However deeply the iron pierced, there was never a thought of defeat being even possible. And when the call came the women toiled in the factories, and the ammunition dumps were their spirit materialised. At home and in the battle-line the final destiny of every nation depends upon the soul.
Still more is the mastery of this word apparent when we consider the future destiny of the world. One result of the world's blood-bath is that all thoughtful men are asking, How can the world be saved in the future? And multitudes discuss the way of the world's salvation by a League of Nations or other method. By parchments and signatures the world is to be saved! All that is but the folly with which men have deceived themselves in all ages. The folly is apparent when we ask, Whence do wars spring? They spring from greed and lust and ambition—from the life surrendered to evil. We speak of the horror of war; what we should speak of is the horror of wickedness. For war is only a symptom, not the disease. What all these weary discussions about 'Leagues to make an end of war,' and the new watchword 'No more war,' aim at is the doing away with the symptom—leaving the disease to run its deadly course. To suppress symptoms without removal of the hidden cause is the way of death. What the nations must face is the disease and its healing!
It is with nations as with individuals! How can a man protect himself against a thief. He can do it in three ways. He may (1) use force; or (2) he may make an agreement with the thief—enter into a treaty with him; or (3) he may endeavour to reform the thief. The first method is militarism and, whether in the form of armies or policemen, is costly and uncertain. The second only protects so long as the thief finds it convenient or in his own interest to keep it. Neither a burglar nor a robber-state can be warded off by treaties. The third alone provides a certain protection; the only safety is that the thief experience a change of spirit—be, in short, converted. 'Admirable,' said Cardinal Fleury, when a scheme for 'perpetual peace' was submitted to him; 'admirable, save for one omission—I find no provision for sending missionaries to convert the hearts of princes.' The day of princes is over, and the day of democracy has come. The first requisite of perpetual peace is that the nations of the world experience a change of heart and spirit—should repent. But in all the schemes for ending war there is no suggestion of sending missionaries to convert the world's democracies. France has 'extinguished the lights of heaven which none shall rekindle'; England, if the number of worshippers in the churches be any gauge, is rapidly sinking back into paganism; and across the Atlantic the United States is resolved to live unto itself alone, separating itself from the perishing nations; while on the Continent of Europe there is but one ritual: 'We did no wrong: we did not begin the war.' Missionaries to convert the democracies of the world—they are needed in legions. But such a need is not in all the thoughts of the orators. They can only think of forming leagues to abolish the vultures that swoop down on the carcases. They cannot realise that the only way to make an end of the swooping vulture is to make an end of carcases. Unless the world experiences a spiritual and moral renewal, any league that would secure it peace in the midst of its depravity would only secure its moral doom. It is manifest then that the only way to abolish war is to bring the body into subjection to the spirit. The way of salvation is the way of spiritual renewal. Love does not kill or poison, and humanity's feet need to be guided into the way of love. Along that road there is but the one guide: He who said 'I am the way.... Love as I have loved you.' The measure of that love is the Cross. And that is why the way to salvation leads through Calvary.... Peace will only come when the kingdoms of this world shall submit to that kingdom of the soul whose dominion is from sea to sea. 'I find a hundred little indications to reassure one that God comes,' writes H. G. Wells. 'The time draws near when mankind will awake ... and there shall be ... no leader but the one God of mankind.' But though Mr. Wells writes sentences so vital as that, yet when one asks him what God is—he is silent. Is He holy and righteous? Though Mr. Wells' God is but an abstraction, yet the truth remains. The coming of the Kingdom of God is the one hope of mankind—that Kingdom which Jesus preached. And the entrance into that Kingdom is by way of repentance and love and faith. When the soul of the world awakes to that, the day of deliverance shall have dawned.
This, then, must be the goal of human effort, to bring the nations of the world into such a unity of spirit that war will no longer be thinkable. But we, as a nation, can only do this if we ourselves bring our lives into conformity with the laws of righteousness. It is manifest that no amount of oratory will enable us to raise the world to any higher level than we have attained ourselves.
