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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Discovery, by Norman Maclean
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Discovery
+
+Author: Norman Maclean
+
+Release Date: September 4, 2010 [EBook #33635]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT DISCOVERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT DISCOVERY
+
+
+BY
+
+NORMAN MACLEAN
+
+
+
+
+"Had I stood aside when in defiance of pledges to which my kingdom was
+a party, the soil of Belgium was violated and her cities laid desolate,
+when the very life of the French nation was threatened with extinction,
+I should have sacrificed my honour, and given to destruction the
+liberties of my Empire and of mankind."
+
+_Proclamation by King George V._
+
+
+
+
+GLASGOW
+
+JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS
+
+PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY
+
+1915
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+
+JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW
+
+Publishers to the University
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD. LONDON
+
+  New York ... The Macmillan Co.
+  Toronto .... The Macmillan Co. of Canada
+  London ..... Simpkin, Hamilton and Co.
+  Cambridge .. Bowes and Bowes
+  Edinburgh .. Douglas and Foulis
+  Sydney ..... Angus and Robertson
+
+MCMXV
+
+
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
+
+  DWELLERS IN THE MIST.
+  HILLS OF HOME.
+  THE BURNT OFFERING.
+  CAN THE WORLD BE WON FOR CHRIST?
+  AFRICA IN TRANSFORMATION.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+J. P. CROAL
+
+TO WHOM THIS BOOK OWES
+
+ITS EXISTENCE
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+Six articles which the writer contributed to _The Scotsman_ constitute
+this book.  Four of these, which appeared under the title "In Our
+Parish," were, in response to requests, re-printed by _The Scotsman_ as
+leaflets, and in that form had a circulation that reached an aggregate
+of 100,000.  One of the articles (now Chapter II.), which was published
+on February 14, 1914, has been revised and somewhat enlarged.  The rest
+are reprinted substantially as they were originally written.
+
+In these last months there has come to the nation a spiritual and
+ethical revival.  Life will never again be what it was in the last long
+summer days ere the guns began to speak.  It will be a better world
+than it has yet been.  The nation is being saved as by fire, and in the
+fire much dross will be consumed.  The conscience of the State has been
+stirred, and it cannot in the future acquiesce in the continuance of
+the social evils which are gnawing at the nation's heart.  The fate of
+the Empire in the long years to come will depend more on the fight for
+social renewal in the midst of the streets than on red battlefields.
+To the men who have stood between the race and destruction the State
+owes a debt which it can only repay by such measures of social
+regeneration as will make possible for every man and woman to realise
+the thrill and the joy of life.  These pages only represent an effort
+to portray the first stirring of that newly awakened consciousness of
+God and of duty which was felt in every parish throughout the Empire,
+and which is destined to transform the world.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+   I.  THE GREAT DISCOVERY
+  II.  THE REVIVAL OF PATRIOTISM
+ III.  THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS
+  IV.  THE POWER OF PRAYER
+   V.  THE VICTORY
+  VI.  THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The Great Discovery
+
+
+
+I
+
+While the thing is still fresh in my mind I will try to put it down on
+paper--the incredible thing that has happened in our parish.  When we
+had least thought about life's great things, we have come face to face
+with the greatest.
+
+We had been for long years living on the surface of things.  The sun
+basked on the slopes of the hills, purple at eve; we came back from the
+offices in town, plunged through the tunnel, and hastened to our
+gardens.  We lifted up our eyes to the hills, and our security seemed
+as immovable as their crests soaring above the little dells that were
+haunts of ancient peace around their foundations.
+
+Long years of ease dimmed our vision.  The church bell rang in vain for
+many of us.  Those who had six whole days in the week to devote to
+their own pleasure began to devote the seventh also to that same end.
+The day of peace was becoming a day of unrest.
+
+Thus it was with us when, with the suddenness of a lightning flash, the
+incredible overtook us.
+
+***
+
+If only one could put it into words!  But words can never express this
+sudden meeting of man and God when that meeting was least expected.
+
+It was heralded by the booming of guns across the sea.  The great city
+lay slumbering between us and the shore, but over the turrets and
+spires it came--boom, boom--under the stars.  It was war.  That
+far-away echo might not itself be the grim struggle of death, but it
+was its harbinger.  Over all the seas death would soon be riding on the
+billows.  Faces became stern.  Good-byes were spoken.
+
+Ah! that word "Good-bye," which we hear every day, and which, like
+those old coins which have passed from hand to hand so long until at
+last the image and superscription are gone, had lost all trace of its
+original meaning, retaining nothing but a faint aroma of courtesy,
+which sometimes vanished in the inflection of the voice until the word
+became only a discourteous dismissal--that word was born for us anew.
+We heard it on the lips of mothers clinging to the hands of their sons,
+who were summoned away to join their regiments, and as white lips said
+"Good-bye" to those whose blood was to water the fair fields of France,
+we suddenly realised what it meant.  The word, meaningless yesterday,
+to-day expressed the greatest wish that the lips of man can utter--God
+be with thee.  On the mother's lips the word was the commitment of her
+boy to the charge of the encompassing God.  Then, when the harvest was
+ripening on the slopes and the drum sounded "Come," and the young and
+the strong went forth with a smile to the great harvesting of death, we
+learned again the meaning of a phrase.  But we were yet to learn the
+meaning of a word.
+
+It is in the darkness that the stars appear and the immeasurable
+abysses of the infinite universe, and it was when the dusk sank into
+the deep night that the word rose high in the firmament of life and
+burned red into our souls.  And that word was God.
+
+It seemed so incredible to us that we should need that old word.  We
+were so powerful and so rich.  Our faith was strong, but it was in the
+reeking tube and in the smoking shard, and in the number of our
+Dreadnoughts.  Then all these things seemed to fail us.  A nightmare
+seemed to fall on us--a nightmare which lifted not night or day.  Our
+soldiers were driven back, back, back.  They fought by day and marched
+by night, and we heard in the night watches the beating of their
+wearied feet, blood stained.
+
+Was there to be no end to that tramp, tramp of men yielding before
+death?  Was the Empire reared by the heroism of generations to crumble
+under our feet?  The ghastly deeds of shame--were they to come to our
+doors!  We looked at our children, and they could not understand the
+light in our eyes.  These deeds of hell--they might occur even now
+under the shadow of our hills.  It was then that the word began to
+blaze in the heavens.  And the word was--God.
+
+***
+
+We had built a new church in our parish, that those who built pleasant
+houses on the slopes, fleeing from the restless city that lay below,
+might have room to worship.  But the desire to worship seemed to be
+dying of attrition.  And the old church where the quarriers and farm
+servants assembled and worshipped in an atmosphere that on a warm day
+became so thick that one could cut it with a knife--that old church
+would have been quite big enough to hold all who came, for the instinct
+to pray seemed to be dying.  And many, because the new church was now
+too big, regretted the old.
+
+Then, suddenly, the new church was filled to the door.  Men and women
+discovered the road leading down to the hollow where the church stands
+amid the graves of the generations.  With wistful faces they turned
+towards it.  While the bell rang they stood in groups among the graves.
+And if you listened there was but one word--war, war, war.  Over and
+over again just that one word.  Until the bell was silent, and they
+turned into the now crowded church.
+
+As I sat there and cast a glance around me, I felt a sudden amazement.
+Those who never before had come down the steep brae when the bell was
+ringing were sitting here and there just as if they had been there
+every Sunday when the beadle, with head erect, ushers the minister to
+the pulpit and snips him in.  (Though the church is new, the minister
+is yet snipped in by the beadle--a lonely prisoner there on his perch,
+and it is an uncanny sound to hear the click of that snip shutting in
+the solitary man.)
+
+In the pew in front of me sat a burly man with a head like a dome.  He
+never came to church.  When I met him he would stand for an hour in the
+lane among the hawthorns explaining his views.  Prayer was mere
+superstition.  Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the
+universe in their grasp.  To ask that one of these laws should be
+altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to ask
+that the universe might be shattered.  Prayer was immoral, the asking
+for what could not be granted, and what we knew could not be granted.
+If he went to church it would be hypocrisy on his part.
+
+And thus it came that when the farm servants came up the Gallows road
+on their way to church on a summer morning, they often heard the whirr
+of my friend's mowing machine as he mowed his lawn.  It was the way he
+took of letting the parish know that culture could have no dealings
+with effete superstitions.
+
+***
+
+And yet there he sat in front of me with a hymn-book which he picked up
+from the shelf at the door, where such books are piled for the use of
+camp-followers.  The tune of the opening Psalm was Kilmarnock, and my
+friend sang it in a way which showed that his mother had trained him
+well.  Then I forgot him, but after a while something like a stifled
+sob in front of me brought him again to my consciousness.
+
+The minister began to pray for the King's forces "on the sea, on the
+land, and in the air."  My mind was playing round the words "in the
+air," for they were an intrusion into the familiar order--an
+innovation!  Every invention of man seemed doomed to become a weapon in
+the hand of the devil.  But the prayer went on--for the sailors keeping
+their watches in the darkness of the night that God might watch over
+them, that through their unfaltering courage our shores might be
+inviolate; for the soldiers now facing the enemy, grappling with death,
+that God might succour them, covering their heads in the day of battle.
+"Break Thou down the fierce power of our enemies," cried the minister
+suddenly, "that with full hearts we may praise Thee, the God of our
+fathers."
+
+A great hush fell on the crowded church.  The shut eyes saw the red
+battlefields, with the lines swaying to and fro, while the shrapnel
+burst and the aeroplanes whirred in the smoke of the cannon.  The cries
+of men suddenly smitten smote on the inner ear.  It was then that the
+great thing happened.
+
+All of a sudden the voice broke, recovered, and broke again, and the
+minister was swept away from the well-ordered, beautiful words he had
+prepared.  He began to speak of the stricken hearts at home, of fathers
+and mothers to whom their sons would never return, of women in empty
+houses with their husbands laid in nameless graves, of little children
+who would never learn to say "Father" ... It was then that my friend
+stifled a sob.  There was Something after all, Someone greater than
+cosmic forces, greater than law--with an eye to pity and an arm to
+save.  There was God.
+
+And my friend's son was with the famous regiment that was swaying to
+and fro, grappling with destiny.  He was helpless--and there was only
+God to appeal to.  There comes an hour in life when the heart realises
+that instinct is mightier far than that logic which is, after all is
+said, only the last refuge of the feeble-minded.  There came like the
+sudden lifting of a curtain the vision of a whole nation--nay, of races
+girdling the whole earth--to whom the same high experience has come.
+Everywhere the sanctuaries filled, the eyes turned upward, for instinct
+is mightier than reason.  The smoke of battle has revealed the face of
+God.
+
+***
+
+With us in the parish churches of Scotland the great thing is the
+sermon.  But to-day it is different; the great thing now is prayer.
+And the minister preached about prayer.  He set forth in clear and
+ordered language, with a felicitous phrase now and then lighting up his
+sentences, that prayer was not a mere relic of fanatical superstition
+but a mighty power.  He discussed with a wealth of learning whether God
+had shut Himself in behind a prison-house of cosmic laws that made it
+impossible for Him to answer prayer.  He reasoned the worshippers cold.
+But there in that hour reason was bound to give way before intuition.
+
+"If I am free," cried the preacher, "to rush to the help of my child
+when he crieth in terror; and if, when the creatures of His hand cry to
+God He is bound and cannot help or soothe, then He is poorer than I, so
+great a thing is freedom."  Prayer was not mere spiritual gymnastics.
+A God immured in cold laws, barred for ever from the play of love or
+tenderness, would be the one being in the universe most to be pitied.
+The Creator did not sit deaf and dumb on the Throne of indifference
+answering nothing, doing nothing.  History was the proof that
+Righteousness was throned at the core of the universe, for at the last
+right ever prevailed.
+
+Then the measured tones went on to speak of the difficulty of believing
+in the efficacy of prayer when Christians faced Christians in mortal
+conflict, and they both cried for victory--both the children of the One
+Father crying for victory over each other.  But the difficulty was of
+appearance only.  For the only prevailing prayer was prayer in the name
+of Christ.  "Whatsoever ye shall ask _in My name_ that will I do."  To
+ask in His name was to ask in His spirit--the spirit of humility,
+self-sacrifice, and love--the spirit of self-surrender to the _will_
+supreme.  The question was which of the prayers for victory was prayer
+in the name of Christ....
+
+This was clear, convincing, but cold.  Only at rare intervals does the
+minister of our parish give way to passion.  Suddenly there came a wave
+of emotion.  He flung his head back, and his eyes glowed.  His voice
+vibrated through the church.  "When I think," he exclaimed, "of the
+things that have been done with the name of God on men's lips; of
+atrocities such as the unspeakable Turk never perpetrated; of war waged
+not upon to-day but upon the centuries of faith that reared great
+cathedrals now in flames; of women and children laid upon the reeking
+altars of human passion; and all this in the name of culture, the
+culture of the superman who deems himself superior to the Ten
+Commandments--then, I say, may God grant that the culture which beareth
+such fruit may perish from off the face of the earth.  Prayer for the
+triumph of such a cause cannot be in Christ's name...."
+
+But the preacher never got any further.
+
+This was what happened, and I am afraid some will not believe me, for a
+Scotsman in church is a stoic, motionless and dumb, as he listens to
+the Word.  But all the traditions of the parish were snapped in a
+second.  In the side gallery sat the General, sitting as he always does
+with his back to the minister.  This he does that he may mark who are
+in church of his servants and tenants, and who absent.
+
+When I read of the nobles in France who went to the scaffold with a
+jest in the days of the Terror, I always think of the General.  He is
+that sort of man.  To-day, little by little, as the sermon went on, he
+turned round.  At last he was facing the pulpit.  His gleaming eyes
+were fixed on the preacher.  His son was dead.  And when the words rang
+through the church, may God grant that such culture may perish ... the
+General sprang to his feet.  "Amen" rang his voice through the church.
+
+There was a sudden movement; as one man they all rose to their feet.
+Hands were lifted up to heaven.  "Amen," "Amen," they cried--and then
+there rose a cheer--muffled, but still a cheer.  In the pulpit the
+words died on the preacher's lips.  He seemed as one suddenly stricken.
+He gazed bewildered over the sea of faces.  They sank back into the
+pews as though suddenly ashamed.
+
+The last man to sit was my friend, who stood to the last with uplifted
+hand.  I think it was he who cried "Hear, hear"--the only sign he gave
+of his long absence from church.  The sermon was never finished.  The
+preacher in a low voice said, "Let us pray."  And he humbled himself as
+one who enters the valley of humiliation.  And then he gave out this
+psalm:--
+
+  Now Israel
+    May say, and that truly,
+  If that the Lord
+    Had not our cause maintained;
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  Then certainly
+    They had devoured us all.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  But blessed be God,
+    Who doth us safely keep,
+  And hath not giv'n
+    Us for a living prey
+  Unto their teeth,
+    And bloody cruelty.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+This psalm as we sang it that day was a pæan of triumph.  The clouds
+suddenly broke.  We heard our fathers singing it in their dark days.
+The melody wedded to the words soared in exultant triumph, wailed like
+the cry of the shingle swept by the surf; the sighing of the wind over
+the heather was in it, and the hissing of the storm through the spray.
+It was fierce as devouring death; it was gentle as a mother crooning
+over her child.  It put iron into the blood of our fathers as they sang
+it.
+
+It was nerved by such a hymn that the sailors of Queen Elizabeth swept
+the main, that the Puritans wrestled with principalities and powers,
+that a handful of moors-men levelled despotism and tyranny to the
+ground.  It swept through our blood like flame as we in our day of
+stress now sang it.  We, too, would pull down strongholds and turn to
+flight the armies of the alien.  In all ages the cause of freedom
+triumphed, and that cause was ours.  We had entered on conflict with
+clean hands and, God helping us, we would wage it with clean hands.
+The clouds suddenly broke and the light of victory irradiated our
+faces.  There came overwhelmingly the realisation that there was a
+power behind us mightier far than sword or shell--even the Lord God
+Omnipotent.  And that was how we made the greatest of all
+discoveries--we found God.
+
+***
+
+Yesterday morning I went early to the station, and there in the booking
+office I found my friend talking to the ticket-collector.  The
+ticket-collector is a philosopher, and he comes to church, because he
+loves the old psalm tunes.  But when one of our parishioners who goes
+now and then to Keswick comes to the booking office, the
+ticket-collector calls him in and reasons with him gently.
+
+"Mahn, there's naething in it," he says; "I can tell you for a fact
+there's naething in it--all a whack of fables."  "Some day you'll find
+out to your cost that there's something in it," flashes the man from
+Keswick.  "If ye wad only reid philosophee," says the ticket-collector,
+"ye would ken better."  But to-day my friend and the ticket-collector
+had their heads close together, and I only heard the conclusion of
+their argument.  "Mahn," said the ticket-collector, "I am beginning to
+think there may be something in it."
+
+And in the evening near the top of the brae I saw the General standing
+erect with his little cane in his hand.  He was talking to the
+shoemaker, the greatest Radical in the parish--one of a party with
+which the General has no dealings.  But they talked like brothers.  For
+the shoemaker has a son fighting at the front, and his heart is sore
+troubled within him.  And the General's son is dead.  And as I came up
+the brae I saw the General putting his hand on the shoemaker's shoulder
+and turn away, walking slowly up the brae.  The old shoemaker saluted
+and came down the brae.  There was a tender look in the old man's eye
+as he greeted me.
+
+In our parish we have truly made the greatest of all discoveries.  We
+have found God, and, finding Him, we have found each other.  The man
+who in his madness kindled the lurid flames of war little dreamed of
+this fire which he kindled.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The Revival of Patriotism
+
+
+
+II
+
+There has come to us in these days a revival of the spirit of
+patriotism.  That revival has come when it was sorely needed.  In days
+of unclouded prosperity other gods called forth our devotion and
+enthusiasm, but the God of our Fathers who made us a great nation and
+sent us to sow the seeds of righteousness beside all waters, bestowing
+upon us empire and might, was well-nigh forgotten.
+
+For the new man "words like Empire, Patriotism, Duty, Honour, Glory and
+God" had little or no meaning.  Causes for which the fathers died could
+not evoke an added heart-beat from their sons.  They cared so little
+for the mighty empire which they inherited that they contemplated the
+bloodshed of civil war--so hot was their zeal for party and so cold
+their love for the state.
+
+It was necessary that discipline should come.  And that discipline
+came, shaking the very foundations of our national life.  Its first
+fruit is that the smouldering fires of patriotism have broken forth
+once more into bright flame; and that everywhere the hearts of the
+people have been stirred by the call to arise and endure hardness that
+the goodly heritage of empire perish not.  And preachers in a thousand
+pulpits have sounded the trumpet-note of duty and of patriotism.
+
+***
+
+It has been said that preachers should aim at making the churches
+sanctuaries of peace, within whose walls the echoes of the guns and the
+cries of the perishing should not penetrate.  Some have even said that
+Christianity, so far from fostering the spirit of patriotism, is in
+reality hostile to it.  "Patriotism itself as a duty," says Lecky, "has
+never found any place in Christian ethics, and strong theological
+feeling has usually been directly hostile to its growth."
+
+No doubt there is something to be said for that view.  The attitude of
+the early Christians towards the Roman Empire was not that of
+patriotism.  The clear shining of the heavenly Jerusalem so dazzled
+their eyes that this world, and the temporal empire occupying its
+stage, seemed but as a shadow.  Their devotion to the Unseen King left
+little room for loyalty to the earthly ruler.  In the glorious
+consciousness of his citizenship in heaven, it was a small thing in the
+estimation of St. Paul that he was also a Roman citizen--but he did not
+forget it.  But when the earthly ruler persecuted, and burnt, and threw
+the Christians to the lions, or slaughtered them to make a Roman
+holiday, then the poor victims cannot be blamed for not being patriots.
+
+And the Church in the mediæval period, organised in the mighty
+hierarchy of Rome, did not tend to foster a national spirit of
+patriotism.  In those days when the Emperor Theodosius made penance in
+the Cathedral of Milan and Ambrose declared that "the Church is not in
+the empire, but the Emperor in the Church"; or in those later days when
+Hildebrand promulgated the doctrine that the temporal power was subject
+to the spiritual power, and kings and emperors were only vassals of the
+Church, and Henry V. was left three days standing barefooted in the
+snow waiting humbly to see the Pope at Canossa--in those days certainly
+Christianity sought to foster not the sense of national loyalty, but
+that of devotion towards that holy Catholic and universal Church whose
+visible head was the Pope.  Christianity placed the Pope on the throne
+of the Cæsars, and sought to evoke towards him a patriotism which
+transcended nationality.  But the Reformation gave its death blow to
+Hildebrandism, and the Pope no longer usurped the temporal Thrones of
+Europe.  And there came the throb of the awakening spirit of
+nationality.  The spirit of patriotism stirred once more the slumbering
+races.
+
+***
+
+The question whether patriotism is a fruit of Christianity must be
+answered not by reference to what men did in the name of their
+religion--for men are fallible--but by the precept and example of the
+Founder of Christianity.  He was a Jew, and of all races the Jew was
+the most patriotic.  An exile by the rivers of Babylon, the Israelite
+refused to forget Zion.  "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
+hand forget its cunning"--that was the cry wherewith his unconquerable
+soul faced an overwhelming destiny.  And in this respect Jesus Christ
+was true to His race.  He was a patriot.  He worshipped in the
+synagogues, and went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, because He loved the
+national institutions of His country.  One note of true patriotism is
+anguish.  It is when love is great that the folly and sin of the person
+beloved pierce the heart.
+
+The patriotism of the Founder of Christianity expressed itself in a cry
+of agony which has reverberated through the centuries--"O Jerusalem,
+Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are
+sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together,
+even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
+Behold, your house is left unto you desolate."  That cry is the measure
+of His patriotism.
+
+Judged, then, by the example of its Founder, Christianity must produce
+the spirit of love and loyalty towards one's own country.  There was a
+patriotism before Christianity, but it was that of arrogance,
+aggression, and self-glorification.  It was a patriotism which meted
+out only contempt to other races.  To the Jew the Greek was only a
+Gentile dog; to the Greek the Jew was only a contemptible Barbarian.
+
+But the patriotism which is animated by the Christian spirit is far
+other.  It is not the vaunting of pride nor the shouting of vulgar
+ditties.  It seeks the glory of its own country, but the glory it seeks
+is the glory of the greater service rendered to humanity.  Conscious of
+its own defects, it does not condemn others.  With eyes cleansed from
+prejudice, it beholds the good in other races.  It seeks the first
+place for its own nation because it acts the noblest, loves the best.
+All the elements which make up the strong power of patriotism--love of
+family, love of neighbours, love of race, love of country--Christianity
+has purified them all.  True patriotism is, then, a fruit of the
+Christian religion, a virtue which falls to be inculcated by the
+Church.  If Christianity be the projection of the Christ-life into the
+midst of every generation, then the life that reflects the beauty of
+Christ must be a life animated by the deepest love of one's country.
+
+***
+
+It was Dean Stanley who rendered God thanks in Paisley Abbey for that
+Scotsmen were "citizens of an Empire so great, members of a Church so
+free."  In the building up of the Empire Scotsmen have borne a great
+share of toil and peril.  In other days the fires of patriotism burned
+brightly.  The cry of our fathers was "my country right or wrong."  But
+we feel not quite so sure of our country being always in the right.
+The passion of Christianity is an ethical passion.  Christian
+patriotism demands national righteousness.  To keep patriotism as an
+ardent fire we must be convinced that our country stands for
+righteousness.  And in this day of our ordeal we have this certainty to
+uphold us, that we are fighting for the right.
+
+It was not in defiance of Christianity, but in its defence, that we
+drew the sword.  For this war sprang from an unbridled lust of conquest
+to which a whole nation surrendered itself.  But before surrendering to
+the passions of war the ideals of Christ were first forsaken by our
+enemy.  A new law was promulgated: "Become hard, O my brethren, for we
+are emancipated and the world belongs to us."  New beatitudes were
+declared: "Ye have heard how ... it was said, Blessed are the meek ...
+but I say unto you, Blessed are the valiant, for they shall make the
+earth their throne ... Ye have read, Blessed are the peacemakers, but I
+say unto you, Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called, if
+not the children of Jehovah, the children of Odin, who is greater than
+Jehovah."
+
+Out of this new gospel, the gospel of Odin, has sprung a war of
+extermination--exiled nations, devastated kingdoms, desolated colleges,
+ruined cathedrals, and multitudes of women and children "left nothing
+but their eyes to weep with."  The name of God has been invoked over
+unspeakable barbarities--but the God thus invoked is not the Christian
+God.  It is Odin in whose name these things are done.  What we are
+fighting for is for the Christian ideal against Odin--for the law of
+truth and mercy against the reign of falsehood of word and bond, and of
+merciless barbarity.  We have bared the breast to death that there may
+sit on the throne of the world's soul, not a ruthless tribal god, but
+the God of Fatherhood and Love whom Jesus Christ revealed.  And in
+waging that war we have ground to hope that the God of righteousness is
+on our side.
+
+If we have not had the name of God constantly on our lips it is not
+because we do not feel that we are fighting His battle, but because He
+is so great, the Lord of Heaven and Earth before whom we are but as
+dust, that we shrink from coupling His great name with ours.  "Are you
+sure that God is on your side?" Abraham Lincoln was asked in the dark
+days of the American Civil War.  "I have not thought about that," he
+replied; "but I am very anxious to know whether we are on God's side."
+And when the causes of this war are examined the assurance grows
+stronger and stronger that we are on God's side.  That is why the whole
+nation has been welded into the unity and consistency of polished
+steel; why the fire of patriotism burns in our midst with an intenser
+heat than ever before.
+
+***
+
+It is not merely from the righteousness of our cause in this war that
+our patriotism draws inspiration, but also from the ideals for which
+our Empire stands over all the world.  As we look out to-day on the
+Empire which our fathers bequeathed us, taking it all in all, it stands
+for righteousness as no other on earth.  It stands for the freedom of
+the soul and the freedom of the body all over the world.
+
+Think of India, whose three hundred millions have been rescued from
+tyranny and ceaseless bloodshed, whose widows have been saved from the
+flames, whose starving have been fed in famine, and to whom the British
+race brought security and peace.  "When I think," said ex-President
+Taft, "of what England has done in India ... how she found those many
+millions torn by internecine strife, disrupted with constant wars,
+unable to continue agriculture or the arts of peace, with inferior
+roads, tyranny, and oppression; and when I think what the Government of
+Great Britain is now doing for these alien races, the debt the world
+owes England ought to be acknowledged in no grudging manner."
+
+No work ever done on earth for the elevation of humanity can compare
+with that wrought in India by our race for the uplift of humanity; and
+it is the same wherever the standard of Britain waves.  In our own day
+we have seen in Egypt a whole race rising out of the mud and clothed
+anew in the garments of self-respect.  Through Africa, wherever the
+sway of Britain extends, though yesterday the land reeked with blood,
+to-day mercy and kindness are healing the woes of men, and millions who
+knew not when death lurked for them in the bush now sleep in peace
+under the palms.  It was the might of Britain that destroyed the slave
+trade, and it is nothing except the might of Britain which prevents the
+slave raider resuming his nefarious traffic, and slavery under the
+guise of other names being imposed on the natives of Africa.  Wherever
+you go, to the tropics or the Orient, there the great power for
+righteousness is the British Empire.  It does not exploit inferior
+races for gold; it is the trustee of the helpless native.
+
+When one thinks of these little islands floating in the western sea, of
+the power that has gone forth from them to heal and bless, of the vast
+multitudes to whom the King-Emperor is the symbol of justice and
+security--his is a poor heart which cannot feel the thrill of gratitude
+for citizenship in an Empire girdling the whole earth, whose
+foundations are thus laid in righteousness.
+
+***
+
+Patriotism is not, however, a mere sentiment.  It was not sentiment
+which built up the Empire.  It was self-sacrifice--the spirit that
+faced and endured death.  For us, too, patriotism must be more than
+sentiment; it must be action and the self-sacrifice which action
+requires.
+
+What our fathers reared we must defend.  And the startling thing is
+that there are still so many of our people who shrink from the burden
+which patriotism imposes.  Many thousands refuse to prepare themselves
+for war; who are as the Romans who could not leave their baths to go
+and fight.
+
+Vast multitudes congregate to gaze on football matches and gamble on
+the issue.  The call of King and country falls on ears grown deaf.  We
+thank God for those who, hearing the call, have gone forth to fight,
+counting everything but loss as compared to their country's gain.  But
+these others, they cannot have paused to think.  They have not pictured
+these fair lands, that have not heard the sound of war for seven
+generations, given over to that devouring enemy which has made Belgium
+a wilderness.
+
+They have not thought of Oxford and St. Andrews sharing the fate of
+Louvain; of London and Edinburgh become as Brussels; of the millions of
+Glasgow and Birmingham thrown on the mercies of the world, women and
+children fleeing, driven by nameless fears, with no place to flee to
+but the mountain fastnesses of Wales and the Highlands of Scotland--the
+last refuge of the miserable and the broken.  And yet these miseries
+would surely befall were all the manhood of the race such as these.
+
+Think what it would mean were the walls of our defence broken down.
+Supposing that a shattering blow were struck at the heart of the Empire
+and our fleet crushed.  What would follow?  The crumbling of the Empire
+in a week!  It is not we alone, with our wives and children in these
+little islands, who would be swept to ruin, and on whom despair would
+fall.  From the far north-west to the long wash of the Australasian
+seas the shadow of devouring misery and death would fall on humanity.
+The millions of India would be forthwith swept into the whirlpools of
+war and mutiny.  Egypt would be thrown back into chaos.  Africa would
+be left to Islam and the merciless rule of a nation which knows but how
+to smite.  Australia and New Zealand would be at the mercy of the
+yellow races.
+
+It would not be a calamity for us in these islands alone.  It would be
+a calamity whose withering blight would be cast over all the world.
+The ideals of righteousness which this Empire upholds would be trampled
+everywhere under foot.  Covetousness and the lust of gold would hold
+the field of the world.
+
+There is only one thing to be done, one duty summoning us with an
+irresistible call--the duty that calls us to stand between our country
+and destruction.  Were the fate which has overtaken the Low Country to
+overtake us; were this fair land to be made a wilderness, our women and
+children driven into the wilds, and the Empire wrested from our hands,
+the men who failed in their duty would never be able to hold up their
+heads again.
+
+What a terrible load would lie on him who, beholding the ruin of his
+native land, could say, "This might not have happened if I, and others
+like me, had done our duty."  That would be a hell from which there
+would be no escape.  "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell."
+
+There can be no limit to the sacrifice which patriotism requires, so
+great a heritage is our native land.  It does not require of us as
+Christians to engage in wars of conquest for the gratification of pride
+and greed, but it does require of us even the sacrifice of our lives in
+the defence of our homes or in the defence of our brother's home.
+
+There are those who find themselves faced with difficulty.  They are
+called upon to fight with every force in their power, to slay,
+withholding not their hand, while they hear the commandment, "Thou
+shall not kill," ringing in their ears, and across the centuries the
+voice of their Lord saying, "Resist not evil; whosoever shall smite
+thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."  They are
+bewildered.  Is not the attitude of non-resistance that which Jesus
+Christ enjoins?  If they fight with sword and shell are they not
+lowering themselves to the level of Nietzsche, Bernhardi and Bülow, and
+submitting to the arbitrament of the sword, which decides nothing
+except its own sharpness.  The call of patriotism summoning to resist
+even unto blood comes to them, and they are uncertain whether to obey.
+
+But we must interpret the will of God, not by isolated sentences, but
+by the whole content of the divine revelation.  The commandment, "Thou
+shalt not kill," does not mean that we are not to kill in any
+circumstance whatever.  If the commandment is to be taken literally,
+then no limit is to be set to it, and we must not kill any animal--not
+even the parasites of uncleanness.  There is, moreover, another law
+which runs: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
+shed, for in the image of God created He him."  So far from the mere
+physical life being for ever sacred, the very altar of God Himself was
+to be no sanctuary for the murderer.  The man who owned a vicious ox
+and knew him to be vicious, and the ox killed a man, the owner thereof
+was to be slain.  There are therefore circumstances in which the law,
+"Thou shalt not kill," is abrogated, and its place is taken by the law,
+"Thou shalt kill."
+
+The law demanding the conservation of life rests on this foundation,
+not that physical life itself is sacred, but that human life bears the
+image of God.  There are things far more sacred than the physical
+life--even those things which constitute the image of God stamped upon
+man.  There are things for which men in all ages have been content to
+die--truth and loyalty to truth, the principles which are dearer than
+life.  Those things which God ordained that men might through them grow
+more and more into His image, for these things man must be ready to
+die, and among these things is nationality.
+
+Men cannot develop in isolation.  What poor creatures men would be if
+they were solitary units.  They would be as the beasts that perish.  It
+is through the heritage of nationality that the soul is enriched.  What
+poor stunted lives would ours be if we had not behind us the great and
+noble deeds which built up our Empire, if the words of the high souls
+of many generations did not come thrilling to our hearts, if
+Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Scott and Burns did not pour their
+treasures into our laps.  The soul grows into the image of God through
+the riches of nationality.  And whosoever warreth against nationality
+warreth against the soul.  And the men who warreth against the soul
+must be resisted to the death.
+
+***
+
+We dare not appeal to Jesus Christ to cloak our shrinking from
+sacrifice.  No doubt His gentleness has been the wonder of history; but
+His strength also summons us to be strong.  For Jesus Christ was not a
+quietist.  His religion is not a mere hospital for wounded souls.  His
+place is among the strong of the earth.  He faced the evil of this
+earth unflinching in His resistance.  "Woe unto you Scribes and
+Pharisees, hypocrites" is His denunciation of the oppressor; "Go tell
+that fox" is His message to the tyrant.  When we think of Him making
+the whips, and falling, with holy anger in His eyes, on those who
+desecrated the courts of the temple, overturning the tables of the
+money changers, we know that the ideal of non-resistance is not His.
+
+No doubt He laid it down as the law for the individual that he should
+turn the other cheek; but He did not lay it down as a law that a man
+should turn another's cheek to the smiter.  What the individual can do,
+the nation may not do.  It no doubt is the duty of the Ruler to turn
+his own individual cheek to the insulter; it is not his duty to turn
+the cheeks of the millions over whom he rules to those who would smite
+them, committing their children to shame and their homes to devastation.
+
+No doubt Jesus Christ enjoined the law of forgiveness, but it was not
+unconditional.  "If he repent, forgive him," is His law, and until the
+wrongdoer repents and ceases from his evil, it would be immoral to
+forgive him.  Duty demands that every means be used to bring the
+evildoer to repentance; for only so is there a chance of his soul being
+saved.  It is manifest that Christianity is not a religion of
+non-resistance to evil, but the religion of Him who Himself resisted
+evil, and who resisted it even to the death.
+
+Patriotism, therefore, demands that we resist even to the shedding of
+blood.  When a hostile army would destroy a nation, as in Belgium, it
+warreth against the soul, and it is as Christian to kill as it would be
+to shoot a tiger which leapeth out of the jungle to devour a man.  And
+that Irish soldier whose face in the hospital in Paris was irradiated
+with joy when he was told that the enemy was put to flight and Paris
+saved, and who died with that gladness in his face, died in the spirit
+of Jesus Christ.
+
+To say that the Founder of Christianity would not strike a blow for
+home and kindred and truth is to forget that He struck a blow in
+Jerusalem and wielded the thongs on the shoulders of those who polluted
+His Father's house.  It is His will that we should strike a blow in
+defence of the house of our soul--the sanctuary of nationality.
+
+***
+
+Patriotism must be vibrant with the spirit of religion if it is to be a
+power rousing the nation to heroism and self-sacrifice.  There never
+was a nation so patriotic as the Jew.  No city ever gripped a nation's
+heart-strings as Jerusalem gripped the heart of the Jew.  No suffering,
+no defeat, no exile however far, could quench the fire of patriotism in
+the heart.  "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
+her cunning.  Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I
+remember thee not, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy"--such
+was the cry of the Jew by the rivers of Babylon, yearning after Sion.
+
+How was it that Jerusalem thus pulled at its children's heart-strings
+until they hurried back to rebuild?  It was because Jerusalem was the
+seat of the worship of God.  It was not the material stones or the
+hills round about that thus compelled the heart.  It was the light of
+eternity shining over them.  It was because of the "house of the Lord
+our God" that the Jew counted no good worth his striving except the
+good of Jerusalem.  It is only when God standeth at the heart of a
+nation that the heart cleaveth with all its fibres to its native land,
+for then the whole of the man--not only the cravings of the body and
+the heart and the mind, but also the deeper cravings of the soul--wind
+themselves round the thought of the nation.
+
+Thus we find that the days when the fires of patriotism burned
+brightest were ever those in which God held sway over the nation.  It
+was with God that the sailors of Queen Elizabeth swept the main, that
+the soldiers of Wellington hurled the enemy far from the shores that
+face England--they were fighting not only for England but for England's
+God.
+
+The testimony of history is this, that patriotism cannot maintain its
+power if once it be divorced from religion.  Let God's face be veiled
+and lost and everything is lost.  "Without God nothing, with God
+everything," says the ancient Celtic proverb, and all ages testify to
+its truth.  And the last proof of it is now before our eyes in the
+condition of France.
+
+A hundred years ago France dominated Europe, erected thrones and
+deposed kings at its will.  But little by little France lost the vision
+of God, until at last M. Viviani celebrated the final triumph over the
+Church in 1907 by exclaiming: "With one magnificent gesture we have
+extinguished the lights of heaven, which none shall rekindle."  France,
+in the words of its present Prime Minister, "extinguished the lights of
+heaven," but in so doing it extinguished something else.  For to-day
+that nation, that not so long ago dominated Europe, can only protect
+its capital city by the help of the two nations which have not yet
+extinguished the lights of heaven.
+
+Without God patriotism becomes impotent, for God is the source of that
+moral law, conformity to which means for a nation life, and defiance of
+which means the degeneration that leadeth to destruction.  With the
+departure from God came moral decay and racial suicide.  The hope of
+France is this, that through the descent of the nation into the valley
+of death the lights of heaven may be once more kindled; the hope of
+Britain, that these same lights may shine more brightly.
+
+The spirit of patriotism will again vivify the nation when we seek
+after God.  In years of prosperity we have forgotten our high calling.
