth, I 
 tried it in Rome, it is the only power which 
 will change London. I am not ashamed to-day 
 any more than two thousand years ago of the 
 Gospel of Christ, for it — and nothing else — 
 is the power of God unto salvation unto every 
 soul which believeth, to the Jew first and also 
 to the Greek." 
 
 No ! St. Paul would not be ashamed, but 
 would some of us be ashamed ? 
 
 {a) Is there no such thing to-day as being 
 ashamed intellectually of professing Christi- 
 anity ? 
 
 I have known people in the West End of 
 London who have even supported Missions 
 in East London, as quite a good thing for the 
 poor, but who at the bottom of their hearts 
 have up to now thought it was riot half clever 
 enough a thing for them. 
 
 {b) Is there no moral shame ? Are there 
 no people calling themselves Christians, and 
 even Churchmen who go about saying that 
 New Testament morality is quite impossible, 
 and that we must just make a truce with vice, 
 and make it as little bad as possible ? 
 
 "38 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 (c) Is there no social shame ? If we are to 
 have outspoken witnesses to-day, such as once 
 converted the world — they are sadly difficult 
 to find in the West End of London to-day. 
 
 But there is a converting power at work 
 to-day ! and it is the same thing which con- 
 verted St. Paul — Suffering. 
 
 People are suffering horribly ; the dear boy 
 on whom their hopes were set is gone ; gone 
 the chance of seeing him again on earth or 
 having another of his cheery letters. 
 
 " Oh ! for the touch of a vanished hand 
 And the sound .of a voice which is still ! " 
 
 And all the philosophy of the ages, and all 
 the accumulated learning of years would be 
 gladly bartered for one ray of absolute certainty 
 that he was not gone for ever. 
 
 It is that certainty the Gospel of St. Paul 
 brings you ; he saw, he heard, he proved, he 
 knew. 
 
 And though with less distinctness because 
 we are lesser men, there are men, aye ! and 
 women among us to-day who have seen, and 
 heard, and proved, and known. 
 
 I have heard myself for twenty-eight years 
 in London every argument which can be 
 
 139 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 brought against Christianity, but when, in 
 your own private and public life, you have 
 been directed and guided and chastened and 
 corrected by an Unseen Person, when you 
 have seen everything promised in the Gospel 
 happen, when the Holy Ghost promised in 
 the Gospel has convicted of sin and taken of 
 Christ and shown it to you and others, and 
 guided into all truth, when you have seen dis- 
 tricts of London changed again and again from 
 deserts into gardens of the Lord, when you have 
 found the Christian religion the key to every 
 locked heart, and no other key fit at all, then 
 you listen with restrained impatience to all 
 the people who tell you the thing is impossible ; 
 for what you have heard, you have heard ; what 
 you have seen, you have seen ; what you have 
 proved, you have proved ; and what you know, 
 yon know. 
 
 Now what is holding you back from believing 
 in the Gospel to-day ? 
 
 On the answer to that question may 
 depend your happiness far more than you 
 realise. 
 
 (i) Is it (quite frankly) that you have not 
 taken religion seriously at all up to now ? 
 
 But, if so, may I ask you whether you really 
 140 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 consider the world in its present state is 
 satisfactory. 
 
 It is notorious that this war has been pro- 
 duced by the Power which openly says that 
 it is sorry it ever took up the effete superstition 
 of Christianity in the fourth century.* 
 
 I should have thought that in the opinion 
 of the whole civihsed world the doctrine of 
 the Superman had been exploded for ever. 
 
 This war could have been stopped if religion 
 had been a greater power than it is. 
 
 (2) But perhaps you are trying to beheve 
 but cannot. Come away, then, from your 
 intellectual difficulties and look at the effects 
 of the Gospel. The Brahmins of India f are 
 being converted by the effect of the Gospel 
 on the poor and outcast. They see whole 
 villages changed and they find the reason is 
 that the villagers have become Christians ; to 
 be six months Bishop of London would do 
 more for your faith than tomes of theology. 
 At any rate give your whole being the 
 chance in this Day of God of learning the 
 Truth. 
 
 * See Professor Cramb's lectures. 
 
 •j- This was told me by the Bishop of Madrai in 1117 last 
 coQversatioa with him. 
 
 141 
 
Outspoken Witness 
 
 (3) Is it because you believe and don't 
 practice ? 
 
 But the Gospel is only said to be the power of 
 God " to him that beheveth," and the belief 
 meant is " faith that worketh by love." Come 
 back to your prayers and your Communion ; look 
 into your home life, your business life ; is this 
 religion in which you profess to believe, govern- 
 ing every item in that life ? are you a chivalrous 
 friend, a loving and faithful husband, a good 
 father and the soul of honour in social life ? 
 Without it all mere lip belief is in vain. " The 
 Kingdom of Heaven is at hand ; repent ye and 
 believe the Gospel " — that is the message of 
 the National Mission ; I preach it myself with 
 no shame except that I am not a better man for 
 preaching it so long, for let this Gospel once 
 be believed by you, and you are a changed 
 man or woman ; let it once go home to the 
 nation and the New England has begun ; and 
 when we wearily ask when shall war be over, 
 and the nations of the world live at peace, 
 St. Paul would only repeat the prophecy of 
 Isaiah : " When the world is filled with the 
 knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover 
 the seas ; " in other words, when the Gospel 
 has gone home to the world at last. 
 
 142 
 
II 
 
 THE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE 
 
I 
 
 THE BROTHERHOOD OF CAPITAL AND 
 LABOUR * 
 
 Can there be a real brotherhood between the 
 representatives of Capital and Labour ? 
 
 The answer to the question I have set myself 
 to answer is, at first sight, why not ? Capital 
 and Labour are both essential to uniting the 
 industries of the world and producing its 
 goods; the industries of the world are, most 
 of them, very productive. Why should not 
 an amicable agreement be possible as to the 
 share which each is to have ? 
 
 But such a simple answer has not been the 
 experience of the last fifty years. Capital and 
 Labour have been incessantly at war, and in 
 some industries, suspicion and hatred have 
 grown to such a pitch that many despair of 
 ever seeing a better state of things. Many 
 think that the war averted the greatest strike 
 ever known in the history of the nation. 
 
 * An address delivered in Bow Church, Lent, 1915, 
 during the dinner hour of the City. 
 L 145 
 
The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 
 
 Of course there have been some noble 
 exceptions, where a very different spirit has 
 been manifested, but when, as so often has 
 happened, the capitalist has frankly tried to 
 make as much for himself as he can, and get 
 his labour as cheaply as possible, and the 
 labourer has done his best to defeat this by 
 checking output, and getting as much as he 
 can for as little work as possible, friction is 
 sure to follow. 
 
 Now I have often lately pointed my hearers 
 to a new country, a new Church, a new empire, 
 and a new world, as the only thing which is a 
 worthy outcome of the sacrifice and struggle 
 of to-day. But I always begin with my vision 
 of a new country in which Capital and Labour 
 are on friendly terms, in which every man 
 has his chance and every dog his day, in which 
 there should be a living wage and decent houses 
 for all ; in which if the Hoxton boys were 
 called to die for Hoxton again, it should be 
 something worth dying for. 
 
 But this can only be produced by a new 
 spirit, and a new spirit can only come from a 
 new Person who has never been invoked 
 before ; it was He that sat upon the Throne 
 Who said, " Behold ! I make all things new." 
 
 146 
 
The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 
 
 Is this new spirit possible ? We look into 
 the past for encouragement, and we find the 
 most ancient and disgraceful institution of the 
 old world — Slavery — destroyed by the oncom- 
 ing of a new spirit. Jesus Christ never headed 
 a slave revolt, but He preached brotherhood to 
 all and breathed a new spirit into the world, 
 which ultimately made slavery impossible. 
 
 Now this is at once our encouragement and 
 our guide ; it is often thought that the Church 
 has failed in courage on the subject of Capital 
 and Labour. I am not denying that it may 
 have. But remember the Church seldom 
 knows the real facts — when it does know the 
 facts, it ought to speak with an unfaltering voice. 
 
 When Rector of Bethnal Green, I used to 
 go round with the Vestry of which I was a 
 member, to see if houses were fit for human 
 habitation or not, and told all my Church 
 workers to report at once if landlords were not 
 doing their duty by their tenants. When a clear 
 case of injustice or oppression is made out, 
 the Church is the tribune of the people, and, 
 in the teeth of any amount of opposition to 
 its work, or loss of subscriptions, must bear its 
 witness against the wrongdoer, and like Nathan 
 before David, must say, " Thou art the man ! " 
 
 147 
 
The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 
 
 But, again and again, the Church cannot 
 know in any particular dispute which side is 
 to blame. 
 
 A partner in a great industry in the North 
 said to me after I had inspected his works 
 (he had served right through the works all his 
 life and had been made the junior partner by 
 the firm) : " What is really wanted here is 
 that one-third of the profits which now go to 
 Capital, should go to Labour ! " But when I 
 go to another firm, how can I know without 
 any investigation that such should be the case 
 there ? I have an inner conviction when I see 
 the big houses built by capitalists that this 
 probably should be the case in many in- 
 dustries, but how can I know that another 
 firm may not be keeping on their employees 
 at a loss, as many do during a slack time in 
 trade ? 
 
 And therefore — in fairness to the Church, it 
 must be remembered that, unless called in 
 by both sides (as Bishop Westcott was), with 
 the facts fully disclosed, it cannot take sides 
 in any individual dispute ; it would be as 
 wrong to denounce all employers as blood- 
 suckers and tyrants as to hold up trades unions 
 as instruments of the devil. 
 
 148 
 
The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 
 
 But, while we cannot arbitrate in details, 
 wc can lay down principles. 
 
 (i) No industry should be carried on in this 
 country which cannot pay a living wage to 
 the labourers according to the standard of 
 living at the time. 
 
 Industries which can only be carried on by 
 sweating must be banned out of the country. 
 