The first duty, then, is to see that we base our own lives on righteousness. The problem is how to bring to bear on the human heart those motives that will move it irresistibly towards righteousness. That road is not easy to travel and the choice of it means effort and travail. It means a battle against selfishness and self-seeking—a battle long-drawn-out. Why should men choose that conflict rather than ease and self-indulgence? There can be no reason save this: that God wills and enjoins righteousness. But does He? We know very little about God, and the strange thing is that the more knowledge that comes to us regarding Him, the more mysterious He becomes. But there is one thing that we do know with absolute certainty regarding God, and it is this—that all down the thousands of years of recorded history the power of the Unseen Ruler of the universe can be traced fighting against iniquity, burying corrupt nations under the avalanche, digging the grave for tyranny and corruption. The history of the world is the history of God making an end of crime. The way to destruction has been the way of iniquity. That God should have so ordered the universe that the stars in their courses fight against the Siseras, that all its forces are at last arrayed for the destruction of evil, is the proof that God is righteous and holy and that the passion in His heart is that His children should be righteous and holy. The world, as God means it, is the school for the training of men and women in goodness—and so in the image of God.... It is only the call of the Unseen Ruler as He summons His children to bring their lives into unison with Himself, that can turn the feet into the way of righteousness. There is no impelling force equal to the choice of good rather than evil except this—that God wills goodness. No other motive save that can turn the faces of men towards the heights.
The greatest of all questions then is this—how most efficiently to bring that motive to bear upon the nation. It is in the early and plastic years that the destiny of individuals is fixed. If anywhere, it is in our schools that our children shall learn the things out of which are the issues of life and death. What atmosphere shall we surround our children with in our schools? is the supreme question. 'To educate without religion is only to produce clever devils,' declared the Duke of Wellington in his downright way. And as a nation we have made sure of everything being taught—except religion. No government-inspector ever asks about it!
What a waste it all is and what a travesty—this pumping of facts and figures into the weary, jaded brains of little children. Only five per cent. or so of the people are capable of benefiting by a long process of education—yet everybody must be confined in dreary barracks from five to fifteen years, learning things that will never be of use and are straightway forgotten. We ordained that all the children should be taught, but in our usual blundering fashion we never settled what we should teach them. The child looks out on a world of wonder, and proves its wisdom by peopling every grove and every hill with fairies. For the child the world is spiritual. And it comes to us and asks how came it and why came it? But our legislators decreed that, so far as they were concerned, the child should be taught geography and the names of rivers and hills, but not about the God who made the rivers and hills and the world; botany, but not about the God who made the grass and the flowers; physiology, but not about the God who fashioned man; dates of kings and of battles, but not about the God whose providence is written over all history; about laws, but not about the Source of all law—the divine commands that regulate human action. The only part of man that the educators considered was the brain. If they intellectualised the race they deemed that the millennium would come. They did it. But the millennium is further off than ever. They caused all the people to go through the mills where knowledge was ground out; they learned to read and write. The only consequence was that they became the victims of every charlatan. They turned their arithmetic into roguery and their literature into lust. They became the victims of the gamblers and the betting touts. They pursued the missing words and became the disciples of demagogues. And salvation has tarried though the brain has been nurtured. Yes! there has come a vast progress! London in the next war can be completely destroyed by spraying it with gas bombs—in eight hours! Education, with God left out, will, then, have come to its fruition!
National education will only become a means of deliverance from evil when our schools shall have been transformed into the nurseries of goodness. For after all, what we need is good men and women. Clever men are as common as berries; what the world cries for is men who can be trusted, men whose motive will be the welfare of others and not their own. 'His fame was immense,' was the verdict on a Roman patriot; 'his private property was so scanty that there was not enough to pay the expenses of his funeral. He was buried at the public cost. The matrons mourned him as they mourned Brutus.' Ah! the terrible thing is not to die poor but to die with a character no man honours. To train our children to love and desire goodness is our need. The history of the ages is the proof that goodness cannot flourish apart from religion. And the Bible tells the story of the dealing of God with men—of the evolution of religion. It is that which constitutes the supreme value of the book.