+We have pursued vanities and forgotten the living God.  When we again
+realise our calling and our election as instruments in the hand of God
+for the establishment of His Kingdom of Righteousness over all the
+earth, our hearts will be filled with ardour, and we shall face
+whatever perils may assail us strong in the assurance that the
+Omnipotent God is in our midst and that nothing can resist His will.
+
+***
+
+And this true patriotism will mean the salvation of the nation.  For it
+will strive to realise at home that righteousness which alone exalteth
+a nation.  Its first task will be to raise the life at home nearer to
+God, for we cannot raise the world to higher levels than that on which
+we ourselves stand.  The vision of the new Jerusalem descending from
+God out of heaven will again flame before our eyes.  "And I, John, saw
+the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven,
+prepared as a bride for her husband."
+
+That new Jerusalem is not a city remote in the inaccessible heights,
+but a city which descends and permeates the material city now so
+polluted by sin, until it becomes the "holy city," with the law of God
+obeyed and the will of God done in it.  Its citizens shall walk its
+streets, pure in heart, seeing God everywhere.  "And they shall bring
+the glory and the honour of the nations into it."  There the nations
+shall be one in the streets of the city of God, all their contendings
+forgotten in the sense of their brotherhood, following the one ideal,
+obeying the one law, loving each other in the love of God.  They will
+strive then as to who shall bring the greatest glory within the compass
+of its walls, and that will be the only striving.
+
+That is the ideal, that we should become a nation so permeated by the
+spirit of God, so brought into obedience to His will, that our cities
+shall become holy cities, even as the new Jerusalem coming down from
+God out of heaven.  When we shall set ourselves to realise that ideal
+once more, then will the nation evoke the devotion of its citizens, for
+devotion to the nation will also be devotion to God.
+
+It was that ideal which fired the patriotism of the Jew.  The same
+ideal alone will make our patriotism glow as a white flame.  When the
+vision of the Supreme Ruler whose throne is established in
+righteousness once more blazes forth before the people, then once more
+the throb of patriotism and the passion to make righteous law operative
+to the ends of the earth will stir the heart, and the manhood of the
+race will once more thrill with the call summoning to service and to
+sacrifice.  The answering shout will everywhere arise--For God and the
+King.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The Shadow of the Cross
+
+
+
+III
+
+The churchyard of our parish lies in a deep hollow, and a little river
+half encircles it.  In the midst of it stands the church beneath whose
+shadow the parish has garnered its dead for centuries.  There the
+generations have lain down to sleep, their hearts reconciled one to
+another, and the beadle has drawn the coverlet of green over them.  As
+he goes about his allotted task he pats a mound here and there gently
+with the back of his spade--for roadman and belted earl are at one here.
+
+The last time I wandered down to the hollow it seemed as if eternal
+peace brooded over the living and the dead.  The leaves, russet and
+gold, glowed in the sunlight.  At the stirring of a gentle breeze, like
+the dropping of a sea-bird's feather, leaf after leaf fluttered
+silently down on the graves.  The great bank of trees across the river
+glowed with rivulets of dull flames running hither and thither.  In its
+stony bed the river sang its endless song.  The immemorial yews,
+beneath whose branches successive generations of children have played
+with now and then a thrill of pleasing terror because of the
+overhanging graves, stood regardless of the sun.  The crows, sated with
+the gleanings of harvest fields, fluttered in their rookeries with
+scarcely a caw.  It seemed as if no sound of discord or strife could
+ever break in that enchanted hollow.
+
+***
+
+As I turned away to retrace my steps through the gate I came on a woman
+sitting on the mort-safe, a handkerchief moist with her tears in her
+hand.  She had come up from the quarries and she had visited her dead.
+And she came because yesterday she received word that on the
+battlefield of Marne her son was killed.  He was her eldest.  The
+others were not old enough yet to fight.  Her husband was killed in an
+accident, and she had reared her children, refusing all help from the
+parish.  The pride of the blood sustained her.  And now that her son
+was dead she came hither, driven by an irresistible instinct to visit
+her husband's grave.  It was as if she wanted to tell him about John,
+and how he died a hero, trying to carry a wounded comrade through the
+hail of the shrapnel.
+
+She was weary, and from her husband's grave she turned to the church.
+She would go and sit in the corner under the gallery, where John used
+to sit.  He had sat with her there at his first Communion.  The
+memories wrapped her round, and she would feel her son near her there.
+But the door of the church was locked and barred.  With an added ache
+in her heart she turned away, and weariness compelled her to sit on the
+iron mort-safe, which the parish provided in a former century to
+protect their dead from sacrilegious hands.  "But the church used to be
+open," I said.  "Aye," she replied tremulously, gathering up her
+handkerchief into a round ball; "but some did-na like it; the boots on
+the week-days are na sae clean, and they dirtied the kirk.  That must
+be why they lockit the door."  It was not that she complained.  Those
+who locked the church were wise men, and no doubt they knew best.  So
+she sat on the mort-safe.
+
+"I have other sons, and when they are older they will go, too," she
+said.  "I'll no' keep them back.  And if they die it'll be for God's
+great cause."  Her lips quivered as she spoke.  The moist ball in the
+right hand was clenched tight--there were no more tears to shed.
+
+And as I looked at the worn, lined face, the bent shoulders, the faded
+rusty black mantle with its fringe, and the sunken lips that quivered
+now and then, there came a sudden realisation.  I saw no longer the one
+grief-burdened figure sitting dejectedly on the mort-safe--I saw the
+unnumbered host of mothers throughout the world who have given their
+sons over to carnage, and who are as Rachel weeping for her children,
+refusing to be comforted because they are not.  Millions of men locked
+in the death grapple means millions of mothers given tears to drink in
+great measure, bound in affliction and iron.
+
+The song of the river went on ceaselessly, the russet-leaves fell
+softly, and the sun shone on a world wrapped in peace--all nature
+utterly regardless of the millions of Rachels that weep.  (Ten million
+hearts may break, but nature silences not one note of its joyousness.)
+And as she sat there, behind her, under the campanile, showed the
+church door, locked and barred.  Nature was heedless of her; the church
+shut its door upon her.  She seemed to me the Mater Dolorosa.
+
+***
+
+As I went up the brae there came the memory of a school lesson long
+ago.  Out of the subconscious it leaped as a diver might come up from
+the depths of the sea with a gleaming coin in his hand.  Among the
+temples of ancient Rome there was one temple always kept open in time
+of war.  There the Roman General clashed the shield and the spear,
+invoking the god ere he went to the battle-line, and its door was shut
+not day or night.  And I have no doubt but that the Eternal Ruler heard
+that clashing of spear on shield, and marked that open door.  But over
+wide districts of Great Britain we have left these pagan habits far
+behind us.  We shut the doors of our temples alike in war and in
+peace--excepting two hours on one day of the week, or in many cases one
+hour in the week.  Nor do I doubt but that the same Ruler marks these
+doors now shut on the mothers of sorrow, and these sanctuaries locked
+and silent.
+
+The glory was now gone from the day.  I could not forget how the iron
+mort-safe gave the rest that the Church refused.  The shadow lay heavy
+over the valley, and the mind tried to give the shadow a name.  But it
+could not.  So up the long flight of stone steps I climbed, and turned
+along a tree-shaded road.  There, where three roads meet, stands a
+little chapel within whose walls a small section of our parishioners
+worship.  I have passed it times out of mind without so much as
+glancing at it.  But to-day its open door arrested my eye, and I stood
+in the roadway and gazed.  And there came to me there a sudden sense of
+thankfulness for that there is one open door in our parish which
+witnesses to the fact that the power and solace of religion are not
+shut in within the confines of only two hours of one day in the week.
+
+While I yet stood in the highway there came forth from the little
+chapel an honoured parishioner, who is passing the golden evening of a
+useful life in researches regarding Calvin and the Pope.  Amazement
+possessed me, for he is a power in the parish church, whose door is
+locked and barred.  We walked together towards the hills.  There was a
+trace of apology in his explanation.  Since this dreadful cataclysm has
+burst and the boom of the guns has come drifting from the sea across
+the high-perched city, he has felt the need of quiet meditation.  Thus
+he has often on his walks slipped through the open door of the chapel
+that stands by the roadside.
+
+"And you have locked the door of the parish church," I exclaimed, "and
+you deny to the poor the privilege you yourself enjoy."  He stopped and
+faced me in the roadway, blinking at me.  "We never locked the Church
+door," he said.  "It used to be open," I answered; "I remember being
+glad to sit in it myself."  "Oh!  I remember," he exclaimed, "it was
+open every day for a few years, but the authorities were never
+consulted when it was thrown open--a most lawless proceeding!--and when
+a suitable opportunity occurred the beadle locked it up.  Law and order
+have to be vindicated."
+
+"What you did then," I replied, "was to allow the beadle to deprive the
+poor parishioners of a privilege which you and a few others enjoy
+elsewhere."  At that he started off walking along the road very
+quickly, but I kept step with him.  "You see," said he, waving a
+deprecatory hand, "I am only one among many, and I was so absorbed in
+these old Reformation controversies that I never gave it a thought, and
+it is only since the war began that I realised...."  And as he spoke I
+felt that my old friend, learned in many controversies, had experienced
+a revolution.  The great tide had swept him past all controversies
+right up to the fountain head.  He had learned that man's high calling
+is not to dispute, but to pray.
+
+As we walked under the darkling hills I told him of that shadow which
+had so suddenly fallen upon me that day, and he at once gave it a name.
+"It is the shadow of the Cross," said he.  And thereupon he began to
+explain out of the wisdom and ripened experience of seventy years how
+across nineteen centuries the shadow of the Cross lies still over all
+the world.  One thinks so seldom of these things, and if occasionally
+one hears them spoken of, familiarity with the words has deadened the
+hearer to their significance.  It was because I listened to him talking
+in the lane that his words gripped me.  They might have made no
+impression if he were in a pulpit.
+
+***
+
+We are accustomed to think of the greatest of all tragedies as an event
+consummated in six hours.  It is, however, far from consummated, for it
+is an age-long tragedy.  Its roots lay in self-interest.  A degenerate
+priesthood in an obscure Syrian town saw nothing in the Greatest of
+Teachers but an unbalanced enthusiast, who struck at their ill-gotten
+gains, and whose triumph would make an end of them and their system.
+So self-interest cried "Crucify."  And though the Roman Governor saw
+through them and wanted to save Him, self-interest again was brought
+into play, and when threatened with an awkward complaint to Rome, he
+said "Crucify."  And ever since then self-interest on innumerable lips
+has cried Crucify, Crucify.  Not only cried, but did it.
+
+For this Teacher identified Himself with His followers, saying that He
+was the Vine and they the branches.  It follows that whatever is done
+to the branch is done to the vine.  A branch cannot be cut and severed
+from the vine without the vine bleeding.  He declared it to be so.
+"Whosoever receiveth you receiveth Me," and it follows that whosoever
+crucifies you crucifies Me.  And the history of the centuries is the
+history of how the poor and unlearned and the toiling have been
+persecuted, harried by war, driven to death and crucified.
+
+Generation after generation have raised the Cross anew, and in the
+crucifying of the dumb multitudes have crucified Him.  Along with His
+own He fought with wild beasts, went through the flames, and suffered
+many bloody and diverse persecutions, and He was with His people now.
+He confronted to-day the mighty of the earth as He did that blinded
+priesthood of old, and He declared that there is only one way of
+conquering, and that by love; that gaining the whole world was a
+miserable bargain if in exchange a man parted with truth and
+righteousness and purity--those things that constitute the soul's very
+breath.
+
+But self-interest answered with cold disdain: "What sickly
+sentimentalist is this?  Let Him be crucified."  He faced to-day the
+lust of conquest, and declared that the conquering of men's bodies was
+nothing; that the only way of attaining power was to conquer men's
+hearts and minds and wills, thus clasping them to us with hooks of
+steel; that the will of God for His children was that they should love
+their enemies and not pour upon them the vials of wrath, trampling them
+under foot; but the arrogance of man answered with the hoarse cry,
+"Crucify."
+
+And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the
+holocaust of war--ten millions of men consigned to the hell of reeking
+trenches.  In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before,
+bearing its awful woe.  In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal
+Love is crucified.  It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips
+trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred
+door of the House of God.
+
+***
+
+The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done
+shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there
+should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power.  And yet there
+must be some explanation of it.  Why should a passion for righteousness
+be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified
+by a petty Roman official?  There can be no explanation but this--that
+that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which
+wrought so evil a deed.  That power was self-interest--selfishness.
+
+The eyes of men turned to Jesus Christ, and they saw one holy,
+harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, whose journeying was the
+journeys of healing among the sons of men, whose words were words of
+blessedness, declaring that God loved and pardoned His children, and
+yet men reviled, scorned, scourged and at last crucified Him.  The
+power that moved men to this dread crime was sin, and thus the word sin
+became a word of horror.  (For the selfishness that crucified was only
+one fruit of sin.)  Out of that realisation of the horror of sin there
+sprang an ethical passion--a passion which in the heart and in the
+world waged ceaseless war on selfishness and all the devices of evil.
+Thus humanity was lifted out of the mire.  They girded themselves to
+fight that dread and hateful power which crucified the Holy One.
+
+Like the wind blowing in from the sea that sweeps before it the foul
+miasma that lies over the valleys, so that men look up and see the
+heavens and feel a new vigour moving in their blood, so a breath from
+the living God came stirring the foul places of humanity, and the eyes,
+no longer blinded by the exhalations of evil passions, saw the ideal of
+purity arise before their eyes, and they turned to climb towards the
+clearer vision.  Through the revelation of purity in the face of Jesus
+Christ and the realisation of the awfulness of that power which crowned
+that purity with thorns, there came to humanity the dawning of
+deliverance from sin--a deliverance still going on to its fruition.
+
+***
+
+History is for ever repeating itself, and to-day the process of
+humanity's deliverance from evil will gather momentum and advance a
+long way towards the final triumph.  For just as men only realised the
+hatefulness of sin when they saw it laid upon Jesus Christ, so will it
+be also to-day.  A generation that had lost the sense of sin beholds
+sin laid upon millions of men, working woe unspeakable, and, beholding,
+learns anew what sin is and the hatefulness of it.  For these millions
+of men grappling with death, what are they but humanity's sin-bearers.
+On them is laid the burden of the sins of this generation.  The
+selfishness, greed, ambition, lust--all the passions which sweep men to
+wars of conquest--have poured the vials of misery on their heads.  The
+son of the widow sitting on the mort-safe, who now lies in a nameless
+grave, he bore it.  The bearing of it killed him.
+
+And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more
+burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that passion for
+righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust.  There will ring
+round the world the compelling cry that this power of hell must not for
+ever hold humanity in its grip--that ruthless ambition, militarism,
+despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth.  Once more
+the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men.
+
+***
+
+There was another power also that stirred the world under the shadow of
+the Cross, and that was the power of self-sacrifice.  There came to men
+an overwhelming realisation that at the heart of the universe was the
+Spirit of self-sacrifice, and that the Cross was but the expression of
+it.  They realised that the greatest thing a man can do with his life
+is to lay it down.  And as men realise to-day that the Cross still
+abides in the heart of God, so that in all their affliction He is
+afflicted, there comes to them the feeling that the one way of coming
+nearest to His heart is the way of self-sacrifice.
+
+Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought
+life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of
+self-sacrifice.  What is it that sustains the men who go down to the
+earthly hell of ruthless war?  It is just this--the consciousness,
+newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and
+country, for home and kindred.  They are content to be blotted out if
+only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be
+exalted.  Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once
+more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure.  Men charge
+across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes.  They are
+raised into the fellowship of the Cross.  And we are raised with them.
+
+If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the
+glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again
+lift up her face to the light.  He has died that we may live.  Greater
+love hath no man than this--nor yet greater glory.  But she needs not
+to be told; she knows it already.  She knows it far better than you or
+I do, for she feels it.  In the deep places of life where words are
+meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the
+glory of self-sacrifice.
+
+By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the
+soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of
+lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine
+wisdom which is hid from the wise.  She knows that the road that goes
+by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can
+come to God.  She knows that her son has walked along that road, and
+that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying
+while bearing it, God has brought him into that joy which all the
+cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe.  And because
+she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has
+felt the touch of God, she is ready to greet the day of still greater
+sacrifice.
+
+***
+
+In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and
+read an article.  It was a bitter invective against Christianity and
+the Church.  Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross--and this
+holocaust as the fruit.  It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced
+eye.  It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity
+for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the
+wicked have continued to crucify Him.  These things are so not because,
+but in spite, of Christianity.
+
+Grievous as war now is, yet it is not war as in the days before the
+Cross was erected on Calvary.  When Ulysses asked Agamemnon for
+sanction to bury the body of Ajax, the King was greatly annoyed.  "What
+do you mean?" he answered, "do you feel pity for a dead enemy?"  That
+was the spirit of war in the old heathen world--the spirit which had no
+mercy on the living and no pity for the dead.  Slowly but surely the
+spirit of Christ fettered the spirit of hate and dethroned the spirit
+of revenge.  We now minister to the wounded and bury the dead enemy
+with the pity and the honour we render to our own.
+
+We can trace the evolution of peace through the centuries.  Wars
+between individuals have ceased.  A century and a half ago warring
+clans in Scotland dyed the heather red; to-day wars between tribes have
+ceased.  There remains only war between nations, and already there are
+great nations between whom war is unthinkable.  If we in these days
+wage war with Germany, yet we in these days also celebrate the
+hundredth anniversary of unbroken peace with the United States of
+America.  If we bewail the failure of Christianity in the former, let
+us be grateful for the triumph of Christianity in the latter.
+
+Formerly war was the normal condition; now to the moral consciousness
+of Christendom war is an outrage.  We only need to look beneath the
+surface to realise that Galilee is conquering Corsica, and will conquer
+at the last.  Beneath the shadow of the Cross men will at last find
+healing for their grievous wounds.
+
+***
+
+And as a symbol thereof the doors of the sanctuaries of peace will be
+flung wide open, and no burdened heart will find the House of God
+locked and barred against groping hands.  One fruit of these grievous
+days may well be that the Church will realise that it does not become
+her to occupy a lower plane than that heathen temple in ancient Rome,
+whose door was shut not day or night while men were dying in battle.
+
+In the coming days when the mothers of sorrow come to their dead, over
+whose graves the falling leaves flutter as a benediction, they will not
+be left sitting on the iron mort-safe.  The open door will invite them
+into the sanctuary of peace, and they will croon the coronach of their
+woe in the holy place.  For they are the priesthood of this generation,
+offering up the most precious sacrifice--and the door of the holy place
+must be open to them.  And there, in the sanctuaries of peace, their
+sorrow will be transmuted into joy.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Power of Prayer
+
+
+
+IV
+
+For eight centuries the Church of St. Giles has been the centre of the
+religious life of Scotland.  At all times of sorrow the nation has
+turned to it, and within its walls, consecrated by the prayers of so
+many generations, the surcharged heart has voiced its woe in the
+presence of the Unseen.  But in all the years of the dim and fading
+past there never was a day like this in which we now stand.  Death has
+come as a grim spectre, and has looked into our eyes.  The winds carry
+to our ears the moans of our perishing sons, dying gloriously for
+freedom on the bloody fields of Flanders.  The great ships guard our
+shores, and we know that if that vigil failed, our cities and villages
+and fair countryside would become as Louvain and the Low Country.
+Death itself would be welcome rather than that.
+
+If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye
+has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our
+ears.  And that call soundeth not in vain.  To-day[1] the two great
+Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their
+misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country--for all the
+things which make life beautiful.  They have come through days of
+alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one
+place.  And in their hearts only one purpose--to seek the blessing of
+God for their nation.
+
+
+[1] November 18, 1914.
+
+
+***
+
+As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many bloody fights
+for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the
+church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of
+time.
+
+Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and
+out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the
+altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing
+for their dead.  The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of
+the surf wailing on the shore, and their sobbing as the cry of the
+grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide.  But the city fathers
+could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of
+destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of
+the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to
+rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to
+pass to the kyrk, and pray whane tyme requires for our Soveraine Lord
+and his Army, and neichbouris being thereat."
+
+That proclamation stirs the blood!  They are dust, these fathers of
+ours, but their spirit is all alive, throbbing in the heart of
+us--their far-away children.  Never did a race meet its Sedan in a
+sublimer spirit than that.  The strong, at toll of bell and tuck of
+drum, manned the ramparts, and the women filled St. Giles' and sent
+heavenward their cries.  The bodies of such a race may for a brief
+season be brought to subjection, but their souls are invincible--and it
+is the soul that always conquers.
+
+And here to-day it is the same.  From every part of Scotland men have
+come, and they passed "to the kirk to pray for our Sovereign Lord and
+his Army."  True, there has been no Flodden and no Sedan; but it is by
+the good hand of God upon us that the enemy was frustrated in his
+eagerness for another Sedan.  And it is in part the prayer of
+thanksgiving that is laid to-day upon His altar, and in part the
+petition that His mercies may be continued to the nation in the cruel
+days to come.
+
+***
+
+What a sanctuary for a nation's prayers, this church, where Kings have
+prayed and gone forth to die in battle; where Queens have wept as the
+voice of judgment, grim and stern, untouched by tenderness or love,
+sounded in the ear; where three thousand people dissolved in tears as
+the good Regent, foully slain, was borne to his grave.  Over it passed
+wave after wave of fanaticism and barbarism; and at last it fell into
+the hands of the restorers--more ruthless far than Goths or Vandals!
+But, through it all, the house of God survived; and, apparelled once
+more in some of its pristine glory, it opens its doors to a nation that
+once more seek after its God.
+
+And above us, as we sit there, hang the colours of our Scottish
+regiments stirring our patriotism, assuring us that the men who guarded
+these flags on many bloody fields were guarded by God, and that we are
+still in His keeping.
+
+What a place this is in which to set vibrating that note of patriotism
+which now quivers from Maiden Kirk to John o' Groat's.  These colours
+there--they are the most eloquent things on earth, for they pertain to
+the realm of symbols.  Words are poor compared to tears, and that is
+because tears belong to the world of symbols.  That tattered banner
+there belonged to the Gordon Highlanders, and was carried through the
+Peninsula and the Crimea.  Woven in faded letters you can read on it
+still Corunna, Almarez, Pyrenees, Waterloo.  Ah! these flags tell of a
+devotion stronger than death, rekindle the memories of the day when
+stern silence fell on the ranks, as the Highland Brigade breasted the
+slopes of the Alma until Sir Colin Campbell lifted his hat and they
+rushed on the foe with the slogan of victory; and that other day when
+"the thin red line tipped with steel" rolled back the surge of the
+Cossacks; aye, and of a hundred such days when men went down joyously
+to death that the race might be free and live.
+
+Waterloo!--it is on many flags.  And we remember how the Man of Destiny
+himself, as he saw his ranks yield before the onslaught of the
+Highlanders, did not restrain his admiration for his enemies, but
+exclaimed with the true soldier's generosity, "Les braves
+Ecossais"--"Brave, brave Scotsmen" (what a contrast to "French's
+contemptible little Army").  The hands that carried, the hearts that
+thrilled at the waving of these flags, their fame will never perish.
+
+  "On the slopes of Quatre Bras
+  The Frenchmen saw them stand unbroken.
+      *    *    *    *    *
+  On the day of Waterloo
+  The pibroch blew where fire was hottest.
+      *    *    *    *    *
+  When the Alma heights were stormed
+  Foremost went the Highland bonnets.
+      *    *    *    *    *
+  As it was in days of yore,
+  So the story shall be ever.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  Think then of the name ye bear,
+  Ye that wear the Highland tartan.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  Zealous of its old renown,
+  Hand it down without a blemish."
+
+As the eye looks along the nave up into the choir and sees the gleam of
+red, colours after colours, there comes the memory of words--"We have
+heard with our ears, O God, and our fathers have told us what work Thou
+didst in their days in the times of old....  Through Thee will we push
+down our enemies...."  The unseen God who has led His people through so
+many and great dangers will not forsake them now.
+
+***
+
+There is a tablet where formerly stood the door that led to Haddo's
+Hole, and there hangs on a pillar the flag that pertains of truth to
+the realm of romance.  Men with their hearts hot with indignation
+buried it in Pretoria in 1880, and put above it the inscription
+"Resurgam."  Afterwards the Colonel recovered it and brought it home.
+When war broke out again his widow restored it to the regiment--the
+Royal Scots Fusiliers.  In 1881 that regiment was the last to leave the
+Transvaal; in 1900 it was the first to enter the Transvaal--as the
+inscription narrates.  And by the direction of Lord Roberts, when
+Pretoria was occupied, this identical flag was run up amid the shouts
+of the victors.  Now it rests here.  "Resurgam"--it is the unquenchable
+spirit of an invincible nation.
+
+If only the manhood of Scotland could be gathered into this Church,
+under these flags, and the story they tell were put into words,
+pulsating with passion--then the ranks of our Army would be filled up
+in a week.  What a lack of imagination we reveal!  We teach dates,
+thinking we are teaching history.  The only way to teach history is by
+flags, and all they stand for.  When Douglas threw the heart of Bruce
+among his enemies he cried, "Lead thou on as thou wast wont and Douglas
+will follow thee or die."  In the spirit of Douglas our fathers
+followed the flags, and we will follow in the steps of our fathers and
+face death with undaunted hearts as they were wont.  There comes to us
+the shouting of their triumph, and we cry: "Lead on; we will follow or
+die."  This grey church, St. Giles', is the temple of patriotism.
+Therefore our feet turn towards it in dark days, and we say, "Our feet
+shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!"
+
+***
+
+How the old words are born for us anew as we thus meet as one "to
+entreat God for the broken peace of Christendom."  We sing "God is our
+refuge and our strength," but there is a note of intensity in the
+singing now such as we never knew before.  Men close their eyes, and
+stand, the world blotted out, before their God, realising that He and
+He alone is the one refuge, the only giver of victory.  We hear the old
+story read of Moses holding up his hands and Israel prevailing on the
+plains below; but it is not Israel we see travailing in battle, but our
+own brothers in the rain-sodden trenches, and we feel the uprising of
+the ceaseless intercession of a nation that has anew found its God.  It
+is not the right hand that assureth victories; it is that spirit of
+enthusiasm, that passion for righteousness which filleth the heart, and
+that spirit is as the wind blowing where it listeth--and it cometh out
+of the Unseen at the call of our prayers.
+
+When in other days we prayed for the King it was in the spirit of cold
+formalism.  But now a lump rises in the throat as we invoke the
+blessing and protection of Heaven for the solitary man who is the
+symbol of the unity of our Empire, and who watcheth over its destinies
+day and night, and who has sent his son to face death with the meanest
+of his subjects.  We hear the glorious words: "If God be for us, who
+can be against us?" and they are written for ourselves.  We, who fight
+for the truth of word and for the freedom and deliverance of the
+oppressed, can feel that God is for us, and that all is well.
+
+And when we pray, our voices rising as one, "Thy kingdom come," we can
+see that kingdom coming through blood and tears, cleansing the foul
+places and establishing peace on everlasting foundations.  It is a new
+day that has dawned for us--a day in which we stand united as the
+subjects of the one King, as the sons of the one God--and the things
+that separated us one from another are swept away.  What the conferring
+of the wise found so difficult to achieve, the roaring of the guns has
+accomplished.  God teacheth his people by sending them through the
+purifying fires.
+
+***
+
+In these prayers in St. Giles' there is a directness which shows that
+we are there for a definite purpose.  We no longer use qualifying
+words.  We cry for victory.  There is a bloodless form of prayer which
+some use and which sends the worshipper away with an aching heart.  It
+is the prayer that never prays directly for victory.  "Thy will be
+done," it prays, in the spirit of submission.  But prayer is not
+submission; it is a wrestling.  In other days our fathers wrestled in
+prayer and prevailed.  "I spent the night in prayer," wrote Oliver
+Cromwell, in critical days; "I prayed God that He would guide us
+against the enemy.  We were simple fellows of the country, and they
+were men of blood and fashion, but the Lord delivered them into our
+hands.  By His grace we killed five thousand.  If He continues to show
+mercy we will kill some more to-morrow."  Such were the Ironsides, "men
+of a spirit," who broke the charges of the Cavaliers, as the cliff
+dashes back in white spray the rush of the billows.
+
+This was also the language of the Covenanters of old; and though we no
+longer use such plainness of speech, we mean the same.  There is a
+place for tenderness; but when men are ground to powder by the judgment
+of God, tenderness is not manifest then.  When the heart whispers
+"Spare" and justice says "Smite," men must obey the voice of justice,
+stifling the voice of the heart.
+
+Our prayers are now for justice.  Better far a righteous war than an
+immoral peace.  We have been compelled to unsheath the sword, and we
+pray that no heart may falter, and no cry arise for the sheathing of
+the sword, until justice be done.  Thus our prayers have become a cry
+for victory.
+
+***
+
+As one sits in an ancient church such as this, there comes knocking at
+the heart many questions regarding that service of prayer which within
+its walls has linked the generations together.  Can prayer really
+prevail with God?  Can it alter the will of the Unchangeable?  If there
+be no power in it, why should men go on praying?
+
+We must distinguish between the will of God which is unchangeable, and
+His lower will which is his purpose towards us and His attitude to us.
+The former is unalterable; the latter varies according to the varying
+of our hearts.  With that lower will we are called to wrestle.  A man
+is born in poverty and obscurity, and the will of God seems to be that
+he should continue poor and obscure.  But he wrestles with that lower
+will until he prevails.  He ultimately moves out into the great tide of
+life and becomes a power.  The will of God towards that man is changed.
+
+It is the same with a nation.  Here is a nation sinking on its lees
+with its ideals dimmed and the shrines of its fathers' God forsaken and
+desolate.  It has fashioned to itself other gods, and the multitudes
+crowd the temples of the goddess of pleasure.  The very race itself is
+sacrificed on the altar of gross pleasure, and the laughter of little
+children is being little by little silenced.  The fires of patriotism
+are dying low, and the love of country gives place to the love of
+party.  There are mean victories rejoiced over, but they are the
+victories of the cynic and the sensualist.  There is the sound of
+shouting, but it is the shouting over the triumph of one self-seeking
+politician over another self-seeking partisan.  Saintliness, which
+other generations held in awe and reverence, provokes now a pitying
+smile.  Mammon alone is held in high honour and sitteth in the high
+places.  What is the will of God towards that nation?  It is this--ruin
+and utter destruction.  Over every nation that thus succumbed to the
+gross and sensual, history shows the sword of God unsheathed, and at
+last the devouring flames of judgment.
+
+But to such a nation there comes as if out of the silent heaven a call
+as a trumpet sound, summoning it to the judgment-seat of God.  Over the
+sea comes the roar of guns.  The foundations which the fathers laid in
+righteousness, through long neglect and decay are crumbling.  An empire
+encircling the globe is tottering to destruction.  The hay and the
+stubble cannot come scathless through the flames.  The writing is on
+the wall, and as the eyes see the hand that writes, trembling seizeth
+upon men.  And then there cometh a sudden change.  The nation in a day
+rises out of the morass of its self-indulgence.  It sets itself to lay
+hold again upon the eternal law of righteousness.  They seek once more
+the shrines of their God.  They set themselves to fast and to pray.
+"Who can tell," they whisper one to another, "if God will turn and
+repent, and turn away from His fierce anger, that we perish not?"
+
+The fields of their inglorious shouting over their games are deserted
+for the fields of hardness and grim preparation.  Once more they gird
+themselves for conflict, as their fathers so often girded, that truth
+and righteousness may prevail over all the earth.  Sharply the choice
+is presented to them between Christ or Odin, and though choosing the
+Christ means agony and woe they make their choice unhesitatingly.  A
+new light shines in their eyes, and the work of their hands and the
+devisings of their hearts become the spirit of prayer.  Yesterday the
+will of God towards that nation, sinking on its lees, was destruction;
+to-day towards that same nation, thus risen out of the foul miasma that
+was stifling its soul, the will of God is salvation.
+
+Because prayer is the greatest power in the world; because it can alter
+the will of God towards us, because it can move the hand of the
+omnipotent God and is thus endued with His omnipotence, our prayers as
+we gather in the sanctuaries are no longer the submission of quietism,
+but a wrestling with God--the crying of a soul as in agony for victory
+based on the triumph of righteousness.  It was such a cry that rose on
+that day in St. Giles.
+
+***
+
+As the second paraphrase was being sung there came the memory of words
+spoken in the pulpit of the great Cathedral by Dr. Cameron Lees.  It
+was at evening service, when the shadows were gathering.  "I have often
+sat in this pulpit," said Dr. Lees, "on the edge of the evening, and
+watched the shadows enveloping the Cathedral.  They invaded the side
+chapels first, and then the nave, creeping onwards through the
+transepts, until the chancel was reached.  After that they gathered in
+strength, until the whole building was in darkness, with the exception
+of the white figure of Christ in the great east window.  I pray that
+the last vision vouchsafed me on earth may be just that--the Saviour of
+men.  I can then close my eyes in the knowledge that He will lead me
+through the dark valley that leadeth to the eternal home."
+
+It has been like that with the whole nation.  Around our shores the
+darkness gathered, until all the horizon was black with threatening
+clouds.  Then we lifted up our eyes and saw....  He will bring
+deliverance and peace.  As we moved along the crowded aisles towards
+the door the white figure of Christ glowed in the great east window,
+and we felt that He will bless His people at last with peace--the peace
+not of death, but of life.
+
+  "Down the dark future, through long generations,
+    The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease,
+  And, like a bell, with solemn sweet vibrations,
+    I hear once more the voice of Christ say Peace.
+  Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
+    The clash of war's great organ shakes the skies;
+  But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
+    The holy melodies of love arise."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Victory
+
+
+
+V
+
+The blinds were all drawn in the red-roofed house that stands at the
+cross-roads.  It was not empty, for the smoke arose from its chimneys
+in the clear morning air.  In other days the music of song and laughter
+often floated from its open windows, but now it was stricken dumb.
+From it two sons had gone to take their place in the line of soul and
+fire that girdles these islands, warding them from destruction.
+
+In a moment the veiled windows flashed their meaning.  In the long
+lists of the dead I found the name I looked for.  I had schooled myself
+to look at these lists, thinking of them in the mass as force or power;
+but that one name insisted on its individuality.  They were all
+individual lives, each throbbing with intensest self-realisation, each
+with his love and hope and fear.  There was none among them so poor but
+some heart clung to them.  They may die, no longer in units, but in
+broad swathes, mown down by machine guns, but they are individual
+hearts still.  In masses the sea swallows them up, trenches are filled
+with them, but however much we try we cannot narcotise our hearts by
+sophistries.  Some day a name stands out alone--and we realise.
+
+All over the land, in every parish, blinds are being drawn in houses
+where music and laughter are silenced.  There comes the surge of a wild
+revolt.  It is not these individual hearts alone that lie stricken, it
+is the joy of the centuries yet to be.  In nameless graves lie the
+dream-children who will never now be born.  This criminal sealing up of
+the very fountain of life--how can we bear it?
+
+And yet we open not our mouths in protest.  Is it because we are losing
+our sensitiveness--becoming brutalised?  It might be that.  For nothing
+coarsens the mind like that tide of hatred and passion which war sends
+sweeping through the hearts of men.  And yet it is not that.  For when
+they told the mother, breaking it gently as love alone can do, that her
+son was dead, she bowed her head in silence, yielding herself to the
+solace of tears; but in a little while she said brokenly: "It is good
+to die so: I would not have my son shelter himself behind other
+mothers' sons."
+
+No, it is not because we are already coarsened that the heart can bear.
+It is rather because we have realised with the passing away of the old
+world of the last long summer days (it seems already centuries remote)
+that there are some things so great that they can transfigure even
+death.  When the loyalty to the highest can only be fulfilled through
+death, we acquiesce in the sacrifice.  In our parish we have not been
+coarsened--we have been quickened.
+
+***
+
+It seems as if it were in another era that my friend at the top of the
+Gallows' Road proved to me convincingly that death alone was king.
+With a keen irony he depicted this little globule of a world, a
+third-rate satellite of a fifth-rate star, floating in the abysses, in
+relation to the universe but as a mere grain of sand amid all the sand
+on the world's shores; and on that puny speck of a world he pictured
+the ephemeral generations, mere flashes of troubled consciousness--and
+then darkness.
+
+It was reasonable when they thought this world the centre of all
+things, with the sun and moon and stars circling it round as humble
+ministrants, that they should believe in some high destiny for
+themselves.  But now that they know how miserably and unspeakably
+insignificant the world is, it was but vanity and arrogance for any man
+to think of himself as of any value whatever in the scheme of things.
+His life was as the flashing of a midge's wings.  His end was as a
+candle blown out in the night.
+
+***
+
+One evening, when the air was vibrant with the melody of birds and
+laden with the perfume of the roses that filled the garden, he
+developed another train of thought.  He pictured the glut of life there
+would be if all the generations on this and millions unnumbered of
+worlds all survived.  With vivid gestures he passed them all before the
+eye--low-browed savages, cannibals, fetish-worshippers, Calvinists, and
+at last the æsthetics of our day.  "There would be no room for them--no
+use for them at all--it would be a glut which baffles all imagination."
+There was no way out but that the individual perished to prevent the
+universe from being crowded out.
+
+And the cobbler at the top of the brae described to me how his dog was
+run over in the street.  "He gaed a bark--and he never gaed anither.
+It'll be like that at the end with us a'.  We'll gae out like my dawg."
+It was a queer result of the glimpse which came to us of an illimitable
+universe--this cheapening of ourselves.  There was nothing at last but
+the charnel-house of the crowded kirkyard, where the generations lay
+layer upon layer, and where the opening of a grave reminded the old
+clerk, as he quaintly declared, of nothing but a dentist's shop.  The
+teeth survived for unrecorded centuries--but that was all.
+
+It is strange the tricks the memory plays.  For, sitting here, glancing
+over the crowded sheet filled with the names of the dead, I remembered
+these things.  And there came the sense of the madness of the universe
+and the intolerableness of life, if the end of all heroism was but
+that--nothingness and corruption.  A handful of bones thrown up by the
+beadle to make room for the dead of to-day--is that all that is left of
+those who handed down the lamp of life to us?  Is that all that will be
+left of us too at the last?