 How much I rejoice that the agricultural 
 labourers at last have a living wage, and the 
 farmers a guaranteed price for wheat to enable 
 them to pay it ! 
 
 It is a Christian principle that the wage of 
 the labourer must be the first charge on the 
 industry. 
 
 (2) It is a second Christian principle that 
 the conditions of labour shall be the best 
 possible. Nothing can make mining anything 
 but arduous and more or less dangerous work, 
 but no care or expense must be spared to see 
 that every security for Hfe or Hmb is taken. 
 
 Lord Shaftesbury's work was furiously op- 
 posed at the time, but the verdict of posterity 
 has been on his side. ' 
 
 (3) But, having secured the fair wage and 
 the sound conditions, it is an equally Christian 
 principle that the work shall be given in full 
 
 149 
 
The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 
 
 and fair measure for the wage received. The 
 practice of restriction of output, which im- 
 perilled at one time the success of the war, 
 could only have grown up in an atmosphere 
 of suspicion ; it was an entrenchment against 
 an employer, distrusted and feared. No 
 country where such a doctrine prevailed could 
 expect to compete against a country where 
 other customs prevailed. 
 
 Now what is to produce this atmosphere of 
 trust and co-operation ? We have tried unsuc- 
 cessfully everything else ; suppose we try for 
 a change Christianity. 
 
 If masters and men could kneel at the foot 
 of the Cross, and kneel together, the problem 
 would be solved. 
 
 There seems already a new spirit abroad in 
 the trenches ; both are fighting and ^ying for 
 the freedom of the world ; is it too much to 
 hope that the brotherhood of the trenches will 
 last beyond the war ? 
 
 Masters and men have gone over the parapet 
 side by side, or if not side by side, with the 
 employer as a trusted officer, into equal danger 
 with his men. Cannot this trust and con- 
 fidence follow after the war ? They were 
 ready to die for a common cause, let them be 
 150 
 
The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 
 
 ready to live for it in the same spirit. These 
 conferences begun by Mr. Hodge have a great 
 future before them, if carried on in a Christian 
 spirit : ^' All things are possible to him that 
 believeth." 
 
 What the Church can do is to try and bring 
 the two together with the words uttered long 
 ago : " Sirs, ye are brethren, why do ye wrong 
 one unto another ? " 
 
 Let the Church admit how often she has 
 failed in her witness, and once again lay down 
 the principles on which the brotherhood 
 between Capital and Labour must rest. 
 
 We may surely believe that if both can be 
 led to refer their difficulties with one another 
 to the one great flawless, unerring Arbitrator 
 in earth or Heaven — we may yet have " a new 
 Heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness." 
 
 151 
 
II 
 
 LOVE LIFE'S CHANCE 
 
 " Though I give my body to be burned, and have not 
 Love, I am nothing." — i Cor. xiii. 3 (R.V.). 
 
 There is no word more frequently on the lips 
 of the Christian preacher and yet no word is 
 apparently more misunderstood than tliis word 
 Love. 
 
 (i) To some it is synonymous with every 
 form of sensuous passion : " You don't really 
 love me," says the tempter to the tempted 
 girl, " or you would do what I ask you." 
 
 But, for ever, Shakespeare has marked off 
 the difference between Lust and Love. 
 
 " Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, 
 But Lust's effect is tempest after sun ! " 
 
 (2) But while love is the reverse of lust, it 
 is no pale placid ineffective sentiment ; there 
 is always a fire about true love. 
 
 " Thy blessed unction from above 
 Is comfort, life and fire of love." 
 
 152 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 It burns brighter and purer and warmer 
 every year ; it feeds on what it seems to 
 consume ; and yet Hke the burning bush, the 
 wonder is that the bush is not consumed. 
 
 (3) Nor again does it wholly consist of feel- 
 ing. Some of the most devout lovers of God 
 are those who feel least ; who say : 
 
 " Lord, it is my chief complaint 
 That my love is weak and faint " ; 
 
 and numbers of those who talk least about 
 their love of humanity are those who will be 
 the first to hear : 
 
 " Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these, 
 ye did it to Me." 
 
 Now the first thing to reahse is that this 
 love, without which nothing is of avail, is a 
 new thing in the world ; it is a new star which 
 appeared on the horizon two thousand years 
 ago. 
 
 I was speaking in Enfield not long ago on 
 the Shepherd Spirit which was the creation 
 of Christianity. This love is the source of 
 that Spirit. It is the larger whole from 
 which the Shepherd Spirit sprang ; it would 
 have been looked upon as mawkishness by 
 Aristotle ; an impossibility by Plato ; weak- 
 ness by the Romans, but it is the fulfilling of 
 
 153 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 the Law to St. Paul, and that is, (i) because 
 for the first time, love was seen on the earth 
 two thousand years ago. We could not have 
 understood its rounded splendour, if we had 
 not seen it ; we should be sure to have thought 
 it too weak here or too stern there ; we should 
 have made the picture too like a man or too 
 like a woman ; there would have been too 
 much strength there or too much softness 
 here. But seen in a life, the whole world 
 could understand love, and to use Bishop 
 Walpole's beautiful words : 
 
 " He was of kin to the whole world. 
 But His freedom from the limitations of 
 sex was even more strange than His racial 
 characteristic. He understood women as 
 well as men, understood them not simply 
 by sympathy but by the same natural 
 feeling that gave Him knowledge of man. 
 He had the woman's instinct as well as 
 the man's strength. There were ob- 
 servable in Him those tendernesses which 
 are so characteristic of women. He wept 
 publicly, and was not ashamed. He 
 allowed and justified the outward expres- 
 sion of feeling towards Himself in kisses 
 
 154 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 and tears. He had a woman's power of 
 attracting not only the confidences of 
 others but the most tender relations. His 
 friends came to Him as sons, and He could 
 rejoice in their intimate affection. To lean 
 on His breast as child on a mother's lap was 
 natural in one who knew both His love 
 and His strength. 
 
 (2) It is from this, St. Paul, the devout lover 
 of His Master, catches one by one the sahent 
 points and photographs them, {a) Love suffers 
 long and is kind. Look at Love in the servants' 
 hall, buffeted, abused, but still kind, still 
 giving Judas a last chance, by calling him 
 friend, still heaUng Malchus' ear. 
 
 {h) Love envies not. How different from 
 the bitter jealousy which spoils even the 
 Church work in the world, and is the bane 
 of half the professions in the world—" profes- 
 sional jealousy " is the reverse of love.^ 
 
 {c) Again in an age of self-advertisement, 
 Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, does 
 not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own. 
 (i) In the midst of a world of strident 
 tempers where the bitter retort is always 
 ready, " Love is not easily provoked '' 
 
 155 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 {e) In the midst of a world of ill-natured 
 gossip, and unkind suspicions, Love thinketh no 
 evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth 
 in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all 
 things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 
 
 (/) But perhaps most delightful of all, your 
 true Love never fails you. He is always there. 
 " Love never faileth," it is always waiting 
 like the father in the parable ; three things 
 are always there like guardian angels waiting 
 for you round the corner — Faith, Hope and 
 Love, but the greatest of these is Love. 
 
 (3) And the home of this wonderful thing 
 is meant of course to be the Church. You 
 are meant to come to the Church to look for 
 love, as naturally as you go to a garden to look 
 for flowers, to paraphrase what Mr. Carey says 
 about the Church as the House of Grace ; the 
 Church is also the House of Love. 
 
 From a cold, unsympathetic world, you are 
 meant to open the door and come into the 
 Church to find another atmosphere altogether ; 
 no jealousy there, no self-seeking there, no 
 ill-natured gossip there ; you have passed into 
 another world ; here all is radiant love, and 
 understanding sympathy, and mutual help, 
 and hope and jov and faith, for you have come 
 
 156 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 into the inmost sacred shrine of the House of 
 Love. 
 
 And the very fact that to say this sounds 
 almost ironical, shows us where we have 
 got to begin ; we saw this plainly in the 
 National Mission ; we must begin with the 
 Church. It is very easy, of course, to use 
 exaggerated language and entirely pervert 
 truth ; nothing is easier than tcvfoul your own 
 nest, and get cheap popularity by running 
 down the Institution to which you belong. 
 
 (i) Roughly speaking, the Church has done 
 splendidly during the war, and all the choirs, 
 the Church Lads' Brigades, Scout Corps, all 
 the Sunday School teachers have all gone, 
 and many of them have laid down their lives 
 for the freedom of the world, and they have 
 shown the greatest love of all, for " greater 
 love hath no man than this, that he lay down 
 his life for his friend." 
 
 (2) Thousands of chaplains volunteered on 
 the first day of the war, and all the Clergy of 
 the Church of England would have been 
 chaplains if there had been room for them 
 all, or if they had been of the age, experience 
 and physique to make the work possible for 
 them. 
 
 157 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 (3) Those who have stayed at home are 
 doing tvi^o men's work ; they are comforting 
 the mourners, and gathering in prayer round 
 the war shrines those who have never prayed 
 before ; they are looking after — and never was 
 their work more needed — the boys and girls 
 working in the great munition factories 
 throughout the land. 
 
 The Church has come out splendidly during 
 the war, and shown herself, when you can 
 break through the frost of custom and the 
 crust of conventionality, a house in which the 
 heart of love still beats true. 
 
 But just because, like the nation, it has 
 shown true grit under the sudden trial, one 
 yearns to have the Church still more com- 
 pletely the Home of Love than it is to-day. 
 
 (i) Why, for instance, these unnecessary 
 separations ? 
 
 I saw a speech from a Wesleyan chaplain 
 last night to say that the troops at the front 
 demand as their right greater co-operation 
 and unity between the Churches, and it was 
 for this I pleaded at the Wesleyan Conference. 
 