But no book has suffered more at the hands of its friends than has the Bible. The Bible is an Eastern book, and it is filled with glowing metaphors and parables. Dull, unimaginative Western minds said: 'These are literally true, and unless you believe them so you are lost.' The writer of the beautiful book of Jonah wrote a story rebuking the narrow spirit of the Jews, and his book has become the citadel of all the narrow souls who see nothing in it but the whale. Children should be taught that science and religion cannot contradict each other, because they both are revelations of the one God; that the Bible is full of poetry and parables which the writers never meant that any should mistake for treatises; that the slaughter of the Canaanites and the psalms of cursing are no more of the essence of religion, than the Stuart tyranny the essence of Scotland; that the serpent in the garden and Jonah in the whale are parables; that religion, in short, is a flowing and deepening river and not a stagnant pool. But religion as too often taught in our schools is only the teaching of things which the growing boy discovers to be untrue. So far from doing good, it is the destruction of religion.
When the Bible is taught as the record of the evolution of the revelation of God, it will move the hearts of men towards goodness while time endures, for it enshrines the figure of Him who based a Kingdom on love and meekness—a Kingdom that endures for ever, because no guns can fight against a Spirit, nor any frontiers bar it. The education that has not this as its base may produce the chlorine gas—but it will never produce that goodness which alone maketh great. But the course is so crowded that something must be jettisoned. And as inspectors take no note of religion—let it be thrown overboard. Its total omission in Secondary Schools is declared necessary, because the syllabus is too crowded already! It is as if a man having a ship laden with dross were offered some nuggets of fine gold and answered, 'My ship is overloaded already, I cannot take more.' But he wouldn't be such a fool. He would throw everything overboard, if need be, to make room!
In the last year of the Great War a new Education Bill was passed for the Northern Kingdom, and provision was made for everything but the teaching of religion. At every election the voters who desire that religion be continued must have another spell of sentry-go to secure it—all except Roman Catholics and Episcopalians! Truly we are of the race of the Bourbons. The expense of teaching has been trebled; the futility of what is taught remains as before. I heard the Chairman of an Education Authority being asked whether provision was made in the schools for teaching the children the scientific facts about alcohol. He replied that the syllabus was too crowded already! Alcohol has claimed more victims from humanity than all the wars and famines of all the centuries; and yet our children were not to be taught the truth about it because the syllabus was so crowded! What is it they teach that could compare in value with the truths of temperance and self-discipline? Through a course of training so expensive that the countryside is well-nigh bankrupt because of its cost, the children pass and they go forth into the world unwarned of the rocks and shoals on which the millions have perished.... That, at this time of day, we should shut the doors of our schools against the knowledge of God, in whose love alone men can find their healing, and against the teaching of truth and temperance, which alone can make children grow in character and goodness, seems possible only on the supposition that we have been bereft of our judgment. 'If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts,' said Carlyle, 'all or most of them, there will be seen for some length of time, perhaps for some centuries, such a world as few are dreaming of.'
'He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a hollyberry.'—EDMUND GOSSE'SFather and Son.
The world is moving so fast that, before each nightfall, yesterday is forgotten. Sitting here before the fire I have been stirring up my memory, and, out of the subconscious, queer recollections have emerged. I can see now the grim-faced Highland minister demonstrating in the month of December to his perfect satisfaction that the Founder of Christianity was born in midsummer, and that Christmas was but a pagan festival sprinkled over with holy water so-called. I think it was the first time I heard of Christmas. That good man denounced the horrors of Christmas with such zest that I, too, would have blushed to look at a hollyberry—only no holly grew in that part of the Isle. And that was so not because the Isle was remote and the folk spoke there an ancient and little-known language that segregated them from the great life of the world. It was the same in great centres very conscious of their own culture. It was really only yesterday that Walter Smith was dealt with by his presbytery for holding the first Christmas service in his church in Edinburgh. But we have travelled far since that particular yesterday, and I am glad that the children of to-day will never need to blush before a hollyberry. For from the Solway to the Pentland Firth the church bells everywhere to-day summon the people to keep holy day and go on pilgrimage to Bethlehem.