+
+In the ordinary day my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road and the
+cobbler on the breast of the brae would have said that that was the
+end.  But the extraordinary day has come upon us unawares, and in the
+extraordinary day this little, burdened, pain-racked life becomes
+suddenly unendurable unless it lie in the bosom of eternity.  If there
+be no rainbow circling the heavens above the carnage heaps of the
+stricken battlefields, if the farewell of death be a farewell for ever,
+how can the heart endure?
+
+***
+
+It certainly looks to the seeing of the eye as if destruction were the
+end.  With the perishing of the body everything seemeth to perish: all
+love, all thought, all tenderness vanish for ever.  But the eyes and
+the ears are for ever playing us false; and here, too, they deceive us.
+For the world is so ordered that nothing ever perishes.  In nature
+there is no destruction.  A handful of ashes in a grate look like
+annihilation, but what it represents is really resurrection.  The
+imprisoned sunrays of uncounted æons, stored up in the lumps of coal,
+have been released from the prison-house, and gone forth again as heat
+and as light.  The physical body may seem to perish; what really
+happens is that its constituent elements are re-grouped.
+
+But in the realm of beauty, is there not destruction possible there?
+Through long centuries faith and devotion rear a great cathedral, every
+line and curve of which is instinct with beauty.  Every statue breathes
+the love and hope and fears of men.  In vaulted aisles and "windows
+richly dight," it symbolises the Unseen--the beauty which the heart
+yearns for.  On that beauty materialised, ruthless Vandalism rains shot
+and shell; the devouring flames consume it.  Its gaunt walls are now a
+monument of barbarism.  Has nothing perished there?  Is it not mockery
+to speak of the conservation of the constituent elements there?  For
+loveliness has vanished there from off the face of the earth, and
+beauty which no hand of man can ever restore has been annihilated.
+
+But it has not.  For beauty is not in things, but in souls.  The beauty
+lay in the soul of the architects that planned, in the hearts of the
+builders that carved the stones until they seemed to breathe--and
+shells cannot destroy that.  The loveliness was shrined in the souls of
+the generations that gazed, and, gazing, were raised into the
+fellowship of the hearts that planned and builded.  Thus did the spirit
+of beauty grow in the hearts of men--and shells cannot destroy that.
+
+And let these charred walls be left to the alchemy of time, and nature
+will clothe them in richer loveliness.  Lichen and moss will grow on
+them, and the moonlight will etherialise them.  One symbol of beauty
+may seem to perish; but the spirit of beauty itself, dwelling in the
+hearts of men and abiding at the core of the universe, is
+indestructible.  The thing which we deem perishable, no power on earth
+can kill.
+
+***
+
+There is on earth something infinitely more precious than the material
+substance, indestructible though it be.  The most beautiful thing the
+world can show is a good man.  Through the years forces play on him,
+and each force adds its element of beauty.  He has struggled with
+adversity, and in the conflict he has learned patience, tolerance and a
+wide charity.  Waves of affliction have passed over him, and he has
+learned tenderness and sympathy with human suffering, so that bruised
+hearts come and lie down in his shadow, and there find healing.  With
+eyes cleansed from self, he looks out on the comedy and tragedy of
+life, and he sees the hidden springs.  The healing power that goes
+forth from him grows with the years.  At last he dies.
+
+Does nature conserve the shell while it consigns the jewel in the
+shell--the man himself, with all his love and tender thought and
+unselfish care--to annihilation?  That is unthinkable.  To know one
+good man is to know that the human personality is imperishable.  It was
+through that knowledge that the soul of man triumphed over the terror
+of death.
+
+There walked in Galilee a Teacher who made a handful of peasants feel
+the possibilities of moral loveliness latent in the human heart, and
+when He died they could not associate the thought of death with Him.
+"It was not possible that He should be holden of it," they said one to
+another.  Everything was possible but that He could become as a clod in
+the valley of corruption.  Of course even that was possible if the
+world were a chaos given over for sport to malicious demons.
+
+It would be possible, then, that the self-sacrificing love stronger
+than death, and the spirit of unsullied purity should become mere dust.
+But the possibility of the world being ruled by any except a Righteous
+Power did not occur to the untutored Galileans.  Therefore they faced
+death with level eyes, refusing to believe in its triumph, saying to
+their hearts, "It is not possible."
+
+And that is the rock on which to plant our feet in the day when the
+world is given over to the wild welter of bloodshed.  In every parish
+over all the land blinds are pulled down, and hearts, wrapped round in
+the dimness, sit still in the shadow of a dumb affliction.  They will
+never again hear the familiar footsteps coming to the door; they will
+hear it in their dreams--only to awake and find silence.  Never again
+will the first question be when the door is opened, as it was through
+all the days since the golden days of childhood, "Where is mother?"
+But the great things which made life noble have not been destroyed by
+bullet or shell.  No man is worthy of freedom except the man who is
+prepared to die for it.  The heart, which in death proved itself
+deserving of freedom, has entered into the fulness of freedom.  The
+heavens are again aglow when we realise that.
+
+***
+
+It was the Professor who made me sure of those things.  I met him at
+the "Priory," where my old friend carries on his controversy with the
+Pope--or used to.  In that house of his one meets all sorts of
+visionaries from the ends of the earth.  A Waldensian pastor full of
+the dream of a rejuvenated Italy; a leader of French Protestants, who
+has forgotten his controversy with the Pope in the great upheaval
+through which his race are finding their soul once more; a dreamer from
+across the Atlantic, his eyes a-gleam with the vision of a reunited
+Christendom--these are the men you will find drinking tea at the Priory
+on any day in our parish.
+
+The original bond between them was their controversy with Rome, but
+they have now forgotten all about that.  There, in a happy hour, I met
+the Professor.  One phrase of his lit up for me the days of darkness.
+"We see the alchemy of Providence at work all round about us," he
+exclaimed, pushing his fingers through his hair until it stood up all
+on end, an aureole of white.
+
+"It is the flower of our manhood that is perishing," said the "Prior,"
+while our hostess was nervously solicitous over the fate of a teacup
+which the Professor was balancing in his left hand, utterly regardless
+of its purpose.
+
+"Perishing!" exclaimed the Professor; "they are not perishing--they are
+living.  To talk of the wastage of life is mere cant."  Our hostess
+rescued the teacup, and the Professor had now the free use of both his
+hands.  The one hand clutched his hair and the other made sundry
+gestures clinching his arguments.
+
+"Why should we rail at death?" said he; "for death has been the saviour
+of humanity.  It was death that made men of us.  It was in the school
+of death that man learned unselfishness, self-sacrifice, chivalry and
+honour.  There is nothing so ugly as the man whose heart is filled by
+the world.  It is death that has saved us all from that.  Were man's
+location here for ever, the world would be his god.  A world without
+death would be a world with no room for the Cross.  Men climbed the
+heights of nobility as they defied death.  The crackling flames were
+unable to silence the martyrs' song; the march of the hosts of
+devouring tyranny could not move the hearts that chose death rather
+than slavery; the generations sealed with their blood their testimony
+that truth and loyalty to truth are more precious than life, and so met
+death with a smile; it was through this wrestling with death that great
+and noble character was forged on the anvil of life.  Death was the
+weapon which forged greatness of soul.  Death cannot destroy what death
+has created.  That could only happen in an insensate world.  What is
+it--death--but just this--the slave of immortality?"
+
+If I could only write it down as the Professor spoke, if I could only
+make you see his eyes glowing with little darts of flame as he saw the
+whole world transformed into a mighty workshop in which the "alchemy of
+Providence" is transmuting the soiled substance of our humanity into
+living souls (over whom death can have no dominion) fashioned for
+heavenly destinies--then you, too, would believe.  Since that day my
+old friend has not spoken a word about the "waste of the flower of the
+race."
+
+***
+
+The house with the drawn blinds stands at the cross-roads, and I must
+come back to it.  What is it that has happened to him who lies in a
+nameless grave in France?  The opportunity for winning glory and
+earthly fame did not come his way; he just laid down his life along
+with hundreds of thousands more.  He has taken his place among the
+undistinguished dead.
+
+      "O, undistinguished dead,
+  Whom the bent covers or the rock-strewn steep
+  Shows to the stars, for you I mourn--I weep,
+      O, undistinguished dead.
+
+      "None knows your name,
+  Blackened and blurred in the wild battle's brunt,
+  Hotly ye fell with all your wounds in front.
+      That was your fame."
+
+Not a line in the records of time for him.  But there are other
+records--those of eternity.  He has lost nothing of the thrill of life.
+He is being borne on that tide of self-surrender and heroism which has
+flowed through the ages, and bears those who embark on it to the very
+feet of God.  He would not himself have it otherwise.  "It is better
+far to go out with honour than survive with shame," wrote a comrade
+from the trenches, now united with him in death.  There is a place for
+sorrow in our land, but its place is by the hearth-stones of those
+whose sons choose to survive with shame.  He has taken his place among
+those who, unseen, are leading on the embattled hosts of his race to
+victory.  He has discovered the treasures in store for the brave and
+the true.  When, amid the flutterings of flags and the shouting of the
+people rejoicing in their deliverance, the great army will return home
+at last--he, too, will come.
+
+At Kobé, when the bugles were welcoming the victorious Japanese home in
+1895, Lafcadio Hearn spoke to an old man of those who would never
+return.  "Probably the Western people believe," answered the old man,
+"that the dead never return.  There are no Japanese dead who do not
+return.  There are none who do not know the way."  It is a poor,
+emasculated religion that does not believe that.  When at the last the
+bugles call in the quiet evening ... they will come back.  They will
+come crowned with glory and honour and immortality--with that victory
+which overcometh the world.  Let the blinds be rolled up, and the
+windows be all flung open to the light.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The Cities of the Plain
+
+
+
+VI
+
+It was the old clerk, of whose services and devotion to our parish I
+have previously written, who gave the Biblical name to the little
+village that lies near the boundary of the great city that is steadily
+creeping towards us, and ever threatening to engulf us.  Its own name
+is singularly pleasant to the ear and redolent of the sound of running
+waters, but it is unnecessary to burden the memory with it.  Though it
+is now many years ago, I remember, as it were yesterday, the first time
+I heard the word on the old clerk's lips.  I was sitting warming myself
+by the fire in the ticket-collector's office.  The ticket-collector was
+ostensibly waiting to provide tickets, but as everybody in our parish
+has a season ticket, that part of his duty is almost a sinecure.
+
+Thus it happens that the ticket-collector has leisure, just before the
+trains pass through, to give his friends the fruits of his researches
+in the realms of philosophy.  That particular day he was speaking of
+the changes he had seen.  "I was brought up," said he, closing his
+argument, "on the Shorter Catechism and porridge.  I dinna haud any
+longer by the Catechism, but I havena lost my faith in porridge."
+
+It was then that the clink of coppers was heard on the sill of the
+ticket window.  In the aperture was framed the face of the clerk, with
+the trimmed grey beard and the small twinkling eyes.  He held three
+pennies deftly in his thumbless hand.  "Return, Sodom," said he.  The
+ticket-collector pushed back his cap, stretched out his right hand as
+if he were beginning to speak, then thought better of it.  Out of his
+case, without a word, he produced a return ticket for Sodom, clinked it
+in his machine, and passed it through the window.  The old clerk
+received it with a grim chuckle.
+
+Away below the bridge there came a rumble.  "Train," said the
+ticket-collector, closing the aperture with a snap, and making for the
+door.  And I have never forgotten the hoarse voice of the old clerk
+with an acid edge to it as he clinked his three coppers, saying
+"Return, Sodom."
+
+***
+
+It is an amazing thing how within the circuit of the same parish,
+removed by one mile from one another, there can live together two eras
+so remote from each other in the order of human development, as the
+world of the red-roofed houses on the slopes of the hills, and the
+village at their base where the gorge, worn by the little river through
+the travail of immemorial centuries, debouches on the great central
+plain that runs across Scotland.
+
+Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a
+great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the
+roofs of its houses.  On the slopes there lies the world in which the
+fringes of life are embroidered--a world where men and women talk of
+books, pictures and plays.  It is a world of hyphenated names.  But in
+all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name.  It is a
+refuse-heap of humanity.  Many diverse races are crowded in it.  The
+city fathers clean out slums without providing first for the
+slum-dwellers, and, swept before the broom of so-called social
+reformers, homeless men and women have drifted to the village, and
+there reconstituted their slum.
+
+From the glens of the north broken Highlanders, driven out to make room
+for sheep, have drifted hither to work in the quarries, and the speech
+of their children's children still bears the trace of their ancient
+language pure and clean; over the sea Irishmen have come to reap the
+harvest fields of the Lothians, and they have been deposited by the
+tide in the village.  Stray Poles have come hither and straggling
+Czechs; a man from Connemara neighbours a shaggy giant from Lewis; and
+a dour stone-cutter from Aberdeen is door by door with an Italian who
+sells what looks like a deadly mixture from a hand-cart.
+
+Here you can see humanity in its primitive state, before it began to
+adorn the fringes of life, and make for itself sanctuaries of privacy.
+Between the slopes and the base of the hill there yawns an invisible
+chasm.  Centuries separate them.  Thus it comes that the slope-dweller
+passes on the top of the arches, scanning his newspaper, without so
+much as seeing the huddle of houses which constitute the village.
+
+It is only a week ago that, like the old clerk, I took out a return
+ticket for the "Cities of the Plain."  (For the old clerk had a
+two-fold formula.  When he was going to one village he said, "Return,
+Sodom," but when he meant to go to the quarries beside the village he
+said, "Return, Cities of the Plain.")  It was to visit an old soldier
+that I thus descended into the plains.  He lives in a rookery in which
+many families are crowded one on the top of the other--a rabbit-warren
+infested by many and strange odours.  He used to come up the slopes and
+do odd jobs, tidying up gardens, and he loved to talk of
+
+    "unhappy far-off things
+  And battles long ago,"
+
+in a language which I also could speak.  So I got to know him.  And as
+I sat by his bed I heard a moan from the adjoining room.  It began in a
+low cry, and then rose into a wail that seemed charged with all the
+woes of humanity.  The old man sat up in bed trembling.  The cry of woe
+now changed into a chorus; other voices swelled it.  It was the act of
+a moment to open the door, and in the dim landing find the door of this
+other room.
+
+I opened it, and there I saw three children huddled before a grate
+which contained nothing but ashes.  On an iron bed, stretched on straw,
+lay a woman sunk in sleep....  A foetid air was laden with the fumes of
+alcohol....  There was no food....  A broken chair, a stool or two, and
+a box that did duty for a table....  The old soldier told me what to
+do, and I did it.  A kindly woman brought coal and food, and the
+wailing was silenced.  The old man explained it all.  The woman sunk in
+the stupor is the wife of a soldier now in the trenches.  She did not
+belong to our parish; but only came a week or two before, swept before
+the broom of the "social reformers" from the city.  The mothers of the
+Parish, the old soldier declared, were heroines.  One such, when her
+son asked her consent to enlist, said, "Eh, laddie, I dinna want ye to
+gang; I dinna want ... but if I were ye I wud gang mysel'."  Our own
+wives and mothers were splendid--but those who came from the city,
+flotsam and jetsam borne on the tide, staying for a little and then
+carried away again, of whom there were three or four in the
+village--these were different.  They meet each other eager for news.
+They are depressed, and feel the need for cheering.  One suggests a
+stimulant ... and the result is this.
+
+He is no Puritan--the old soldier lying on his bed, his campaigning
+done--and he spoke out of an understanding heart.  It was only poor
+human nature, overtaken by thick darkness and misery, trying to open a
+window towards the realm of sunshine.
+
+And I came out into the roadway and turned towards the station.  I did
+not see them before, but I saw them now.  A few yards separating them,
+I pass two shops licensed to sell the means for opening windows towards
+this realm of happiness; and two houses with gaudy lights called the
+villagers to enter the region where all cares and worries are
+forgotten.  In the street pale-faced, ill-clad children played at being
+soldiers, marching with heads erect.  The gorge was already dark with
+the evening shadows, but the lamps in the village were lit.
+
+When the village was passed I stood and looked back.  In the west the
+setting sun had thrown over the heavens a glow.  A well of liquid fire
+glowed over Torfionn, and its rays spread fan-like, so that they
+spanned the horizon, and, touching the rounded mass of Corstarfin, went
+forth over the firth.  Against this background stood silhouetted the
+great arches that carry the railway across the hollow, and behind these
+the arches that bear the canal.  The piers stood as a gigantic forest.
+These mighty arches might have been the work of the Romans.  A soft,
+luminous haze fell on the village.  Window after window was lit up.
+The door of a cottage near me was opened, and a flood of light streamed
+out.  A woman stood in the door, and looking up the road shouted "Jim,"
+and a little boy, leaving his fellow-soldiers, rushed to her, and she
+clasped him in her arms and closed the door....  In that moment the
+little village seemed to me as if it were an outpost of Paradise.
+Nature threw as a benediction the mantle of its loveliness over it.
+What nature meant to be a sanctuary of beauty, man had changed into
+Sodom.
+
+***
+
+The ticket-collector stood at his post and scanned the passengers as
+they went through.  He knew them all, and had only a stray ticket to
+collect.  I was last, and duly gave up my "return" from the "Cities of
+the Plain."  But he did not let me through the gate.  "I want to show
+you something," said the ticket-collector, and he led me into his
+office and produced a pamphlet.
+
+"I got it from the man who goes to Keswick," said the ticket-collector;
+"you know him."  I knew him, the best of men.
+
+"Nae doubt," went on the ticket-collector; "nae doubt.  He was always
+giving me tracts.  Tracts--faugh!--poor stuff, nae style, nae logic,
+and nae philosophee in them.  But I aye took them and thanked him--for
+he is a nice man, though a perfect babe in matters of understanding.
+And I found them useful for spills.  The other day he handed me
+this..." and he waved a blue paper-covered booklet.
+
+"Mahn," he exclaimed, pushing his peaked cap back from his grey head,
+and sweeping his brass buttons down with his hand; "mahn, this has fair
+hit me between the eyes."  Then he opened the pamphlet and began to
+read passages that he had heavily scored with blue pencil.  The Czar
+has abolished the sale of vodka for ever!  What is the result?
+
+"The old women in the villages," read the ticket-collector, "can hardly
+believe their own eyes, so changed are their menfolk....  Everywhere
+peace, kindness and industry.  War is said to be hell; but this is like
+a foretaste of heaven."
+
+"Listen to this," cried the collector, his arm outstretched.  "A
+newspaper correspondent writes, since the sale of vodka stopped the old
+night population (in the doss-houses) seems to have vanished."  Every
+passage he read bore the same testimony.
+
+"And what are we doing?" he exclaimed.  "We have stopped nothing; we
+surround our soldiers with the old temptations, and we leave their
+defenceless wives exposed to the same temptations; I know all about it.
+Mahn, it was Ruskin that said, 'There is no wealth but life,' and we
+leave all our wealth of life at the mercy of every evil.  It's a fair
+scandal.  Do you ken the conclusion I've come to!  It is that the best
+form of government is a benevolent despotism.  Oor men are afraid of
+this and that--losing votes--but an autocrat with a stroke of a pen can
+sweep away the power of hell.  If they would only make King George an
+autocrat for a few years....  That would be grand!"
+
+He insisted on lending me the blue-covered pamphlet, and it being his
+hour off he walked with me across the bridge.  The valley was now dark.
+The snuff-manufacturer's house down below was wrapped in gloom.  Lights
+twinkled on the slopes.  Below a lamp-post at the far end of the bridge
+two men stood.  When he saw them the ticket-collector stood fast.
+
+"Mahn," said he, "I've come to a great resolution.  I'm too old to
+fight; and they canna get at me in ony way.  No Income-tax for me; and
+threepence on the tea is naething, for I never take it; I want to feel
+that I am worth men dying for me; and I am going to be tee-total till
+the end of the war.  I'll give the money to help the soldiers' weans.
+It's the weans that pull at my heart-strings."
+
+And he turned on his heel and walked rapidly back across the bridge.
+
+Under the lamp-post stood the roadman and the beadle, looking after
+him.  I spoke to them, for since the war began we all speak to each
+other in our parish.
+
+"Has he forgotten ony thin'?" asked the roadman, waving a hand towards
+the retreating form of the ticket-collector.
+
+"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be
+tee-total till the end of the war."
+
+"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost
+soul!"
+
+My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long
+flight of stone steps that leads to the road above.  On the top of the
+first flight I turned and looked after them.  When they came opposite
+the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went
+resolutely past, down into the hollow.  The two of them have probably
+resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."
+
+***
+
+I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed.
+It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised
+its queerness before.  A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I
+never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to
+write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is
+that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that
+lay twice a day under my feet--the problem of the Cities of the Plain.
+A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime
+hazy.  Events stand out luridly and arrestingly.  Here is one.  I was
+in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out.  All of a sudden there
+sounded the drum,
+
+      "Saying Come,
+      Freemen, come,
+  Ere your heritage be wasted! said the
+      quick alarming drum."
+
+And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet.  Mothers gave their
+sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God.
+
+On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with
+men and horses, going out to fight and die.  The hawsers were loosed.
+The steamer churned and backed and crept away.  A girl stood near me
+crying softly.  A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no
+tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and
+called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?"  And she wiped her cheek with the
+moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I
+am not crying."  And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into
+the drizzle and the haze.  Weeks later I read how one man of that
+regiment--the regiment of my own county--killed another ... and a few
+days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl.  He was not
+from the island, that man, and I know not who he is.  His mother
+doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became
+a murderer under the fostering of the State.
+
+Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State
+that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with
+temptations.  Away from the influence of mother and sister and
+sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the
+State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did
+so.  The Secretary of War made appeals to them.  "Be sober," said he,
+"avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live."
+But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that
+you may disregard the noble advice my servant gives you."  They came in
+their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call
+of their mother--clean and sober--and their mother opened the canteen
+for their benefit on the plain.  Such a world as that dwelt in the
+imagination of Dean Swift--I never imagined that it could exist here
+and now.  And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are
+we preparing for the men who are baring their breasts to the arrows,
+standing between us and death?  When they come back, war-worn, to what
+will they return?  To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the
+candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children
+famished and neglected?  Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice;
+is it for that that they have gone down into hell?  Surely it cannot be
+for that!  A wave has passed over us, raising us to the realisation of
+the higher values of things.  Words live for us now which were dead
+yesterday.  A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and
+the word _Temperance_ has risen from the couch on which it lay dying,
+and it claims us for its own.  Through it we can make the world know
+that we are worth fighting for--worth that the young, the strong, and
+the brave should take everything they hold dear--their ideals, their
+love, their little children unborn--and throw them into the trench, and
+there give themselves and their dreams to death for us.  We must see to
+it that we are worthy the sacrifice.
+
+***
+
+It seemed to me hitherto that I was a citizen of the country endowed
+with the greatest freedom on earth.  But the ticket-collector has
+proved to me that that was a dream.  Here in our parish I have no power
+to control this thing that matters so vitally in the Cities of the
+Plain.  We have a Parish Council and a County Council, and I don't know
+how many other dignified and honourable authorities, whom we elect.
+But we elect nobody to control this.  A body of unelected Justices, of
+whom we know nothing, settle for us that down yonder in the Cities of
+the Plain there shall be half a dozen State-regulated places for the
+manufacturing of paupers and criminals.  (The laws change with such
+kaleidoscopic swiftness in those days that I may be wrong.)  And here
+am I, newly awakened by the ticket-collector to that enormity, and I am
+not free to do anything.  It is surely a mad world.  We needed to be
+awakened; and we have been awakened with the shriek of shells and the
+crying of the perishing!  And the result of the awakening will be
+regeneration for the Cities of the Plain.
+
+***
+
+The ticket-collector has deprived me for the time being of my peace of
+mind.  My conversion is so recent that I am afraid of falling into the
+fanaticism of the newly converted.  I followed the General the other
+day into the railway carriage, and as we were passing over Sodom, lying
+there under our feet, I spoke to him about it.  He looked at me with
+cold eyes.
+
+"Do you want to sacrifice the freedom of the individual?" he asked in
+his curt military tones; "do you think that you can make saints of
+people by Act of Parliament?  They would be mere plaster-saints."
+
+I was reduced to silence.  My new-born zeal seemed to ooze out at every
+pore.  There was a touch of amused scorn in the General's eye as he
+glanced at me.  The General is a man of experience, and he is quite
+right.  Acts of Parliament will never make saints of the people.  But
+the State can see to it that the people are not surrounded by
+temptations through the operations of Acts of Parliament; that, if the
+State is impotent to make saints, it shall not, on the other hand, set
+itself deliberately to make devils.  That, it seems to me, is what the
+State is now doing in the Cities of the Plain.
+
+In ten thousand schools the State sanctions that its children be taught
+to pray--"Lead us not into temptation," and that same State encircles
+the path of its children by legalised temptations at every corner.  It
+is the maddest of worlds.  I may be wrong and the General wholly right.
+But as the ticket-collector said the last time I saw him--"I would like
+to see the man who could convince me that I am wrong."  And I don't
+know whether to be grateful to the ticket-collector or not.  He has
+deprived me of some of my sleep; he has made my head ache with thinking
+of problems which I am not fit to cope with; and, most unlooked for of
+all, he has made a tee-totaler of me till the end of the war.  There is
+a plaintive note in the ticket-collector's voice, which strikes a chord
+in my heart, when he invariably adds: "I hope the war won't last long."
+For, if it does, there will be the danger of the ticket-collector and
+myself becoming teetotalers for altogether.  And it is such an ugly
+word--tee-totaler!  If only the ticket-collector would coin a new and
+beautiful word to connote his new and beneficent state of mind!  It is
+a pity that great causes should be burdened by the weight of ugly words.
+
+
+
+
+  GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+  BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
+
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Discovery, by Norman Maclean
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Discovery
+
+Author: Norman Maclean
+
+Release Date: September 4, 2010 [EBook #33635]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT DISCOVERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+THE GREAT DISCOVERY
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H4>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+NORMAN MACLEAN
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P STYLE="margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 80%">
+"Had I stood aside when in defiance of pledges to which my kingdom was
+a party, the soil of Belgium was violated and her cities laid desolate,
+when the very life of the French nation was threatened with extinction,
+I should have sacrificed my honour, and given to destruction the
+liberties of my Empire and of mankind."
+<BR><BR>
+<I>Proclamation by King George V.</I>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+GLASGOW
+<BR>
+JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS
+<BR>
+PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY
+<BR>
+1915
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+PUBLISHED BY
+<BR>
+JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW
+<BR>
+Publishers to the University
+</H5>
+
+<BR>
+
+<PRE STYLE="margin-left: 10%; font-size: 80%">
+MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD. LONDON
+
+New York ... The Macmillan Co.
+Toronto .... The Macmillan Co. of Canada
+London ..... Simpkin, Hamilton and Co.
+Cambridge .. Bowes and Bowes
+Edinburgh .. Douglas and Foulis
+Sydney ..... Angus and Robertson
+</PRE>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+MCMXV
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+<I>BY THE SAME AUTHOR.</I>
+</H4>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+DWELLERS IN THE MIST.<BR>
+HILLS OF HOME.<BR>
+THE BURNT OFFERING.<BR>
+CAN THE WORLD BE WON FOR CHRIST?<BR>
+AFRICA IN TRANSFORMATION.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+TO
+<BR>
+J. P. CROAL
+<BR>
+TO WHOM THIS BOOK OWES
+<BR>
+ITS EXISTENCE
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+Preface
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Six articles which the writer contributed to <I>The Scotsman</I> constitute
+this book.  Four of these, which appeared under the title "In Our
+Parish," were, in response to requests, re-printed by <I>The Scotsman</I> as
+leaflets, and in that form had a circulation that reached an aggregate
+of 100,000.  One of the articles (now Chapter II.), which was published
+on February 14, 1914, has been revised and somewhat enlarged.  The rest
+are reprinted substantially as they were originally written.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In these last months there has come to the nation a spiritual and
+ethical revival.  Life will never again be what it was in the last long
+summer days ere the guns began to speak.  It will be a better world
+than it has yet been.  The nation is being saved as by fire, and in the
+fire much dross will be consumed.  The conscience of the State has been
+stirred, and it cannot in the future acquiesce in the continuance of
+the social evils which are gnawing at the nation's heart.  The fate of
+the Empire in the long years to come will depend more on the fight for
+social renewal in the midst of the streets than on red battlefields.
+To the men who have stood between the race and destruction the State
+owes a debt which it can only repay by such measures of social
+regeneration as will make possible for every man and woman to realise
+the thrill and the joy of life.  These pages only represent an effort
+to portray the first stirring of that newly awakened consciousness of
+God and of duty which was felt in every parish throughout the Empire,
+and which is destined to transform the world.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+Contents
+</H2>
+
+<TABLE ALIGN="center" WIDTH="80%">
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">I.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap01">THE GREAT DISCOVERY</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">II.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap02">THE REVIVAL OF PATRIOTISM</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">III.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap03">THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap04">THE POWER OF PRAYER</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">V.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap05">THE VICTORY</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap06">THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+The Great Discovery
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+I
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+While the thing is still fresh in my mind I will try to put it down on
+paper&mdash;the incredible thing that has happened in our parish.  When we
+had least thought about life's great things, we have come face to face
+with the greatest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We had been for long years living on the surface of things.  The sun
+basked on the slopes of the hills, purple at eve; we came back from the
+offices in town, plunged through the tunnel, and hastened to our
+gardens.  We lifted up our eyes to the hills, and our security seemed
+as immovable as their crests soaring above the little dells that were
+haunts of ancient peace around their foundations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Long years of ease dimmed our vision.  The church bell rang in vain for
+many of us.  Those who had six whole days in the week to devote to
+their own pleasure began to devote the seventh also to that same end.
+The day of peace was becoming a day of unrest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus it was with us when, with the suddenness of a lightning flash, the
+incredible overtook us.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+If only one could put it into words!  But words can never express this
+sudden meeting of man and God when that meeting was least expected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was heralded by the booming of guns across the sea.  The great city
+lay slumbering between us and the shore, but over the turrets and
+spires it came&mdash;boom, boom&mdash;under the stars.  It was war.  That
+far-away echo might not itself be the grim struggle of death, but it
+was its harbinger.  Over all the seas death would soon be riding on the
+billows.  Faces became stern.  Good-byes were spoken.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ah! that word "Good-bye," which we hear every day, and which, like
+those old coins which have passed from hand to hand so long until at
+last the image and superscription are gone, had lost all trace of its
+original meaning, retaining nothing but a faint aroma of courtesy,
+which sometimes vanished in the inflection of the voice until the word
+became only a discourteous dismissal&mdash;that word was born for us anew.
+We heard it on the lips of mothers clinging to the hands of their sons,
+who were summoned away to join their regiments, and as white lips said
+"Good-bye" to those whose blood was to water the fair fields of France,
+we suddenly realised what it meant.  The word, meaningless yesterday,
+to-day expressed the greatest wish that the lips of man can utter&mdash;God
+be with thee.  On the mother's lips the word was the commitment of her
+boy to the charge of the encompassing God.  Then, when the harvest was
+ripening on the slopes and the drum sounded "Come," and the young and
+the strong went forth with a smile to the great harvesting of death, we
+learned again the meaning of a phrase.  But we were yet to learn the
+meaning of a word.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is in the darkness that the stars appear and the immeasurable
+abysses of the infinite universe, and it was when the dusk sank into
+the deep night that the word rose high in the firmament of life and
+burned red into our souls.  And that word was God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seemed so incredible to us that we should need that old word.  We
+were so powerful and so rich.  Our faith was strong, but it was in the
+reeking tube and in the smoking shard, and in the number of our
+Dreadnoughts.  Then all these things seemed to fail us.  A nightmare
+seemed to fall on us&mdash;a nightmare which lifted not night or day.  Our
+soldiers were driven back, back, back.  They fought by day and marched
+by night, and we heard in the night watches the beating of their
+wearied feet, blood stained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Was there to be no end to that tramp, tramp of men yielding before
+death?  Was the Empire reared by the heroism of generations to crumble
+under our feet?  The ghastly deeds of shame&mdash;were they to come to our
+doors!  We looked at our children, and they could not understand the
+light in our eyes.  These deeds of hell&mdash;they might occur even now
+under the shadow of our hills.  It was then that the word began to
+blaze in the heavens.  And the word was&mdash;God.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+We had built a new church in our parish, that those who built pleasant
+houses on the slopes, fleeing from the restless city that lay below,
+might have room to worship.  But the desire to worship seemed to be
+dying of attrition.  And the old church where the quarriers and farm
+servants assembled and worshipped in an atmosphere that on a warm day
+became so thick that one could cut it with a knife&mdash;that old church
+would have been quite big enough to hold all who came, for the instinct
+to pray seemed to be dying.  And many, because the new church was now
+too big, regretted the old.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, suddenly, the new church was filled to the door.  Men and women
+discovered the road leading down to the hollow where the church stands
+amid the graves of the generations.  With wistful faces they turned
+towards it.  While the bell rang they stood in groups among the graves.
+And if you listened there was but one word&mdash;war, war, war.  Over and
+over again just that one word.  Until the bell was silent, and they
+turned into the now crowded church.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As I sat there and cast a glance around me, I felt a sudden amazement.
+Those who never before had come down the steep brae when the bell was
+ringing were sitting here and there just as if they had been there
+every Sunday when the beadle, with head erect, ushers the minister to
+the pulpit and snips him in.  (Though the church is new, the minister
+is yet snipped in by the beadle&mdash;a lonely prisoner there on his perch,
+and it is an uncanny sound to hear the click of that snip shutting in
+the solitary man.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the pew in front of me sat a burly man with a head like a dome.  He
+never came to church.  When I met him he would stand for an hour in the
+lane among the hawthorns explaining his views.  Prayer was mere
+superstition.  Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the
+universe in their grasp.  To ask that one of these laws should be
+altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to ask
+that the universe might be shattered.  Prayer was immoral, the asking
+for what could not be granted, and what we knew could not be granted.
+If he went to church it would be hypocrisy on his part.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And thus it came that when the farm servants came up the Gallows road
+on their way to church on a summer morning, they often heard the whirr
+of my friend's mowing machine as he mowed his lawn.  It was the way he
+took of letting the parish know that culture could have no dealings
+with effete superstitions.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+And yet there he sat in front of me with a hymn-book which he picked up
+from the shelf at the door, where such books are piled for the use of
+camp-followers.  The tune of the opening Psalm was Kilmarnock, and my
+friend sang it in a way which showed that his mother had trained him
+well.  Then I forgot him, but after a while something like a stifled
+sob in front of me brought him again to my consciousness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The minister began to pray for the King's forces "on the sea, on the
+land, and in the air."  My mind was playing round the words "in the
+air," for they were an intrusion into the familiar order&mdash;an
+innovation!  Every invention of man seemed doomed to become a weapon in
+the hand of the devil.  But the prayer went on&mdash;for the sailors keeping
+their watches in the darkness of the night that God might watch over
+them, that through their unfaltering courage our shores might be
+inviolate; for the soldiers now facing the enemy, grappling with death,
+that God might succour them, covering their heads in the day of battle.
+"Break Thou down the fierce power of our enemies," cried the minister
+suddenly, "that with full hearts we may praise Thee, the God of our
+fathers."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A great hush fell on the crowded church.  The shut eyes saw the red
+battlefields, with the lines swaying to and fro, while the shrapnel
+burst and the aeroplanes whirred in the smoke of the cannon.  The cries
+of men suddenly smitten smote on the inner ear.  It was then that the
+great thing happened.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All of a sudden the voice broke, recovered, and broke again, and the
+minister was swept away from the well-ordered, beautiful words he had
+prepared.  He began to speak of the stricken hearts at home, of fathers
+and mothers to whom their sons would never return, of women in empty
+houses with their husbands laid in nameless graves, of little children
+who would never learn to say "Father" ... It was then that my friend
+stifled a sob.  There was Something after all, Someone greater than
+cosmic forces, greater than law&mdash;with an eye to pity and an arm to
+save.  There was God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And my friend's son was with the famous regiment that was swaying to
+and fro, grappling with destiny.  He was helpless&mdash;and there was only
+God to appeal to.  There comes an hour in life when the heart realises
+that instinct is mightier far than that logic which is, after all is
+said, only the last refuge of the feeble-minded.  There came like the
+sudden lifting of a curtain the vision of a whole nation&mdash;nay, of races
+girdling the whole earth&mdash;to whom the same high experience has come.
+Everywhere the sanctuaries filled, the eyes turned upward, for instinct
+is mightier than reason.  The smoke of battle has revealed the face of
+God.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+With us in the parish churches of Scotland the great thing is the
+sermon.  But to-day it is different; the great thing now is prayer.
+And the minister preached about prayer.  He set forth in clear and
+ordered language, with a felicitous phrase now and then lighting up his
+sentences, that prayer was not a mere relic of fanatical superstition
+but a mighty power.  He discussed with a wealth of learning whether God
+had shut Himself in behind a prison-house of cosmic laws that made it
+impossible for Him to answer prayer.  He reasoned the worshippers cold.
+But there in that hour reason was bound to give way before intuition.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I am free," cried the preacher, "to rush to the help of my child
+when he crieth in terror; and if, when the creatures of His hand cry to
+God He is bound and cannot help or soothe, then He is poorer than I, so
+great a thing is freedom."  Prayer was not mere spiritual gymnastics.
+A God immured in cold laws, barred for ever from the play of love or
+tenderness, would be the one being in the universe most to be pitied.
