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.
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 BrasThe Frenchmen saw them stand unbroken.* * * * *On the day of WaterlooThe pibroch blew where fire was hottest.* * * * *When the Alma heights were stormedForemost 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 portalsThe clash of war's great organ shakes the skies;But beautiful as songs of the immortals,The holy melodies of love arise."
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 steepShows 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.