 Instead of the Church appearing as the 
 Home of Love to the man in the street, it 
 has appeared to be the cockpit of faction and 
 
 158 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 a spectacle of disunion. Nothing must or can 
 be done which violates principles, but every- 
 thing must and should be done which, consistent 
 with the outlines of the historic government and 
 teaching of the Church, would make the Church 
 once again a Home of Unity. 
 
 (2) But we need not wait for this formal re- 
 union. Is the Church itself, is the Church of 
 this diocese, the Church of this parish, a Home 
 of Love ? Do people say to-day, " See how 
 these Christians love one another " ? 
 
 Do they come as naturally to the Church 
 people of this parish for love as they go to 
 a garden for flowers ? 
 
 If not, whose fault is it ? We shall never 
 win the world if we rest upon our privileges 
 and stand on our dignity. We shall never win 
 the world if we are just precise, and correct 
 and respectable ! There must be something 
 like the fire of love in us. We must show 
 the forthcoming of the Incarnation, the losing 
 oneself to find oneself, the venture and daring 
 of love. 
 
 Come, Holy Ghost, then fill Thy Church 
 with Love ! 
 
 (3) And if we love, what ought it make 
 us do ? 
 
 159 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 A Church with real Christians in it ought 
 to be leading the mission work of London ; 
 the funds of the diocese are to be amalgamated 
 now into one Fund, the London Diocesan 
 Fund. Your Church must be the first to 
 raise it from j^8o,ooo to j^i 50,000 a year. 
 Every missionary from the farthest end of 
 the world must find a welcome here, for so 
 hot will be the fire in the heart of a missionary 
 Church that it will light a flame throughout 
 the world which shall never be put out. If 
 a Church loves, it loves to the ends of the 
 earth, and if it loves at all, it will love like 
 its Master, who having loved His own which 
 were in the world, loved them unto the end. 
 
 But none of this can be accomplished 
 unless we ourselves are loving. Look straight 
 in your own heart, brothers and sisters, and 
 compare it with the love described in this 
 chapter. 
 
 Do people find you long-suffering and kind, 
 do they find you unselfish and humble, glad 
 when others are praised, discouraging ill- 
 natured gossip and always ready to believe 
 the best of everyone ! 
 
 Do they find you generous, loyal and 
 patient ? 
 
 160 
 
Love Life's Chance 
 
 If not, then ask for love to-day. Life, says 
 Browning, is just the chance of gaining love. 
 
 Lifers Chance is the title of Bishop Walpole's 
 book. 
 
 Life's Chance — are you missing it ? If so, 
 you miss everything. Though you give all 
 your goods to feed the poor, and have not love, 
 you are nothing. 
 
 Get love, and the humblest who loves be- 
 comes a power ; he will have a share in the final 
 victory, for if one thing is certain, it is the 
 Triumph of Love. As certainly as the resistless 
 tide rolls at last on the reluctant dunes on the 
 beach, so love at last conquers the world, and 
 as certainly as the great sun struggling through 
 the mist rises at last, so certainly will love 
 suffuse the earth with light 
 
 . " For though the tired wave, vainly breaking, 
 Seems here no painful inch to gain. 
 Far back through creeks and inlets making, 
 Comes silent, flooding in the main. 
 
 " And not by eastern windows only. 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
 In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly. 
 But westward, look, the land is bright." 
 
 M l6l 
 
ill 
 
 CHRIST THE INVISIBLE KING* 
 
 " Whom, having not seen, ye love ; in whom, though 
 now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy un- 
 speakable and full of glory." — I Pet. i. 8. 
 
 " All authority has been given unto Me in heaven and in 
 earth." — St. Matt, xxviii. i8. 
 
 Is there an Invisible King of the World ? This 
 question is forced upon us by three things 
 at the present time : (i) There is the publi- 
 cation of a book which no doubt will be 
 widely read, of which I have been courteously 
 sent an advance copy, by Mr. H. G. Wells — 
 God the hwisible King. Of this I will speak 
 in a moment. (2) We are bound to face the 
 question through the appalling chaos which 
 the appearance of the world presents to-day, 
 and which makes many people imagine that 
 the world has slipped out of the control 
 of any higher power, and that, as a matter of 
 fact, there is no King of the World. (3) Of 
 course there is the fact that we have seen our 
 
 • An address delivered on the Sunday after Ascension Day. 
 162 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 King crowned on Ascension Day before Heaven 
 and earth, and have kept His coronation day 
 vi^ith shouts of triumph and hymns of praise. 
 
 I. Now. I shall spend little time this morn- 
 ing in rebutting the charges against current 
 Christianity contained in the book to which 
 I have alluded : 
 
 {a) The Christianity attacked has never 
 been taught, to my knowledge, in the 
 Church for hundreds of years, and if 
 rash and unbalanced statements have been 
 sometimes made, such criticism from an 
 honest mind does us good. 
 
 Q?) The doctrine of the Trinity, which 
 is the especial stumbling-block to the 
 writer, is admittedly a great mystery, and 
 was not invented by the Church. It is 
 imbedded in the New Testament. Take 
 the Baptism of our Lord ; the Father 
 speaks, the Son is in the water, and the 
 Holy Ghost descends as a dove. In the 
 last discourses our Lord speaks to the 
 Father and promises to send the Com- 
 forter ; the doctrine of the Trinity is 
 putting into words the sayings of the 
 New Testament. 
 
 163 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 (c) It is of course absolutely contra- 
 dictory and one-sided to talk of a finite 
 God. Is not a finite God a contradiction 
 in terms ? It may be, as we shall see, that 
 He is, " cabined, cribbed, confined " by 
 human obstinacy and self-will ; but a God 
 finite in Himself is no God, and a God 
 which has nothing to do with nature, and 
 which leaves out, apparently, according to 
 Mr. Wells, creation and the flowers and 
 the trees, is a God which does not own 
 enough territory, and though He may be 
 a petty princelet over certain princes, is 
 not King of the World. 
 
 (d) But I would rather recognise the 
 beautiful sayings in the book : " God is 
 a person ; God is courage ; God is eternally 
 young." 
 
 " He is by our poor scales of measure- 
 ment, boundless love ; boundless courage ; 
 boundless generosity." 
 
 " He is thought and a steadfast will. 
 He is our friend and brother and the light 
 of the world. That, briefly, is the belief 
 of the modern mind with regard to God." 
 
 " It is as if this being bridged a thousand 
 misunderstandings and brought us into 
 164 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 fellowship with a great multitude of other 
 people." 
 
 " Closer He is than breathing, nearer 
 than hands and feet." 
 
 '' Therefore one goes about the world 
 like one who was lonely and has found a 
 lover, like one who was perplexed and has 
 found a solution." 
 
 " The true God goes through the world 
 like fifes and drums and flags, calling for 
 recruits along the street. We must go 
 out to Him. We must accept His dis- 
 cipline and fight His battle. The peace 
 of God comes not by thinking about it 
 but by forgetting oneself in Him." 
 
 " God should be wise, brave and beauti- 
 ful ; He should stand lightly on His feet 
 in the morning-time, eager to go forward 
 as though He had but newly risen to a 
 day that was still but a promise. He 
 should bear a sword — that clean, dis- 
 criminating weapon — and His eyes should 
 be bright as swords ; and His lips should 
 be open in eagerness to the fresh adventure 
 before Him ; and He should be in golden 
 harness reflecting the rising sun." 
 
 This is a splendid picture, but we can do 
 
 165 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 better than that. This is only the dream 
 of a man ; this is only the picture he has 
 drawn by his imagination. With us it is a 
 reality. That is our God ; we serve Him ; 
 we follow Him. That is the God Who 
 has been described for us by a better hand 
 even than that of the writer from whose 
 work I have just been reading, by one who 
 had seen and loved Him on earth, and 
 fell at His feet when he saw Him again. 
 He said, " His eyes are as a flame of fire, 
 and His feet like burnished brass, and 
 His voice is as the sound of many waters, 
 and out of His mouth proceedeth a sharp, 
 two-edged sword, and His countenance is 
 as the sun shining in its strength." There 
 you are. There is the God, our only Lord, 
 the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the 
 Saviour and Redeemer of the world. 
 
 For all that, what I have quoted from 
 Mr. Wells is beautiful, and if you turn the 
 word God into Christ, it is what many 
 an ardent Christian has said about His 
 invisible King any time in the last two 
 thousand years. 
 
 And so, instead of any irritation at the hard 
 1 66 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 things said about orthodox Christianity, I 
 would plead that we should all rejoice that a 
 mind which thinks ahead, and whose think- 
 ing is followed by so many all over the 
 world, should have thought itself, at a time 
 when some are giving up their faith in 
 God, into so beautiful a conception of God, 
 contradictory and onesided as it turns out 
 to be. 
 
 II. But at the same time, it is with intel- 
 lectual and moral relief that we turn to 
 consider again the claim we make for our King 
 on His coronation day, or rather the claim 
 which He makes for Himself and to which we 
 enthusiastically assent. 
 
 (i) He is Himself Lord of all the earth. 
 There are not three Gods in the Christian 
 religion, as Mr. Wells seems to think, but one 
 God ; and this God made the world — " With- 
 out Him was not anything made which was 
 made." 
 
 And this it is which gives the peculiar pathos 
 to our Good Friday hymn : 
 
 " His are the thousand sparkling rills, 
 
 Which from a thousand fountains burst, 
 And fill with music all the hills : 
 And yet He saith, ' I thirst.' " 
 
 167 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 We know all about the destruction of life 
 in nature, and we know that one animal feeds 
 on another, as we ourselves feed on other 
 animals, but we do not admit that 
 
 " Nature, red in tooth and claw 
 With ravin, shrieks against our creed." 
 
 On the contrary, naturalists tell us that the 
 animal creation is uniformly happy, and that — 
 apart from human sin — if God again looked 
 out upon the earth, He would say, " It was 
 very good." 
 
 (2) But He is more than King of the World, 
 He is King of the Mind. 
 