+The Creator did not sit deaf and dumb on the Throne of indifference
+answering nothing, doing nothing.  History was the proof that
+Righteousness was throned at the core of the universe, for at the last
+right ever prevailed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then the measured tones went on to speak of the difficulty of believing
+in the efficacy of prayer when Christians faced Christians in mortal
+conflict, and they both cried for victory&mdash;both the children of the One
+Father crying for victory over each other.  But the difficulty was of
+appearance only.  For the only prevailing prayer was prayer in the name
+of Christ.  "Whatsoever ye shall ask <I>in My name</I> that will I do."  To
+ask in His name was to ask in His spirit&mdash;the spirit of humility,
+self-sacrifice, and love&mdash;the spirit of self-surrender to the <I>will</I>
+supreme.  The question was which of the prayers for victory was prayer
+in the name of Christ....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This was clear, convincing, but cold.  Only at rare intervals does the
+minister of our parish give way to passion.  Suddenly there came a wave
+of emotion.  He flung his head back, and his eyes glowed.  His voice
+vibrated through the church.  "When I think," he exclaimed, "of the
+things that have been done with the name of God on men's lips; of
+atrocities such as the unspeakable Turk never perpetrated; of war waged
+not upon to-day but upon the centuries of faith that reared great
+cathedrals now in flames; of women and children laid upon the reeking
+altars of human passion; and all this in the name of culture, the
+culture of the superman who deems himself superior to the Ten
+Commandments&mdash;then, I say, may God grant that the culture which beareth
+such fruit may perish from off the face of the earth.  Prayer for the
+triumph of such a cause cannot be in Christ's name...."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the preacher never got any further.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This was what happened, and I am afraid some will not believe me, for a
+Scotsman in church is a stoic, motionless and dumb, as he listens to
+the Word.  But all the traditions of the parish were snapped in a
+second.  In the side gallery sat the General, sitting as he always does
+with his back to the minister.  This he does that he may mark who are
+in church of his servants and tenants, and who absent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When I read of the nobles in France who went to the scaffold with a
+jest in the days of the Terror, I always think of the General.  He is
+that sort of man.  To-day, little by little, as the sermon went on, he
+turned round.  At last he was facing the pulpit.  His gleaming eyes
+were fixed on the preacher.  His son was dead.  And when the words rang
+through the church, may God grant that such culture may perish ... the
+General sprang to his feet.  "Amen" rang his voice through the church.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a sudden movement; as one man they all rose to their feet.
+Hands were lifted up to heaven.  "Amen," "Amen," they cried&mdash;and then
+there rose a cheer&mdash;muffled, but still a cheer.  In the pulpit the
+words died on the preacher's lips.  He seemed as one suddenly stricken.
+He gazed bewildered over the sea of faces.  They sank back into the
+pews as though suddenly ashamed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The last man to sit was my friend, who stood to the last with uplifted
+hand.  I think it was he who cried "Hear, hear"&mdash;the only sign he gave
+of his long absence from church.  The sermon was never finished.  The
+preacher in a low voice said, "Let us pray."  And he humbled himself as
+one who enters the valley of humiliation.  And then he gave out this
+psalm:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Now Israel<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">May say, and that truly,</SPAN><BR>
+If that the Lord<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Had not our cause maintained;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+Then certainly<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">They had devoured us all.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+But blessed be God,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Who doth us safely keep,</SPAN><BR>
+And hath not giv'n<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Us for a living prey</SPAN><BR>
+Unto their teeth,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And bloody cruelty.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+This psalm as we sang it that day was a pæan of triumph.  The clouds
+suddenly broke.  We heard our fathers singing it in their dark days.
+The melody wedded to the words soared in exultant triumph, wailed like
+the cry of the shingle swept by the surf; the sighing of the wind over
+the heather was in it, and the hissing of the storm through the spray.
+It was fierce as devouring death; it was gentle as a mother crooning
+over her child.  It put iron into the blood of our fathers as they sang
+it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was nerved by such a hymn that the sailors of Queen Elizabeth swept
+the main, that the Puritans wrestled with principalities and powers,
+that a handful of moors-men levelled despotism and tyranny to the
+ground.  It swept through our blood like flame as we in our day of
+stress now sang it.  We, too, would pull down strongholds and turn to
+flight the armies of the alien.  In all ages the cause of freedom
+triumphed, and that cause was ours.  We had entered on conflict with
+clean hands and, God helping us, we would wage it with clean hands.
+The clouds suddenly broke and the light of victory irradiated our
+faces.  There came overwhelmingly the realisation that there was a
+power behind us mightier far than sword or shell&mdash;even the Lord God
+Omnipotent.  And that was how we made the greatest of all
+discoveries&mdash;we found God.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+Yesterday morning I went early to the station, and there in the booking
+office I found my friend talking to the ticket-collector.  The
+ticket-collector is a philosopher, and he comes to church, because he
+loves the old psalm tunes.  But when one of our parishioners who goes
+now and then to Keswick comes to the booking office, the
+ticket-collector calls him in and reasons with him gently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mahn, there's naething in it," he says; "I can tell you for a fact
+there's naething in it&mdash;all a whack of fables."  "Some day you'll find
+out to your cost that there's something in it," flashes the man from
+Keswick.  "If ye wad only reid philosophee," says the ticket-collector,
+"ye would ken better."  But to-day my friend and the ticket-collector
+had their heads close together, and I only heard the conclusion of
+their argument.  "Mahn," said the ticket-collector, "I am beginning to
+think there may be something in it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And in the evening near the top of the brae I saw the General standing
+erect with his little cane in his hand.  He was talking to the
+shoemaker, the greatest Radical in the parish&mdash;one of a party with
+which the General has no dealings.  But they talked like brothers.  For
+the shoemaker has a son fighting at the front, and his heart is sore
+troubled within him.  And the General's son is dead.  And as I came up
+the brae I saw the General putting his hand on the shoemaker's shoulder
+and turn away, walking slowly up the brae.  The old shoemaker saluted
+and came down the brae.  There was a tender look in the old man's eye
+as he greeted me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In our parish we have truly made the greatest of all discoveries.  We
+have found God, and, finding Him, we have found each other.  The man
+who in his madness kindled the lurid flames of war little dreamed of
+this fire which he kindled.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+II
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+The Revival of Patriotism
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+II
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+There has come to us in these days a revival of the spirit of
+patriotism.  That revival has come when it was sorely needed.  In days
+of unclouded prosperity other gods called forth our devotion and
+enthusiasm, but the God of our Fathers who made us a great nation and
+sent us to sow the seeds of righteousness beside all waters, bestowing
+upon us empire and might, was well-nigh forgotten.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the new man "words like Empire, Patriotism, Duty, Honour, Glory and
+God" had little or no meaning.  Causes for which the fathers died could
+not evoke an added heart-beat from their sons.  They cared so little
+for the mighty empire which they inherited that they contemplated the
+bloodshed of civil war&mdash;so hot was their zeal for party and so cold
+their love for the state.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was necessary that discipline should come.  And that discipline
+came, shaking the very foundations of our national life.  Its first
+fruit is that the smouldering fires of patriotism have broken forth
+once more into bright flame; and that everywhere the hearts of the
+people have been stirred by the call to arise and endure hardness that
+the goodly heritage of empire perish not.  And preachers in a thousand
+pulpits have sounded the trumpet-note of duty and of patriotism.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+It has been said that preachers should aim at making the churches
+sanctuaries of peace, within whose walls the echoes of the guns and the
+cries of the perishing should not penetrate.  Some have even said that
+Christianity, so far from fostering the spirit of patriotism, is in
+reality hostile to it.  "Patriotism itself as a duty," says Lecky, "has
+never found any place in Christian ethics, and strong theological
+feeling has usually been directly hostile to its growth."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No doubt there is something to be said for that view.  The attitude of
+the early Christians towards the Roman Empire was not that of
+patriotism.  The clear shining of the heavenly Jerusalem so dazzled
+their eyes that this world, and the temporal empire occupying its
+stage, seemed but as a shadow.  Their devotion to the Unseen King left
+little room for loyalty to the earthly ruler.  In the glorious
+consciousness of his citizenship in heaven, it was a small thing in the
+estimation of St. Paul that he was also a Roman citizen&mdash;but he did not
+forget it.  But when the earthly ruler persecuted, and burnt, and threw
+the Christians to the lions, or slaughtered them to make a Roman
+holiday, then the poor victims cannot be blamed for not being patriots.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the Church in the mediæval period, organised in the mighty
+hierarchy of Rome, did not tend to foster a national spirit of
+patriotism.  In those days when the Emperor Theodosius made penance in
+the Cathedral of Milan and Ambrose declared that "the Church is not in
+the empire, but the Emperor in the Church"; or in those later days when
+Hildebrand promulgated the doctrine that the temporal power was subject
+to the spiritual power, and kings and emperors were only vassals of the
+Church, and Henry V. was left three days standing barefooted in the
+snow waiting humbly to see the Pope at Canossa&mdash;in those days certainly
+Christianity sought to foster not the sense of national loyalty, but
+that of devotion towards that holy Catholic and universal Church whose
+visible head was the Pope.  Christianity placed the Pope on the throne
+of the Cæsars, and sought to evoke towards him a patriotism which
+transcended nationality.  But the Reformation gave its death blow to
+Hildebrandism, and the Pope no longer usurped the temporal Thrones of
+Europe.  And there came the throb of the awakening spirit of
+nationality.  The spirit of patriotism stirred once more the slumbering
+races.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+The question whether patriotism is a fruit of Christianity must be
+answered not by reference to what men did in the name of their
+religion&mdash;for men are fallible&mdash;but by the precept and example of the
+Founder of Christianity.  He was a Jew, and of all races the Jew was
+the most patriotic.  An exile by the rivers of Babylon, the Israelite
+refused to forget Zion.  "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
+hand forget its cunning"&mdash;that was the cry wherewith his unconquerable
+soul faced an overwhelming destiny.  And in this respect Jesus Christ
+was true to His race.  He was a patriot.  He worshipped in the
+synagogues, and went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, because He loved the
+national institutions of His country.  One note of true patriotism is
+anguish.  It is when love is great that the folly and sin of the person
+beloved pierce the heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The patriotism of the Founder of Christianity expressed itself in a cry
+of agony which has reverberated through the centuries&mdash;"O Jerusalem,
+Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are
+sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together,
+even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
+Behold, your house is left unto you desolate."  That cry is the measure
+of His patriotism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Judged, then, by the example of its Founder, Christianity must produce
+the spirit of love and loyalty towards one's own country.  There was a
+patriotism before Christianity, but it was that of arrogance,
+aggression, and self-glorification.  It was a patriotism which meted
+out only contempt to other races.  To the Jew the Greek was only a
+Gentile dog; to the Greek the Jew was only a contemptible Barbarian.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the patriotism which is animated by the Christian spirit is far
+other.  It is not the vaunting of pride nor the shouting of vulgar
+ditties.  It seeks the glory of its own country, but the glory it seeks
+is the glory of the greater service rendered to humanity.  Conscious of
+its own defects, it does not condemn others.  With eyes cleansed from
+prejudice, it beholds the good in other races.  It seeks the first
+place for its own nation because it acts the noblest, loves the best.
+All the elements which make up the strong power of patriotism&mdash;love of
+family, love of neighbours, love of race, love of country&mdash;Christianity
+has purified them all.  True patriotism is, then, a fruit of the
+Christian religion, a virtue which falls to be inculcated by the
+Church.  If Christianity be the projection of the Christ-life into the
+midst of every generation, then the life that reflects the beauty of
+Christ must be a life animated by the deepest love of one's country.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+It was Dean Stanley who rendered God thanks in Paisley Abbey for that
+Scotsmen were "citizens of an Empire so great, members of a Church so
+free."  In the building up of the Empire Scotsmen have borne a great
+share of toil and peril.  In other days the fires of patriotism burned
+brightly.  The cry of our fathers was "my country right or wrong."  But
+we feel not quite so sure of our country being always in the right.
+The passion of Christianity is an ethical passion.  Christian
+patriotism demands national righteousness.  To keep patriotism as an
+ardent fire we must be convinced that our country stands for
+righteousness.  And in this day of our ordeal we have this certainty to
+uphold us, that we are fighting for the right.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not in defiance of Christianity, but in its defence, that we
+drew the sword.  For this war sprang from an unbridled lust of conquest
+to which a whole nation surrendered itself.  But before surrendering to
+the passions of war the ideals of Christ were first forsaken by our
+enemy.  A new law was promulgated: "Become hard, O my brethren, for we
+are emancipated and the world belongs to us."  New beatitudes were
+declared: "Ye have heard how ... it was said, Blessed are the meek ...
+but I say unto you, Blessed are the valiant, for they shall make the
+earth their throne ... Ye have read, Blessed are the peacemakers, but I
+say unto you, Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called, if
+not the children of Jehovah, the children of Odin, who is greater than
+Jehovah."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Out of this new gospel, the gospel of Odin, has sprung a war of
+extermination&mdash;exiled nations, devastated kingdoms, desolated colleges,
+ruined cathedrals, and multitudes of women and children "left nothing
+but their eyes to weep with."  The name of God has been invoked over
+unspeakable barbarities&mdash;but the God thus invoked is not the Christian
+God.  It is Odin in whose name these things are done.  What we are
+fighting for is for the Christian ideal against Odin&mdash;for the law of
+truth and mercy against the reign of falsehood of word and bond, and of
+merciless barbarity.  We have bared the breast to death that there may
+sit on the throne of the world's soul, not a ruthless tribal god, but
+the God of Fatherhood and Love whom Jesus Christ revealed.  And in
+waging that war we have ground to hope that the God of righteousness is
+on our side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we have not had the name of God constantly on our lips it is not
+because we do not feel that we are fighting His battle, but because He
+is so great, the Lord of Heaven and Earth before whom we are but as
+dust, that we shrink from coupling His great name with ours.  "Are you
+sure that God is on your side?" Abraham Lincoln was asked in the dark
+days of the American Civil War.  "I have not thought about that," he
+replied; "but I am very anxious to know whether we are on God's side."
+And when the causes of this war are examined the assurance grows
+stronger and stronger that we are on God's side.  That is why the whole
+nation has been welded into the unity and consistency of polished
+steel; why the fire of patriotism burns in our midst with an intenser
+heat than ever before.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+It is not merely from the righteousness of our cause in this war that
+our patriotism draws inspiration, but also from the ideals for which
+our Empire stands over all the world.  As we look out to-day on the
+Empire which our fathers bequeathed us, taking it all in all, it stands
+for righteousness as no other on earth.  It stands for the freedom of
+the soul and the freedom of the body all over the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Think of India, whose three hundred millions have been rescued from
+tyranny and ceaseless bloodshed, whose widows have been saved from the
+flames, whose starving have been fed in famine, and to whom the British
+race brought security and peace.  "When I think," said ex-President
+Taft, "of what England has done in India ... how she found those many
+millions torn by internecine strife, disrupted with constant wars,
+unable to continue agriculture or the arts of peace, with inferior
+roads, tyranny, and oppression; and when I think what the Government of
+Great Britain is now doing for these alien races, the debt the world
+owes England ought to be acknowledged in no grudging manner."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No work ever done on earth for the elevation of humanity can compare
+with that wrought in India by our race for the uplift of humanity; and
+it is the same wherever the standard of Britain waves.  In our own day
+we have seen in Egypt a whole race rising out of the mud and clothed
+anew in the garments of self-respect.  Through Africa, wherever the
+sway of Britain extends, though yesterday the land reeked with blood,
+to-day mercy and kindness are healing the woes of men, and millions who
+knew not when death lurked for them in the bush now sleep in peace
+under the palms.  It was the might of Britain that destroyed the slave
+trade, and it is nothing except the might of Britain which prevents the
+slave raider resuming his nefarious traffic, and slavery under the
+guise of other names being imposed on the natives of Africa.  Wherever
+you go, to the tropics or the Orient, there the great power for
+righteousness is the British Empire.  It does not exploit inferior
+races for gold; it is the trustee of the helpless native.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When one thinks of these little islands floating in the western sea, of
+the power that has gone forth from them to heal and bless, of the vast
+multitudes to whom the King-Emperor is the symbol of justice and
+security&mdash;his is a poor heart which cannot feel the thrill of gratitude
+for citizenship in an Empire girdling the whole earth, whose
+foundations are thus laid in righteousness.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+Patriotism is not, however, a mere sentiment.  It was not sentiment
+which built up the Empire.  It was self-sacrifice&mdash;the spirit that
+faced and endured death.  For us, too, patriotism must be more than
+sentiment; it must be action and the self-sacrifice which action
+requires.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What our fathers reared we must defend.  And the startling thing is
+that there are still so many of our people who shrink from the burden
+which patriotism imposes.  Many thousands refuse to prepare themselves
+for war; who are as the Romans who could not leave their baths to go
+and fight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vast multitudes congregate to gaze on football matches and gamble on
+the issue.  The call of King and country falls on ears grown deaf.  We
+thank God for those who, hearing the call, have gone forth to fight,
+counting everything but loss as compared to their country's gain.  But
+these others, they cannot have paused to think.  They have not pictured
+these fair lands, that have not heard the sound of war for seven
+generations, given over to that devouring enemy which has made Belgium
+a wilderness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They have not thought of Oxford and St. Andrews sharing the fate of
+Louvain; of London and Edinburgh become as Brussels; of the millions of
+Glasgow and Birmingham thrown on the mercies of the world, women and
+children fleeing, driven by nameless fears, with no place to flee to
+but the mountain fastnesses of Wales and the Highlands of Scotland&mdash;the
+last refuge of the miserable and the broken.  And yet these miseries
+would surely befall were all the manhood of the race such as these.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Think what it would mean were the walls of our defence broken down.
+Supposing that a shattering blow were struck at the heart of the Empire
+and our fleet crushed.  What would follow?  The crumbling of the Empire
+in a week!  It is not we alone, with our wives and children in these
+little islands, who would be swept to ruin, and on whom despair would
+fall.  From the far north-west to the long wash of the Australasian
+seas the shadow of devouring misery and death would fall on humanity.
+The millions of India would be forthwith swept into the whirlpools of
+war and mutiny.  Egypt would be thrown back into chaos.  Africa would
+be left to Islam and the merciless rule of a nation which knows but how
+to smite.  Australia and New Zealand would be at the mercy of the
+yellow races.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It would not be a calamity for us in these islands alone.  It would be
+a calamity whose withering blight would be cast over all the world.
+The ideals of righteousness which this Empire upholds would be trampled
+everywhere under foot.  Covetousness and the lust of gold would hold
+the field of the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is only one thing to be done, one duty summoning us with an
+irresistible call&mdash;the duty that calls us to stand between our country
+and destruction.  Were the fate which has overtaken the Low Country to
+overtake us; were this fair land to be made a wilderness, our women and
+children driven into the wilds, and the Empire wrested from our hands,
+the men who failed in their duty would never be able to hold up their
+heads again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a terrible load would lie on him who, beholding the ruin of his
+native land, could say, "This might not have happened if I, and others
+like me, had done our duty."  That would be a hell from which there
+would be no escape.  "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There can be no limit to the sacrifice which patriotism requires, so
+great a heritage is our native land.  It does not require of us as
+Christians to engage in wars of conquest for the gratification of pride
+and greed, but it does require of us even the sacrifice of our lives in
+the defence of our homes or in the defence of our brother's home.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are those who find themselves faced with difficulty.  They are
+called upon to fight with every force in their power, to slay,
+withholding not their hand, while they hear the commandment, "Thou
+shall not kill," ringing in their ears, and across the centuries the
+voice of their Lord saying, "Resist not evil; whosoever shall smite
+thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."  They are
+bewildered.  Is not the attitude of non-resistance that which Jesus
+Christ enjoins?  If they fight with sword and shell are they not
+lowering themselves to the level of Nietzsche, Bernhardi and Bülow, and
+submitting to the arbitrament of the sword, which decides nothing
+except its own sharpness.  The call of patriotism summoning to resist
+even unto blood comes to them, and they are uncertain whether to obey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But we must interpret the will of God, not by isolated sentences, but
+by the whole content of the divine revelation.  The commandment, "Thou
+shalt not kill," does not mean that we are not to kill in any
+circumstance whatever.  If the commandment is to be taken literally,
+then no limit is to be set to it, and we must not kill any animal&mdash;not
+even the parasites of uncleanness.  There is, moreover, another law
+which runs: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
+shed, for in the image of God created He him."  So far from the mere
+physical life being for ever sacred, the very altar of God Himself was
+to be no sanctuary for the murderer.  The man who owned a vicious ox
+and knew him to be vicious, and the ox killed a man, the owner thereof
+was to be slain.  There are therefore circumstances in which the law,
+"Thou shalt not kill," is abrogated, and its place is taken by the law,
+"Thou shalt kill."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The law demanding the conservation of life rests on this foundation,
+not that physical life itself is sacred, but that human life bears the
+image of God.  There are things far more sacred than the physical
+life&mdash;even those things which constitute the image of God stamped upon
+man.  There are things for which men in all ages have been content to
+die&mdash;truth and loyalty to truth, the principles which are dearer than
+life.  Those things which God ordained that men might through them grow
+more and more into His image, for these things man must be ready to
+die, and among these things is nationality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men cannot develop in isolation.  What poor creatures men would be if
+they were solitary units.  They would be as the beasts that perish.  It
+is through the heritage of nationality that the soul is enriched.  What
+poor stunted lives would ours be if we had not behind us the great and
+noble deeds which built up our Empire, if the words of the high souls
+of many generations did not come thrilling to our hearts, if
+Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Scott and Burns did not pour their
+treasures into our laps.  The soul grows into the image of God through
+the riches of nationality.  And whosoever warreth against nationality
+warreth against the soul.  And the men who warreth against the soul
+must be resisted to the death.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+We dare not appeal to Jesus Christ to cloak our shrinking from
+sacrifice.  No doubt His gentleness has been the wonder of history; but
+His strength also summons us to be strong.  For Jesus Christ was not a
+quietist.  His religion is not a mere hospital for wounded souls.  His
+place is among the strong of the earth.  He faced the evil of this
+earth unflinching in His resistance.  "Woe unto you Scribes and
+Pharisees, hypocrites" is His denunciation of the oppressor; "Go tell
+that fox" is His message to the tyrant.  When we think of Him making
+the whips, and falling, with holy anger in His eyes, on those who
+desecrated the courts of the temple, overturning the tables of the
+money changers, we know that the ideal of non-resistance is not His.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No doubt He laid it down as the law for the individual that he should
+turn the other cheek; but He did not lay it down as a law that a man
+should turn another's cheek to the smiter.  What the individual can do,
+the nation may not do.  It no doubt is the duty of the Ruler to turn
+his own individual cheek to the insulter; it is not his duty to turn
+the cheeks of the millions over whom he rules to those who would smite
+them, committing their children to shame and their homes to devastation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No doubt Jesus Christ enjoined the law of forgiveness, but it was not
+unconditional.  "If he repent, forgive him," is His law, and until the
+wrongdoer repents and ceases from his evil, it would be immoral to
+forgive him.  Duty demands that every means be used to bring the
+evildoer to repentance; for only so is there a chance of his soul being
+saved.  It is manifest that Christianity is not a religion of
+non-resistance to evil, but the religion of Him who Himself resisted
+evil, and who resisted it even to the death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patriotism, therefore, demands that we resist even to the shedding of
+blood.  When a hostile army would destroy a nation, as in Belgium, it
+warreth against the soul, and it is as Christian to kill as it would be
+to shoot a tiger which leapeth out of the jungle to devour a man.  And
+that Irish soldier whose face in the hospital in Paris was irradiated
+with joy when he was told that the enemy was put to flight and Paris
+saved, and who died with that gladness in his face, died in the spirit
+of Jesus Christ.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To say that the Founder of Christianity would not strike a blow for
+home and kindred and truth is to forget that He struck a blow in
+Jerusalem and wielded the thongs on the shoulders of those who polluted
+His Father's house.  It is His will that we should strike a blow in
+defence of the house of our soul&mdash;the sanctuary of nationality.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+Patriotism must be vibrant with the spirit of religion if it is to be a
+power rousing the nation to heroism and self-sacrifice.  There never
+was a nation so patriotic as the Jew.  No city ever gripped a nation's
+heart-strings as Jerusalem gripped the heart of the Jew.  No suffering,
+no defeat, no exile however far, could quench the fire of patriotism in
+the heart.  "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
+her cunning.  Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I
+remember thee not, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy"&mdash;such
+was the cry of the Jew by the rivers of Babylon, yearning after Sion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How was it that Jerusalem thus pulled at its children's heart-strings
+until they hurried back to rebuild?  It was because Jerusalem was the
+seat of the worship of God.  It was not the material stones or the
+hills round about that thus compelled the heart.  It was the light of
+eternity shining over them.  It was because of the "house of the Lord
+our God" that the Jew counted no good worth his striving except the
+good of Jerusalem.  It is only when God standeth at the heart of a
+nation that the heart cleaveth with all its fibres to its native land,
+for then the whole of the man&mdash;not only the cravings of the body and
+the heart and the mind, but also the deeper cravings of the soul&mdash;wind
+themselves round the thought of the nation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus we find that the days when the fires of patriotism burned
+brightest were ever those in which God held sway over the nation.  It
+was with God that the sailors of Queen Elizabeth swept the main, that
+the soldiers of Wellington hurled the enemy far from the shores that
+face England&mdash;they were fighting not only for England but for England's
+God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The testimony of history is this, that patriotism cannot maintain its
+power if once it be divorced from religion.  Let God's face be veiled
+and lost and everything is lost.  "Without God nothing, with God
+everything," says the ancient Celtic proverb, and all ages testify to
+its truth.  And the last proof of it is now before our eyes in the
+condition of France.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A hundred years ago France dominated Europe, erected thrones and
+deposed kings at its will.  But little by little France lost the vision
+of God, until at last M. Viviani celebrated the final triumph over the
+Church in 1907 by exclaiming: "With one magnificent gesture we have
+extinguished the lights of heaven, which none shall rekindle."  France,
+in the words of its present Prime Minister, "extinguished the lights of
+heaven," but in so doing it extinguished something else.  For to-day
+that nation, that not so long ago dominated Europe, can only protect
+its capital city by the help of the two nations which have not yet
+extinguished the lights of heaven.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Without God patriotism becomes impotent, for God is the source of that
+moral law, conformity to which means for a nation life, and defiance of
+which means the degeneration that leadeth to destruction.  With the
+departure from God came moral decay and racial suicide.  The hope of
+France is this, that through the descent of the nation into the valley
+of death the lights of heaven may be once more kindled; the hope of
+Britain, that these same lights may shine more brightly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The spirit of patriotism will again vivify the nation when we seek
+after God.  In years of prosperity we have forgotten our high calling.
+We have pursued vanities and forgotten the living God.  When we again
+realise our calling and our election as instruments in the hand of God
+for the establishment of His Kingdom of Righteousness over all the
+earth, our hearts will be filled with ardour, and we shall face
+whatever perils may assail us strong in the assurance that the
+Omnipotent God is in our midst and that nothing can resist His will.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+And this true patriotism will mean the salvation of the nation.  For it
+will strive to realise at home that righteousness which alone exalteth
+a nation.  Its first task will be to raise the life at home nearer to
+God, for we cannot raise the world to higher levels than that on which
+we ourselves stand.  The vision of the new Jerusalem descending from
+God out of heaven will again flame before our eyes.  "And I, John, saw
+the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven,
+prepared as a bride for her husband."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That new Jerusalem is not a city remote in the inaccessible heights,
+but a city which descends and permeates the material city now so
+polluted by sin, until it becomes the "holy city," with the law of God
+obeyed and the will of God done in it.  Its citizens shall walk its
+streets, pure in heart, seeing God everywhere.  "And they shall bring
+the glory and the honour of the nations into it."  There the nations
+shall be one in the streets of the city of God, all their contendings
+forgotten in the sense of their brotherhood, following the one ideal,
+obeying the one law, loving each other in the love of God.  They will
+strive then as to who shall bring the greatest glory within the compass
+of its walls, and that will be the only striving.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is the ideal, that we should become a nation so permeated by the
+spirit of God, so brought into obedience to His will, that our cities
+shall become holy cities, even as the new Jerusalem coming down from
+God out of heaven.  When we shall set ourselves to realise that ideal
+once more, then will the nation evoke the devotion of its citizens, for
+devotion to the nation will also be devotion to God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was that ideal which fired the patriotism of the Jew.  The same
+ideal alone will make our patriotism glow as a white flame.  When the
+vision of the Supreme Ruler whose throne is established in
+righteousness once more blazes forth before the people, then once more
+the throb of patriotism and the passion to make righteous law operative
+to the ends of the earth will stir the heart, and the manhood of the
+race will once more thrill with the call summoning to service and to
+sacrifice.  The answering shout will everywhere arise&mdash;For God and the
+King.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+III
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+The Shadow of the Cross
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+III
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The churchyard of our parish lies in a deep hollow, and a little river
+half encircles it.  In the midst of it stands the church beneath whose
+shadow the parish has garnered its dead for centuries.  There the
+generations have lain down to sleep, their hearts reconciled one to
+another, and the beadle has drawn the coverlet of green over them.  As
+he goes about his allotted task he pats a mound here and there gently
+with the back of his spade&mdash;for roadman and belted earl are at one here.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The last time I wandered down to the hollow it seemed as if eternal
+peace brooded over the living and the dead.  The leaves, russet and
+gold, glowed in the sunlight.  At the stirring of a gentle breeze, like
+the dropping of a sea-bird's feather, leaf after leaf fluttered
+silently down on the graves.  The great bank of trees across the river
+glowed with rivulets of dull flames running hither and thither.  In its
+stony bed the river sang its endless song.  The immemorial yews,
+beneath whose branches successive generations of children have played
+with now and then a thrill of pleasing terror because of the
+overhanging graves, stood regardless of the sun.  The crows, sated with
+the gleanings of harvest fields, fluttered in their rookeries with
+scarcely a caw.  It seemed as if no sound of discord or strife could
+ever break in that enchanted hollow.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+As I turned away to retrace my steps through the gate I came on a woman
+sitting on the mort-safe, a handkerchief moist with her tears in her
+hand.  She had come up from the quarries and she had visited her dead.
+And she came because yesterday she received word that on the
+battlefield of Marne her son was killed.  He was her eldest.  The
+others were not old enough yet to fight.  Her husband was killed in an
+accident, and she had reared her children, refusing all help from the
+parish.  The pride of the blood sustained her.  And now that her son
+was dead she came hither, driven by an irresistible instinct to visit
+her husband's grave.  It was as if she wanted to tell him about John,
+and how he died a hero, trying to carry a wounded comrade through the
+hail of the shrapnel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was weary, and from her husband's grave she turned to the church.
+She would go and sit in the corner under the gallery, where John used
+to sit.  He had sat with her there at his first Communion.  The
+memories wrapped her round, and she would feel her son near her there.
+But the door of the church was locked and barred.  With an added ache
+in her heart she turned away, and weariness compelled her to sit on the
+iron mort-safe, which the parish provided in a former century to
+protect their dead from sacrilegious hands.  "But the church used to be
+open," I said.  "Aye," she replied tremulously, gathering up her
+handkerchief into a round ball; "but some did-na like it; the boots on
+the week-days are na sae clean, and they dirtied the kirk.  That must
+be why they lockit the door."  It was not that she complained.  Those
+who locked the church were wise men, and no doubt they knew best.  So
+she sat on the mort-safe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have other sons, and when they are older they will go, too," she
+said.  "I'll no' keep them back.  And if they die it'll be for God's
+great cause."  Her lips quivered as she spoke.  The moist ball in the
+right hand was clenched tight&mdash;there were no more tears to shed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as I looked at the worn, lined face, the bent shoulders, the faded
+rusty black mantle with its fringe, and the sunken lips that quivered
+now and then, there came a sudden realisation.  I saw no longer the one
+grief-burdened figure sitting dejectedly on the mort-safe&mdash;I saw the
+unnumbered host of mothers throughout the world who have given their
+sons over to carnage, and who are as Rachel weeping for her children,
+refusing to be comforted because they are not.  Millions of men locked
+in the death grapple means millions of mothers given tears to drink in
+great measure, bound in affliction and iron.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The song of the river went on ceaselessly, the russet-leaves fell
+softly, and the sun shone on a world wrapped in peace&mdash;all nature
+utterly regardless of the millions of Rachels that weep.  (Ten million
+hearts may break, but nature silences not one note of its joyousness.)
+And as she sat there, behind her, under the campanile, showed the
+church door, locked and barred.  Nature was heedless of her; the church
+shut its door upon her.  She seemed to me the Mater Dolorosa.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+As I went up the brae there came the memory of a school lesson long
+ago.  Out of the subconscious it leaped as a diver might come up from
+the depths of the sea with a gleaming coin in his hand.  Among the
+temples of ancient Rome there was one temple always kept open in time
+of war.  There the Roman General clashed the shield and the spear,
+invoking the god ere he went to the battle-line, and its door was shut
+not day or night.  And I have no doubt but that the Eternal Ruler heard
+that clashing of spear on shield, and marked that open door.  But over
+wide districts of Great Britain we have left these pagan habits far
+behind us.  We shut the doors of our temples alike in war and in
+peace&mdash;excepting two hours on one day of the week, or in many cases one
+hour in the week.  Nor do I doubt but that the same Ruler marks these
+doors now shut on the mothers of sorrow, and these sanctuaries locked
+and silent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The glory was now gone from the day.  I could not forget how the iron
+mort-safe gave the rest that the Church refused.  The shadow lay heavy
+over the valley, and the mind tried to give the shadow a name.  But it
+could not.  So up the long flight of stone steps I climbed, and turned
+along a tree-shaded road.  There, where three roads meet, stands a
+little chapel within whose walls a small section of our parishioners
+worship.  I have passed it times out of mind without so much as
+glancing at it.  But to-day its open door arrested my eye, and I stood
+in the roadway and gazed.  And there came to me there a sudden sense of
+thankfulness for that there is one open door in our parish which
+witnesses to the fact that the power and solace of religion are not
+shut in within the confines of only two hours of one day in the week.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While I yet stood in the highway there came forth from the little
+chapel an honoured parishioner, who is passing the golden evening of a
+useful life in researches regarding Calvin and the Pope.  Amazement
+possessed me, for he is a power in the parish church, whose door is
+locked and barred.  We walked together towards the hills.  There was a
+trace of apology in his explanation.  Since this dreadful cataclysm has
+burst and the boom of the guns has come drifting from the sea across
+the high-perched city, he has felt the need of quiet meditation.  Thus
+he has often on his walks slipped through the open door of the chapel
+that stands by the roadside.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And you have locked the door of the parish church," I exclaimed, "and
+you deny to the poor the privilege you yourself enjoy."  He stopped and
+faced me in the roadway, blinking at me.  "We never locked the Church
+door," he said.  "It used to be open," I answered; "I remember being
+glad to sit in it myself."  "Oh!  I remember," he exclaimed, "it was
+open every day for a few years, but the authorities were never
+consulted when it was thrown open&mdash;a most lawless proceeding!&mdash;and when
+a suitable opportunity occurred the beadle locked it up.  Law and order
+have to be vindicated."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What you did then," I replied, "was to allow the beadle to deprive the
+poor parishioners of a privilege which you and a few others enjoy
+elsewhere."  At that he started off walking along the road very
+quickly, but I kept step with him.  "You see," said he, waving a
+deprecatory hand, "I am only one among many, and I was so absorbed in
+these old Reformation controversies that I never gave it a thought, and
+it is only since the war began that I realised...."  And as he spoke I
+felt that my old friend, learned in many controversies, had experienced
+a revolution.  The great tide had swept him past all controversies
+right up to the fountain head.  He had learned that man's high calling
+is not to dispute, but to pray.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As we walked under the darkling hills I told him of that shadow which
+had so suddenly fallen upon me that day, and he at once gave it a name.
+"It is the shadow of the Cross," said he.  And thereupon he began to
+explain out of the wisdom and ripened experience of seventy years how
+across nineteen centuries the shadow of the Cross lies still over all
+the world.  One thinks so seldom of these things, and if occasionally
+one hears them spoken of, familiarity with the words has deadened the
+hearer to their significance.  It was because I listened to him talking
+in the lane that his words gripped me.  They might have made no
+impression if he were in a pulpit.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+We are accustomed to think of the greatest of all tragedies as an event
+consummated in six hours.  It is, however, far from consummated, for it
+is an age-long tragedy.  Its roots lay in self-interest.  A degenerate
+priesthood in an obscure Syrian town saw nothing in the Greatest of
+Teachers but an unbalanced enthusiast, who struck at their ill-gotten
+gains, and whose triumph would make an end of them and their system.
+So self-interest cried "Crucify."  And though the Roman Governor saw
+through them and wanted to save Him, self-interest again was brought
+into play, and when threatened with an awkward complaint to Rome, he
+said "Crucify."  And ever since then self-interest on innumerable lips
+has cried Crucify, Crucify.  Not only cried, but did it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For this Teacher identified Himself with His followers, saying that He
+was the Vine and they the branches.  It follows that whatever is done
+to the branch is done to the vine.  A branch cannot be cut and severed
+from the vine without the vine bleeding.  He declared it to be so.
+"Whosoever receiveth you receiveth Me," and it follows that whosoever
+crucifies you crucifies Me.  And the history of the centuries is the
+history of how the poor and unlearned and the toiling have been
+persecuted, harried by war, driven to death and crucified.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Generation after generation have raised the Cross anew, and in the
+crucifying of the dumb multitudes have crucified Him.  Along with His
+own He fought with wild beasts, went through the flames, and suffered
+many bloody and diverse persecutions, and He was with His people now.
+He confronted to-day the mighty of the earth as He did that blinded
+priesthood of old, and He declared that there is only one way of
+conquering, and that by love; that gaining the whole world was a
+miserable bargain if in exchange a man parted with truth and
+righteousness and purity&mdash;those things that constitute the soul's very
+breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But self-interest answered with cold disdain: "What sickly
+sentimentalist is this?  Let Him be crucified."  He faced to-day the
+lust of conquest, and declared that the conquering of men's bodies was
+nothing; that the only way of attaining power was to conquer men's
+hearts and minds and wills, thus clasping them to us with hooks of
+steel; that the will of God for His children was that they should love
+their enemies and not pour upon them the vials of wrath, trampling them
+under foot; but the arrogance of man answered with the hoarse cry,
+"Crucify."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the
+holocaust of war&mdash;ten millions of men consigned to the hell of reeking
+trenches.  In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before,
+bearing its awful woe.  In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal
+Love is crucified.  It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips
+trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred
+door of the House of God.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done
+shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there
+should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power.  And yet there
+must be some explanation of it.  Why should a passion for righteousness
+be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified
+by a petty Roman official?  There can be no explanation but this&mdash;that
+that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which
+wrought so evil a deed.  That power was self-interest&mdash;selfishness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The eyes of men turned to Jesus Christ, and they saw one holy,
+harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, whose journeying was the
+journeys of healing among the sons of men, whose words were words of
+blessedness, declaring that God loved and pardoned His children, and
+yet men reviled, scorned, scourged and at last crucified Him.  The
+power that moved men to this dread crime was sin, and thus the word sin
+became a word of horror.  (For the selfishness that crucified was only
+one fruit of sin.)  Out of that realisation of the horror of sin there
+sprang an ethical passion&mdash;a passion which in the heart and in the
+world waged ceaseless war on selfishness and all the devices of evil.
+Thus humanity was lifted out of the mire.  They girded themselves to
+fight that dread and hateful power which crucified the Holy One.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like the wind blowing in from the sea that sweeps before it the foul
+miasma that lies over the valleys, so that men look up and see the
+heavens and feel a new vigour moving in their blood, so a breath from
+the living God came stirring the foul places of humanity, and the eyes,
+no longer blinded by the exhalations of evil passions, saw the ideal of
+purity arise before their eyes, and they turned to climb towards the
+clearer vision.  Through the revelation of purity in the face of Jesus
+Christ and the realisation of the awfulness of that power which crowned
+that purity with thorns, there came to humanity the dawning of
+deliverance from sin&mdash;a deliverance still going on to its fruition.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+History is for ever repeating itself, and to-day the process of
+humanity's deliverance from evil will gather momentum and advance a
+long way towards the final triumph.  For just as men only realised the
+hatefulness of sin when they saw it laid upon Jesus Christ, so will it
+be also to-day.  A generation that had lost the sense of sin beholds
+sin laid upon millions of men, working woe unspeakable, and, beholding,
+learns anew what sin is and the hatefulness of it.  For these millions
+of men grappling with death, what are they but humanity's sin-bearers.
+On them is laid the burden of the sins of this generation.  The
+selfishness, greed, ambition, lust&mdash;all the passions which sweep men to
+wars of conquest&mdash;have poured the vials of misery on their heads.  The
+son of the widow sitting on the mort-safe, who now lies in a nameless
+grave, he bore it.  The bearing of it killed him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more
+burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that passion for
+righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust.  There will ring
+round the world the compelling cry that this power of hell must not for
+ever hold humanity in its grip&mdash;that ruthless ambition, militarism,
+despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth.  Once more
+the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+There was another power also that stirred the world under the shadow of
+the Cross, and that was the power of self-sacrifice.  There came to men
+an overwhelming realisation that at the heart of the universe was the
+Spirit of self-sacrifice, and that the Cross was but the expression of
+it.  They realised that the greatest thing a man can do with his life
+is to lay it down.  And as men realise to-day that the Cross still
+abides in the heart of God, so that in all their affliction He is
+afflicted, there comes to them the feeling that the one way of coming
+nearest to His heart is the way of self-sacrifice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought
+life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of
+self-sacrifice.  What is it that sustains the men who go down to the
+earthly hell of ruthless war?  It is just this&mdash;the consciousness,
+newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and
+country, for home and kindred.  They are content to be blotted out if
+only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be
+exalted.  Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once
+more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure.  Men charge
+across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes.  They are
+raised into the fellowship of the Cross.  And we are raised with them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the
+glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again
+lift up her face to the light.  He has died that we may live.  Greater
+love hath no man than this&mdash;nor yet greater glory.  But she needs not
+to be told; she knows it already.  She knows it far better than you or
+I do, for she feels it.  In the deep places of life where words are
+meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the
+glory of self-sacrifice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the
+soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of
+lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine
+wisdom which is hid from the wise.  She knows that the road that goes
+by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can
+come to God.  She knows that her son has walked along that road, and
+that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying
+while bearing it, God has brought him into that joy which all the
+cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe.  And because
+she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has
+felt the touch of God, she is ready to greet the day of still greater
+sacrifice.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and
+read an article.  It was a bitter invective against Christianity and
+the Church.  Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross&mdash;and this
+holocaust as the fruit.  It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced
+eye.  It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity
+for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the
+wicked have continued to crucify Him.  These things are so not because,
+but in spite, of Christianity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Grievous as war now is, yet it is not war as in the days before the
+Cross was erected on Calvary.  When Ulysses asked Agamemnon for
+sanction to bury the body of Ajax, the King was greatly annoyed.  "What
+do you mean?" he answered, "do you feel pity for a dead enemy?"  That
+was the spirit of war in the old heathen world&mdash;the spirit which had no
+mercy on the living and no pity for the dead.  Slowly but surely the
+spirit of Christ fettered the spirit of hate and dethroned the spirit
+of revenge.  We now minister to the wounded and bury the dead enemy
+with the pity and the honour we render to our own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We can trace the evolution of peace through the centuries.  Wars
+between individuals have ceased.  A century and a half ago warring
+clans in Scotland dyed the heather red; to-day wars between tribes have
+ceased.  There remains only war between nations, and already there are
+great nations between whom war is unthinkable.  If we in these days
+wage war with Germany, yet we in these days also celebrate the
+hundredth anniversary of unbroken peace with the United States of
+America.  If we bewail the failure of Christianity in the former, let
+us be grateful for the triumph of Christianity in the latter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Formerly war was the normal condition; now to the moral consciousness
+of Christendom war is an outrage.  We only need to look beneath the
+surface to realise that Galilee is conquering Corsica, and will conquer
+at the last.  Beneath the shadow of the Cross men will at last find
+healing for their grievous wounds.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+And as a symbol thereof the doors of the sanctuaries of peace will be
+flung wide open, and no burdened heart will find the House of God
+locked and barred against groping hands.  One fruit of these grievous
+days may well be that the Church will realise that it does not become
+her to occupy a lower plane than that heathen temple in ancient Rome,
+whose door was shut not day or night while men were dying in battle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the coming days when the mothers of sorrow come to their dead, over
+whose graves the falling leaves flutter as a benediction, they will not
+be left sitting on the iron mort-safe.  The open door will invite them
+into the sanctuary of peace, and they will croon the coronach of their
+woe in the holy place.  For they are the priesthood of this generation,
+offering up the most precious sacrifice&mdash;and the door of the holy place
+must be open to them.  And there, in the sanctuaries of peace, their
+sorrow will be transmuted into joy.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+The Power of Prayer
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IV
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+For eight centuries the Church of St. Giles has been the centre of the
+religious life of Scotland.  At all times of sorrow the nation has
+turned to it, and within its walls, consecrated by the prayers of so
+many generations, the surcharged heart has voiced its woe in the
+presence of the Unseen.  But in all the years of the dim and fading
+past there never was a day like this in which we now stand.  Death has
+come as a grim spectre, and has looked into our eyes.  The winds carry
+to our ears the moans of our perishing sons, dying gloriously for
+freedom on the bloody fields of Flanders.  The great ships guard our
+shores, and we know that if that vigil failed, our cities and villages
+and fair countryside would become as Louvain and the Low Country.
+Death itself would be welcome rather than that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye
+has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our
+ears.  And that call soundeth not in vain.  To-day[<A NAME="chap04fn1text"></A><A HREF="#chap04fn1">1</A>] the two great
+Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their
+misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country&mdash;for all the
+things which make life beautiful.  They have come through days of
+alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one
+place.  And in their hearts only one purpose&mdash;to seek the blessing of
+God for their nation.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="footnote">
+<A NAME="chap04fn1"></A>
+[<A HREF="#chap04fn1text">1</A>] November 18, 1914.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many bloody fights
+for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the
+church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of
+time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and
+out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the
+altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing
+for their dead.  The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of
+the surf wailing on the shore, and their sobbing as the cry of the
+grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide.  But the city fathers
+could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of
+destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of
+the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to
+rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to
+pass to the kyrk, and pray whane tyme requires for our Soveraine Lord
+and his Army, and neichbouris being thereat."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That proclamation stirs the blood!  They are dust, these fathers of
+ours, but their spirit is all alive, throbbing in the heart of
+us&mdash;their far-away children.  Never did a race meet its Sedan in a
+sublimer spirit than that.  The strong, at toll of bell and tuck of
+drum, manned the ramparts, and the women filled St. Giles' and sent
+heavenward their cries.  The bodies of such a race may for a brief
+season be brought to subjection, but their souls are invincible&mdash;and it
+is the soul that always conquers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And here to-day it is the same.  From every part of Scotland men have
+come, and they passed "to the kirk to pray for our Sovereign Lord and
+his Army."  True, there has been no Flodden and no Sedan; but it is by
+the good hand of God upon us that the enemy was frustrated in his
+eagerness for another Sedan.  And it is in part the prayer of
+thanksgiving that is laid to-day upon His altar, and in part the
+petition that His mercies may be continued to the nation in the cruel
+days to come.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+What a sanctuary for a nation's prayers, this church, where Kings have
+prayed and gone forth to die in battle; where Queens have wept as the
+voice of judgment, grim and stern, untouched by tenderness or love,
+sounded in the ear; where three thousand people dissolved in tears as
+the good Regent, foully slain, was borne to his grave.  Over it passed
+wave after wave of fanaticism and barbarism; and at last it fell into
+the hands of the restorers&mdash;more ruthless far than Goths or Vandals!
+But, through it all, the house of God survived; and, apparelled once
+more in some of its pristine glory, it opens its doors to a nation that
+once more seek after its God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And above us, as we sit there, hang the colours of our Scottish
+regiments stirring our patriotism, assuring us that the men who guarded
+these flags on many bloody fields were guarded by God, and that we are
+still in His keeping.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What a place this is in which to set vibrating that note of patriotism
+which now quivers from Maiden Kirk to John o' Groat's.  These colours
+there&mdash;they are the most eloquent things on earth, for they pertain to
+the realm of symbols.  Words are poor compared to tears, and that is
+because tears belong to the world of symbols.  That tattered banner
+there belonged to the Gordon Highlanders, and was carried through the
+Peninsula and the Crimea.  Woven in faded letters you can read on it
+still Corunna, Almarez, Pyrenees, Waterloo.  Ah! these flags tell of a
+devotion stronger than death, rekindle the memories of the day when
+stern silence fell on the ranks, as the Highland Brigade breasted the
+slopes of the Alma until Sir Colin Campbell lifted his hat and they
+rushed on the foe with the slogan of victory; and that other day when
+"the thin red line tipped with steel" rolled back the surge of the
+Cossacks; aye, and of a hundred such days when men went down joyously
+to death that the race might be free and live.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Waterloo!&mdash;it is on many flags.  And we remember how the Man of Destiny
+himself, as he saw his ranks yield before the onslaught of the
+Highlanders, did not restrain his admiration for his enemies, but
+exclaimed with the true soldier's generosity, "Les braves
+Ecossais"&mdash;"Brave, brave Scotsmen" (what a contrast to "French's
+contemptible little Army").  The hands that carried, the hearts that
+thrilled at the waving of these flags, their fame will never perish.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"On the slopes of Quatre Bras<BR>
+The Frenchmen saw them stand unbroken.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+On the day of Waterloo<BR>
+The pibroch blew where fire was hottest.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+When the Alma heights were stormed<BR>
+Foremost went the Highland bonnets.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+As it was in days of yore,<BR>
+So the story shall be ever.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+Think then of the name ye bear,<BR>
+Ye that wear the Highland tartan.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;    *</SPAN><BR>
+Zealous of its old renown,<BR>
+Hand it down without a blemish."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the eye looks along the nave up into the choir and sees the gleam of
+red, colours after colours, there comes the memory of words&mdash;"We have
+heard with our ears, O God, and our fathers have told us what work Thou
+didst in their days in the times of old....  Through Thee will we push
+down our enemies...."  The unseen God who has led His people through so
+many and great dangers will not forsake them now.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+There is a tablet where formerly stood the door that led to Haddo's
+Hole, and there hangs on a pillar the flag that pertains of truth to
+the realm of romance.  Men with their hearts hot with indignation
+buried it in Pretoria in 1880, and put above it the inscription
+"Resurgam."  Afterwards the Colonel recovered it and brought it home.
+When war broke out again his widow restored it to the regiment&mdash;the
+Royal Scots Fusiliers.  In 1881 that regiment was the last to leave the
+Transvaal; in 1900 it was the first to enter the Transvaal&mdash;as the
+inscription narrates.  And by the direction of Lord Roberts, when
+Pretoria was occupied, this identical flag was run up amid the shouts
+of the victors.  Now it rests here.  "Resurgam"&mdash;it is the unquenchable
+spirit of an invincible nation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If only the manhood of Scotland could be gathered into this Church,
+under these flags, and the story they tell were put into words,
+pulsating with passion&mdash;then the ranks of our Army would be filled up
+in a week.  What a lack of imagination we reveal!  We teach dates,
+thinking we are teaching history.  The only way to teach history is by
+flags, and all they stand for.  When Douglas threw the heart of Bruce
+among his enemies he cried, "Lead thou on as thou wast wont and Douglas
+will follow thee or die."  In the spirit of Douglas our fathers
+followed the flags, and we will follow in the steps of our fathers and
+face death with undaunted hearts as they were wont.  There comes to us
+the shouting of their triumph, and we cry: "Lead on; we will follow or
+die."  This grey church, St. Giles', is the temple of patriotism.
+Therefore our feet turn towards it in dark days, and we say, "Our feet
+shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!"
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+How the old words are born for us anew as we thus meet as one "to
+entreat God for the broken peace of Christendom."  We sing "God is our
+refuge and our strength," but there is a note of intensity in the
+singing now such as we never knew before.  Men close their eyes, and
+stand, the world blotted out, before their God, realising that He and
+He alone is the one refuge, the only giver of victory.  We hear the old
+story read of Moses holding up his hands and Israel prevailing on the
+plains below; but it is not Israel we see travailing in battle, but our
+own brothers in the rain-sodden trenches, and we feel the uprising of
+the ceaseless intercession of a nation that has anew found its God.  It
+is not the right hand that assureth victories; it is that spirit of
+enthusiasm, that passion for righteousness which filleth the heart, and
+that spirit is as the wind blowing where it listeth&mdash;and it cometh out
+of the Unseen at the call of our prayers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When in other days we prayed for the King it was in the spirit of cold
+formalism.  But now a lump rises in the throat as we invoke the
+blessing and protection of Heaven for the solitary man who is the
+symbol of the unity of our Empire, and who watcheth over its destinies
+day and night, and who has sent his son to face death with the meanest
+of his subjects.  We hear the glorious words: "If God be for us, who
+can be against us?" and they are written for ourselves.  We, who fight
+for the truth of word and for the freedom and deliverance of the
+oppressed, can feel that God is for us, and that all is well.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And when we pray, our voices rising as one, "Thy kingdom come," we can
+see that kingdom coming through blood and tears, cleansing the foul
+places and establishing peace on everlasting foundations.  It is a new
+day that has dawned for us&mdash;a day in which we stand united as the
+subjects of the one King, as the sons of the one God&mdash;and the things
+that separated us one from another are swept away.  What the conferring
+of the wise found so difficult to achieve, the roaring of the guns has
+accomplished.  God teacheth his people by sending them through the
+purifying fires.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+In these prayers in St. Giles' there is a directness which shows that
+we are there for a definite purpose.  We no longer use qualifying
+words.  We cry for victory.  There is a bloodless form of prayer which
+some use and which sends the worshipper away with an aching heart.  It
+is the prayer that never prays directly for victory.  "Thy will be
+done," it prays, in the spirit of submission.  But prayer is not
+submission; it is a wrestling.  In other days our fathers wrestled in
+prayer and prevailed.  "I spent the night in prayer," wrote Oliver
+Cromwell, in critical days; "I prayed God that He would guide us
+against the enemy.  We were simple fellows of the country, and they
+were men of blood and fashion, but the Lord delivered them into our
+hands.  By His grace we killed five thousand.  If He continues to show
+mercy we will kill some more to-morrow."  Such were the Ironsides, "men
+of a spirit," who broke the charges of the Cavaliers, as the cliff
+dashes back in white spray the rush of the billows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This was also the language of the Covenanters of old; and though we no
+longer use such plainness of speech, we mean the same.  There is a
+place for tenderness; but when men are ground to powder by the judgment
+of God, tenderness is not manifest then.  When the heart whispers
+"Spare" and justice says "Smite," men must obey the voice of justice,
+stifling the voice of the heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Our prayers are now for justice.  Better far a righteous war than an
+immoral peace.  We have been compelled to unsheath the sword, and we
+pray that no heart may falter, and no cry arise for the sheathing of
+the sword, until justice be done.  Thus our prayers have become a cry
+for victory.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+As one sits in an ancient church such as this, there comes knocking at
+the heart many questions regarding that service of prayer which within
+its walls has linked the generations together.  Can prayer really
+prevail with God?  Can it alter the will of the Unchangeable?  If there
+be no power in it, why should men go on praying?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We must distinguish between the will of God which is unchangeable, and
+His lower will which is his purpose towards us and His attitude to us.
+The former is unalterable; the latter varies according to the varying
+of our hearts.  With that lower will we are called to wrestle.  A man
+is born in poverty and obscurity, and the will of God seems to be that
+he should continue poor and obscure.  But he wrestles with that lower
+will until he prevails.  He ultimately moves out into the great tide of
+life and becomes a power.  The will of God towards that man is changed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is the same with a nation.  Here is a nation sinking on its lees
+with its ideals dimmed and the shrines of its fathers' God forsaken and
+desolate.  It has fashioned to itself other gods, and the multitudes
+crowd the temples of the goddess of pleasure.  The very race itself is
+sacrificed on the altar of gross pleasure, and the laughter of little
+children is being little by little silenced.  The fires of patriotism
+are dying low, and the love of country gives place to the love of
+party.  There are mean victories rejoiced over, but they are the
+victories of the cynic and the sensualist.  There is the sound of
+shouting, but it is the shouting over the triumph of one self-seeking
+politician over another self-seeking partisan.  Saintliness, which
+other generations held in awe and reverence, provokes now a pitying
+smile.  Mammon alone is held in high honour and sitteth in the high
+places.  What is the will of God towards that nation?  It is this&mdash;ruin
+and utter destruction.  Over every nation that thus succumbed to the
+gross and sensual, history shows the sword of God unsheathed, and at
+last the devouring flames of judgment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But to such a nation there comes as if out of the silent heaven a call
+as a trumpet sound, summoning it to the judgment-seat of God.  Over the
+sea comes the roar of guns.  The foundations which the fathers laid in
+righteousness, through long neglect and decay are crumbling.  An empire
+encircling the globe is tottering to destruction.  The hay and the
+stubble cannot come scathless through the flames.  The writing is on
+the wall, and as the eyes see the hand that writes, trembling seizeth
+upon men.  And then there cometh a sudden change.  The nation in a day
+rises out of the morass of its self-indulgence.  It sets itself to lay
+hold again upon the eternal law of righteousness.  They seek once more
+the shrines of their God.  They set themselves to fast and to pray.
+"Who can tell," they whisper one to another, "if God will turn and
+repent, and turn away from His fierce anger, that we perish not?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fields of their inglorious shouting over their games are deserted
+for the fields of hardness and grim preparation.  Once more they gird
+themselves for conflict, as their fathers so often girded, that truth
+and righteousness may prevail over all the earth.  Sharply the choice
+is presented to them between Christ or Odin, and though choosing the
+Christ means agony and woe they make their choice unhesitatingly.  A
+new light shines in their eyes, and the work of their hands and the
+devisings of their hearts become the spirit of prayer.  Yesterday the
+will of God towards that nation, sinking on its lees, was destruction;
+to-day towards that same nation, thus risen out of the foul miasma that
+was stifling its soul, the will of God is salvation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Because prayer is the greatest power in the world; because it can alter
+the will of God towards us, because it can move the hand of the
+omnipotent God and is thus endued with His omnipotence, our prayers as
+we gather in the sanctuaries are no longer the submission of quietism,
+but a wrestling with God&mdash;the crying of a soul as in agony for victory
+based on the triumph of righteousness.  It was such a cry that rose on
+that day in St. Giles.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+As the second paraphrase was being sung there came the memory of words
+spoken in the pulpit of the great Cathedral by Dr. Cameron Lees.  It
+was at evening service, when the shadows were gathering.  "I have often
+sat in this pulpit," said Dr. Lees, "on the edge of the evening, and
+watched the shadows enveloping the Cathedral.  They invaded the side
+chapels first, and then the nave, creeping onwards through the
+transepts, until the chancel was reached.  After that they gathered in
+strength, until the whole building was in darkness, with the exception
+of the white figure of Christ in the great east window.  I pray that
+the last vision vouchsafed me on earth may be just that&mdash;the Saviour of
+men.  I can then close my eyes in the knowledge that He will lead me
+through the dark valley that leadeth to the eternal home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It has been like that with the whole nation.  Around our shores the
+darkness gathered, until all the horizon was black with threatening
+clouds.  Then we lifted up our eyes and saw....  He will bring
+deliverance and peace.  As we moved along the crowded aisles towards
+the door the white figure of Christ glowed in the great east window,
+and we felt that He will bless His people at last with peace&mdash;the peace
+not of death, but of life.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"Down the dark future, through long generations,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease,</SPAN><BR>
+And, like a bell, with solemn sweet vibrations,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">I hear once more the voice of Christ say Peace.</SPAN><BR>
+Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The clash of war's great organ shakes the skies;</SPAN><BR>
+But beautiful as songs of the immortals,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The holy melodies of love arise."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+V
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+The Victory
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+V
+</h4>
+
+<P>
+The blinds were all drawn in the red-roofed house that stands at the
+cross-roads.  It was not empty, for the smoke arose from its chimneys
+in the clear morning air.  In other days the music of song and laughter
+often floated from its open windows, but now it was stricken dumb.
+From it two sons had gone to take their place in the line of soul and
+fire that girdles these islands, warding them from destruction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a moment the veiled windows flashed their meaning.  In the long
+lists of the dead I found the name I looked for.  I had schooled myself
+to look at these lists, thinking of them in the mass as force or power;
+but that one name insisted on its individuality.  They were all
+individual lives, each throbbing with intensest self-realisation, each
+with his love and hope and fear.  There was none among them so poor but
+some heart clung to them.  They may die, no longer in units, but in
+broad swathes, mown down by machine guns, but they are individual
+hearts still.  In masses the sea swallows them up, trenches are filled
+with them, but however much we try we cannot narcotise our hearts by
+sophistries.  Some day a name stands out alone&mdash;and we realise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All over the land, in every parish, blinds are being drawn in houses
+where music and laughter are silenced.  There comes the surge of a wild
+revolt.  It is not these individual hearts alone that lie stricken, it
+is the joy of the centuries yet to be.  In nameless graves lie the
+dream-children who will never now be born.  This criminal sealing up of
+the very fountain of life&mdash;how can we bear it?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet we open not our mouths in protest.  Is it because we are losing
+our sensitiveness&mdash;becoming brutalised?  It might be that.  For nothing
+coarsens the mind like that tide of hatred and passion which war sends
+sweeping through the hearts of men.  And yet it is not that.  For when
+they told the mother, breaking it gently as love alone can do, that her
+son was dead, she bowed her head in silence, yielding herself to the
+solace of tears; but in a little while she said brokenly: "It is good
+to die so: I would not have my son shelter himself behind other
+mothers' sons."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No, it is not because we are already coarsened that the heart can bear.
+It is rather because we have realised with the passing away of the old
+world of the last long summer days (it seems already centuries remote)
+that there are some things so great that they can transfigure even
+death.  When the loyalty to the highest can only be fulfilled through
+death, we acquiesce in the sacrifice.  In our parish we have not been
+coarsened&mdash;we have been quickened.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+It seems as if it were in another era that my friend at the top of the
+Gallows' Road proved to me convincingly that death alone was king.
+With a keen irony he depicted this little globule of a world, a
+third-rate satellite of a fifth-rate star, floating in the abysses, in
+relation to the universe but as a mere grain of sand amid all the sand
+on the world's shores; and on that puny speck of a world he pictured
+the ephemeral generations, mere flashes of troubled consciousness&mdash;and
+then darkness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was reasonable when they thought this world the centre of all
+things, with the sun and moon and stars circling it round as humble
+ministrants, that they should believe in some high destiny for
+themselves.  But now that they know how miserably and unspeakably
+insignificant the world is, it was but vanity and arrogance for any man
+to think of himself as of any value whatever in the scheme of things.
+His life was as the flashing of a midge's wings.  His end was as a
+candle blown out in the night.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+One evening, when the air was vibrant with the melody of birds and
+laden with the perfume of the roses that filled the garden, he
+developed another train of thought.  He pictured the glut of life there
+would be if all the generations on this and millions unnumbered of
+worlds all survived.  With vivid gestures he passed them all before the
+eye&mdash;low-browed savages, cannibals, fetish-worshippers, Calvinists, and
+at last the æsthetics of our day.  "There would be no room for them&mdash;no
+use for them at all&mdash;it would be a glut which baffles all imagination."
+There was no way out but that the individual perished to prevent the
+universe from being crowded out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the cobbler at the top of the brae described to me how his dog was
+run over in the street.  "He gaed a bark&mdash;and he never gaed anither.
+It'll be like that at the end with us a'.  We'll gae out like my dawg."
+It was a queer result of the glimpse which came to us of an illimitable
+universe&mdash;this cheapening of ourselves.  There was nothing at last but
+the charnel-house of the crowded kirkyard, where the generations lay
+layer upon layer, and where the opening of a grave reminded the old
+clerk, as he quaintly declared, of nothing but a dentist's shop.  The
+teeth survived for unrecorded centuries&mdash;but that was all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is strange the tricks the memory plays.  For, sitting here, glancing
+over the crowded sheet filled with the names of the dead, I remembered
+these things.  And there came the sense of the madness of the universe
+and the intolerableness of life, if the end of all heroism was but
+that&mdash;nothingness and corruption.  A handful of bones thrown up by the
+beadle to make room for the dead of to-day&mdash;is that all that is left of
+those who handed down the lamp of life to us?  Is that all that will be
+left of us too at the last?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the ordinary day my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road and the
+cobbler on the breast of the brae would have said that that was the
+end.  But the extraordinary day has come upon us unawares, and in the
+extraordinary day this little, burdened, pain-racked life becomes
+suddenly unendurable unless it lie in the bosom of eternity.  If there
+be no rainbow circling the heavens above the carnage heaps of the
+stricken battlefields, if the farewell of death be a farewell for ever,
+how can the heart endure?
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+It certainly looks to the seeing of the eye as if destruction were the
+end.  With the perishing of the body everything seemeth to perish: all
+love, all thought, all tenderness vanish for ever.  But the eyes and
+the ears are for ever playing us false; and here, too, they deceive us.
+For the world is so ordered that nothing ever perishes.  In nature
+there is no destruction.  A handful of ashes in a grate look like
+annihilation, but what it represents is really resurrection.  The
+imprisoned sunrays of uncounted æons, stored up in the lumps of coal,
+have been released from the prison-house, and gone forth again as heat
+and as light.  The physical body may seem to perish; what really
+happens is that its constituent elements are re-grouped.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in the realm of beauty, is there not destruction possible there?
+Through long centuries faith and devotion rear a great cathedral, every
+line and curve of which is instinct with beauty.  Every statue breathes
+the love and hope and fears of men.  In vaulted aisles and "windows
+richly dight," it symbolises the Unseen&mdash;the beauty which the heart
+yearns for.  On that beauty materialised, ruthless Vandalism rains shot
+and shell; the devouring flames consume it.  Its gaunt walls are now a
+monument of barbarism.  Has nothing perished there?  Is it not mockery
+to speak of the conservation of the constituent elements there?  For
+loveliness has vanished there from off the face of the earth, and
+beauty which no hand of man can ever restore has been annihilated.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it has not.  For beauty is not in things, but in souls.  The beauty
+lay in the soul of the architects that planned, in the hearts of the
+builders that carved the stones until they seemed to breathe&mdash;and
+shells cannot destroy that.  The loveliness was shrined in the souls of
+the generations that gazed, and, gazing, were raised into the
+fellowship of the hearts that planned and builded.  Thus did the spirit
+of beauty grow in the hearts of men&mdash;and shells cannot destroy that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And let these charred walls be left to the alchemy of time, and nature
+will clothe them in richer loveliness.  Lichen and moss will grow on
+them, and the moonlight will etherialise them.  One symbol of beauty
+may seem to perish; but the spirit of beauty itself, dwelling in the
+hearts of men and abiding at the core of the universe, is
+indestructible.  The thing which we deem perishable, no power on earth
+can kill.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+There is on earth something infinitely more precious than the material
+substance, indestructible though it be.  The most beautiful thing the
+world can show is a good man.  Through the years forces play on him,
+and each force adds its element of beauty.  He has struggled with
+adversity, and in the conflict he has learned patience, tolerance and a
+wide charity.  Waves of affliction have passed over him, and he has
+learned tenderness and sympathy with human suffering, so that bruised
+hearts come and lie down in his shadow, and there find healing.  With
+eyes cleansed from self, he looks out on the comedy and tragedy of
+life, and he sees the hidden springs.  The healing power that goes
+forth from him grows with the years.  At last he dies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Does nature conserve the shell while it consigns the jewel in the
+shell&mdash;the man himself, with all his love and tender thought and
+unselfish care&mdash;to annihilation?  That is unthinkable.  To know one
+good man is to know that the human personality is imperishable.  It was
+through that knowledge that the soul of man triumphed over the terror
+of death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There walked in Galilee a Teacher who made a handful of peasants feel
+the possibilities of moral loveliness latent in the human heart, and
+when He died they could not associate the thought of death with Him.
+"It was not possible that He should be holden of it," they said one to
+another.  Everything was possible but that He could become as a clod in
+the valley of corruption.  Of course even that was possible if the
+world were a chaos given over for sport to malicious demons.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It would be possible, then, that the self-sacrificing love stronger
+than death, and the spirit of unsullied purity should become mere dust.
+But the possibility of the world being ruled by any except a Righteous
+Power did not occur to the untutored Galileans.  Therefore they faced
+death with level eyes, refusing to believe in its triumph, saying to
+their hearts, "It is not possible."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And that is the rock on which to plant our feet in the day when the
+world is given over to the wild welter of bloodshed.  In every parish
+over all the land blinds are pulled down, and hearts, wrapped round in
+the dimness, sit still in the shadow of a dumb affliction.  They will
+never again hear the familiar footsteps coming to the door; they will
+hear it in their dreams&mdash;only to awake and find silence.  Never again
+will the first question be when the door is opened, as it was through
+all the days since the golden days of childhood, "Where is mother?"
+But the great things which made life noble have not been destroyed by
+bullet or shell.  No man is worthy of freedom except the man who is
+prepared to die for it.  The heart, which in death proved itself
+deserving of freedom, has entered into the fulness of freedom.  The
+heavens are again aglow when we realise that.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+It was the Professor who made me sure of those things.  I met him at
+the "Priory," where my old friend carries on his controversy with the
+Pope&mdash;or used to.  In that house of his one meets all sorts of
+visionaries from the ends of the earth.  A Waldensian pastor full of
+the dream of a rejuvenated Italy; a leader of French Protestants, who
+has forgotten his controversy with the Pope in the great upheaval
+through which his race are finding their soul once more; a dreamer from
+across the Atlantic, his eyes a-gleam with the vision of a reunited
+Christendom&mdash;these are the men you will find drinking tea at the Priory
+on any day in our parish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The original bond between them was their controversy with Rome, but
+they have now forgotten all about that.  There, in a happy hour, I met
+the Professor.  One phrase of his lit up for me the days of darkness.
+"We see the alchemy of Providence at work all round about us," he
+exclaimed, pushing his fingers through his hair until it stood up all
+on end, an aureole of white.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is the flower of our manhood that is perishing," said the "Prior,"
+while our hostess was nervously solicitous over the fate of a teacup
+which the Professor was balancing in his left hand, utterly regardless
+of its purpose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Perishing!" exclaimed the Professor; "they are not perishing&mdash;they are
+living.  To talk of the wastage of life is mere cant."  Our hostess
+rescued the teacup, and the Professor had now the free use of both his
+hands.  The one hand clutched his hair and the other made sundry
+gestures clinching his arguments.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why should we rail at death?" said he; "for death has been the saviour
+of humanity.  It was death that made men of us.  It was in the school
+of death that man learned unselfishness, self-sacrifice, chivalry and
+honour.  There is nothing so ugly as the man whose heart is filled by
+the world.  It is death that has saved us all from that.  Were man's
+location here for ever, the world would be his god.  A world without
+death would be a world with no room for the Cross.  Men climbed the
+heights of nobility as they defied death.  The crackling flames were
+unable to silence the martyrs' song; the march of the hosts of
+devouring tyranny could not move the hearts that chose death rather
+than slavery; the generations sealed with their blood their testimony
+that truth and loyalty to truth are more precious than life, and so met
+death with a smile; it was through this wrestling with death that great
+and noble character was forged on the anvil of life.  Death was the
+weapon which forged greatness of soul.  Death cannot destroy what death
+has created.  That could only happen in an insensate world.  What is
+it&mdash;death&mdash;but just this&mdash;the slave of immortality?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If I could only write it down as the Professor spoke, if I could only
+make you see his eyes glowing with little darts of flame as he saw the
+whole world transformed into a mighty workshop in which the "alchemy of
+Providence" is transmuting the soiled substance of our humanity into
+living souls (over whom death can have no dominion) fashioned for
+heavenly destinies&mdash;then you, too, would believe.  Since that day my
+old friend has not spoken a word about the "waste of the flower of the
+race."
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+The house with the drawn blinds stands at the cross-roads, and I must
+come back to it.  What is it that has happened to him who lies in a
+nameless grave in France?  The opportunity for winning glory and
+earthly fame did not come his way; he just laid down his life along
+with hundreds of thousands more.  He has taken his place among the
+undistinguished dead.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">"O, undistinguished dead,</SPAN><BR>
+Whom the bent covers or the rock-strewn steep<BR>
+Shows to the stars, for you I mourn&mdash;I weep,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">O, undistinguished dead.</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">"None knows your name,</SPAN><BR>
+Blackened and blurred in the wild battle's brunt,<BR>
+Hotly ye fell with all your wounds in front.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">That was your fame."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Not a line in the records of time for him.  But there are other
+records&mdash;those of eternity.  He has lost nothing of the thrill of life.
+He is being borne on that tide of self-surrender and heroism which has
+flowed through the ages, and bears those who embark on it to the very
+feet of God.  He would not himself have it otherwise.  "It is better
+far to go out with honour than survive with shame," wrote a comrade
+from the trenches, now united with him in death.  There is a place for
+sorrow in our land, but its place is by the hearth-stones of those
+whose sons choose to survive with shame.  He has taken his place among
+those who, unseen, are leading on the embattled hosts of his race to
+victory.  He has discovered the treasures in store for the brave and
+the true.  When, amid the flutterings of flags and the shouting of the
+people rejoicing in their deliverance, the great army will return home
+at last&mdash;he, too, will come.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At Kobé, when the bugles were welcoming the victorious Japanese home in
+1895, Lafcadio Hearn spoke to an old man of those who would never
+return.  "Probably the Western people believe," answered the old man,
+"that the dead never return.  There are no Japanese dead who do not
+return.  There are none who do not know the way."  It is a poor,
+emasculated religion that does not believe that.  When at the last the
+bugles call in the quiet evening ... they will come back.  They will
+come crowned with glory and honour and immortality&mdash;with that victory
+which overcometh the world.  Let the blinds be rolled up, and the
+windows be all flung open to the light.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+VI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+The Cities of the Plain
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+VI
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+It was the old clerk, of whose services and devotion to our parish I
+have previously written, who gave the Biblical name to the little
+village that lies near the boundary of the great city that is steadily
+creeping towards us, and ever threatening to engulf us.  Its own name
+is singularly pleasant to the ear and redolent of the sound of running
+waters, but it is unnecessary to burden the memory with it.  Though it
+is now many years ago, I remember, as it were yesterday, the first time
+I heard the word on the old clerk's lips.  I was sitting warming myself
+by the fire in the ticket-collector's office.  The ticket-collector was
+ostensibly waiting to provide tickets, but as everybody in our parish
+has a season ticket, that part of his duty is almost a sinecure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus it happens that the ticket-collector has leisure, just before the
+trains pass through, to give his friends the fruits of his researches
+in the realms of philosophy.  That particular day he was speaking of
+the changes he had seen.  "I was brought up," said he, closing his
+argument, "on the Shorter Catechism and porridge.  I dinna haud any
+longer by the Catechism, but I havena lost my faith in porridge."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was then that the clink of coppers was heard on the sill of the
+ticket window.  In the aperture was framed the face of the clerk, with
+the trimmed grey beard and the small twinkling eyes.  He held three
+pennies deftly in his thumbless hand.  "Return, Sodom," said he.  The
+ticket-collector pushed back his cap, stretched out his right hand as
+if he were beginning to speak, then thought better of it.  Out of his
+case, without a word, he produced a return ticket for Sodom, clinked it
+in his machine, and passed it through the window.  The old clerk
+received it with a grim chuckle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Away below the bridge there came a rumble.  "Train," said the
+ticket-collector, closing the aperture with a snap, and making for the
+door.  And I have never forgotten the hoarse voice of the old clerk
+with an acid edge to it as he clinked his three coppers, saying
+"Return, Sodom."
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+It is an amazing thing how within the circuit of the same parish,
+removed by one mile from one another, there can live together two eras
+so remote from each other in the order of human development, as the
+world of the red-roofed houses on the slopes of the hills, and the
+village at their base where the gorge, worn by the little river through
+the travail of immemorial centuries, debouches on the great central
+plain that runs across Scotland.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a
+great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the
+roofs of its houses.  On the slopes there lies the world in which the
+fringes of life are embroidered&mdash;a world where men and women talk of
+books, pictures and plays.  It is a world of hyphenated names.  But in
+all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name.  It is a
+refuse-heap of humanity.  Many diverse races are crowded in it.  The
+city fathers clean out slums without providing first for the
+slum-dwellers, and, swept before the broom of so-called social
+reformers, homeless men and women have drifted to the village, and
+there reconstituted their slum.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the glens of the north broken Highlanders, driven out to make room
+for sheep, have drifted hither to work in the quarries, and the speech
+of their children's children still bears the trace of their ancient
+language pure and clean; over the sea Irishmen have come to reap the
+harvest fields of the Lothians, and they have been deposited by the
+tide in the village.  Stray Poles have come hither and straggling
+Czechs; a man from Connemara neighbours a shaggy giant from Lewis; and
+a dour stone-cutter from Aberdeen is door by door with an Italian who
+sells what looks like a deadly mixture from a hand-cart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here you can see humanity in its primitive state, before it began to
+adorn the fringes of life, and make for itself sanctuaries of privacy.