 One of the most current misrepresentations 
 of the teaching of Christianity is that there 
 was no truth taught in the world and no light 
 given until two thousand years ago, whereas, 
 from the very earliest days of Christianity it 
 was taught that Christ was the Logos or Word, 
 that He has always been the truth from the 
 beginning ; that just as the sun sends forth 
 prevenient rays of early dawn, before he rises 
 in his strength, so, centuries before the great 
 revelation, the Word of God had been speak- 
 ing to great minds, and that every ray of 
 truth which lighted up Confucius or Buddha 
 
 168 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 or Plato or Socrates came from the one source 
 of light which was about later to rise in its 
 strength. 
 
 " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light," 
 said Christ, when He came, and by that say- 
 ing He claimed the human mind : " You can 
 do nothing against the Truth but for the 
 Truth," is a saying which has cheered thou- 
 sands in their days of doubt, for Christ 
 claimed, and claims to-day, to be the Key to the 
 World's Problems ; the Centre of the World's 
 System of Thought ; the King of the Mind. 
 
 (3) But more than that. He claims to be, 
 and is acclaimed to be by all impartial thinkers, 
 the King of the Conscience. Often and often 
 have I quoted a saying of Bishop Temple's 
 addressed to a thousand working men when 
 he spoke on " Conscience and the Bible " — 
 " Christ not only satisfies the human con- 
 science, but He educates it." 
 
 In other words. He is more perfect than the 
 Human conscience could have conceived ; He 
 has trained the human conscience to expand 
 itself to take Him in. " Live so that Jesus 
 Christ will approve of your life," cried John 
 Stuart Mill to the young men of his day ; and 
 Lecky — an impartial witness, if ever there was 
 
 169 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 one — said, " The record of those three short 
 years have done more to regenerate mankind 
 than all the disquisitions of philosophers or 
 all the plans of statesmen." We too agree 
 that God is courage ; that God is perpetual 
 youth ; that God is a Person. 
 
 This King of ours is no vague, shadov^y 
 power. He is flesh and blood ; He is the most 
 wonderful person the world has ever seen ; 
 He reigns even on the Cross, and the earliest 
 representation of Him on the Cross is of a 
 youth, always young, and with no mark of 
 pain or suffering on His brow or His body. 
 
 (4) And that is why He makes His fourth 
 and most successful claim, and remains the 
 crowned and attested " King of the Heart." 
 You could not love an abstraction ; you could 
 not love one who had done nothing. But 
 you can love " a Man of Sorrows, and ac- 
 quainted with grief " ; and when such a one, 
 so young, so strong and so tender, says, " Come 
 unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy 
 laden," we come. 
 
 It is not required or expected of us all 
 to attain some ecstatic state of devotion, but 
 there are few who would""flot dare to take up 
 the beautiful words of long ago : 
 
 170 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 " Whom, having not seen, we love ; and in 
 Whom, behcving, we rejoice with joy unspeak- 
 able and full of glory." 
 
 We do not talk too much about it, but there 
 is one occupant- of the throne in the heart of 
 every earnest Christian : " His Lord and 
 Saviour Jesus Christ." 
 
 (5) But even now the claim is not finished ; 
 many stay here, and their religion is indi- 
 viduahstic and therefore stunted. When we 
 started the Christian Social Union nearly 
 thirty years ago, we put among the objects of 
 the Union, to enforce the claim that Jesus 
 Christ was the Living Master and King of 
 human affairs. Everything else has failed to 
 produce harmony or even a working co-opera- 
 tion between Capital and Labour. 
 
 Nothing will ever reconcile them but the 
 fact and sight which abolished slavery — the 
 Master and slave kneehng side by side at the 
 Christian altar. Let both reahse that Christ 
 is the King of Trade, and let social and in- 
 dustrial life be ruled on Christian principles, 
 and there shall be " a truce of God." 
 
 (6) But, after all, what a span of time this 
 life is ! what a contest of ants with ants are 
 disputes about dividends and profits when you 
 
 171 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 look up at the silent stars, and remember the 
 thousands who pass every day from one hfe 
 into eternity ! 
 
 " The army of the Dead go by, and still go 
 by! " 
 
 But we are not afraid about those who pass 
 from one life to the other, for there is one who 
 stands King of the Other World, and it is 
 He who cries on Easter Day : 
 
 " I am He that liveth and was dead, and 
 behold ! I am alive for evermore and have 
 the keys of Hell and Death." The keys are 
 the symbol of authority, and only witness to 
 His simple and majestic claim, " All authority 
 is given unto Me in Heaven and in Earth." 
 
 HI. This, then, is the King we crown upon 
 Ascension Day, and if He is all this, no wonder 
 we cry : 
 
 " Crown Him with many crowns, 
 The Lamb upon His throne ; 
 Hark ! how the heavenly anthem drowns 
 All music but its own." 
 
 And if it be urged. Why does such a King 
 as this not show more power and win more 
 victories, we must remember that the only final 
 victory God means to win is a moral victory, 
 and for this there must be three necessities. 
 
 172 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 (i) The King is hampered in His rule (and 
 this is what Mr. Wells is aiming at in his 
 idea of a Finite God) by human self-will 
 and ambition ; He is for a time defeated 
 by unredeemed and unrepentant human 
 nature. 
 
 The Devil made the war, not God. But 
 the Devil must be conquered by force. 
 
 God will not strike dead an individual who 
 sets himself up against Him, and He will not 
 destroy His free-will, nor will He destroy in 
 a moment a self-willed nation ; the mystery of 
 iniquity must work for a time. 
 
 Our task is to subdue the earth to the 
 invisible King by prayer, by preaching, by 
 sacraments ; to make the whole world accept 
 Him as King. " All authority has been given 
 unto Me . . ." He says, " therefore goP 
 
 (2) And to accomplish this. He is calling 
 for recruits ; hke Garibaldi, He cries : " I 
 promise you forced marches, short rations, 
 bloody battles, bonds, imprisonment and death. 
 Let him who loves home and Fatherland follow 
 me." He goes out to enrol recruits : 
 
 " The Son of God goes forth to war, 
 A kingly crown to gain ; 
 His blood-red banner streams afar ! 
 Who follows in His train ? " 
 
 173 
 
Christ the Invisible King 
 
 It is the glory of the Christian that he is 
 asked to follow in His train. 
 
 (3) A day is coming when the Triumph will 
 be visible and complete. Not yet does He 
 see all things put under His feet. Not yet, 
 but some day the kingdom of the world shall 
 become the Kingdom of the Lord and of His 
 Christ, 
 
 Crown Him then the King of your Mind, 
 your Conscience, your Heart, your Life and 
 your Future, and you shall be present at the 
 day when visibly He takes to Himself His 
 great power and reigns. 
 
 Is Christ King of our minds, Lord of our 
 consciences, the Ideal of our hearts, the Ruler 
 of our conduct, the Hope of our souls after 
 death ? We must crown Him King within 
 first, then in our parishes, then in the world ; 
 and if we are faithful we shall one day see this 
 astounding sight : we shall see the stone which 
 the builders rejected become the Head of the 
 corner, and the despised and rejected of men 
 openly and visibly proclaimed and acknow- 
 ledged King of the World. 
 
 174 
 
Ill 
 
 THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE DAWN 
 
THE BLESSEDNESS OF SEEING BY FAITH* 
 
 " Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have 
 believed." — St. John xx. 29. 
 
 All Saints' Day in the midst of a great war has 
 a richness and significance which it can have 
 at no other time. We are all thinking on that 
 day of dear boyish faces ; I am thinking now of 
 some who have been killed flying and have 
 dropped to their death seventeen thousand feet ; 
 others have died with their faces to the foe as 
 they led on their men ; others, equally heroic, 
 from accidents while preparing for the battle ; 
 they have gone and with a pathos too deep 
 for words, we think of their dear smiles and 
 happy laughter and almost choke to think we 
 shall never see them on earth again. 
 
 One mother is quite certain that her boy, 
 who had been almost husband and father 
 as well as son, came back to her after his fatal 
 fall, and clothed in the same dress in which 
 
 * An address delivered on All Saints' Day, 1917. 
 N 177 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 he had gone, but dazzHng above the brightness 
 of the sun, threw his arms round her, pressed 
 his Hps on hers, and said in a voice of surprising 
 tenderness : 
 
 " No, Mummy ! I am not coming back to 
 you on earth any more." 
 
 We are absolutely forced to ask — What are 
 they doing ? What do we know about the 
 other world ? No other question, except see- 
 ing that they have not died in vain, is of any 
 importance except this. Are they happy ? 
 Have they a full and vital human life ? Are 
 they near us in spirit ? Shall we see them 
 again ? 
 
 And if I seek to answer some of these ques- 
 tions now, it is with a deep sense of my in- 
 adequacy to deal with so vast a subject, but 
 also with a behef that it is the failure to reahse 
 how much we can know which has driven 
 people to Theosophy and Spirituahsm. 
 
 (i) And first let me defend discussing such 
 a subject on the day sacred to the Saints. 
 
 " Our boy would have laughed at being 
 called a saint," was said to me not long ago, 
 but I believe we are often wrong as to what a 
 saint is. We mix it up with stained windows, 
 but I agree with James Russell Lowell : 
 
 178 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 " One Feast, of Church's feast the crest, 
 I, though no Churchman, love to keep : 
 All Saints, the unknown good who rest 
 In God's still memory folded deep." 
 
 All Souls' Day is a day I hope we shall restore 
 in the new Prayer Book, for the instinct of 
 the Church was to love all created spirits, and 
 those who will may then commemorate their 
 boys on All Souls' Day; but I shall keep the 
 memory of my boys on the Feast of All Saints, 
 for by their fearlessness, their cleanness of 
 life, their purity of character, their devotion 
 unto death, in a short time, they have fulfilled 
 a long time, and have raised for ever the 
 standard of what life in this world may be. 
 
 Now what do we really know for certain 
 about them ? 
 