+Between the slopes and the base of the hill there yawns an invisible
+chasm.  Centuries separate them.  Thus it comes that the slope-dweller
+passes on the top of the arches, scanning his newspaper, without so
+much as seeing the huddle of houses which constitute the village.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is only a week ago that, like the old clerk, I took out a return
+ticket for the "Cities of the Plain."  (For the old clerk had a
+two-fold formula.  When he was going to one village he said, "Return,
+Sodom," but when he meant to go to the quarries beside the village he
+said, "Return, Cities of the Plain.")  It was to visit an old soldier
+that I thus descended into the plains.  He lives in a rookery in which
+many families are crowded one on the top of the other&mdash;a rabbit-warren
+infested by many and strange odours.  He used to come up the slopes and
+do odd jobs, tidying up gardens, and he loved to talk of
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">"unhappy far-off things</SPAN><BR>
+And battles long ago,"<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+in a language which I also could speak.  So I got to know him.  And as
+I sat by his bed I heard a moan from the adjoining room.  It began in a
+low cry, and then rose into a wail that seemed charged with all the
+woes of humanity.  The old man sat up in bed trembling.  The cry of woe
+now changed into a chorus; other voices swelled it.  It was the act of
+a moment to open the door, and in the dim landing find the door of this
+other room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I opened it, and there I saw three children huddled before a grate
+which contained nothing but ashes.  On an iron bed, stretched on straw,
+lay a woman sunk in sleep....  A foetid air was laden with the fumes of
+alcohol....  There was no food....  A broken chair, a stool or two, and
+a box that did duty for a table....  The old soldier told me what to
+do, and I did it.  A kindly woman brought coal and food, and the
+wailing was silenced.  The old man explained it all.  The woman sunk in
+the stupor is the wife of a soldier now in the trenches.  She did not
+belong to our parish; but only came a week or two before, swept before
+the broom of the "social reformers" from the city.  The mothers of the
+Parish, the old soldier declared, were heroines.  One such, when her
+son asked her consent to enlist, said, "Eh, laddie, I dinna want ye to
+gang; I dinna want ... but if I were ye I wud gang mysel'."  Our own
+wives and mothers were splendid&mdash;but those who came from the city,
+flotsam and jetsam borne on the tide, staying for a little and then
+carried away again, of whom there were three or four in the
+village&mdash;these were different.  They meet each other eager for news.
+They are depressed, and feel the need for cheering.  One suggests a
+stimulant ... and the result is this.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He is no Puritan&mdash;the old soldier lying on his bed, his campaigning
+done&mdash;and he spoke out of an understanding heart.  It was only poor
+human nature, overtaken by thick darkness and misery, trying to open a
+window towards the realm of sunshine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And I came out into the roadway and turned towards the station.  I did
+not see them before, but I saw them now.  A few yards separating them,
+I pass two shops licensed to sell the means for opening windows towards
+this realm of happiness; and two houses with gaudy lights called the
+villagers to enter the region where all cares and worries are
+forgotten.  In the street pale-faced, ill-clad children played at being
+soldiers, marching with heads erect.  The gorge was already dark with
+the evening shadows, but the lamps in the village were lit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When the village was passed I stood and looked back.  In the west the
+setting sun had thrown over the heavens a glow.  A well of liquid fire
+glowed over Torfionn, and its rays spread fan-like, so that they
+spanned the horizon, and, touching the rounded mass of Corstarfin, went
+forth over the firth.  Against this background stood silhouetted the
+great arches that carry the railway across the hollow, and behind these
+the arches that bear the canal.  The piers stood as a gigantic forest.
+These mighty arches might have been the work of the Romans.  A soft,
+luminous haze fell on the village.  Window after window was lit up.
+The door of a cottage near me was opened, and a flood of light streamed
+out.  A woman stood in the door, and looking up the road shouted "Jim,"
+and a little boy, leaving his fellow-soldiers, rushed to her, and she
+clasped him in her arms and closed the door....  In that moment the
+little village seemed to me as if it were an outpost of Paradise.
+Nature threw as a benediction the mantle of its loveliness over it.
+What nature meant to be a sanctuary of beauty, man had changed into
+Sodom.
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+The ticket-collector stood at his post and scanned the passengers as
+they went through.  He knew them all, and had only a stray ticket to
+collect.  I was last, and duly gave up my "return" from the "Cities of
+the Plain."  But he did not let me through the gate.  "I want to show
+you something," said the ticket-collector, and he led me into his
+office and produced a pamphlet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I got it from the man who goes to Keswick," said the ticket-collector;
+"you know him."  I knew him, the best of men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nae doubt," went on the ticket-collector; "nae doubt.  He was always
+giving me tracts.  Tracts&mdash;faugh!&mdash;poor stuff, nae style, nae logic,
+and nae philosophee in them.  But I aye took them and thanked him&mdash;for
+he is a nice man, though a perfect babe in matters of understanding.
+And I found them useful for spills.  The other day he handed me
+this..." and he waved a blue paper-covered booklet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mahn," he exclaimed, pushing his peaked cap back from his grey head,
+and sweeping his brass buttons down with his hand; "mahn, this has fair
+hit me between the eyes."  Then he opened the pamphlet and began to
+read passages that he had heavily scored with blue pencil.  The Czar
+has abolished the sale of vodka for ever!  What is the result?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The old women in the villages," read the ticket-collector, "can hardly
+believe their own eyes, so changed are their menfolk....  Everywhere
+peace, kindness and industry.  War is said to be hell; but this is like
+a foretaste of heaven."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Listen to this," cried the collector, his arm outstretched.  "A
+newspaper correspondent writes, since the sale of vodka stopped the old
+night population (in the doss-houses) seems to have vanished."  Every
+passage he read bore the same testimony.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And what are we doing?" he exclaimed.  "We have stopped nothing; we
+surround our soldiers with the old temptations, and we leave their
+defenceless wives exposed to the same temptations; I know all about it.
+Mahn, it was Ruskin that said, 'There is no wealth but life,' and we
+leave all our wealth of life at the mercy of every evil.  It's a fair
+scandal.  Do you ken the conclusion I've come to!  It is that the best
+form of government is a benevolent despotism.  Oor men are afraid of
+this and that&mdash;losing votes&mdash;but an autocrat with a stroke of a pen can
+sweep away the power of hell.  If they would only make King George an
+autocrat for a few years....  That would be grand!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He insisted on lending me the blue-covered pamphlet, and it being his
+hour off he walked with me across the bridge.  The valley was now dark.
+The snuff-manufacturer's house down below was wrapped in gloom.  Lights
+twinkled on the slopes.  Below a lamp-post at the far end of the bridge
+two men stood.  When he saw them the ticket-collector stood fast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mahn," said he, "I've come to a great resolution.  I'm too old to
+fight; and they canna get at me in ony way.  No Income-tax for me; and
+threepence on the tea is naething, for I never take it; I want to feel
+that I am worth men dying for me; and I am going to be tee-total till
+the end of the war.  I'll give the money to help the soldiers' weans.
+It's the weans that pull at my heart-strings."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And he turned on his heel and walked rapidly back across the bridge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Under the lamp-post stood the roadman and the beadle, looking after
+him.  I spoke to them, for since the war began we all speak to each
+other in our parish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Has he forgotten ony thin'?" asked the roadman, waving a hand towards
+the retreating form of the ticket-collector.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be
+tee-total till the end of the war."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost
+soul!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long
+flight of stone steps that leads to the road above.  On the top of the
+first flight I turned and looked after them.  When they came opposite
+the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went
+resolutely past, down into the hollow.  The two of them have probably
+resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."
+</P>
+
+<HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="20%">
+
+<P>
+I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed.
+It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised
+its queerness before.  A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I
+never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to
+write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is
+that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that
+lay twice a day under my feet&mdash;the problem of the Cities of the Plain.
+A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime
+hazy.  Events stand out luridly and arrestingly.  Here is one.  I was
+in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out.  All of a sudden there
+sounded the drum,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">"Saying Come,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Freemen, come,</SPAN><BR>
+Ere your heritage be wasted! said the<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">quick alarming drum."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet.  Mothers gave their
+sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with
+men and horses, going out to fight and die.  The hawsers were loosed.
+The steamer churned and backed and crept away.  A girl stood near me
+crying softly.  A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no
+tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and
+called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?"  And she wiped her cheek with the
+moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I
+am not crying."  And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into
+the drizzle and the haze.  Weeks later I read how one man of that
+regiment&mdash;the regiment of my own county&mdash;killed another ... and a few
+days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl.  He was not
+from the island, that man, and I know not who he is.  His mother
+doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became
+a murderer under the fostering of the State.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State
+that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with
+temptations.  Away from the influence of mother and sister and
+sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the
+State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did
+so.  The Secretary of War made appeals to them.  "Be sober," said he,
+"avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live."
+But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that
+you may disregard the noble advice my servant gives you."  They came in
+their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call
+of their mother&mdash;clean and sober&mdash;and their mother opened the canteen
+for their benefit on the plain.  Such a world as that dwelt in the
+imagination of Dean Swift&mdash;I never imagined that it could exist here
+and now.  And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are
+we preparing for the men who are baring their breasts to the arrows,
+standing between us and death?  When they come back, war-worn, to what
+will they return?  To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the
+candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children
+famished and neglected?  Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice;
+is it for that that they have gone down into hell?  Surely it cannot be
+for that!  A wave has passed over us, raising us to the realisation of
+the higher values of things.  Words live for us now which were dead
+yesterday.  A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and
+the word <I>Temperance</I> has risen from the couch on which it lay dying,
+and it claims us for its own.  Through it we can make the world know
+that we are worth fighting for&mdash;worth that the young, the strong, and
+the brave should take everything they hold dear&mdash;their ideals, their
+love, their little children unborn&mdash;and throw them into the trench, and
+there give themselves and their dreams to death for us.  We must see to
+it that we are worthy the sacrifice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+***
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seemed to me hitherto that I was a citizen of the country endowed
+with the greatest freedom on earth.  But the ticket-collector has
+proved to me that that was a dream.  Here in our parish I have no power
+to control this thing that matters so vitally in the Cities of the
+Plain.  We have a Parish Council and a County Council, and I don't know
+how many other dignified and honourable authorities, whom we elect.
+But we elect nobody to control this.  A body of unelected Justices, of
+whom we know nothing, settle for us that down yonder in the Cities of
+the Plain there shall be half a dozen State-regulated places for the
+manufacturing of paupers and criminals.  (The laws change with such
+kaleidoscopic swiftness in those days that I may be wrong.)  And here
+am I, newly awakened by the ticket-collector to that enormity, and I am
+not free to do anything.  It is surely a mad world.  We needed to be
+awakened; and we have been awakened with the shriek of shells and the
+crying of the perishing!  And the result of the awakening will be
+regeneration for the Cities of the Plain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+***
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The ticket-collector has deprived me for the time being of my peace of
+mind.  My conversion is so recent that I am afraid of falling into the
+fanaticism of the newly converted.  I followed the General the other
+day into the railway carriage, and as we were passing over Sodom, lying
+there under our feet, I spoke to him about it.  He looked at me with
+cold eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you want to sacrifice the freedom of the individual?" he asked in
+his curt military tones; "do you think that you can make saints of
+people by Act of Parliament?  They would be mere plaster-saints."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was reduced to silence.  My new-born zeal seemed to ooze out at every
+pore.  There was a touch of amused scorn in the General's eye as he
+glanced at me.  The General is a man of experience, and he is quite
+right.  Acts of Parliament will never make saints of the people.  But
+the State can see to it that the people are not surrounded by
+temptations through the operations of Acts of Parliament; that, if the
+State is impotent to make saints, it shall not, on the other hand, set
+itself deliberately to make devils.  That, it seems to me, is what the
+State is now doing in the Cities of the Plain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In ten thousand schools the State sanctions that its children be taught
+to pray&mdash;"Lead us not into temptation," and that same State encircles
+the path of its children by legalised temptations at every corner.  It
+is the maddest of worlds.  I may be wrong and the General wholly right.
+But as the ticket-collector said the last time I saw him&mdash;"I would like
+to see the man who could convince me that I am wrong."  And I don't
+know whether to be grateful to the ticket-collector or not.  He has
+deprived me of some of my sleep; he has made my head ache with thinking
+of problems which I am not fit to cope with; and, most unlooked for of
+all, he has made a tee-totaler of me till the end of the war.  There is
+a plaintive note in the ticket-collector's voice, which strikes a chord
+in my heart, when he invariably adds: "I hope the war won't last long."
+For, if it does, there will be the danger of the ticket-collector and
+myself becoming teetotalers for altogether.  And it is such an ugly
+word&mdash;tee-totaler!  If only the ticket-collector would coin a new and
+beautiful word to connote his new and beneficent state of mind!  It is
+a pity that great causes should be burdened by the weight of ugly words.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS<BR>
+BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.<BR>
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Discovery, by Norman Maclean
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Discovery, by Norman Maclean
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Discovery
+
+Author: Norman Maclean
+
+Release Date: September 4, 2010 [EBook #33635]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT DISCOVERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT DISCOVERY
+
+
+BY
+
+NORMAN MACLEAN
+
+
+
+
+"Had I stood aside when in defiance of pledges to which my kingdom was
+a party, the soil of Belgium was violated and her cities laid desolate,
+when the very life of the French nation was threatened with extinction,
+I should have sacrificed my honour, and given to destruction the
+liberties of my Empire and of mankind."
+
+_Proclamation by King George V._
+
+
+
+
+GLASGOW
+
+JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS
+
+PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY
+
+1915
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+
+JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW
+
+Publishers to the University
+
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD. LONDON
+
+  New York ... The Macmillan Co.
+  Toronto .... The Macmillan Co. of Canada
+  London ..... Simpkin, Hamilton and Co.
+  Cambridge .. Bowes and Bowes
+  Edinburgh .. Douglas and Foulis
+  Sydney ..... Angus and Robertson
+
+MCMXV
+
+
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
+
+  DWELLERS IN THE MIST.
+  HILLS OF HOME.
+  THE BURNT OFFERING.
+  CAN THE WORLD BE WON FOR CHRIST?
+  AFRICA IN TRANSFORMATION.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+J. P. CROAL
+
+TO WHOM THIS BOOK OWES
+
+ITS EXISTENCE
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+Six articles which the writer contributed to _The Scotsman_ constitute
+this book.  Four of these, which appeared under the title "In Our
+Parish," were, in response to requests, re-printed by _The Scotsman_ as
+leaflets, and in that form had a circulation that reached an aggregate
+of 100,000.  One of the articles (now Chapter II.), which was published
+on February 14, 1914, has been revised and somewhat enlarged.  The rest
+are reprinted substantially as they were originally written.
+
+In these last months there has come to the nation a spiritual and
+ethical revival.  Life will never again be what it was in the last long
+summer days ere the guns began to speak.  It will be a better world
+than it has yet been.  The nation is being saved as by fire, and in the
+fire much dross will be consumed.  The conscience of the State has been
+stirred, and it cannot in the future acquiesce in the continuance of
+the social evils which are gnawing at the nation's heart.  The fate of
+the Empire in the long years to come will depend more on the fight for
+social renewal in the midst of the streets than on red battlefields.
+To the men who have stood between the race and destruction the State
+owes a debt which it can only repay by such measures of social
+regeneration as will make possible for every man and woman to realise
+the thrill and the joy of life.  These pages only represent an effort
+to portray the first stirring of that newly awakened consciousness of
+God and of duty which was felt in every parish throughout the Empire,
+and which is destined to transform the world.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+   I.  THE GREAT DISCOVERY
+  II.  THE REVIVAL OF PATRIOTISM
+ III.  THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS
+  IV.  THE POWER OF PRAYER
+   V.  THE VICTORY
+  VI.  THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The Great Discovery
+
+
+
+I
+
+While the thing is still fresh in my mind I will try to put it down on
+paper--the incredible thing that has happened in our parish.  When we
+had least thought about life's great things, we have come face to face
+with the greatest.
+
+We had been for long years living on the surface of things.  The sun
+basked on the slopes of the hills, purple at eve; we came back from the
+offices in town, plunged through the tunnel, and hastened to our
+gardens.  We lifted up our eyes to the hills, and our security seemed
+as immovable as their crests soaring above the little dells that were
+haunts of ancient peace around their foundations.
+
+Long years of ease dimmed our vision.  The church bell rang in vain for
+many of us.  Those who had six whole days in the week to devote to
+their own pleasure began to devote the seventh also to that same end.
+The day of peace was becoming a day of unrest.
+
+Thus it was with us when, with the suddenness of a lightning flash, the
+incredible overtook us.
+
+***
+
+If only one could put it into words!  But words can never express this
+sudden meeting of man and God when that meeting was least expected.
+
+It was heralded by the booming of guns across the sea.  The great city
+lay slumbering between us and the shore, but over the turrets and
+spires it came--boom, boom--under the stars.  It was war.  That
+far-away echo might not itself be the grim struggle of death, but it
+was its harbinger.  Over all the seas death would soon be riding on the
+billows.  Faces became stern.  Good-byes were spoken.
+
+Ah! that word "Good-bye," which we hear every day, and which, like
+those old coins which have passed from hand to hand so long until at
+last the image and superscription are gone, had lost all trace of its
+original meaning, retaining nothing but a faint aroma of courtesy,
+which sometimes vanished in the inflection of the voice until the word
+became only a discourteous dismissal--that word was born for us anew.
+We heard it on the lips of mothers clinging to the hands of their sons,
+who were summoned away to join their regiments, and as white lips said
+"Good-bye" to those whose blood was to water the fair fields of France,
+we suddenly realised what it meant.  The word, meaningless yesterday,
+to-day expressed the greatest wish that the lips of man can utter--God
+be with thee.  On the mother's lips the word was the commitment of her
+boy to the charge of the encompassing God.  Then, when the harvest was
+ripening on the slopes and the drum sounded "Come," and the young and
+the strong went forth with a smile to the great harvesting of death, we
+learned again the meaning of a phrase.  But we were yet to learn the
+meaning of a word.
+
+It is in the darkness that the stars appear and the immeasurable
+abysses of the infinite universe, and it was when the dusk sank into
+the deep night that the word rose high in the firmament of life and
+burned red into our souls.  And that word was God.
+
+It seemed so incredible to us that we should need that old word.  We
+were so powerful and so rich.  Our faith was strong, but it was in the
+reeking tube and in the smoking shard, and in the number of our
+Dreadnoughts.  Then all these things seemed to fail us.  A nightmare
+seemed to fall on us--a nightmare which lifted not night or day.  Our
+soldiers were driven back, back, back.  They fought by day and marched
+by night, and we heard in the night watches the beating of their
+wearied feet, blood stained.
+
+Was there to be no end to that tramp, tramp of men yielding before
+death?  Was the Empire reared by the heroism of generations to crumble
+under our feet?  The ghastly deeds of shame--were they to come to our
+doors!  We looked at our children, and they could not understand the
+light in our eyes.  These deeds of hell--they might occur even now
+under the shadow of our hills.  It was then that the word began to
+blaze in the heavens.  And the word was--God.
+
+***
+
+We had built a new church in our parish, that those who built pleasant
+houses on the slopes, fleeing from the restless city that lay below,
+might have room to worship.  But the desire to worship seemed to be
+dying of attrition.  And the old church where the quarriers and farm
+servants assembled and worshipped in an atmosphere that on a warm day
+became so thick that one could cut it with a knife--that old church
+would have been quite big enough to hold all who came, for the instinct
+to pray seemed to be dying.  And many, because the new church was now
+too big, regretted the old.
+
+Then, suddenly, the new church was filled to the door.  Men and women
+discovered the road leading down to the hollow where the church stands
+amid the graves of the generations.  With wistful faces they turned
+towards it.  While the bell rang they stood in groups among the graves.
+And if you listened there was but one word--war, war, war.  Over and
+over again just that one word.  Until the bell was silent, and they
+turned into the now crowded church.
+
+As I sat there and cast a glance around me, I felt a sudden amazement.
+Those who never before had come down the steep brae when the bell was
+ringing were sitting here and there just as if they had been there
+every Sunday when the beadle, with head erect, ushers the minister to
+the pulpit and snips him in.  (Though the church is new, the minister
+is yet snipped in by the beadle--a lonely prisoner there on his perch,
+and it is an uncanny sound to hear the click of that snip shutting in
+the solitary man.)
+
+In the pew in front of me sat a burly man with a head like a dome.  He
+never came to church.  When I met him he would stand for an hour in the
+lane among the hawthorns explaining his views.  Prayer was mere
+superstition.  Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the
+universe in their grasp.  To ask that one of these laws should be
+altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to ask
+that the universe might be shattered.  Prayer was immoral, the asking
+for what could not be granted, and what we knew could not be granted.
+If he went to church it would be hypocrisy on his part.
+
+And thus it came that when the farm servants came up the Gallows road
+on their way to church on a summer morning, they often heard the whirr
+of my friend's mowing machine as he mowed his lawn.  It was the way he
+took of letting the parish know that culture could have no dealings
+with effete superstitions.
+
+***
+
+And yet there he sat in front of me with a hymn-book which he picked up
+from the shelf at the door, where such books are piled for the use of
+camp-followers.  The tune of the opening Psalm was Kilmarnock, and my
+friend sang it in a way which showed that his mother had trained him
+well.  Then I forgot him, but after a while something like a stifled
+sob in front of me brought him again to my consciousness.
+
+The minister began to pray for the King's forces "on the sea, on the
+land, and in the air."  My mind was playing round the words "in the
+air," for they were an intrusion into the familiar order--an
+innovation!  Every invention of man seemed doomed to become a weapon in
+the hand of the devil.  But the prayer went on--for the sailors keeping
+their watches in the darkness of the night that God might watch over
+them, that through their unfaltering courage our shores might be
+inviolate; for the soldiers now facing the enemy, grappling with death,
+that God might succour them, covering their heads in the day of battle.
+"Break Thou down the fierce power of our enemies," cried the minister
+suddenly, "that with full hearts we may praise Thee, the God of our
+fathers."
+
+A great hush fell on the crowded church.  The shut eyes saw the red
+battlefields, with the lines swaying to and fro, while the shrapnel
+burst and the aeroplanes whirred in the smoke of the cannon.  The cries
+of men suddenly smitten smote on the inner ear.  It was then that the
+great thing happened.
+
+All of a sudden the voice broke, recovered, and broke again, and the
+minister was swept away from the well-ordered, beautiful words he had
+prepared.  He began to speak of the stricken hearts at home, of fathers
+and mothers to whom their sons would never return, of women in empty
+houses with their husbands laid in nameless graves, of little children
+who would never learn to say "Father" ... It was then that my friend
+stifled a sob.  There was Something after all, Someone greater than
+cosmic forces, greater than law--with an eye to pity and an arm to
+save.  There was God.
+
+And my friend's son was with the famous regiment that was swaying to
+and fro, grappling with destiny.  He was helpless--and there was only
+God to appeal to.  There comes an hour in life when the heart realises
+that instinct is mightier far than that logic which is, after all is
+said, only the last refuge of the feeble-minded.  There came like the
+sudden lifting of a curtain the vision of a whole nation--nay, of races
+girdling the whole earth--to whom the same high experience has come.
+Everywhere the sanctuaries filled, the eyes turned upward, for instinct
+is mightier than reason.  The smoke of battle has revealed the face of
+God.
+
+***
+
+With us in the parish churches of Scotland the great thing is the
+sermon.  But to-day it is different; the great thing now is prayer.
+And the minister preached about prayer.  He set forth in clear and
+ordered language, with a felicitous phrase now and then lighting up his
+sentences, that prayer was not a mere relic of fanatical superstition
+but a mighty power.  He discussed with a wealth of learning whether God
+had shut Himself in behind a prison-house of cosmic laws that made it
+impossible for Him to answer prayer.  He reasoned the worshippers cold.
+But there in that hour reason was bound to give way before intuition.
+
+"If I am free," cried the preacher, "to rush to the help of my child
+when he crieth in terror; and if, when the creatures of His hand cry to
+God He is bound and cannot help or soothe, then He is poorer than I, so
+great a thing is freedom."  Prayer was not mere spiritual gymnastics.
+A God immured in cold laws, barred for ever from the play of love or
+tenderness, would be the one being in the universe most to be pitied.
+The Creator did not sit deaf and dumb on the Throne of indifference
+answering nothing, doing nothing.  History was the proof that
+Righteousness was throned at the core of the universe, for at the last
+right ever prevailed.
+
+Then the measured tones went on to speak of the difficulty of believing
+in the efficacy of prayer when Christians faced Christians in mortal
+conflict, and they both cried for victory--both the children of the One
+Father crying for victory over each other.  But the difficulty was of
+appearance only.  For the only prevailing prayer was prayer in the name
+of Christ.  "Whatsoever ye shall ask _in My name_ that will I do."  To
+ask in His name was to ask in His spirit--the spirit of humility,
+self-sacrifice, and love--the spirit of self-surrender to the _will_
+supreme.  The question was which of the prayers for victory was prayer
+in the name of Christ....
+
+This was clear, convincing, but cold.  Only at rare intervals does the
+minister of our parish give way to passion.  Suddenly there came a wave
+of emotion.  He flung his head back, and his eyes glowed.  His voice
+vibrated through the church.  "When I think," he exclaimed, "of the
+things that have been done with the name of God on men's lips; of
+atrocities such as the unspeakable Turk never perpetrated; of war waged
+not upon to-day but upon the centuries of faith that reared great
+cathedrals now in flames; of women and children laid upon the reeking
+altars of human passion; and all this in the name of culture, the
+culture of the superman who deems himself superior to the Ten
+Commandments--then, I say, may God grant that the culture which beareth
+such fruit may perish from off the face of the earth.  Prayer for the
+triumph of such a cause cannot be in Christ's name...."
+
+But the preacher never got any further.
+
+This was what happened, and I am afraid some will not believe me, for a
+Scotsman in church is a stoic, motionless and dumb, as he listens to
+the Word.  But all the traditions of the parish were snapped in a
+second.  In the side gallery sat the General, sitting as he always does
+with his back to the minister.  This he does that he may mark who are
+in church of his servants and tenants, and who absent.
+
+When I read of the nobles in France who went to the scaffold with a
+jest in the days of the Terror, I always think of the General.  He is
+that sort of man.  To-day, little by little, as the sermon went on, he
+turned round.  At last he was facing the pulpit.  His gleaming eyes
+were fixed on the preacher.  His son was dead.  And when the words rang
+through the church, may God grant that such culture may perish ... the
+General sprang to his feet.  "Amen" rang his voice through the church.
+
+There was a sudden movement; as one man they all rose to their feet.
+Hands were lifted up to heaven.  "Amen," "Amen," they cried--and then
+there rose a cheer--muffled, but still a cheer.  In the pulpit the
+words died on the preacher's lips.  He seemed as one suddenly stricken.
+He gazed bewildered over the sea of faces.  They sank back into the
+pews as though suddenly ashamed.
+
+The last man to sit was my friend, who stood to the last with uplifted
+hand.  I think it was he who cried "Hear, hear"--the only sign he gave
+of his long absence from church.  The sermon was never finished.  The
+preacher in a low voice said, "Let us pray."  And he humbled himself as
+one who enters the valley of humiliation.  And then he gave out this
+psalm:--
+
+  Now Israel
+    May say, and that truly,
+  If that the Lord
+    Had not our cause maintained;
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  Then certainly
+    They had devoured us all.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  But blessed be God,
+    Who doth us safely keep,
+  And hath not giv'n
+    Us for a living prey
+  Unto their teeth,
+    And bloody cruelty.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+
+This psalm as we sang it that day was a paean of triumph.  The clouds
+suddenly broke.  We heard our fathers singing it in their dark days.
+The melody wedded to the words soared in exultant triumph, wailed like
+the cry of the shingle swept by the surf; the sighing of the wind over
+the heather was in it, and the hissing of the storm through the spray.
+It was fierce as devouring death; it was gentle as a mother crooning
+over her child.  It put iron into the blood of our fathers as they sang
+it.
+
+It was nerved by such a hymn that the sailors of Queen Elizabeth swept
+the main, that the Puritans wrestled with principalities and powers,
+that a handful of moors-men levelled despotism and tyranny to the
+ground.  It swept through our blood like flame as we in our day of
+stress now sang it.  We, too, would pull down strongholds and turn to
+flight the armies of the alien.  In all ages the cause of freedom
+triumphed, and that cause was ours.  We had entered on conflict with
+clean hands and, God helping us, we would wage it with clean hands.
+The clouds suddenly broke and the light of victory irradiated our
+faces.  There came overwhelmingly the realisation that there was a
+power behind us mightier far than sword or shell--even the Lord God
+Omnipotent.  And that was how we made the greatest of all
+discoveries--we found God.
+
+***
+
+Yesterday morning I went early to the station, and there in the booking
+office I found my friend talking to the ticket-collector.  The
+ticket-collector is a philosopher, and he comes to church, because he
+loves the old psalm tunes.  But when one of our parishioners who goes
+now and then to Keswick comes to the booking office, the
+ticket-collector calls him in and reasons with him gently.
+
+"Mahn, there's naething in it," he says; "I can tell you for a fact
+there's naething in it--all a whack of fables."  "Some day you'll find
+out to your cost that there's something in it," flashes the man from
+Keswick.  "If ye wad only reid philosophee," says the ticket-collector,
+"ye would ken better."  But to-day my friend and the ticket-collector
+had their heads close together, and I only heard the conclusion of
+their argument.  "Mahn," said the ticket-collector, "I am beginning to
+think there may be something in it."
+
+And in the evening near the top of the brae I saw the General standing
+erect with his little cane in his hand.  He was talking to the
+shoemaker, the greatest Radical in the parish--one of a party with
+which the General has no dealings.  But they talked like brothers.  For
+the shoemaker has a son fighting at the front, and his heart is sore
+troubled within him.  And the General's son is dead.  And as I came up
+the brae I saw the General putting his hand on the shoemaker's shoulder
+and turn away, walking slowly up the brae.  The old shoemaker saluted
+and came down the brae.  There was a tender look in the old man's eye
+as he greeted me.
+
+In our parish we have truly made the greatest of all discoveries.  We
+have found God, and, finding Him, we have found each other.  The man
+who in his madness kindled the lurid flames of war little dreamed of
+this fire which he kindled.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The Revival of Patriotism
+
+
+
+II
+
+There has come to us in these days a revival of the spirit of
+patriotism.  That revival has come when it was sorely needed.  In days
+of unclouded prosperity other gods called forth our devotion and
+enthusiasm, but the God of our Fathers who made us a great nation and
+sent us to sow the seeds of righteousness beside all waters, bestowing
+upon us empire and might, was well-nigh forgotten.
+
+For the new man "words like Empire, Patriotism, Duty, Honour, Glory and
+God" had little or no meaning.  Causes for which the fathers died could
+not evoke an added heart-beat from their sons.  They cared so little
+for the mighty empire which they inherited that they contemplated the
+bloodshed of civil war--so hot was their zeal for party and so cold
+their love for the state.
+
+It was necessary that discipline should come.  And that discipline
+came, shaking the very foundations of our national life.  Its first
+fruit is that the smouldering fires of patriotism have broken forth
+once more into bright flame; and that everywhere the hearts of the
+people have been stirred by the call to arise and endure hardness that
+the goodly heritage of empire perish not.  And preachers in a thousand
+pulpits have sounded the trumpet-note of duty and of patriotism.
+
+***
+
+It has been said that preachers should aim at making the churches
+sanctuaries of peace, within whose walls the echoes of the guns and the
+cries of the perishing should not penetrate.  Some have even said that
+Christianity, so far from fostering the spirit of patriotism, is in
+reality hostile to it.  "Patriotism itself as a duty," says Lecky, "has
+never found any place in Christian ethics, and strong theological
+feeling has usually been directly hostile to its growth."
+
+No doubt there is something to be said for that view.  The attitude of
+the early Christians towards the Roman Empire was not that of
+patriotism.  The clear shining of the heavenly Jerusalem so dazzled
+their eyes that this world, and the temporal empire occupying its
+stage, seemed but as a shadow.  Their devotion to the Unseen King left
+little room for loyalty to the earthly ruler.  In the glorious
+consciousness of his citizenship in heaven, it was a small thing in the
+estimation of St. Paul that he was also a Roman citizen--but he did not
+forget it.  But when the earthly ruler persecuted, and burnt, and threw
+the Christians to the lions, or slaughtered them to make a Roman
+holiday, then the poor victims cannot be blamed for not being patriots.
+
+And the Church in the mediaeval period, organised in the mighty
+hierarchy of Rome, did not tend to foster a national spirit of
+patriotism.  In those days when the Emperor Theodosius made penance in
+the Cathedral of Milan and Ambrose declared that "the Church is not in
+the empire, but the Emperor in the Church"; or in those later days when
+Hildebrand promulgated the doctrine that the temporal power was subject
+to the spiritual power, and kings and emperors were only vassals of the
+Church, and Henry V. was left three days standing barefooted in the
+snow waiting humbly to see the Pope at Canossa--in those days certainly
+Christianity sought to foster not the sense of national loyalty, but
+that of devotion towards that holy Catholic and universal Church whose
+visible head was the Pope.  Christianity placed the Pope on the throne
+of the Caesars, and sought to evoke towards him a patriotism which
+transcended nationality.  But the Reformation gave its death blow to
+Hildebrandism, and the Pope no longer usurped the temporal Thrones of
+Europe.  And there came the throb of the awakening spirit of
+nationality.  The spirit of patriotism stirred once more the slumbering
+races.
+
+***
+
+The question whether patriotism is a fruit of Christianity must be
+answered not by reference to what men did in the name of their
+religion--for men are fallible--but by the precept and example of the
+Founder of Christianity.  He was a Jew, and of all races the Jew was
+the most patriotic.  An exile by the rivers of Babylon, the Israelite
+refused to forget Zion.  "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
+hand forget its cunning"--that was the cry wherewith his unconquerable
+soul faced an overwhelming destiny.  And in this respect Jesus Christ
+was true to His race.  He was a patriot.  He worshipped in the
+synagogues, and went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, because He loved the
+national institutions of His country.  One note of true patriotism is
+anguish.  It is when love is great that the folly and sin of the person
+beloved pierce the heart.
+
+The patriotism of the Founder of Christianity expressed itself in a cry
+of agony which has reverberated through the centuries--"O Jerusalem,
+Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are
+sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together,
+even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
+Behold, your house is left unto you desolate."  That cry is the measure
+of His patriotism.
+
+Judged, then, by the example of its Founder, Christianity must produce
+the spirit of love and loyalty towards one's own country.  There was a
+patriotism before Christianity, but it was that of arrogance,
+aggression, and self-glorification.  It was a patriotism which meted
+out only contempt to other races.  To the Jew the Greek was only a
+Gentile dog; to the Greek the Jew was only a contemptible Barbarian.
+
+But the patriotism which is animated by the Christian spirit is far
+other.  It is not the vaunting of pride nor the shouting of vulgar
+ditties.  It seeks the glory of its own country, but the glory it seeks
+is the glory of the greater service rendered to humanity.  Conscious of
+its own defects, it does not condemn others.  With eyes cleansed from
+prejudice, it beholds the good in other races.  It seeks the first
+place for its own nation because it acts the noblest, loves the best.
+All the elements which make up the strong power of patriotism--love of
+family, love of neighbours, love of race, love of country--Christianity
+has purified them all.  True patriotism is, then, a fruit of the
+Christian religion, a virtue which falls to be inculcated by the
+Church.  If Christianity be the projection of the Christ-life into the
+midst of every generation, then the life that reflects the beauty of
+Christ must be a life animated by the deepest love of one's country.
+
+***
+
+It was Dean Stanley who rendered God thanks in Paisley Abbey for that
+Scotsmen were "citizens of an Empire so great, members of a Church so
+free."  In the building up of the Empire Scotsmen have borne a great
+share of toil and peril.  In other days the fires of patriotism burned
+brightly.  The cry of our fathers was "my country right or wrong."  But
+we feel not quite so sure of our country being always in the right.
+The passion of Christianity is an ethical passion.  Christian
+patriotism demands national righteousness.  To keep patriotism as an
+ardent fire we must be convinced that our country stands for
+righteousness.  And in this day of our ordeal we have this certainty to
+uphold us, that we are fighting for the right.
+
+It was not in defiance of Christianity, but in its defence, that we
+drew the sword.  For this war sprang from an unbridled lust of conquest
+to which a whole nation surrendered itself.  But before surrendering to
+the passions of war the ideals of Christ were first forsaken by our
+enemy.  A new law was promulgated: "Become hard, O my brethren, for we
+are emancipated and the world belongs to us."  New beatitudes were
+declared: "Ye have heard how ... it was said, Blessed are the meek ...
+but I say unto you, Blessed are the valiant, for they shall make the
+earth their throne ... Ye have read, Blessed are the peacemakers, but I
+say unto you, Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called, if
+not the children of Jehovah, the children of Odin, who is greater than
+Jehovah."
+
+Out of this new gospel, the gospel of Odin, has sprung a war of
+extermination--exiled nations, devastated kingdoms, desolated colleges,
+ruined cathedrals, and multitudes of women and children "left nothing
+but their eyes to weep with."  The name of God has been invoked over
+unspeakable barbarities--but the God thus invoked is not the Christian
+God.  It is Odin in whose name these things are done.  What we are
+fighting for is for the Christian ideal against Odin--for the law of
+truth and mercy against the reign of falsehood of word and bond, and of
+merciless barbarity.  We have bared the breast to death that there may
+sit on the throne of the world's soul, not a ruthless tribal god, but
+the God of Fatherhood and Love whom Jesus Christ revealed.  And in
+waging that war we have ground to hope that the God of righteousness is
+on our side.
+
+If we have not had the name of God constantly on our lips it is not
+because we do not feel that we are fighting His battle, but because He
+is so great, the Lord of Heaven and Earth before whom we are but as
+dust, that we shrink from coupling His great name with ours.  "Are you
+sure that God is on your side?" Abraham Lincoln was asked in the dark
+days of the American Civil War.  "I have not thought about that," he
+replied; "but I am very anxious to know whether we are on God's side."
+And when the causes of this war are examined the assurance grows
+stronger and stronger that we are on God's side.  That is why the whole
+nation has been welded into the unity and consistency of polished
+steel; why the fire of patriotism burns in our midst with an intenser
+heat than ever before.
+
+***
+
+It is not merely from the righteousness of our cause in this war that
+our patriotism draws inspiration, but also from the ideals for which
+our Empire stands over all the world.  As we look out to-day on the
+Empire which our fathers bequeathed us, taking it all in all, it stands
+for righteousness as no other on earth.  It stands for the freedom of
+the soul and the freedom of the body all over the world.
+
+Think of India, whose three hundred millions have been rescued from
+tyranny and ceaseless bloodshed, whose widows have been saved from the
+flames, whose starving have been fed in famine, and to whom the British
+race brought security and peace.  "When I think," said ex-President
+Taft, "of what England has done in India ... how she found those many
+millions torn by internecine strife, disrupted with constant wars,
+unable to continue agriculture or the arts of peace, with inferior
+roads, tyranny, and oppression; and when I think what the Government of
+Great Britain is now doing for these alien races, the debt the world
+owes England ought to be acknowledged in no grudging manner."
+
+No work ever done on earth for the elevation of humanity can compare
+with that wrought in India by our race for the uplift of humanity; and
+it is the same wherever the standard of Britain waves.  In our own day
+we have seen in Egypt a whole race rising out of the mud and clothed
+anew in the garments of self-respect.  Through Africa, wherever the
+sway of Britain extends, though yesterday the land reeked with blood,
+to-day mercy and kindness are healing the woes of men, and millions who
+knew not when death lurked for them in the bush now sleep in peace
+under the palms.  It was the might of Britain that destroyed the slave
+trade, and it is nothing except the might of Britain which prevents the
+slave raider resuming his nefarious traffic, and slavery under the
+guise of other names being imposed on the natives of Africa.  Wherever
+you go, to the tropics or the Orient, there the great power for
+righteousness is the British Empire.  It does not exploit inferior
+races for gold; it is the trustee of the helpless native.
+
+When one thinks of these little islands floating in the western sea, of
+the power that has gone forth from them to heal and bless, of the vast
+multitudes to whom the King-Emperor is the symbol of justice and
+security--his is a poor heart which cannot feel the thrill of gratitude
+for citizenship in an Empire girdling the whole earth, whose
+foundations are thus laid in righteousness.
+
+***
+
+Patriotism is not, however, a mere sentiment.  It was not sentiment
+which built up the Empire.  It was self-sacrifice--the spirit that
+faced and endured death.  For us, too, patriotism must be more than
+sentiment; it must be action and the self-sacrifice which action
+requires.
+
+What our fathers reared we must defend.  And the startling thing is
+that there are still so many of our people who shrink from the burden
+which patriotism imposes.  Many thousands refuse to prepare themselves
+for war; who are as the Romans who could not leave their baths to go
+and fight.
+
+Vast multitudes congregate to gaze on football matches and gamble on
+the issue.  The call of King and country falls on ears grown deaf.  We
+thank God for those who, hearing the call, have gone forth to fight,
+counting everything but loss as compared to their country's gain.  But
+these others, they cannot have paused to think.  They have not pictured
+these fair lands, that have not heard the sound of war for seven
+generations, given over to that devouring enemy which has made Belgium
+a wilderness.
+
+They have not thought of Oxford and St. Andrews sharing the fate of
+Louvain; of London and Edinburgh become as Brussels; of the millions of
+Glasgow and Birmingham thrown on the mercies of the world, women and
+children fleeing, driven by nameless fears, with no place to flee to
+but the mountain fastnesses of Wales and the Highlands of Scotland--the
+last refuge of the miserable and the broken.  And yet these miseries
+would surely befall were all the manhood of the race such as these.
+
+Think what it would mean were the walls of our defence broken down.
+Supposing that a shattering blow were struck at the heart of the Empire
+and our fleet crushed.  What would follow?  The crumbling of the Empire
+in a week!  It is not we alone, with our wives and children in these
+little islands, who would be swept to ruin, and on whom despair would
+fall.  From the far north-west to the long wash of the Australasian
+seas the shadow of devouring misery and death would fall on humanity.
+The millions of India would be forthwith swept into the whirlpools of
+war and mutiny.  Egypt would be thrown back into chaos.  Africa would
+be left to Islam and the merciless rule of a nation which knows but how
+to smite.  Australia and New Zealand would be at the mercy of the
+yellow races.
+
+It would not be a calamity for us in these islands alone.  It would be
+a calamity whose withering blight would be cast over all the world.
+The ideals of righteousness which this Empire upholds would be trampled
+everywhere under foot.  Covetousness and the lust of gold would hold
+the field of the world.
+
+There is only one thing to be done, one duty summoning us with an
+irresistible call--the duty that calls us to stand between our country
+and destruction.  Were the fate which has overtaken the Low Country to
+overtake us; were this fair land to be made a wilderness, our women and
+children driven into the wilds, and the Empire wrested from our hands,
+the men who failed in their duty would never be able to hold up their
+heads again.
+
+What a terrible load would lie on him who, beholding the ruin of his
+native land, could say, "This might not have happened if I, and others
+like me, had done our duty."  That would be a hell from which there
+would be no escape.  "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell."
+
+There can be no limit to the sacrifice which patriotism requires, so
+great a heritage is our native land.  It does not require of us as
+Christians to engage in wars of conquest for the gratification of pride
+and greed, but it does require of us even the sacrifice of our lives in
+the defence of our homes or in the defence of our brother's home.
+
+There are those who find themselves faced with difficulty.  They are
+called upon to fight with every force in their power, to slay,
+withholding not their hand, while they hear the commandment, "Thou
+shall not kill," ringing in their ears, and across the centuries the
+voice of their Lord saying, "Resist not evil; whosoever shall smite
+thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also."  They are
+bewildered.  Is not the attitude of non-resistance that which Jesus
+Christ enjoins?  If they fight with sword and shell are they not
+lowering themselves to the level of Nietzsche, Bernhardi and Buelow, and
+submitting to the arbitrament of the sword, which decides nothing
+except its own sharpness.  The call of patriotism summoning to resist
+even unto blood comes to them, and they are uncertain whether to obey.
+
+But we must interpret the will of God, not by isolated sentences, but
+by the whole content of the divine revelation.  The commandment, "Thou
+shalt not kill," does not mean that we are not to kill in any
+circumstance whatever.  If the commandment is to be taken literally,
+then no limit is to be set to it, and we must not kill any animal--not
+even the parasites of uncleanness.  There is, moreover, another law
+which runs: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
+shed, for in the image of God created He him."  So far from the mere
+physical life being for ever sacred, the very altar of God Himself was
+to be no sanctuary for the murderer.  The man who owned a vicious ox
+and knew him to be vicious, and the ox killed a man, the owner thereof
+was to be slain.  There are therefore circumstances in which the law,
+"Thou shalt not kill," is abrogated, and its place is taken by the law,
+"Thou shalt kill."
+
+The law demanding the conservation of life rests on this foundation,
+not that physical life itself is sacred, but that human life bears the
+image of God.  There are things far more sacred than the physical
+life--even those things which constitute the image of God stamped upon
+man.  There are things for which men in all ages have been content to
+die--truth and loyalty to truth, the principles which are dearer than
+life.  Those things which God ordained that men might through them grow
+more and more into His image, for these things man must be ready to
+die, and among these things is nationality.
+
+Men cannot develop in isolation.  What poor creatures men would be if
+they were solitary units.  They would be as the beasts that perish.  It
+is through the heritage of nationality that the soul is enriched.  What
+poor stunted lives would ours be if we had not behind us the great and
+noble deeds which built up our Empire, if the words of the high souls
+of many generations did not come thrilling to our hearts, if
+Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Scott and Burns did not pour their
+treasures into our laps.  The soul grows into the image of God through
+the riches of nationality.  And whosoever warreth against nationality
+warreth against the soul.  And the men who warreth against the soul
+must be resisted to the death.
+
+***
+
+We dare not appeal to Jesus Christ to cloak our shrinking from
+sacrifice.  No doubt His gentleness has been the wonder of history; but
+His strength also summons us to be strong.  For Jesus Christ was not a
+quietist.  His religion is not a mere hospital for wounded souls.  His
+place is among the strong of the earth.  He faced the evil of this
+earth unflinching in His resistance.  "Woe unto you Scribes and
+Pharisees, hypocrites" is His denunciation of the oppressor; "Go tell
+that fox" is His message to the tyrant.  When we think of Him making
+the whips, and falling, with holy anger in His eyes, on those who
+desecrated the courts of the temple, overturning the tables of the
+money changers, we know that the ideal of non-resistance is not His.
+
+No doubt He laid it down as the law for the individual that he should
+turn the other cheek; but He did not lay it down as a law that a man
+should turn another's cheek to the smiter.  What the individual can do,
+the nation may not do.  It no doubt is the duty of the Ruler to turn
+his own individual cheek to the insulter; it is not his duty to turn
+the cheeks of the millions over whom he rules to those who would smite
+them, committing their children to shame and their homes to devastation.
+
+No doubt Jesus Christ enjoined the law of forgiveness, but it was not
+unconditional.  "If he repent, forgive him," is His law, and until the
+wrongdoer repents and ceases from his evil, it would be immoral to
+forgive him.  Duty demands that every means be used to bring the
+evildoer to repentance; for only so is there a chance of his soul being
+saved.  It is manifest that Christianity is not a religion of
+non-resistance to evil, but the religion of Him who Himself resisted
+evil, and who resisted it even to the death.
+
+Patriotism, therefore, demands that we resist even to the shedding of
+blood.  When a hostile army would destroy a nation, as in Belgium, it
+warreth against the soul, and it is as Christian to kill as it would be
+to shoot a tiger which leapeth out of the jungle to devour a man.  And
+that Irish soldier whose face in the hospital in Paris was irradiated
+with joy when he was told that the enemy was put to flight and Paris
+saved, and who died with that gladness in his face, died in the spirit
+of Jesus Christ.
+
+To say that the Founder of Christianity would not strike a blow for
+home and kindred and truth is to forget that He struck a blow in
+Jerusalem and wielded the thongs on the shoulders of those who polluted
+His Father's house.  It is His will that we should strike a blow in
+defence of the house of our soul--the sanctuary of nationality.
+
+***
+
+Patriotism must be vibrant with the spirit of religion if it is to be a
+power rousing the nation to heroism and self-sacrifice.  There never
+was a nation so patriotic as the Jew.  No city ever gripped a nation's
+heart-strings as Jerusalem gripped the heart of the Jew.  No suffering,
+no defeat, no exile however far, could quench the fire of patriotism in
+the heart.  "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
+her cunning.  Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I
+remember thee not, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy"--such
+was the cry of the Jew by the rivers of Babylon, yearning after Sion.
+
+How was it that Jerusalem thus pulled at its children's heart-strings
+until they hurried back to rebuild?  It was because Jerusalem was the
+seat of the worship of God.  It was not the material stones or the
+hills round about that thus compelled the heart.  It was the light of
+eternity shining over them.  It was because of the "house of the Lord
+our God" that the Jew counted no good worth his striving except the
+good of Jerusalem.  It is only when God standeth at the heart of a
+nation that the heart cleaveth with all its fibres to its native land,
+for then the whole of the man--not only the cravings of the body and
+the heart and the mind, but also the deeper cravings of the soul--wind
+themselves round the thought of the nation.
+
+Thus we find that the days when the fires of patriotism burned
+brightest were ever those in which God held sway over the nation.  It
+was with God that the sailors of Queen Elizabeth swept the main, that
+the soldiers of Wellington hurled the enemy far from the shores that
+face England--they were fighting not only for England but for England's
+God.
+
+The testimony of history is this, that patriotism cannot maintain its
+power if once it be divorced from religion.  Let God's face be veiled
+and lost and everything is lost.  "Without God nothing, with God
+everything," says the ancient Celtic proverb, and all ages testify to
+its truth.  And the last proof of it is now before our eyes in the
+condition of France.
+
+A hundred years ago France dominated Europe, erected thrones and
+deposed kings at its will.  But little by little France lost the vision
+of God, until at last M. Viviani celebrated the final triumph over the
+Church in 1907 by exclaiming: "With one magnificent gesture we have
+extinguished the lights of heaven, which none shall rekindle."  France,
+in the words of its present Prime Minister, "extinguished the lights of
+heaven," but in so doing it extinguished something else.  For to-day
+that nation, that not so long ago dominated Europe, can only protect
+its capital city by the help of the two nations which have not yet
+extinguished the lights of heaven.
+
+Without God patriotism becomes impotent, for God is the source of that
+moral law, conformity to which means for a nation life, and defiance of
+which means the degeneration that leadeth to destruction.  With the
+departure from God came moral decay and racial suicide.  The hope of
+France is this, that through the descent of the nation into the valley
+of death the lights of heaven may be once more kindled; the hope of
+Britain, that these same lights may shine more brightly.
+
+The spirit of patriotism will again vivify the nation when we seek
+after God.  In years of prosperity we have forgotten our high calling.
+We have pursued vanities and forgotten the living God.  When we again
+realise our calling and our election as instruments in the hand of God
+for the establishment of His Kingdom of Righteousness over all the
+earth, our hearts will be filled with ardour, and we shall face
+whatever perils may assail us strong in the assurance that the
+Omnipotent God is in our midst and that nothing can resist His will.
+
+***
+
+And this true patriotism will mean the salvation of the nation.  For it
+will strive to realise at home that righteousness which alone exalteth
+a nation.  Its first task will be to raise the life at home nearer to
+God, for we cannot raise the world to higher levels than that on which
+we ourselves stand.  The vision of the new Jerusalem descending from
+God out of heaven will again flame before our eyes.  "And I, John, saw
+the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven,
+prepared as a bride for her husband."
+
+That new Jerusalem is not a city remote in the inaccessible heights,
+but a city which descends and permeates the material city now so
+polluted by sin, until it becomes the "holy city," with the law of God
+obeyed and the will of God done in it.  Its citizens shall walk its
+streets, pure in heart, seeing God everywhere.  "And they shall bring
+the glory and the honour of the nations into it."  There the nations
+shall be one in the streets of the city of God, all their contendings
+forgotten in the sense of their brotherhood, following the one ideal,
+obeying the one law, loving each other in the love of God.  They will
+strive then as to who shall bring the greatest glory within the compass
+of its walls, and that will be the only striving.
+
+That is the ideal, that we should become a nation so permeated by the
+spirit of God, so brought into obedience to His will, that our cities
+shall become holy cities, even as the new Jerusalem coming down from
+God out of heaven.  When we shall set ourselves to realise that ideal
+once more, then will the nation evoke the devotion of its citizens, for
+devotion to the nation will also be devotion to God.
+
+It was that ideal which fired the patriotism of the Jew.  The same
+ideal alone will make our patriotism glow as a white flame.  When the
+vision of the Supreme Ruler whose throne is established in
+righteousness once more blazes forth before the people, then once more
+the throb of patriotism and the passion to make righteous law operative
+to the ends of the earth will stir the heart, and the manhood of the
+race will once more thrill with the call summoning to service and to
+sacrifice.  The answering shout will everywhere arise--For God and the
+King.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The Shadow of the Cross
+
+
+
+III
+
+The churchyard of our parish lies in a deep hollow, and a little river
+half encircles it.  In the midst of it stands the church beneath whose
+shadow the parish has garnered its dead for centuries.  There the
+generations have lain down to sleep, their hearts reconciled one to
+another, and the beadle has drawn the coverlet of green over them.  As
+he goes about his allotted task he pats a mound here and there gently
+with the back of his spade--for roadman and belted earl are at one here.
+
+The last time I wandered down to the hollow it seemed as if eternal
+peace brooded over the living and the dead.  The leaves, russet and
+gold, glowed in the sunlight.  At the stirring of a gentle breeze, like
+the dropping of a sea-bird's feather, leaf after leaf fluttered
+silently down on the graves.  The great bank of trees across the river
+glowed with rivulets of dull flames running hither and thither.  In its
+stony bed the river sang its endless song.  The immemorial yews,
+beneath whose branches successive generations of children have played
+with now and then a thrill of pleasing terror because of the
+overhanging graves, stood regardless of the sun.  The crows, sated with
+the gleanings of harvest fields, fluttered in their rookeries with
+scarcely a caw.  It seemed as if no sound of discord or strife could
+ever break in that enchanted hollow.
+
+***
+
+As I turned away to retrace my steps through the gate I came on a woman
+sitting on the mort-safe, a handkerchief moist with her tears in her
+hand.  She had come up from the quarries and she had visited her dead.
+And she came because yesterday she received word that on the
+battlefield of Marne her son was killed.  He was her eldest.  The
+others were not old enough yet to fight.  Her husband was killed in an
+accident, and she had reared her children, refusing all help from the
+parish.  The pride of the blood sustained her.  And now that her son
+was dead she came hither, driven by an irresistible instinct to visit
+her husband's grave.  It was as if she wanted to tell him about John,
+and how he died a hero, trying to carry a wounded comrade through the
+hail of the shrapnel.
+
+She was weary, and from her husband's grave she turned to the church.
+She would go and sit in the corner under the gallery, where John used
+to sit.  He had sat with her there at his first Communion.  The
+memories wrapped her round, and she would feel her son near her there.
+But the door of the church was locked and barred.  With an added ache
+in her heart she turned away, and weariness compelled her to sit on the
+iron mort-safe, which the parish provided in a former century to
+protect their dead from sacrilegious hands.  "But the church used to be
+open," I said.  "Aye," she replied tremulously, gathering up her
+handkerchief into a round ball; "but some did-na like it; the boots on
+the week-days are na sae clean, and they dirtied the kirk.  That must
+be why they lockit the door."  It was not that she complained.  Those
+who locked the church were wise men, and no doubt they knew best.  So
+she sat on the mort-safe.
+
+"I have other sons, and when they are older they will go, too," she
+said.  "I'll no' keep them back.  And if they die it'll be for God's
+great cause."  Her lips quivered as she spoke.  The moist ball in the
+right hand was clenched tight--there were no more tears to shed.
+
+And as I looked at the worn, lined face, the bent shoulders, the faded
+rusty black mantle with its fringe, and the sunken lips that quivered
+now and then, there came a sudden realisation.  I saw no longer the one
+grief-burdened figure sitting dejectedly on the mort-safe--I saw the
+unnumbered host of mothers throughout the world who have given their
+sons over to carnage, and who are as Rachel weeping for her children,
+refusing to be comforted because they are not.  Millions of men locked
+in the death grapple means millions of mothers given tears to drink in
+great measure, bound in affliction and iron.
+
+The song of the river went on ceaselessly, the russet-leaves fell
+softly, and the sun shone on a world wrapped in peace--all nature
+utterly regardless of the millions of Rachels that weep.  (Ten million
+hearts may break, but nature silences not one note of its joyousness.)
+And as she sat there, behind her, under the campanile, showed the
+church door, locked and barred.  Nature was heedless of her; the church
+shut its door upon her.  She seemed to me the Mater Dolorosa.
+
+***
+
+As I went up the brae there came the memory of a school lesson long
+ago.  Out of the subconscious it leaped as a diver might come up from
+the depths of the sea with a gleaming coin in his hand.  Among the
+temples of ancient Rome there was one temple always kept open in time
+of war.  There the Roman General clashed the shield and the spear,
+invoking the god ere he went to the battle-line, and its door was shut
+not day or night.  And I have no doubt but that the Eternal Ruler heard
+that clashing of spear on shield, and marked that open door.  But over
+wide districts of Great Britain we have left these pagan habits far
+behind us.  We shut the doors of our temples alike in war and in
+peace--excepting two hours on one day of the week, or in many cases one
+hour in the week.  Nor do I doubt but that the same Ruler marks these
+doors now shut on the mothers of sorrow, and these sanctuaries locked
+and silent.
+
+The glory was now gone from the day.  I could not forget how the iron
+mort-safe gave the rest that the Church refused.  The shadow lay heavy
+over the valley, and the mind tried to give the shadow a name.  But it
+could not.  So up the long flight of stone steps I climbed, and turned
+along a tree-shaded road.  There, where three roads meet, stands a
+little chapel within whose walls a small section of our parishioners
+worship.  I have passed it times out of mind without so much as
+glancing at it.  But to-day its open door arrested my eye, and I stood
+in the roadway and gazed.  And there came to me there a sudden sense of
+thankfulness for that there is one open door in our parish which
+witnesses to the fact that the power and solace of religion are not
+shut in within the confines of only two hours of one day in the week.
+
+While I yet stood in the highway there came forth from the little
+chapel an honoured parishioner, who is passing the golden evening of a
+useful life in researches regarding Calvin and the Pope.  Amazement
+possessed me, for he is a power in the parish church, whose door is
+locked and barred.  We walked together towards the hills.  There was a
+trace of apology in his explanation.  Since this dreadful cataclysm has
+burst and the boom of the guns has come drifting from the sea across
+the high-perched city, he has felt the need of quiet meditation.  Thus
+he has often on his walks slipped through the open door of the chapel
+that stands by the roadside.
+
+"And you have locked the door of the parish church," I exclaimed, "and
+you deny to the poor the privilege you yourself enjoy."  He stopped and
+faced me in the roadway, blinking at me.  "We never locked the Church
+door," he said.  "It used to be open," I answered; "I remember being
+glad to sit in it myself."  "Oh!  I remember," he exclaimed, "it was
+open every day for a few years, but the authorities were never
+consulted when it was thrown open--a most lawless proceeding!--and when
+a suitable opportunity occurred the beadle locked it up.  Law and order
+have to be vindicated."
+
+"What you did then," I replied, "was to allow the beadle to deprive the
+poor parishioners of a privilege which you and a few others enjoy
+elsewhere."  At that he started off walking along the road very
+quickly, but I kept step with him.  "You see," said he, waving a
+deprecatory hand, "I am only one among many, and I was so absorbed in
+these old Reformation controversies that I never gave it a thought, and
+it is only since the war began that I realised...."  And as he spoke I
+felt that my old friend, learned in many controversies, had experienced
+a revolution.  The great tide had swept him past all controversies
+right up to the fountain head.  He had learned that man's high calling
+is not to dispute, but to pray.
+
+As we walked under the darkling hills I told him of that shadow which
+had so suddenly fallen upon me that day, and he at once gave it a name.
+"It is the shadow of the Cross," said he.  And thereupon he began to
+explain out of the wisdom and ripened experience of seventy years how
+across nineteen centuries the shadow of the Cross lies still over all
+the world.  One thinks so seldom of these things, and if occasionally
+one hears them spoken of, familiarity with the words has deadened the
+hearer to their significance.  It was because I listened to him talking
+in the lane that his words gripped me.  They might have made no
+impression if he were in a pulpit.
+
+***
+
+We are accustomed to think of the greatest of all tragedies as an event
+consummated in six hours.  It is, however, far from consummated, for it
+is an age-long tragedy.  Its roots lay in self-interest.  A degenerate
+priesthood in an obscure Syrian town saw nothing in the Greatest of
+Teachers but an unbalanced enthusiast, who struck at their ill-gotten
+gains, and whose triumph would make an end of them and their system.
+So self-interest cried "Crucify."  And though the Roman Governor saw
+through them and wanted to save Him, self-interest again was brought
+into play, and when threatened with an awkward complaint to Rome, he
+said "Crucify."  And ever since then self-interest on innumerable lips
+has cried Crucify, Crucify.  Not only cried, but did it.
+
+For this Teacher identified Himself with His followers, saying that He
+was the Vine and they the branches.  It follows that whatever is done
+to the branch is done to the vine.  A branch cannot be cut and severed
+from the vine without the vine bleeding.  He declared it to be so.
+"Whosoever receiveth you receiveth Me," and it follows that whosoever
+crucifies you crucifies Me.  And the history of the centuries is the
+history of how the poor and unlearned and the toiling have been
+persecuted, harried by war, driven to death and crucified.
+
+Generation after generation have raised the Cross anew, and in the
+crucifying of the dumb multitudes have crucified Him.  Along with His
+own He fought with wild beasts, went through the flames, and suffered
+many bloody and diverse persecutions, and He was with His people now.
+He confronted to-day the mighty of the earth as He did that blinded
+priesthood of old, and He declared that there is only one way of
+conquering, and that by love; that gaining the whole world was a
+miserable bargain if in exchange a man parted with truth and
+righteousness and purity--those things that constitute the soul's very
+breath.
+
+But self-interest answered with cold disdain: "What sickly
+sentimentalist is this?  Let Him be crucified."  He faced to-day the
+lust of conquest, and declared that the conquering of men's bodies was
+nothing; that the only way of attaining power was to conquer men's
+hearts and minds and wills, thus clasping them to us with hooks of
+steel; that the will of God for His children was that they should love
+their enemies and not pour upon them the vials of wrath, trampling them
+under foot; but the arrogance of man answered with the hoarse cry,
+"Crucify."
+
+And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the
+holocaust of war--ten millions of men consigned to the hell of reeking
+trenches.  In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before,
+bearing its awful woe.  In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal
+Love is crucified.  It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips
+trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred
+door of the House of God.
+
+***
+
+The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done
+shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there
+should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power.  And yet there
+must be some explanation of it.  Why should a passion for righteousness
+be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified
+by a petty Roman official?  There can be no explanation but this--that
+that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which
+wrought so evil a deed.  That power was self-interest--selfishness.
+
+The eyes of men turned to Jesus Christ, and they saw one holy,
+harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, whose journeying was the
+journeys of healing among the sons of men, whose words were words of
+blessedness, declaring that God loved and pardoned His children, and
+yet men reviled, scorned, scourged and at last crucified Him.  The
+power that moved men to this dread crime was sin, and thus the word sin
+became a word of horror.  (For the selfishness that crucified was only
+one fruit of sin.)  Out of that realisation of the horror of sin there
+sprang an ethical passion--a passion which in the heart and in the
+world waged ceaseless war on selfishness and all the devices of evil.
+Thus humanity was lifted out of the mire.  They girded themselves to
+fight that dread and hateful power which crucified the Holy One.
+
+Like the wind blowing in from the sea that sweeps before it the foul
+miasma that lies over the valleys, so that men look up and see the
+heavens and feel a new vigour moving in their blood, so a breath from
+the living God came stirring the foul places of humanity, and the eyes,
+no longer blinded by the exhalations of evil passions, saw the ideal of
+purity arise before their eyes, and they turned to climb towards the
+clearer vision.  Through the revelation of purity in the face of Jesus
+Christ and the realisation of the awfulness of that power which crowned
+that purity with thorns, there came to humanity the dawning of
+deliverance from sin--a deliverance still going on to its fruition.
+
+***
+
+History is for ever repeating itself, and to-day the process of
+humanity's deliverance from evil will gather momentum and advance a
+long way towards the final triumph.  For just as men only realised the
+hatefulness of sin when they saw it laid upon Jesus Christ, so will it
+be also to-day.  A generation that had lost the sense of sin beholds
+sin laid upon millions of men, working woe unspeakable, and, beholding,
+learns anew what sin is and the hatefulness of it.  For these millions
+of men grappling with death, what are they but humanity's sin-bearers.
+On them is laid the burden of the sins of this generation.  The
+selfishness, greed, ambition, lust--all the passions which sweep men to
+wars of conquest--have poured the vials of misery on their heads.  The
+son of the widow sitting on the mort-safe, who now lies in a nameless
+grave, he bore it.  The bearing of it killed him.
+
+And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more
+burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that passion for
+righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust.  There will ring
+round the world the compelling cry that this power of hell must not for
+ever hold humanity in its grip--that ruthless ambition, militarism,
+despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth.  Once more
+the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men.
+
+***
+
+There was another power also that stirred the world under the shadow of
+the Cross, and that was the power of self-sacrifice.  There came to men
+an overwhelming realisation that at the heart of the universe was the
+Spirit of self-sacrifice, and that the Cross was but the expression of
+it.  They realised that the greatest thing a man can do with his life
+is to lay it down.  And as men realise to-day that the Cross still
+abides in the heart of God, so that in all their affliction He is
+afflicted, there comes to them the feeling that the one way of coming
+nearest to His heart is the way of self-sacrifice.
+
+Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought
+life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of
+self-sacrifice.  What is it that sustains the men who go down to the
+earthly hell of ruthless war?  It is just this--the consciousness,
+newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and
+country, for home and kindred.  They are content to be blotted out if
+only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be
+exalted.  Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once
+more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure.  Men charge
+across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes.  They are
+raised into the fellowship of the Cross.  And we are raised with them.
+
+If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the
+glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again
+lift up her face to the light.  He has died that we may live.  Greater
+love hath no man than this--nor yet greater glory.  But she needs not
+to be told; she knows it already.  She knows it far better than you or
+I do, for she feels it.  In the deep places of life where words are
+meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the
+glory of self-sacrifice.
+
+By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the
+soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of
+lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine
+wisdom which is hid from the wise.  She knows that the road that goes
+by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can
+come to God.  She knows that her son has walked along that road, and
+that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying
+while bearing it, God has brought him into that joy which all the
+cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe.  And because
+she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has
+felt the touch of God, she is ready to greet the day of still greater
+sacrifice.
+
+***
+
+In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and
+read an article.  It was a bitter invective against Christianity and
+the Church.  Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross--and this
+holocaust as the fruit.  It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced
+eye.  It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity
+for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the
+wicked have continued to crucify Him.  These things are so not because,
+but in spite, of Christianity.
+
+Grievous as war now is, yet it is not war as in the days before the
+Cross was erected on Calvary.  When Ulysses asked Agamemnon for
+sanction to bury the body of Ajax, the King was greatly annoyed.  "What
+do you mean?" he answered, "do you feel pity for a dead enemy?"  That
+was the spirit of war in the old heathen world--the spirit which had no
+mercy on the living and no pity for the dead.  Slowly but surely the
+spirit of Christ fettered the spirit of hate and dethroned the spirit
+of revenge.  We now minister to the wounded and bury the dead enemy
+with the pity and the honour we render to our own.
+
+We can trace the evolution of peace through the centuries.  Wars
+between individuals have ceased.  A century and a half ago warring
+clans in Scotland dyed the heather red; to-day wars between tribes have
+ceased.  There remains only war between nations, and already there are
+great nations between whom war is unthinkable.  If we in these days
+wage war with Germany, yet we in these days also celebrate the
+hundredth anniversary of unbroken peace with the United States of
+America.  If we bewail the failure of Christianity in the former, let
+us be grateful for the triumph of Christianity in the latter.
+
+Formerly war was the normal condition; now to the moral consciousness
+of Christendom war is an outrage.  We only need to look beneath the
+surface to realise that Galilee is conquering Corsica, and will conquer
+at the last.  Beneath the shadow of the Cross men will at last find
+healing for their grievous wounds.
+
+***
+
+And as a symbol thereof the doors of the sanctuaries of peace will be
+flung wide open, and no burdened heart will find the House of God
+locked and barred against groping hands.  One fruit of these grievous
+days may well be that the Church will realise that it does not become
+her to occupy a lower plane than that heathen temple in ancient Rome,
+whose door was shut not day or night while men were dying in battle.
+
+In the coming days when the mothers of sorrow come to their dead, over
+whose graves the falling leaves flutter as a benediction, they will not
+be left sitting on the iron mort-safe.  The open door will invite them
+into the sanctuary of peace, and they will croon the coronach of their
+woe in the holy place.  For they are the priesthood of this generation,
+offering up the most precious sacrifice--and the door of the holy place
+must be open to them.  And there, in the sanctuaries of peace, their
+sorrow will be transmuted into joy.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Power of Prayer
+
+
+
+IV
+
+For eight centuries the Church of St. Giles has been the centre of the
+religious life of Scotland.  At all times of sorrow the nation has
+turned to it, and within its walls, consecrated by the prayers of so
+many generations, the surcharged heart has voiced its woe in the
+presence of the Unseen.  But in all the years of the dim and fading
+past there never was a day like this in which we now stand.  Death has
+come as a grim spectre, and has looked into our eyes.  The winds carry
+to our ears the moans of our perishing sons, dying gloriously for
+freedom on the bloody fields of Flanders.  The great ships guard our
+shores, and we know that if that vigil failed, our cities and villages
+and fair countryside would become as Louvain and the Low Country.
+Death itself would be welcome rather than that.
+
+If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye
+has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our
+ears.  And that call soundeth not in vain.  To-day[1] the two great
+Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their
+misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country--for all the
+things which make life beautiful.  They have come through days of
+alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one
+place.  And in their hearts only one purpose--to seek the blessing of
+God for their nation.
+
+
+[1] November 18, 1914.
+
+
+***
+
+As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many bloody fights
+for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the
+church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of
+time.
+
+Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and
+out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the
+altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing
+for their dead.  The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of
+the surf wailing on the shore, and their sobbing as the cry of the
+grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide.  But the city fathers
+could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of
+destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of
+the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to
+rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to
+pass to the kyrk, and pray whane tyme requires for our Soveraine Lord
+and his Army, and neichbouris being thereat."
+
+That proclamation stirs the blood!  They are dust, these fathers of
+ours, but their spirit is all alive, throbbing in the heart of
+us--their far-away children.  Never did a race meet its Sedan in a
+sublimer spirit than that.  The strong, at toll of bell and tuck of
+drum, manned the ramparts, and the women filled St. Giles' and sent
+heavenward their cries.  The bodies of such a race may for a brief
+season be brought to subjection, but their souls are invincible--and it
+is the soul that always conquers.
+
+And here to-day it is the same.  From every part of Scotland men have
+come, and they passed "to the kirk to pray for our Sovereign Lord and
+his Army."  True, there has been no Flodden and no Sedan; but it is by
+the good hand of God upon us that the enemy was frustrated in his
+eagerness for another Sedan.  And it is in part the prayer of
+thanksgiving that is laid to-day upon His altar, and in part the
+petition that His mercies may be continued to the nation in the cruel
+days to come.
+
+***
+
+What a sanctuary for a nation's prayers, this church, where Kings have
+prayed and gone forth to die in battle; where Queens have wept as the
+voice of judgment, grim and stern, untouched by tenderness or love,
+sounded in the ear; where three thousand people dissolved in tears as
+the good Regent, foully slain, was borne to his grave.  Over it passed
+wave after wave of fanaticism and barbarism; and at last it fell into
+the hands of the restorers--more ruthless far than Goths or Vandals!
+But, through it all, the house of God survived; and, apparelled once
+more in some of its pristine glory, it opens its doors to a nation that
+once more seek after its God.
+
+And above us, as we sit there, hang the colours of our Scottish
+regiments stirring our patriotism, assuring us that the men who guarded
+these flags on many bloody fields were guarded by God, and that we are
+still in His keeping.
+
+What a place this is in which to set vibrating that note of patriotism
+which now quivers from Maiden Kirk to John o' Groat's.  These colours
+there--they are the most eloquent things on earth, for they pertain to
+the realm of symbols.  Words are poor compared to tears, and that is
+because tears belong to the world of symbols.  That tattered banner
+there belonged to the Gordon Highlanders, and was carried through the
+Peninsula and the Crimea.  Woven in faded letters you can read on it
+still Corunna, Almarez, Pyrenees, Waterloo.  Ah! these flags tell of a
+devotion stronger than death, rekindle the memories of the day when
+stern silence fell on the ranks, as the Highland Brigade breasted the
+slopes of the Alma until Sir Colin Campbell lifted his hat and they
+rushed on the foe with the slogan of victory; and that other day when
+"the thin red line tipped with steel" rolled back the surge of the
+Cossacks; aye, and of a hundred such days when men went down joyously
+to death that the race might be free and live.
+
+Waterloo!--it is on many flags.  And we remember how the Man of Destiny
+himself, as he saw his ranks yield before the onslaught of the
+Highlanders, did not restrain his admiration for his enemies, but
+exclaimed with the true soldier's generosity, "Les braves
+Ecossais"--"Brave, brave Scotsmen" (what a contrast to "French's
+contemptible little Army").  The hands that carried, the hearts that
+thrilled at the waving of these flags, their fame will never perish.
+
+  "On the slopes of Quatre Bras
+  The Frenchmen saw them stand unbroken.
+      *    *    *    *    *
+  On the day of Waterloo
+  The pibroch blew where fire was hottest.
+      *    *    *    *    *
+  When the Alma heights were stormed
+  Foremost went the Highland bonnets.
+      *    *    *    *    *
+  As it was in days of yore,
+  So the story shall be ever.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  Think then of the name ye bear,
+  Ye that wear the Highland tartan.
+    *    *    *    *    *
+  Zealous of its old renown,
+  Hand it down without a blemish."
+
+As the eye looks along the nave up into the choir and sees the gleam of
+red, colours after colours, there comes the memory of words--"We have
+heard with our ears, O God, and our fathers have told us what work Thou
+didst in their days in the times of old....  Through Thee will we push
+down our enemies...."  The unseen God who has led His people through so
+many and great dangers will not forsake them now.
+
+***
+
+There is a tablet where formerly stood the door that led to Haddo's
+Hole, and there hangs on a pillar the flag that pertains of truth to
+the realm of romance.  Men with their hearts hot with indignation
+buried it in Pretoria in 1880, and put above it the inscription
+"Resurgam."  Afterwards the Colonel recovered it and brought it home.
+When war broke out again his widow restored it to the regiment--the
+Royal Scots Fusiliers.  In 1881 that regiment was the last to leave the
+Transvaal; in 1900 it was the first to enter the Transvaal--as the
+inscription narrates.  And by the direction of Lord Roberts, when
+Pretoria was occupied, this identical flag was run up amid the shouts
+of the victors.  Now it rests here.  "Resurgam"--it is the unquenchable
+spirit of an invincible nation.
+
+If only the manhood of Scotland could be gathered into this Church,
+under these flags, and the story they tell were put into words,
+pulsating with passion--then the ranks of our Army would be filled up
+in a week.  What a lack of imagination we reveal!  We teach dates,
+thinking we are teaching history.  The only way to teach history is by
+flags, and all they stand for.  When Douglas threw the heart of Bruce
+among his enemies he cried, "Lead thou on as thou wast wont and Douglas
+will follow thee or die."  In the spirit of Douglas our fathers
+followed the flags, and we will follow in the steps of our fathers and
+face death with undaunted hearts as they were wont.  There comes to us
+the shouting of their triumph, and we cry: "Lead on; we will follow or
+die."  This grey church, St. Giles', is the temple of patriotism.
+Therefore our feet turn towards it in dark days, and we say, "Our feet
+shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!"