 That is the urgent and insistent question 
 to-day — a question for the lack of a satis- 
 factory answer to which men and women are 
 flocking to mediums to-day only to find the 
 bitter disappointment of those who try to 
 believe because they see, whereas the blessing 
 is promised " to those who have not seen but 
 yet have believed." 
 
 (i) It is revealed for certain that they are 
 alive, alive as much as they ever were. One 
 
 179 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 of the unquestioned sayings of the Son of God 
 was contained in the familiar words, " In my 
 Father's House are many mansions ; if it were 
 not so, I would have told you," and those who 
 accept St. John's Gospel have the further 
 promise : " I am the Resurrection and the 
 Life ; he that liveth and believeth in Me shall 
 never die." 
 
 All this was not a surprise to the world ; 
 it was prepared for by the instinct of im- 
 mortality in all of us ; it was prepared for by 
 the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the 
 soul stands before some Higher Power ; by 
 the Jewish belief in Immortality, but it becomes 
 only a certainty because the Son of God came 
 from Heaven and told us ; indeed He says : " If 
 it were not so, I would have told you," i. e. " if 
 that instinct and age-long belief were leading 
 you astray, you should have known the worst." 
 
 Now if we knew for certain no more than 
 that, what a relief from despair ! I shall never 
 forget seeing a wife one Sunday, who had heard 
 her husband was missing, bowed in sorrow and 
 despair, and the next Sunday her face trans- 
 figured with joy because she heard by a post- 
 card that he was alive, a prisoner, it was true, 
 and away perhaps for years, but still alive. 
 
 1 80 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 And ought there not to be more radiant grati- 
 tude and joy than there is when Christ stands 
 triumphant on Easter Day and cries : " I am 
 He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am 
 alive for evermore, and have the keys of Hell 
 and of Death." 
 
 (2) But is it real life ? is it a full human 
 life ? a life they can enjoy ? 
 
 And I have no doubt, as Bishop Walpole 
 points out in his excellent book, Life in the 
 World to Come, that this was the object of 
 those appearances of our Lord after His 
 resurrection, " He took of the bread and 
 fish " and said, " A spirit hath not flesh and 
 bones, as ye see me have." The description 
 of the mysterious life of our Lord in the 
 New Testament between the Resurrection 
 and the Ascension Day does not imply that 
 that life is literally the same life as the life 
 beyond the veil, but it is speaking in the 
 only language we can understand here ; we 
 have not the faculties to grasp the exact truth : 
 " Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, the things 
 which the Lord hath prepared for them that 
 love Him," but we are able to spell out con- 
 tinuity, vitality, completeness of life, something 
 which every pure-hearted, full-blooded spirit 
 
 181 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 can enjoy; something which can make true 
 the saying of the Psalmist, " He asked life of 
 Thee. Thou hast given him a long life, even 
 for ever and ever." 
 
 (3) And in the third place, being a full life, 
 it is not a solitary life. 
 
 One of the most touching things said during 
 the war was by a mother of a rich and handsome 
 son, owner of a great estate, killed quite early 
 in the war — " It does not seem lonely, all 
 these young knights going out together." We 
 are learning a little bit to-day the social side 
 of Christianity ; that the ideally full life is not 
 lived in solitude ; that the life of the CathoHc 
 Church is meant to be a brotherhood, and 
 full of far more brotherly sympathy and love 
 than we have yet succeeded in making it. 
 
 But, if this is so, think of what the life in 
 the world to come must be, from which all 
 jealousy and misunderstanding, and brutality 
 and lust and drink are excluded, all the things 
 which break up famihes and disturb our Church 
 life here. 
 
 What friendships must be formed there ! 
 what comradeship ! The comradeship of the 
 trenches is one of the most beautiful things 
 we have yet seen on earth ; and it precedes 
 
 182 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 sometimes by a few hours the comradeship of 
 the world to come. 
 
 (4) But are the boys ready for this purity 
 of Hf e, and unselfish service of the other world ? 
 and here comes in the fourth distinct note 
 of Progress, growth in character. We should 
 have felt certain of it in any case, for a growing 
 thing has to grow ; why should we suppose 
 that a boy who has grown in character since 
 his childhood should cease to grow because 
 he has passed through the grave and gate of 
 death, which does not touch the real man ? 
 Five minutes after death he is still the same as 
 five minutes before. But when the veil is lifted 
 for even a moment, we find signs of growth ; 
 even the selfish Dives had clearly grown in 
 character, for he had learnt to have some care 
 for his brothers ; and our Lord Himself says : 
 " They that are counted worthy to attain that 
 world neither marry nor are given in marriage, 
 but are as the angels of God." He clearly 
 intimates that the life is on a higher plane. 
 
 (5) But are they transfigured beyond us ! 
 Do they cease to be our boys ; our sons, our 
 brothers, our husbands ? And here we may 
 speak with absolute certainty. 
 
 God's honour is pledged that the beautiful 
 183 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 love He has planted in the human breast shall 
 not be mocked — " If it were not so, I would 
 have told you " is an appeal to trust to the 
 sincerity and honest dealing of God — no refine- 
 ment of cruelty would be so great, no horror 
 enacted even in this war so great, as giving a 
 mother her superb love of son, or wife for her 
 husband only to blast it for ever. No love 
 could be possible for a God who could do this, 
 rather undying hate, and it is really a blasphemy 
 of the worst kind to harbour such a thought 
 for a moment. All revelation is the other way 
 — Christ gives back the son He had raised 
 to his mother ; His last thought on earth is 
 for His own mother ; He appears after rising 
 from the dead, at once to those He loves on 
 earth ; and the most characteristic saying 
 which He uttered, and one which is full of 
 meaning was this, " Behold and see — it is I 
 Myself." 
 
 " Behold and see ; it is I myself," is what 
 our boy would be saying, if his voice could 
 reach us through the veil. 
 
 (6) But then comes the most pathetic ques- 
 tion of all. Can they help us and be with us ? 
 
 Those who have never had so vivid a vision 
 as that described above can be certain that the 
 
 184 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 boys are far nearer than we often think ; we 
 are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews that 
 " we are come to Mount Sion and the spirits 
 of just men made perfect " ; they pray for us 
 and we for them, and many a time may the 
 spirit of the boy we love be whispering 
 comfort into our ear. 
 
 (7) And above all — We shall see them again. 
 
 " My eyes shall behold him and not another." 
 
 " Oh, then what raptured greetings 
 
 On Canaan's happy shore, 
 What knitting sever'd friendships up, 
 
 Where partings are no more ! 
 Then eyes with joy shall sparkle 
 
 That brimm'd with tears of late ; 
 Orphans no longer fatherless. 
 
 Nor widows desolate." 
 
 But why cannot we see these things and 
 these persons ? Why have the mist and the 
 cloud and the veil at all ? And that is why I 
 chose this particular saying of our Lord : 
 
 " Thomas, because thou hast seen, thou hast 
 believed : blessed are those who have not 
 seen, and yet have believed." 
 
 There is a pecuhar value to this seeing by 
 faith. 
 
 (i) In the first place it does not distort. 
 
 No one can read The Necromancers or 
 
 185 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 Raymond without realising how distorted our 
 ideas of the other world may be when we try 
 to see. Contrast with these seven truths of the 
 CathoHc Faith, the banahtiesof the life depicted 
 in Raymond, or the horrors portrayed in The 
 Necromancers. Can anyone say that even if 
 they were true, anyone could be the least the 
 better for them ? 
 
 (2) These seven great truths which are 
 revealed simply change life. 
 
 {a) They lift us out of our paltriness to 
 share the noble aims our boys have now 
 before them ; they make the perfect 
 sacrifice here, and have passed to a perfect 
 service hereafter. 
 
 (b) They lift us out of our mourning 
 into the certainty of never-dying life ; we 
 must not keep them back by mourning 
 as those without hope. 
 
 {c) They make us determine that where 
 our treasure is there will our hearts be 
 also. They put us on our mettle to live a 
 life worthy of theirs. 
 
 No one can live a mean or selfish life who 
 believes his son is among the saints. 
 186 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 (3) And more than that — the very necessity 
 for faith discipHnes our characters. 
 
 To die still remains " the great adventure." 
 
 There is always a danger that the vast 
 interests of the v^^orld to come should bhnd 
 man's eyes to the importance of the present. 
 
 Hundreds are wasting valuable time to-day 
 trying to see ; whereas they should be pre- 
 paring here day by day for the vision when 
 it comes — it is a positive training in character 
 to see only one step at a time, and a literal 
 truth is contained in the familiar Hne : 
 
 " One step enough for me." 
 
 Courage then, Hope and Aspiration are the 
 messages of All Saints' Day, to mourners. 
 " Look up, and Hft up your heads, for your 
 redemption draweth nigh." Your Great 
 Comrade in Heaven will never let you down : 
 
 " Children, in My gracious keeping 
 Leave ye now your dear ones sleeping." 
 
 " You cannot see them now, but some day you 
 shall see them with your own eyes again ; leave 
 them to me ; I will guard them. I will teach 
 them ; see that you grow in grace on earth, 
 as they grow in Heaven." Others around you 
 
 187 
 
The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 
 
 will try to see ; but if you walk by faith, then 
 in increased hope and sincerity of soul, and 
 in growing nobility of life, you will inherit the 
 blessing of those who have not seen and yet 
 have believed. 
 
 " We know not when, we know not where, 
 We know not what that world will be 
 But this we know : it will be fair 
 To see. 
 
 " With heart athirst and thirsty face. 
 We know and know not what shall be : 
 Christ Jesus bring us of His grace 
 To see. 
 
 " Christ Jesus, bring us of His grace, 
 Beyond all prayers our hope can pray. 
 One day to see Him face to face — 
 One day." 
 
 C, RoSSETTI. 
 
II 
 
 EASTER THE VICTORY OF FREEDOM * 
 
 " This is the day which the Lord hath made ; we will 
 rejoice and be glad in it." — Ps. cxviii. 24. 
 
 I. It often happens, especially in this variable 
 climate, that a day opens in mist and cloud. 
 It is not quite certain at first, as we say, how- 
 it will " turn out " ; outlines of scenery are 
 not clear ; the issue of the day .is doubtful, 
 and then at midday, or in the afternoon, all 
 is different : the day has declared itself ; 
 everything is seen in the clearest outline ; 
 near and even distant views stand out, and 
 the whole world is seen in the light of another 
 day which the Lord hath made. 
 
 So it has been with regard to the war. 
 Even in the dim dawn of it, so far off to us 
 now, the issues were fairly plain — to my mind 
 even palpably plain ; but more cautious people 
 talked about mixed motives, and you were 
 
 * Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, Easter Day, 1917. 
 189 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 hardly allowed to speak of a conflict between 
 right and wrong, for fear of seeming to claim 
 God exclusively on your side, and so make 
 yourself as ridiculous as the German Emperor. 
 Even some of your best friends said that you 
 could not put the country's role higher than 
 the role of a policeman ; and our boys fought 
 and died, and more took their places and 
 fought and died ; and though all men called 
 them heroes, it was not thought quite right 
 to call them martyrs, although they died 
 with the brightness and even the joy of the 
 martyrs of old. 
 
 But now, all has changed ; the day has 
 declared itself ; the mists have cleared away, 
 and the whole world knows the issue. It is a 
 fight for the freedom of the world against the 
 most ruthless, most degrading and remorseless 
 Tyranny which has ever been known in it. 
 Let no one say that this amounts to asserting 
 that there is not a single good man among 
 the Germans, or a single bad man among the 
 AlHes ; it is, of course, asserting nothing of 
 the sort. There may be many now — and let 
 us pray God there may be increasingly more 
 — good individual Christian men and women 
 among the Germans ; our complaint is that 
 
 190 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 they have, apparently, no influence whatever 
 over the conduct of their cause. On the other 
 hand, we are not posing in the least as a perfect 
 nation ; we should never have pushed home 
 so hard the National Mission, if we had believed 
 ourselves perfect, complete in all the will of 
 God. No one has spoken out more plainly 
 than I have myself in every part of England 
 and Scotland on the subject of national sins, 
 such as Drink and Lust. 
 
 But the fact remains : the one side is per- 
 sistently guilty of acts of outrageous tyranny, 
 and the other is lighting for international law, 
 and the laws of chivalry and respect for those 
 elementary principles of honour and pity 
 which can alone make life on this earth desirable 
 or even tolerable. 
 
 Even before the American President's famous 
 speech, the acts of tyranny were summarised 
 by one of our most level-headed writers under 
 eleven heads : 
 
 1. The enemy have begun military action 
 without a declaration of war. 
 
 2. They have seized and put to death 
 civilian hostages. 
 
 3. They have violated neutral territory. 
 
 191 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 4. They have massacred non-combatants to 
 terrorise the civil population. 
 
 5. They have dropped explosives upon open 
 towns. 
 
 6. They have sunk innocent non-belligerent 
 merchantmen, and of late months with no 
 pretence of saving their crews. 
 
 7. They began the use of poison-gas and 
 burning oil. 
 
 8. They have destroyed the passenger ships 
 of belligerents, and even hospital ships. 
 
 9. They have ill-treated prisoners of war, 
 and compelled them, contrary to all inter- 
 national conventions, to work against their 
 own countries. 
 
 10. They have, by military order and as 
 an act of government, stolen private property 
 and rifled banks. 
 
 11. They have destroyed the houses and 
 the orchards of the people who have sheltered 
 them during the last two years, and carried 
 off their young girls and children into a slavery 
 worse than death. 
 
 No tyrants of whom we have ever read in 
 history have ever done worse. But those 
 tyrants lived and tyrannised and died for the 
 
 192 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 most part before Christ came and taught the 
 world that the exact opposite was the will of 
 God, and the fact that all this is being done two 
 thousand years after He came and died to save 
 the world from this very tyranny makes it in a 
 special degree a crucifying of the Son of God 
 afresh, and putting Him to an open shame ! 
 
 It is this which has brought into the struggle 
 the United States of America — the greatest 
 lovers of freedom in the world ; we must not 
 blame them that as a nation they took so long 
 to sec the truth, but I confess that I longed 
 m the first years of the war that the great and 
 mighty people whom I learnt to love and 
 honour when I visited them ten years ago 
 might see at last that the issue which was 
 being fought for in this day of God was " The 
 Freedom of the World." 
 
 They have seen it at last ; it was as well to 
 wait until all in the nation saw it, for now, 
 with a determination which those who know 
 the United States are certain will never 
 weaken, the last free nation of the world has 
 ranged itself under Freedom's banner. In 
 burning words which will live in history, and 
 which are an echo of the great Lincoln, the 
 President says : 
 
 o 193 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 " The German Government has thrown 
 aside all considerations of humanity and 
 right and is running amok. We are now 
 about to accept the gage of battle with 
 this natural foe to liberty, and shall, if 
 necessary, spend the whole force of the 
 nation to check and nullify its pretensions 
 and its power. . . . The world must be 
 made safe for democracy. . . . 
 
 " Civilisation seems to be in the balance, 
 but right is more precious than peace, and 
 we shall fight for the things which we 
 have always carried nearest our hearts — 
 for democracy, for the right of those who 
 submit to authority to have a voice in 
 their own government, for the rights and 
 liberties of small nations, for the universal 
 dominion of right by such a concert of 
 free peoples as will bring peace and safety 
 to all nations and make the world itself at 
 last free. 
 
 " To such a task we can dedicate our lives, 
 our fortunes, everything we are, every- 
 thing we have, with the pride of those who 
 know the day has come when America is 
 privileged to spend her blood and might 
 for the principles that gave her birth and 
 194 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 the happiness and peace which she has 
 treasured. God helping her, she can no 
 other." 
 
 And so, as the Spectator not long ago so truly 
 said : 
 
 " The greatest, the richest, and the 
 most energetic of all the white com- 
 munities of the world is now ranged on 
 our side, and is pledged to use all the 
 resources of a vast continent to beat down 
 the pirates of land and sea, and free 
 Europe from the enslaver. For any Eng- 
 lishman to write or talk as if he did not 
 feel a sense of profound relief at such an 
 event would be to make himself ridiculous. 
 Yet we beheve that those Americans, and 
 we are glad to say that they are not a 
 few, who are readers of the Spectator will 
 not misunderstand us when we say : ' Our 
 joy is great because America stands by our 
 side, but it is far greater because America 
 has awakened from her trance, has given 
 her soul its rights, and has taken that 
 place in the battle for the destruction of 
 tyranny and for the reconstruction of 
 the world on that basis of personal liberty, 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 self-government, and international inde- 
 pendence which should be man's inahen- 
 able heritage, but of which he has so often 
 been robbed by force and fraud.' Thank 
 God ! it can no longer be possible for 
 anyone to say of America : 
 
 " ' She alone breaks from the van ^nd the freeman, 
 She alone sinks to the rear and the slaves.' " 
 
 And it is because the issue is now so plain 
 that Russia has tossed away the rule which 
 interfered with the fight for freedom, and, 
 after years of autocracy found finally impos- 
 sible to bear, even with a ruler personally 
 kindly and unselfish, is trying to become, 
 to the astonishment of the world a Free 
 Republic. 
 
 We ourselves have long known the joys of 
 freedom, and it is because we are not only the 
 children of the free but the mothers of the free 
 that from every corner of the world the 
 children of the Empire have come out to 
 fight, not merely for the mother herself, as 
 some think, but for the freedom which she 
 taught them, the freedom they drew in with 
 their mother's milk. 
 
 It is because the British Empire is founded 
 196 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 upon freedom that it stands four-square to all 
 the winds of heaven. 
 
 II. But, it may be said, " This is all true, 
 and impossible to deny, but what has this to 
 do with Easter Day ? " 
 
 Such a question illustrates precisely what 
 Donald Hankey points out in that marvellous 
 book, A Student in Arms, as characteristic of 
 the soldier's attitude towards the Christian 
 religion. " They admire immensely," he says, 
 " courage, unselfishness, chivalry, and kindness, 
 but consider that they have no sort of con- 
 nection with religion ; religion is a thing apart, 
 an affair for parsons and Sunday church- 
 parade." 
 
 It is one of those ghastly mistakes which 
 to some extent account for the aloofness of 
 millions of men from the Christian religion ; 
 we have not succeeded in convincing them 
 that it has the most intimate bearing on every 
 living question of the day ; for Easter, as a 
 matter of fact, is the seal and pledge of the 
 victory of freedom. 
 
 Every power of tyranny which ever cursed 
 the earth assembled on Good Friday to crush 
 out the freedom of the world. Sin held the 
 sinner in firm grip, and there was no escape for 
 
 197 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 him ; slavery was an institution so ancient, so 
 strong, that no other form of labour was even 
 thought of ; military tyranny held down the 
 little Jewish race, and a Pilate could toss a 
 Christ to his foes and go home to his break- 
 fast ; a Church could hound down the most 
 religious soul that ever breathed to a felon's 
 death and gloat over it ; no wonder that the 
 blackness of thick darkness seemed to settle 
 down upon the world on Good Friday, and 
 made even the loving, trustful soul of the Son 
 of God burst into the bitter cry : " My 
 God ! My God ! why hast Thou , forsaken 
 Me ? " 
 
 But on Easter Day the sun shone again ; 
 the tyrant's bonds were burst : 
 
 " Sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously ; 
 The horse and his rider hath He cast into the sea ! " 
 
 The world breathed again ; the freedom of 
 the world was won. Years would have to 
 elapse before the freedom won on Easter Day 
 would reach the confines of the earth ; the 
 path of freedom would have to " broaden 
 slowly down from precedent to precedent." 
 Many a village Hampden would have to make 
 his protest and suffer and die before freedom 
 
 198 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 could be attained ; but the principle of free- 
 dom was established, and the power to attain 
 it was won. 
 