+
+***
+
+How the old words are born for us anew as we thus meet as one "to
+entreat God for the broken peace of Christendom."  We sing "God is our
+refuge and our strength," but there is a note of intensity in the
+singing now such as we never knew before.  Men close their eyes, and
+stand, the world blotted out, before their God, realising that He and
+He alone is the one refuge, the only giver of victory.  We hear the old
+story read of Moses holding up his hands and Israel prevailing on the
+plains below; but it is not Israel we see travailing in battle, but our
+own brothers in the rain-sodden trenches, and we feel the uprising of
+the ceaseless intercession of a nation that has anew found its God.  It
+is not the right hand that assureth victories; it is that spirit of
+enthusiasm, that passion for righteousness which filleth the heart, and
+that spirit is as the wind blowing where it listeth--and it cometh out
+of the Unseen at the call of our prayers.
+
+When in other days we prayed for the King it was in the spirit of cold
+formalism.  But now a lump rises in the throat as we invoke the
+blessing and protection of Heaven for the solitary man who is the
+symbol of the unity of our Empire, and who watcheth over its destinies
+day and night, and who has sent his son to face death with the meanest
+of his subjects.  We hear the glorious words: "If God be for us, who
+can be against us?" and they are written for ourselves.  We, who fight
+for the truth of word and for the freedom and deliverance of the
+oppressed, can feel that God is for us, and that all is well.
+
+And when we pray, our voices rising as one, "Thy kingdom come," we can
+see that kingdom coming through blood and tears, cleansing the foul
+places and establishing peace on everlasting foundations.  It is a new
+day that has dawned for us--a day in which we stand united as the
+subjects of the one King, as the sons of the one God--and the things
+that separated us one from another are swept away.  What the conferring
+of the wise found so difficult to achieve, the roaring of the guns has
+accomplished.  God teacheth his people by sending them through the
+purifying fires.
+
+***
+
+In these prayers in St. Giles' there is a directness which shows that
+we are there for a definite purpose.  We no longer use qualifying
+words.  We cry for victory.  There is a bloodless form of prayer which
+some use and which sends the worshipper away with an aching heart.  It
+is the prayer that never prays directly for victory.  "Thy will be
+done," it prays, in the spirit of submission.  But prayer is not
+submission; it is a wrestling.  In other days our fathers wrestled in
+prayer and prevailed.  "I spent the night in prayer," wrote Oliver
+Cromwell, in critical days; "I prayed God that He would guide us
+against the enemy.  We were simple fellows of the country, and they
+were men of blood and fashion, but the Lord delivered them into our
+hands.  By His grace we killed five thousand.  If He continues to show
+mercy we will kill some more to-morrow."  Such were the Ironsides, "men
+of a spirit," who broke the charges of the Cavaliers, as the cliff
+dashes back in white spray the rush of the billows.
+
+This was also the language of the Covenanters of old; and though we no
+longer use such plainness of speech, we mean the same.  There is a
+place for tenderness; but when men are ground to powder by the judgment
+of God, tenderness is not manifest then.  When the heart whispers
+"Spare" and justice says "Smite," men must obey the voice of justice,
+stifling the voice of the heart.
+
+Our prayers are now for justice.  Better far a righteous war than an
+immoral peace.  We have been compelled to unsheath the sword, and we
+pray that no heart may falter, and no cry arise for the sheathing of
+the sword, until justice be done.  Thus our prayers have become a cry
+for victory.
+
+***
+
+As one sits in an ancient church such as this, there comes knocking at
+the heart many questions regarding that service of prayer which within
+its walls has linked the generations together.  Can prayer really
+prevail with God?  Can it alter the will of the Unchangeable?  If there
+be no power in it, why should men go on praying?
+
+We must distinguish between the will of God which is unchangeable, and
+His lower will which is his purpose towards us and His attitude to us.
+The former is unalterable; the latter varies according to the varying
+of our hearts.  With that lower will we are called to wrestle.  A man
+is born in poverty and obscurity, and the will of God seems to be that
+he should continue poor and obscure.  But he wrestles with that lower
+will until he prevails.  He ultimately moves out into the great tide of
+life and becomes a power.  The will of God towards that man is changed.
+
+It is the same with a nation.  Here is a nation sinking on its lees
+with its ideals dimmed and the shrines of its fathers' God forsaken and
+desolate.  It has fashioned to itself other gods, and the multitudes
+crowd the temples of the goddess of pleasure.  The very race itself is
+sacrificed on the altar of gross pleasure, and the laughter of little
+children is being little by little silenced.  The fires of patriotism
+are dying low, and the love of country gives place to the love of
+party.  There are mean victories rejoiced over, but they are the
+victories of the cynic and the sensualist.  There is the sound of
+shouting, but it is the shouting over the triumph of one self-seeking
+politician over another self-seeking partisan.  Saintliness, which
+other generations held in awe and reverence, provokes now a pitying
+smile.  Mammon alone is held in high honour and sitteth in the high
+places.  What is the will of God towards that nation?  It is this--ruin
+and utter destruction.  Over every nation that thus succumbed to the
+gross and sensual, history shows the sword of God unsheathed, and at
+last the devouring flames of judgment.
+
+But to such a nation there comes as if out of the silent heaven a call
+as a trumpet sound, summoning it to the judgment-seat of God.  Over the
+sea comes the roar of guns.  The foundations which the fathers laid in
+righteousness, through long neglect and decay are crumbling.  An empire
+encircling the globe is tottering to destruction.  The hay and the
+stubble cannot come scathless through the flames.  The writing is on
+the wall, and as the eyes see the hand that writes, trembling seizeth
+upon men.  And then there cometh a sudden change.  The nation in a day
+rises out of the morass of its self-indulgence.  It sets itself to lay
+hold again upon the eternal law of righteousness.  They seek once more
+the shrines of their God.  They set themselves to fast and to pray.
+"Who can tell," they whisper one to another, "if God will turn and
+repent, and turn away from His fierce anger, that we perish not?"
+
+The fields of their inglorious shouting over their games are deserted
+for the fields of hardness and grim preparation.  Once more they gird
+themselves for conflict, as their fathers so often girded, that truth
+and righteousness may prevail over all the earth.  Sharply the choice
+is presented to them between Christ or Odin, and though choosing the
+Christ means agony and woe they make their choice unhesitatingly.  A
+new light shines in their eyes, and the work of their hands and the
+devisings of their hearts become the spirit of prayer.  Yesterday the
+will of God towards that nation, sinking on its lees, was destruction;
+to-day towards that same nation, thus risen out of the foul miasma that
+was stifling its soul, the will of God is salvation.
+
+Because prayer is the greatest power in the world; because it can alter
+the will of God towards us, because it can move the hand of the
+omnipotent God and is thus endued with His omnipotence, our prayers as
+we gather in the sanctuaries are no longer the submission of quietism,
+but a wrestling with God--the crying of a soul as in agony for victory
+based on the triumph of righteousness.  It was such a cry that rose on
+that day in St. Giles.
+
+***
+
+As the second paraphrase was being sung there came the memory of words
+spoken in the pulpit of the great Cathedral by Dr. Cameron Lees.  It
+was at evening service, when the shadows were gathering.  "I have often
+sat in this pulpit," said Dr. Lees, "on the edge of the evening, and
+watched the shadows enveloping the Cathedral.  They invaded the side
+chapels first, and then the nave, creeping onwards through the
+transepts, until the chancel was reached.  After that they gathered in
+strength, until the whole building was in darkness, with the exception
+of the white figure of Christ in the great east window.  I pray that
+the last vision vouchsafed me on earth may be just that--the Saviour of
+men.  I can then close my eyes in the knowledge that He will lead me
+through the dark valley that leadeth to the eternal home."
+
+It has been like that with the whole nation.  Around our shores the
+darkness gathered, until all the horizon was black with threatening
+clouds.  Then we lifted up our eyes and saw....  He will bring
+deliverance and peace.  As we moved along the crowded aisles towards
+the door the white figure of Christ glowed in the great east window,
+and we felt that He will bless His people at last with peace--the peace
+not of death, but of life.
+
+  "Down the dark future, through long generations,
+    The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease,
+  And, like a bell, with solemn sweet vibrations,
+    I hear once more the voice of Christ say Peace.
+  Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
+    The clash of war's great organ shakes the skies;
+  But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
+    The holy melodies of love arise."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Victory
+
+
+
+V
+
+The blinds were all drawn in the red-roofed house that stands at the
+cross-roads.  It was not empty, for the smoke arose from its chimneys
+in the clear morning air.  In other days the music of song and laughter
+often floated from its open windows, but now it was stricken dumb.
+From it two sons had gone to take their place in the line of soul and
+fire that girdles these islands, warding them from destruction.
+
+In a moment the veiled windows flashed their meaning.  In the long
+lists of the dead I found the name I looked for.  I had schooled myself
+to look at these lists, thinking of them in the mass as force or power;
+but that one name insisted on its individuality.  They were all
+individual lives, each throbbing with intensest self-realisation, each
+with his love and hope and fear.  There was none among them so poor but
+some heart clung to them.  They may die, no longer in units, but in
+broad swathes, mown down by machine guns, but they are individual
+hearts still.  In masses the sea swallows them up, trenches are filled
+with them, but however much we try we cannot narcotise our hearts by
+sophistries.  Some day a name stands out alone--and we realise.
+
+All over the land, in every parish, blinds are being drawn in houses
+where music and laughter are silenced.  There comes the surge of a wild
+revolt.  It is not these individual hearts alone that lie stricken, it
+is the joy of the centuries yet to be.  In nameless graves lie the
+dream-children who will never now be born.  This criminal sealing up of
+the very fountain of life--how can we bear it?
+
+And yet we open not our mouths in protest.  Is it because we are losing
+our sensitiveness--becoming brutalised?  It might be that.  For nothing
+coarsens the mind like that tide of hatred and passion which war sends
+sweeping through the hearts of men.  And yet it is not that.  For when
+they told the mother, breaking it gently as love alone can do, that her
+son was dead, she bowed her head in silence, yielding herself to the
+solace of tears; but in a little while she said brokenly: "It is good
+to die so: I would not have my son shelter himself behind other
+mothers' sons."
+
+No, it is not because we are already coarsened that the heart can bear.
+It is rather because we have realised with the passing away of the old
+world of the last long summer days (it seems already centuries remote)
+that there are some things so great that they can transfigure even
+death.  When the loyalty to the highest can only be fulfilled through
+death, we acquiesce in the sacrifice.  In our parish we have not been
+coarsened--we have been quickened.
+
+***
+
+It seems as if it were in another era that my friend at the top of the
+Gallows' Road proved to me convincingly that death alone was king.
+With a keen irony he depicted this little globule of a world, a
+third-rate satellite of a fifth-rate star, floating in the abysses, in
+relation to the universe but as a mere grain of sand amid all the sand
+on the world's shores; and on that puny speck of a world he pictured
+the ephemeral generations, mere flashes of troubled consciousness--and
+then darkness.
+
+It was reasonable when they thought this world the centre of all
+things, with the sun and moon and stars circling it round as humble
+ministrants, that they should believe in some high destiny for
+themselves.  But now that they know how miserably and unspeakably
+insignificant the world is, it was but vanity and arrogance for any man
+to think of himself as of any value whatever in the scheme of things.
+His life was as the flashing of a midge's wings.  His end was as a
+candle blown out in the night.
+
+***
+
+One evening, when the air was vibrant with the melody of birds and
+laden with the perfume of the roses that filled the garden, he
+developed another train of thought.  He pictured the glut of life there
+would be if all the generations on this and millions unnumbered of
+worlds all survived.  With vivid gestures he passed them all before the
+eye--low-browed savages, cannibals, fetish-worshippers, Calvinists, and
+at last the aesthetics of our day.  "There would be no room for them--no
+use for them at all--it would be a glut which baffles all imagination."
+There was no way out but that the individual perished to prevent the
+universe from being crowded out.
+
+And the cobbler at the top of the brae described to me how his dog was
+run over in the street.  "He gaed a bark--and he never gaed anither.
+It'll be like that at the end with us a'.  We'll gae out like my dawg."
+It was a queer result of the glimpse which came to us of an illimitable
+universe--this cheapening of ourselves.  There was nothing at last but
+the charnel-house of the crowded kirkyard, where the generations lay
+layer upon layer, and where the opening of a grave reminded the old
+clerk, as he quaintly declared, of nothing but a dentist's shop.  The
+teeth survived for unrecorded centuries--but that was all.
+
+It is strange the tricks the memory plays.  For, sitting here, glancing
+over the crowded sheet filled with the names of the dead, I remembered
+these things.  And there came the sense of the madness of the universe
+and the intolerableness of life, if the end of all heroism was but
+that--nothingness and corruption.  A handful of bones thrown up by the
+beadle to make room for the dead of to-day--is that all that is left of
+those who handed down the lamp of life to us?  Is that all that will be
+left of us too at the last?
+
+In the ordinary day my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road and the
+cobbler on the breast of the brae would have said that that was the
+end.  But the extraordinary day has come upon us unawares, and in the
+extraordinary day this little, burdened, pain-racked life becomes
+suddenly unendurable unless it lie in the bosom of eternity.  If there
+be no rainbow circling the heavens above the carnage heaps of the
+stricken battlefields, if the farewell of death be a farewell for ever,
+how can the heart endure?
+
+***
+
+It certainly looks to the seeing of the eye as if destruction were the
+end.  With the perishing of the body everything seemeth to perish: all
+love, all thought, all tenderness vanish for ever.  But the eyes and
+the ears are for ever playing us false; and here, too, they deceive us.
+For the world is so ordered that nothing ever perishes.  In nature
+there is no destruction.  A handful of ashes in a grate look like
+annihilation, but what it represents is really resurrection.  The
+imprisoned sunrays of uncounted aeons, stored up in the lumps of coal,
+have been released from the prison-house, and gone forth again as heat
+and as light.  The physical body may seem to perish; what really
+happens is that its constituent elements are re-grouped.
+
+But in the realm of beauty, is there not destruction possible there?
+Through long centuries faith and devotion rear a great cathedral, every
+line and curve of which is instinct with beauty.  Every statue breathes
+the love and hope and fears of men.  In vaulted aisles and "windows
+richly dight," it symbolises the Unseen--the beauty which the heart
+yearns for.  On that beauty materialised, ruthless Vandalism rains shot
+and shell; the devouring flames consume it.  Its gaunt walls are now a
+monument of barbarism.  Has nothing perished there?  Is it not mockery
+to speak of the conservation of the constituent elements there?  For
+loveliness has vanished there from off the face of the earth, and
+beauty which no hand of man can ever restore has been annihilated.
+
+But it has not.  For beauty is not in things, but in souls.  The beauty
+lay in the soul of the architects that planned, in the hearts of the
+builders that carved the stones until they seemed to breathe--and
+shells cannot destroy that.  The loveliness was shrined in the souls of
+the generations that gazed, and, gazing, were raised into the
+fellowship of the hearts that planned and builded.  Thus did the spirit
+of beauty grow in the hearts of men--and shells cannot destroy that.
+
+And let these charred walls be left to the alchemy of time, and nature
+will clothe them in richer loveliness.  Lichen and moss will grow on
+them, and the moonlight will etherialise them.  One symbol of beauty
+may seem to perish; but the spirit of beauty itself, dwelling in the
+hearts of men and abiding at the core of the universe, is
+indestructible.  The thing which we deem perishable, no power on earth
+can kill.
+
+***
+
+There is on earth something infinitely more precious than the material
+substance, indestructible though it be.  The most beautiful thing the
+world can show is a good man.  Through the years forces play on him,
+and each force adds its element of beauty.  He has struggled with
+adversity, and in the conflict he has learned patience, tolerance and a
+wide charity.  Waves of affliction have passed over him, and he has
+learned tenderness and sympathy with human suffering, so that bruised
+hearts come and lie down in his shadow, and there find healing.  With
+eyes cleansed from self, he looks out on the comedy and tragedy of
+life, and he sees the hidden springs.  The healing power that goes
+forth from him grows with the years.  At last he dies.
+
+Does nature conserve the shell while it consigns the jewel in the
+shell--the man himself, with all his love and tender thought and
+unselfish care--to annihilation?  That is unthinkable.  To know one
+good man is to know that the human personality is imperishable.  It was
+through that knowledge that the soul of man triumphed over the terror
+of death.
+
+There walked in Galilee a Teacher who made a handful of peasants feel
+the possibilities of moral loveliness latent in the human heart, and
+when He died they could not associate the thought of death with Him.
+"It was not possible that He should be holden of it," they said one to
+another.  Everything was possible but that He could become as a clod in
+the valley of corruption.  Of course even that was possible if the
+world were a chaos given over for sport to malicious demons.
+
+It would be possible, then, that the self-sacrificing love stronger
+than death, and the spirit of unsullied purity should become mere dust.
+But the possibility of the world being ruled by any except a Righteous
+Power did not occur to the untutored Galileans.  Therefore they faced
+death with level eyes, refusing to believe in its triumph, saying to
+their hearts, "It is not possible."
+
+And that is the rock on which to plant our feet in the day when the
+world is given over to the wild welter of bloodshed.  In every parish
+over all the land blinds are pulled down, and hearts, wrapped round in
+the dimness, sit still in the shadow of a dumb affliction.  They will
+never again hear the familiar footsteps coming to the door; they will
+hear it in their dreams--only to awake and find silence.  Never again
+will the first question be when the door is opened, as it was through
+all the days since the golden days of childhood, "Where is mother?"
+But the great things which made life noble have not been destroyed by
+bullet or shell.  No man is worthy of freedom except the man who is
+prepared to die for it.  The heart, which in death proved itself
+deserving of freedom, has entered into the fulness of freedom.  The
+heavens are again aglow when we realise that.
+
+***
+
+It was the Professor who made me sure of those things.  I met him at
+the "Priory," where my old friend carries on his controversy with the
+Pope--or used to.  In that house of his one meets all sorts of
+visionaries from the ends of the earth.  A Waldensian pastor full of
+the dream of a rejuvenated Italy; a leader of French Protestants, who
+has forgotten his controversy with the Pope in the great upheaval
+through which his race are finding their soul once more; a dreamer from
+across the Atlantic, his eyes a-gleam with the vision of a reunited
+Christendom--these are the men you will find drinking tea at the Priory
+on any day in our parish.
+
+The original bond between them was their controversy with Rome, but
+they have now forgotten all about that.  There, in a happy hour, I met
+the Professor.  One phrase of his lit up for me the days of darkness.
+"We see the alchemy of Providence at work all round about us," he
+exclaimed, pushing his fingers through his hair until it stood up all
+on end, an aureole of white.
+
+"It is the flower of our manhood that is perishing," said the "Prior,"
+while our hostess was nervously solicitous over the fate of a teacup
+which the Professor was balancing in his left hand, utterly regardless
+of its purpose.
+
+"Perishing!" exclaimed the Professor; "they are not perishing--they are
+living.  To talk of the wastage of life is mere cant."  Our hostess
+rescued the teacup, and the Professor had now the free use of both his
+hands.  The one hand clutched his hair and the other made sundry
+gestures clinching his arguments.
+
+"Why should we rail at death?" said he; "for death has been the saviour
+of humanity.  It was death that made men of us.  It was in the school
+of death that man learned unselfishness, self-sacrifice, chivalry and
+honour.  There is nothing so ugly as the man whose heart is filled by
+the world.  It is death that has saved us all from that.  Were man's
+location here for ever, the world would be his god.  A world without
+death would be a world with no room for the Cross.  Men climbed the
+heights of nobility as they defied death.  The crackling flames were
+unable to silence the martyrs' song; the march of the hosts of
+devouring tyranny could not move the hearts that chose death rather
+than slavery; the generations sealed with their blood their testimony
+that truth and loyalty to truth are more precious than life, and so met
+death with a smile; it was through this wrestling with death that great
+and noble character was forged on the anvil of life.  Death was the
+weapon which forged greatness of soul.  Death cannot destroy what death
+has created.  That could only happen in an insensate world.  What is
+it--death--but just this--the slave of immortality?"
+
+If I could only write it down as the Professor spoke, if I could only
+make you see his eyes glowing with little darts of flame as he saw the
+whole world transformed into a mighty workshop in which the "alchemy of
+Providence" is transmuting the soiled substance of our humanity into
+living souls (over whom death can have no dominion) fashioned for
+heavenly destinies--then you, too, would believe.  Since that day my
+old friend has not spoken a word about the "waste of the flower of the
+race."
+
+***
+
+The house with the drawn blinds stands at the cross-roads, and I must
+come back to it.  What is it that has happened to him who lies in a
+nameless grave in France?  The opportunity for winning glory and
+earthly fame did not come his way; he just laid down his life along
+with hundreds of thousands more.  He has taken his place among the
+undistinguished dead.
+
+      "O, undistinguished dead,
+  Whom the bent covers or the rock-strewn steep
+  Shows to the stars, for you I mourn--I weep,
+      O, undistinguished dead.
+
+      "None knows your name,
+  Blackened and blurred in the wild battle's brunt,
+  Hotly ye fell with all your wounds in front.
+      That was your fame."
+
+Not a line in the records of time for him.  But there are other
+records--those of eternity.  He has lost nothing of the thrill of life.
+He is being borne on that tide of self-surrender and heroism which has
+flowed through the ages, and bears those who embark on it to the very
+feet of God.  He would not himself have it otherwise.  "It is better
+far to go out with honour than survive with shame," wrote a comrade
+from the trenches, now united with him in death.  There is a place for
+sorrow in our land, but its place is by the hearth-stones of those
+whose sons choose to survive with shame.  He has taken his place among
+those who, unseen, are leading on the embattled hosts of his race to
+victory.  He has discovered the treasures in store for the brave and
+the true.  When, amid the flutterings of flags and the shouting of the
+people rejoicing in their deliverance, the great army will return home
+at last--he, too, will come.
+
+At Kobe, when the bugles were welcoming the victorious Japanese home in
+1895, Lafcadio Hearn spoke to an old man of those who would never
+return.  "Probably the Western people believe," answered the old man,
+"that the dead never return.  There are no Japanese dead who do not
+return.  There are none who do not know the way."  It is a poor,
+emasculated religion that does not believe that.  When at the last the
+bugles call in the quiet evening ... they will come back.  They will
+come crowned with glory and honour and immortality--with that victory
+which overcometh the world.  Let the blinds be rolled up, and the
+windows be all flung open to the light.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+The Cities of the Plain
+
+
+
+VI
+
+It was the old clerk, of whose services and devotion to our parish I
+have previously written, who gave the Biblical name to the little
+village that lies near the boundary of the great city that is steadily
+creeping towards us, and ever threatening to engulf us.  Its own name
+is singularly pleasant to the ear and redolent of the sound of running
+waters, but it is unnecessary to burden the memory with it.  Though it
+is now many years ago, I remember, as it were yesterday, the first time
+I heard the word on the old clerk's lips.  I was sitting warming myself
+by the fire in the ticket-collector's office.  The ticket-collector was
+ostensibly waiting to provide tickets, but as everybody in our parish
+has a season ticket, that part of his duty is almost a sinecure.
+
+Thus it happens that the ticket-collector has leisure, just before the
+trains pass through, to give his friends the fruits of his researches
+in the realms of philosophy.  That particular day he was speaking of
+the changes he had seen.  "I was brought up," said he, closing his
+argument, "on the Shorter Catechism and porridge.  I dinna haud any
+longer by the Catechism, but I havena lost my faith in porridge."
+
+It was then that the clink of coppers was heard on the sill of the
+ticket window.  In the aperture was framed the face of the clerk, with
+the trimmed grey beard and the small twinkling eyes.  He held three
+pennies deftly in his thumbless hand.  "Return, Sodom," said he.  The
+ticket-collector pushed back his cap, stretched out his right hand as
+if he were beginning to speak, then thought better of it.  Out of his
+case, without a word, he produced a return ticket for Sodom, clinked it
+in his machine, and passed it through the window.  The old clerk
+received it with a grim chuckle.
+
+Away below the bridge there came a rumble.  "Train," said the
+ticket-collector, closing the aperture with a snap, and making for the
+door.  And I have never forgotten the hoarse voice of the old clerk
+with an acid edge to it as he clinked his three coppers, saying
+"Return, Sodom."
+
+***
+
+It is an amazing thing how within the circuit of the same parish,
+removed by one mile from one another, there can live together two eras
+so remote from each other in the order of human development, as the
+world of the red-roofed houses on the slopes of the hills, and the
+village at their base where the gorge, worn by the little river through
+the travail of immemorial centuries, debouches on the great central
+plain that runs across Scotland.
+
+Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a
+great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the
+roofs of its houses.  On the slopes there lies the world in which the
+fringes of life are embroidered--a world where men and women talk of
+books, pictures and plays.  It is a world of hyphenated names.  But in
+all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name.  It is a
+refuse-heap of humanity.  Many diverse races are crowded in it.  The
+city fathers clean out slums without providing first for the
+slum-dwellers, and, swept before the broom of so-called social
+reformers, homeless men and women have drifted to the village, and
+there reconstituted their slum.
+
+From the glens of the north broken Highlanders, driven out to make room
+for sheep, have drifted hither to work in the quarries, and the speech
+of their children's children still bears the trace of their ancient
+language pure and clean; over the sea Irishmen have come to reap the
+harvest fields of the Lothians, and they have been deposited by the
+tide in the village.  Stray Poles have come hither and straggling
+Czechs; a man from Connemara neighbours a shaggy giant from Lewis; and
+a dour stone-cutter from Aberdeen is door by door with an Italian who
+sells what looks like a deadly mixture from a hand-cart.
+
+Here you can see humanity in its primitive state, before it began to
+adorn the fringes of life, and make for itself sanctuaries of privacy.
+Between the slopes and the base of the hill there yawns an invisible
+chasm.  Centuries separate them.  Thus it comes that the slope-dweller
+passes on the top of the arches, scanning his newspaper, without so
+much as seeing the huddle of houses which constitute the village.
+
+It is only a week ago that, like the old clerk, I took out a return
+ticket for the "Cities of the Plain."  (For the old clerk had a
+two-fold formula.  When he was going to one village he said, "Return,
+Sodom," but when he meant to go to the quarries beside the village he
+said, "Return, Cities of the Plain.")  It was to visit an old soldier
+that I thus descended into the plains.  He lives in a rookery in which
+many families are crowded one on the top of the other--a rabbit-warren
+infested by many and strange odours.  He used to come up the slopes and
+do odd jobs, tidying up gardens, and he loved to talk of
+
+    "unhappy far-off things
+  And battles long ago,"
+
+in a language which I also could speak.  So I got to know him.  And as
+I sat by his bed I heard a moan from the adjoining room.  It began in a
+low cry, and then rose into a wail that seemed charged with all the
+woes of humanity.  The old man sat up in bed trembling.  The cry of woe
+now changed into a chorus; other voices swelled it.  It was the act of
+a moment to open the door, and in the dim landing find the door of this
+other room.
+
+I opened it, and there I saw three children huddled before a grate
+which contained nothing but ashes.  On an iron bed, stretched on straw,
+lay a woman sunk in sleep....  A foetid air was laden with the fumes of
+alcohol....  There was no food....  A broken chair, a stool or two, and
+a box that did duty for a table....  The old soldier told me what to
+do, and I did it.  A kindly woman brought coal and food, and the
+wailing was silenced.  The old man explained it all.  The woman sunk in
+the stupor is the wife of a soldier now in the trenches.  She did not
+belong to our parish; but only came a week or two before, swept before
+the broom of the "social reformers" from the city.  The mothers of the
+Parish, the old soldier declared, were heroines.  One such, when her
+son asked her consent to enlist, said, "Eh, laddie, I dinna want ye to
+gang; I dinna want ... but if I were ye I wud gang mysel'."  Our own
+wives and mothers were splendid--but those who came from the city,
+flotsam and jetsam borne on the tide, staying for a little and then
+carried away again, of whom there were three or four in the
+village--these were different.  They meet each other eager for news.
+They are depressed, and feel the need for cheering.  One suggests a
+stimulant ... and the result is this.
+
+He is no Puritan--the old soldier lying on his bed, his campaigning
+done--and he spoke out of an understanding heart.  It was only poor
+human nature, overtaken by thick darkness and misery, trying to open a
+window towards the realm of sunshine.
+
+And I came out into the roadway and turned towards the station.  I did
+not see them before, but I saw them now.  A few yards separating them,
+I pass two shops licensed to sell the means for opening windows towards
+this realm of happiness; and two houses with gaudy lights called the
+villagers to enter the region where all cares and worries are
+forgotten.  In the street pale-faced, ill-clad children played at being
+soldiers, marching with heads erect.  The gorge was already dark with
+the evening shadows, but the lamps in the village were lit.
+
+When the village was passed I stood and looked back.  In the west the
+setting sun had thrown over the heavens a glow.  A well of liquid fire
+glowed over Torfionn, and its rays spread fan-like, so that they
+spanned the horizon, and, touching the rounded mass of Corstarfin, went
+forth over the firth.  Against this background stood silhouetted the
+great arches that carry the railway across the hollow, and behind these
+the arches that bear the canal.  The piers stood as a gigantic forest.
+These mighty arches might have been the work of the Romans.  A soft,
+luminous haze fell on the village.  Window after window was lit up.
+The door of a cottage near me was opened, and a flood of light streamed
+out.  A woman stood in the door, and looking up the road shouted "Jim,"
+and a little boy, leaving his fellow-soldiers, rushed to her, and she
+clasped him in her arms and closed the door....  In that moment the
+little village seemed to me as if it were an outpost of Paradise.
+Nature threw as a benediction the mantle of its loveliness over it.
+What nature meant to be a sanctuary of beauty, man had changed into
+Sodom.
+
+***
+
+The ticket-collector stood at his post and scanned the passengers as
+they went through.  He knew them all, and had only a stray ticket to
+collect.  I was last, and duly gave up my "return" from the "Cities of
+the Plain."  But he did not let me through the gate.  "I want to show
+you something," said the ticket-collector, and he led me into his
+office and produced a pamphlet.
+
+"I got it from the man who goes to Keswick," said the ticket-collector;
+"you know him."  I knew him, the best of men.
+
+"Nae doubt," went on the ticket-collector; "nae doubt.  He was always
+giving me tracts.  Tracts--faugh!--poor stuff, nae style, nae logic,
+and nae philosophee in them.  But I aye took them and thanked him--for
+he is a nice man, though a perfect babe in matters of understanding.
+And I found them useful for spills.  The other day he handed me
+this..." and he waved a blue paper-covered booklet.
+
+"Mahn," he exclaimed, pushing his peaked cap back from his grey head,
+and sweeping his brass buttons down with his hand; "mahn, this has fair
+hit me between the eyes."  Then he opened the pamphlet and began to
+read passages that he had heavily scored with blue pencil.  The Czar
+has abolished the sale of vodka for ever!  What is the result?
+
+"The old women in the villages," read the ticket-collector, "can hardly
+believe their own eyes, so changed are their menfolk....  Everywhere
+peace, kindness and industry.  War is said to be hell; but this is like
+a foretaste of heaven."
+
+"Listen to this," cried the collector, his arm outstretched.  "A
+newspaper correspondent writes, since the sale of vodka stopped the old
+night population (in the doss-houses) seems to have vanished."  Every
+passage he read bore the same testimony.
+
+"And what are we doing?" he exclaimed.  "We have stopped nothing; we
+surround our soldiers with the old temptations, and we leave their
+defenceless wives exposed to the same temptations; I know all about it.
+Mahn, it was Ruskin that said, 'There is no wealth but life,' and we
+leave all our wealth of life at the mercy of every evil.  It's a fair
+scandal.  Do you ken the conclusion I've come to!  It is that the best
+form of government is a benevolent despotism.  Oor men are afraid of
+this and that--losing votes--but an autocrat with a stroke of a pen can
+sweep away the power of hell.  If they would only make King George an
+autocrat for a few years....  That would be grand!"
+
+He insisted on lending me the blue-covered pamphlet, and it being his
+hour off he walked with me across the bridge.  The valley was now dark.
+The snuff-manufacturer's house down below was wrapped in gloom.  Lights
+twinkled on the slopes.  Below a lamp-post at the far end of the bridge
+two men stood.  When he saw them the ticket-collector stood fast.
+
+"Mahn," said he, "I've come to a great resolution.  I'm too old to
+fight; and they canna get at me in ony way.  No Income-tax for me; and
+threepence on the tea is naething, for I never take it; I want to feel
+that I am worth men dying for me; and I am going to be tee-total till
+the end of the war.  I'll give the money to help the soldiers' weans.
+It's the weans that pull at my heart-strings."
+
+And he turned on his heel and walked rapidly back across the bridge.
+
+Under the lamp-post stood the roadman and the beadle, looking after
+him.  I spoke to them, for since the war began we all speak to each
+other in our parish.
+
+"Has he forgotten ony thin'?" asked the roadman, waving a hand towards
+the retreating form of the ticket-collector.
+
+"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be
+tee-total till the end of the war."
+
+"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost
+soul!"
+
+My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long
+flight of stone steps that leads to the road above.  On the top of the
+first flight I turned and looked after them.  When they came opposite
+the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went
+resolutely past, down into the hollow.  The two of them have probably
+resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."
+
+***
+
+I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed.
+It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised
+its queerness before.  A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I
+never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to
+write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is
+that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that
+lay twice a day under my feet--the problem of the Cities of the Plain.
+A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime
+hazy.  Events stand out luridly and arrestingly.  Here is one.  I was
+in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out.  All of a sudden there
+sounded the drum,
+
+      "Saying Come,
+      Freemen, come,
+  Ere your heritage be wasted! said the
+      quick alarming drum."
+
+And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet.  Mothers gave their
+sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God.
+
+On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with
+men and horses, going out to fight and die.  The hawsers were loosed.
+The steamer churned and backed and crept away.  A girl stood near me
+crying softly.  A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no
+tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and
+called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?"  And she wiped her cheek with the
+moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I
+am not crying."  And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into
+the drizzle and the haze.  Weeks later I read how one man of that
+regiment--the regiment of my own county--killed another ... and a few
+days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl.  He was not
+from the island, that man, and I know not who he is.  His mother
+doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became
+a murderer under the fostering of the State.
+
+Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State
+that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with
+temptations.  Away from the influence of mother and sister and
+sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the
+State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did
+so.  The Secretary of War made appeals to them.  "Be sober," said he,
+"avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live."
+But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that
+you may disregard the noble advice my servant gives you."  They came in
+their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call
+of their mother--clean and sober--and their mother opened the canteen
+for their benefit on the plain.  Such a world as that dwelt in the
+imagination of Dean Swift--I never imagined that it could exist here
+and now.  And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are
+we preparing for the men who are baring their breasts to the arrows,
+standing between us and death?  When they come back, war-worn, to what
+will they return?  To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the
+candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children
+famished and neglected?  Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice;
+is it for that that they have gone down into hell?  Surely it cannot be
+for that!  A wave has passed over us, raising us to the realisation of
+the higher values of things.  Words live for us now which were dead
+yesterday.  A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and
+the word _Temperance_ has risen from the couch on which it lay dying,
+and it claims us for its own.  Through it we can make the world know
+that we are worth fighting for--worth that the young, the strong, and
+the brave should take everything they hold dear--their ideals, their
+love, their little children unborn--and throw them into the trench, and
+there give themselves and their dreams to death for us.  We must see to
+it that we are worthy the sacrifice.
+
+***
+
+It seemed to me hitherto that I was a citizen of the country endowed
+with the greatest freedom on earth.  But the ticket-collector has
+proved to me that that was a dream.  Here in our parish I have no power
+to control this thing that matters so vitally in the Cities of the
+Plain.  We have a Parish Council and a County Council, and I don't know
+how many other dignified and honourable authorities, whom we elect.
+But we elect nobody to control this.  A body of unelected Justices, of
+whom we know nothing, settle for us that down yonder in the Cities of
+the Plain there shall be half a dozen State-regulated places for the
+manufacturing of paupers and criminals.  (The laws change with such
+kaleidoscopic swiftness in those days that I may be wrong.)  And here
+am I, newly awakened by the ticket-collector to that enormity, and I am
+not free to do anything.  It is surely a mad world.  We needed to be
+awakened; and we have been awakened with the shriek of shells and the
+crying of the perishing!  And the result of the awakening will be
+regeneration for the Cities of the Plain.
+
+***
+
+The ticket-collector has deprived me for the time being of my peace of
+mind.  My conversion is so recent that I am afraid of falling into the
+fanaticism of the newly converted.  I followed the General the other
+day into the railway carriage, and as we were passing over Sodom, lying
+there under our feet, I spoke to him about it.  He looked at me with
+cold eyes.
+
+"Do you want to sacrifice the freedom of the individual?" he asked in
+his curt military tones; "do you think that you can make saints of
+people by Act of Parliament?  They would be mere plaster-saints."
+
+I was reduced to silence.  My new-born zeal seemed to ooze out at every
+pore.  There was a touch of amused scorn in the General's eye as he
+glanced at me.  The General is a man of experience, and he is quite
+right.  Acts of Parliament will never make saints of the people.  But
+the State can see to it that the people are not surrounded by
+temptations through the operations of Acts of Parliament; that, if the
+State is impotent to make saints, it shall not, on the other hand, set
+itself deliberately to make devils.  That, it seems to me, is what the
+State is now doing in the Cities of the Plain.
+
+In ten thousand schools the State sanctions that its children be taught
+to pray--"Lead us not into temptation," and that same State encircles
+the path of its children by legalised temptations at every corner.  It
+is the maddest of worlds.  I may be wrong and the General wholly right.
+But as the ticket-collector said the last time I saw him--"I would like
+to see the man who could convince me that I am wrong."  And I don't
+know whether to be grateful to the ticket-collector or not.  He has
+deprived me of some of my sleep; he has made my head ache with thinking
+of problems which I am not fit to cope with; and, most unlooked for of
+all, he has made a tee-totaler of me till the end of the war.  There is
+a plaintive note in the ticket-collector's voice, which strikes a chord
+in my heart, when he invariably adds: "I hope the war won't last long."
+For, if it does, there will be the danger of the ticket-collector and
+myself becoming teetotalers for altogether.  And it is such an ugly
+word--tee-totaler!  If only the ticket-collector would coin a new and
+beautiful word to connote his new and beneficent state of mind!  It is
+a pity that great causes should be burdened by the weight of ugly words.
+
+
+
+
+  GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+  BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
+
+
+
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+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Discovery, by Norman Maclean
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