 Slavery might still go on for a time, and 
 did go on, but when master and man had once 
 knelt side by side at the Christian altar the 
 thing was doomed ; the Roman Empire might 
 still go on, and did, but a wedge had been 
 driven in which would break it to pieces — 
 and it broke it. Men and women would in 
 every age be slaves to sin, but it was, after 
 Easter, a voluntary bondage, and there was 
 always the power at hand to set them free. 
 When Christ rose from the grave on Easter 
 Day, freedom rose with Him, and took into 
 her hand the wand which shall one day rule 
 the world. " This is the day which the Lord 
 hath made ; we will rejoice and he glad in it^"* 
 for on this day, two thousand years ago, the 
 freedom of the world was won, the sentence of 
 the God of Heaven was pronounced for all 
 time upon " everything that was high and 
 lofty," and the power of God was pledged for 
 ever on the side of the weak against the strong, 
 for " had not the solitary Man upon the Cross 
 been stronger than the surrounding crowds ? " 
 And every great Day of God which has leapt 
 
 199 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 to light since has been a repetition, or rather 
 a reflection, of the hght of Easter Day. 
 
 Once reahse (to use the title of a most strik- 
 ing book by Mr. March Phillips) that " Europe 
 is at last unbound,'''' once realise that we are in 
 the midst of a Titanic struggle between liberty 
 and tyranny, and that the surging millions 
 now about to be locked in a final death struggle 
 are deciding the question whether freedom or 
 tyranny shall rule the world for the next 
 thousand years, and perhaps for ever — once 
 reahse this, and things begin to fall into their 
 right perspective. 
 
 Death, loss, pain, wounds, are horrible in 
 themselves, but, glorified by the motive for 
 which they were incurred, they lose their 
 horror ; they are glorified by the freedom to 
 win which they are endured ; the martyred 
 boy who died in the cause of freedom fighting 
 four German aeroplanes will be rejoicing in 
 the other world even now, and in a few short 
 years with those he loves, for having thus 
 struck his blow for the freedom of the world. 
 
 This day itself, with all its pains and death, 
 is the most glorious day the world has known 
 for at least a thousand years. When you say, 
 " It is the day which the Lord hath made," 
 
 200 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 you do not mean that God stirred up the 
 calculated ambition which caused the war, or 
 the devilry shown in its execution, but that 
 the day in which it is to be iinally destroyed 
 is a Divine day ; it is a day of God ; it is a 
 day which reflects the Light of Easter ; it is 
 bright with a supernatural light, and filled with 
 supernatural power, and in that sense it is a 
 day which the Lord hath made. 
 
 Let us be worthy, then, of living in such a 
 day. " It is a great thing to be alive in the 
 world to-day," said an old worker in Christ's 
 cause to me not long ago. " Isn't it lucky, 
 mother," said another boy to his mother, 
 " that I was born just at the right time ? " 
 
 And only recently a great statesman quoted 
 the stirring words of Wordsworth : 
 
 " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven ! " 
 
 III. But what does it mean to be worthy of 
 so great a day ? 
 
 I. It means that we must fight on with 
 unflinching courage to the end. Only an over- 
 whelming victory can overthrow tyranny ; the 
 quarrel, as the American President said, is not 
 with the German people as such, but with 
 
 201 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 them as the victims and instruments of tyranny. 
 We must, to use the words of one of the most 
 beautiful of the war prayers, " give, and not 
 count the cost ; fight, and not heed the 
 wounds ; toil, and not seek for rest ; labour, 
 and not ask for any reward but that of knowing 
 that we do Thy will." 
 
 2. We must do it with eyes wide open to 
 the danger. Not nearly are the opposing forces 
 overcome. The chief of the Imperial Staff 
 early in 191 7 said that the Germans had a 
 million more men than the year before, and 
 asked for half a million more before July. 
 Everything, literally czwrythifig must be sacri- 
 ficed in answer to such an appeal. 
 
 " fVho stands if freedom falls, 
 Who dies if England live ! " 
 
 3. We must do all this brightly and bravely 
 as " children of the Resurrection." We are 
 the children of the light and of the day ; death 
 has no terrors for us. " Over the parapet ! " 
 cried Donald Hankey to his men for the last 
 time. " If you're wounded, there's Blighty ; 
 if you're killed, there's the Resurrection ; " and 
 for him it was the Resurrection. Or, as a boy 
 of eighteen, who gave his life for his country, 
 puts it : 
 
 202 
 
Easter the Victory of Freedom 
 
 " We do not fight this war from greed of gain ; 
 We strive that others after may be free ; 
 And while our bodies brave the change of pain, 
 With holy prayers we trust our souls to Thee.*' * 
 
 4. And, lastly, let us carry it all out, " with- 
 out bitterness or self-seeking, but bearing about 
 with us the infection of a good courage, that 
 we may be diifusers of life, and may meet all 
 ills and cross accidents with gallant and high- 
 hearted happiness, giving God thanks always 
 for all things." 
 
 In that spirit, then, let us go forth to resume 
 the mighty conflict. " This is the Day which 
 the Lord hath made ; we will rejoice and be 
 glad in it ; " for, indeed, the victory of Easter 
 is the sign and seal from God that the 
 banner of Freedom shall one day float over 
 an enfranchised world, 
 
 • J. C. Tuckc-y. 
 
 203 
 
Ill 
 
 1 
 
 FOLLOWING THE STAR * 
 
 "And when they saw the star, they rejoiced with 
 exceeding great joy." — St. Matthew ii. lo. 
 
 This is in a special sense the greatest day in 
 all the long years of war, for our King himself 
 has summoned us to prayer, and in noble words 
 appraises at its true value the glory of our 
 task, and yet points out the special gifts we 
 need from Heaven, insight and courage — insight 
 that we may clearly understand, amid all the 
 distracting advice of those who would seek to 
 guide us, what is the true path to pursue, and 
 courage to pursue it with unfaltering foot- 
 steps to the end. Never was the nation 
 engaged in a nobler task than it is to-day, 
 when it humbles itself before Almighty God, 
 and prays as one man, " Make Thy way plain 
 before my face." 
 
 * Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on January 6th, 1918, 
 the Feast of the Epiphany, set apart by command of the 
 King for Thanksgiving and Intercession. 
 
 204 
 
Following the Star 
 
 I. And in order that we may be encouraged 
 in our day of Prayer and Thanksgiving, I want 
 to fix your minds this morning upon an interest- 
 ing group of seekers after Truth, who " followed 
 the gleam " two thousand years ago. We 
 know httle of these Wise Men from the East, 
 whose wonderful journey we commemorate on 
 this the Feast of Epiphany, but this we can 
 say of them ; they displayed just those virtues, 
 which we are imploring God to vouchsafe to 
 us to-day. They showed insight, they showed 
 courage, and because they followed the right 
 star, and followed it to the end, they achieved 
 the joy which the world could neither give 
 nor take away, " For when they saw the star 
 again," after deserting it for the moment to 
 seek earthly guidance, " they rejoiced with 
 exceeding great joy." And when we ask our- 
 selves what there was about the appearance 
 of the Star which should fill them with such 
 exceeding joy, no doubt the first reason was 
 they knew now that they were right ; they 
 were right in having come ; they were right 
 in leaving their far-off homes, in taking what 
 no doubt some of their friends thought and 
 said, was a fool's errand across boundless 
 tracks of burning sand ; they were right in the 
 
 205 
 
Following the Star 
 
 particular star on which they had kept their eyes 
 fixed through all the distracting splendour of 
 an Eastern sky at midnight ; they were right, 
 for they knew that, in that humble cave which 
 is now, thank God, guarded by British soldiers, 
 was lying at that moment the Mighty Saviour 
 of the world. 
 
 And if, dear people, the first note which I 
 strike to-day is a note of joy, it is for the same 
 reason which made the kings of the East 
 rejoice two thousand years ago. 
 
 If there is one thing absolutely certain to- 
 day, it is that the nation was right in August 
 1 91 4 in leaving the peaceful security of its 
 homes, girdled by the silver sea and its mighty 
 Navy, and plunging into the welter of blood 
 which we call the Great War. 
 
 We have sorrow to-day — we have tears ; but 
 the sorrow is a noble sorrow, and the tears 
 are tears of pride as well as grief. But if we 
 were standing here to-day, having disowned 
 our pledges, failed our friends, and tarnished 
 for ever our reputation as a nation, no words 
 would be able to describe the bitter tears of 
 shame and sorrow with which every patriot 
 to-day would hang his head. 
 
 No ! We were right ; the gleam we followed 
 206 
 
Following the Star 
 
 was the true gleam ; the star of honour which 
 led us on was the authentic star ; the powers 
 which we faced have proved themselves even 
 more the powers of darkness than we thought. 
 To have allowed the whole earth to have been 
 treated as Belgium, Serbia, and Armenia have 
 been treated, would have been to have hell on 
 earth ; and in spite of all loss and sorrow, and 
 in full face of all the struggle and sacrifice which 
 is to come, I ask you first to rejoice with exceed- 
 ing great joy that the star which we followed 
 clearly now " stands over where the young 
 Child is " ; the star of honour has led us to 
 Christ; the path of the just has again proved 
 a shining Hght which shineth more and more 
 unto the perfect day. 
 
 II. But there was another reason for the joy 
 which possessed these brave explorers in their 
 great venture of faith. The Star to them was 
 something more than a guide ; it was a prophet 
 — it was the witness and forerunner of a coming 
 dawn. There was a new day dawning on the 
 world, for there was lying in that manger bed 
 — notice the order of the prophetic announce- 
 ment — a Governor most wonderful, a Coun- 
 sellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, 
 and — last of all — the Prince of Peace. 
 
 207 
 
Following the Star 
 
 Now it is not too much to say that the mis- 
 understandings which have arisen with regard 
 to the attitude of Christianity to war have 
 arisen from the isolation of the one title, the 
 Prince of Peace, from all the others — I may 
 almost say the ignoring and exclusion of all 
 the others in favour of the last. Thank God, 
 there was the last : it would indeed be a sorry 
 outlook for the world if there never was to be 
 a day " when wars should be no more," and 
 when, to use the words of another famous pro- 
 phecy, " They shall not hurt or destroy in all 
 My Holy Mountain." But I defy anyone to 
 find, from one end of the Bible to the other, 
 that peace was to be pursued at the cost of 
 trampling under foot justice, wisdom, the 
 honour of the Mighty God, and the welfare 
 of the children of the Everlasting Father. In 
 other words, the Child that was born at 
 Bethlehem, and worshipped by the Wise Men 
 at the Epiphany, was first a Governor, a Coun- 
 sellor, a Mighty God, an Everlasting Father, 
 before He could show Himself fully in His 
 last and final character as a Prince of Peace. 
 
 (d) In the first place, there must be the 
 Governor. Men are freely asking to-day 
 w^hether there is a Moral Governor of the 
 
 208 
 
Following the Star 
 
 world at all, and certainly if the war ended 
 now there would be a strong case against it. 
 Wickedness has at present triumphed all along 
 the line. We were shown by an able writer 
 the other day the cleverness of the cry, " No 
 indemnities and no annexations," uttered by 
 a nation which has gathered thousands of 
 milhons into its purse by high-handed aggres- 
 sion and ruthless robbery, and then offers to 
 hand back the stripped and ruined vineyards 
 and fruit-trees while she carries off the spoil. 
 If there is to be no punishment — not vin- 
 dictive retaliation, but honest and well- 
 deserved punishment and retribution — for the 
 desolation of Belgium, the agony of Serbia, 
 the hapless men and women and children of 
 Armenia, slowly done to death, then we may 
 still ask : " Where is the God of the father- 
 less and widow ? '' But we can no longer 
 answer : " It is God in His Holy habitation," 
 for, if His Name was to be called Wonderful 
 and His first title was to be Governor, then 
 before heaven and earth the Government of 
 His world has failed, and the only thing 
 wonderful about it has been the completeness 
 of its ruin. But this can only happen if 
 His warriors fail Him. Garibaldi rallied his 
 P 209 
 
Following the Star 
 
 followers with the splendid rallying-cry : " I 
 promise you forced marches, short rations, 
 bloody battles, wounds, imprisonment, and 
 death : let him who loves home and Father- 
 land follow me ! " — and the whole of Italy 
 followed him. 
 
 The Child Who was disclosed to the Wise 
 Men to-day was the same Who was seen by 
 the seer who knew Him best, as " riding forth 
 conquering and to conquer." " His eyes were 
 as a flame of fire " (of righteous indignation), 
 and " out of His mouth went a sharp two- 
 edged sword, and His countenance was as the 
 sun shining in his strength," and as He goes 
 forth He too utters the same rallying-cry, " I 
 promise you forced marches, short rations, 
 bloody battles, wounds, imprisonment, and 
 death : let him who loves home and Father- 
 land follow Me ! " 
 
 (b) And with the Governor must go the 
 Counsellor : the Star steadily shines, and pro- 
 claims that Incarnate Wisdom lies in the Holy 
 Mother's arms in that lowly stable. 
 
 And how greatly we need Heavenly Wisdom 
 to-day ! " If any man lack wisdom," we are 
 told, " let him ask of God, Who giveth liber- 
 ally, and upbraideth not." Wisdom that the 
 
 210 
 
Following the Star 
 
 nation may not be deceived hy the German 
 agents now masquerading as Russian patriots : 
 wisdom not to make the mistake of one hundred 
 and seventeen years ago, when the patched-up 
 peace of Amiens in 1801 lasted exactly fourteen 
 months, and necessitated twelve more years of 
 war, until a real peace was possible, which 
 lasted for one hundred years : wisdom to dis- 
 tinguish between war-weariness and real ex- 
 haustion, between righteous indignation and 
 unrighteous vindictiveness — between maudlin 
 sentiment and true love of your enemies which 
 means in many cases their military and naval 
 defeat ; between braggadocio and true patriot- 
 ism ; between a natural longing for a knock-out 
 blow and the calm determination not to make 
 peace until the object of entering the war has 
 been attained. 
 
 Yes ! indeed we need wisdom truly, and if 
 we have followed the star to the manger-bed 
 we shall do well to kneel before the Coun- 
 sellor and pray Him " to pour His grace into 
 our hearts, that as we have known the Incar- 
 nation of His Son Jesus Christ by the message 
 of an angel, so by His Cross and Passion we 
 may be brought unto the glory of His Resur- 
 rection." 
 
 p 2 211 
 
Following the Star 
 
 (c) For, indeed, if the great prophecy has 
 been fulfilled, we are in the presence of the 
 Mighty God Himself. " He that hath seen 
 Me hath seen the Father." " I and My 
 Father are one thing." " Before Abraham 
 was, I am." So these great declarations ring 
 out unsilenced down the ages, and if they are 
 true, in the presence of what an immense 
 Mystery are we gathered to-day ! 
 
 " The Son of God His glory hides 
 With parents mean and poor, 
 And He, Who made the heavens, abides 
 In dwelling-place obscure. 
 
 " Those mighty Hands that rule the sky 
 No earthly toil refuse : 
 The Maker of the stars on high 
 An humble trade pursues." 
 
 If the dawn of the great day of Freedom and 
 Brotherhood seems to tarry, may it not be 
 that we have really, after all these two thousand 
 years, not believed as a nation in this stupen- 
 dous Epiphany ? Can it be that while we 
 fight a Christian cause we are not sufficiently 
 Christian ourselves ? Do let us bow ourselves 
 to-day before the Mighty God, and instead 
 of whittling away a miracle here or watering 
 down the stupendous wonder there, frankly 
 
 212 
 
Following the Star 
 
 acknowledge that the whole Epiphany is 
 miraculous from start to finish ; that God 
 meant to do a great and startling thing, and 
 has done it — and that, being a great and start- 
 ling thing in itself, it is likely to be accompanied 
 by startling events : that it is enough to say, 
 when commands are clearly given by the 
 Incarnate God, " The Most Mighty God hath 
 spoken ! " 
 
 {d) And so with the title Everlasting Father. 
 It is a passionate hunger of the human soul 
 which cries aloud for Fatherhood. We must 
 have more proof of the care of God : it is 
 not enough to hear that " Not a sparrow 
 falls to the ground without your Father" — 
 there must be action corresponding to the 
 promise. 
 
 God must have done something to prove it : 
 there are tens of thousands of mourning hearts 
 to-day, many no doubt in this cathedral, who 
 ask : Have the boys died in vain ? Where are 
 they now ? Is it true that underneath them 
 are the Everlasting Arms, through Time and 
 Eternity ? 
 
 And there is no proof, unless the Star lead 
 to-day the searchers after truth to the Incar- 
 nate Love of God : then we may well picture 
 213 
 
Following the Star 
 
 God's response, in Browning's well-known 
 words : 
 
 *' Think ! Abib, dost thou think ? The Very God 
 So the all-wise were the all-loving too. 
 So through the thunder comes a human voice, 
 Saying, O heart I made, a heart beats here. 
 
 "Face My hands fashioned: see it in Myself! 
 
 Thou hast no power, nor couldst conceive of Mine, 
 But Love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 
 
 And thou must love Me, Who hast died for thee." 
 
 (e) And so we pass finally to the Prince of 
 Peace. Justice satisfied, Wisdom justified of 
 all her children ; God acknowledged as God, 
 and adored ; the Everlasting Father's care for 
 the least and the lowest acknowledged and 
 proved ; and then, and not till then. Peace. 
 
 Then the white war-horse can be changed 
 for the peaceful foal of an ass ; the glittering 
 sword for palm-branches ; the glad voices of 
 children for the shouts of warriors ; and the 
 Prince of Peace comes to His own at last. 
 
 What a day ! for it means a new world ; it 
 means that they shall not hurt or destroy in 
 all My Holy Mountain, for the earth shall be 
 filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
 waters cover the seas. It means peace between 
 Capital and Labour, between race and race, 
 
 214 
 
Following the Star 
 
 between master and man, between man and 
 his Maker. It means that the Star has done its 
 work, and the morning has come ; it means that 
 heaviness has endured for a night (and a very- 
 long one) but that joy has come in the morn- 
 ing ; it means that the sucking child can now 
 play by the hole of the asp, and the tongue of 
 the dumb may sing ; for in the wilderness will 
 have waters broken out, and streams in the 
 desert. 
 
 But until that glad morning comes, let us 
 thank God for the Star, and follow its gleam. 
 
 " Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom. 
 
 Lead Thou me on ; 
 
 The night is dark, and I am far from home, 
 
 Lead Thou me on." 
 
 Let US thank God to-day for the splendid 
 valour of our youth, the unselfish service of 
 our women, for the light of hope which has 
 never failed us yet, for the coming into the 
 war of the great Power in the West ; for the 
 brightness and unselfishness which lights up 
 the otherwise dreary watch in the trenches or 
 on the sea ; for the fortitude of our mourners 
 and the courage of the desolate : and let us 
 pray, as we have never prayed before, for the 
 spirit of our fathers, which onCe before (in the 
 
 215 
 
Following the Star 
 
 famous words of Pitt) '* saved their country by 
 their exertions and Europe by their example." 
 But even more than that — for, as Nurse Cavell 
 has reminded us, " Patriotism is not enough " 
 — let us bow ourselves at last as a nation before 
 the Governor, the Counsellor, the Mighty God, 
 the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace ; 
 and full of His Divine Justice, Wisdom, Peace, 
 and Love, go forth to achieve the one thing 
 for which the world is longing — a reign of 
 lasting peace. 
 
 THE END 
 
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