There was never a time when the people of this land needed more to go on such a pilgrimage. There are ample signs that Mammon has captured the hearts of this generation. The day is gone on which Ruskin declared that there is no wealth but life. We have outlived that. A full bank account and an empty house—that is our modern wealth. The rich flaunt their riches in a world seething with discontent. And the aforetime quiescent masses now demand that Mammon should smile on them. Society may perish, but they must have their full share in the largesse of Mammon. On the altar of that god duty and patriotism are laid as the meet offering. 'Great is Mammon,' is the burden of the praise of our day. And what a god before whom to bow the knee!
It is only when I go on pilgrimage to-day to the grotto in the rock in which the asses were stabled in Bethlehem and to the stall where the Child is laid that I can realise the vulgarity and the meanness of Mammon. Out of that manger there issued a power compared to which all other influences that moulded men are as the rushlight to the sun; in that stable lies the fountain out of which sprang the river that has borne on its bosom for nineteen centuries all of beauty and of truth and of love wherewith humanity has been blessed; and yet all that came out of the direst poverty. Mammon had no smile for the greatest and most radiant thing in all the world's history. Money secures at least food and shelter, and it was because they had none that the innkeeper shut them out. If they could have showed him a purse full of gold pieces, he would soon have made room. And all the life of this Jesus was woven after that pattern. The cheapest food sold then were sparrows. It was because He was often sent to buy them that He knew that two of them were sold in the market place for a farthing. The patched garment is the symbol of poverty—or used to be! And He knew all about garments being patched and patched until they were past mending. At the eventide when the boy James brought a coat to be mended He heard His mother say with a weary sigh: 'I have mended this again and again: nobody can keep boys in decent clothes; so different from girls; a new patch will just tear a bigger hole in the old.' Often He saw His mother cast a half-farthing into the treasury, for she had nought else. The tax-gatherer comes, and there isn't a coin to pay. Jesus gave much, but He never gave any money, for He had none to give. He was homeless for three years, deemed mad by His family, with no place where to lay His head. A grave given in charity receives Him at the last. The place of Jesus from the manger to the grave is among the poorest of the poor. He belonged to the great class of the disinherited. If the greatest thing on earth sprang from poverty such as this, then surely Christmas pours the contempt of heaven upon Mammon.
We have only to look at him with eyes cleansed by gazing at the Child in the manger and we realise how tawdry a god this Mammon is. What can he do for us? Nothing of any worth. He has never minted a coinage which can buy the inspiration of a noble thought, which can purchase love for the starved heart, or can endow a man with the vision and the faculty divine. One has but to consider a moment and he will realise the poverty-stricken condition of Mammon's devotees. They can command speed on earth or in the air; they can fly a hundred miles an hour; but what is the good when at the end of the hundred miles they are as at the beginning—sated, restless, and dissatisfied? They can command no speed by which they can escape from themselves. And it is vain to wing a flight upwards through the air if heaven be empty overhead; vain to alight five hundred miles away if on earth there be no temple, no holy day, no shrine at which to worship. 'You own the land,' said the poor painter to the new-rich who boasted his land: 'you own the land but I own the landscape.' The great gift is to own the landscape. And no money ever bought that. The only thing Mammon can do is to secure food, shelter, and clothes. It can also secure freedom from work—but that is a freedom shared with the tramp. Life is greater far than livelihood; and the worshippers of Mammon lose the very essence and the end of life in a vain pursuit of the means of living.
That is the witness raised by Christmas as it calls the nations to realise the true greatness of man. To a generation that has made life a hectic rush after money and pleasure, Christmas testifies that to estimate any man by the money he owns is to blaspheme against the Child laid in the manger. The wealth of Croesus makes him but the prey of the conqueror, and the dust of centuries has buried the pomp and glory of emperors. But this Child, cradled in poverty, reigns from generation to generation. The voice of an Alexander or a Napoleon would to-day cause no heart to beat quicker; but millions would die for Him. And that because He alone revealed to men the things that are unpurchasable, the riches that are unseen. He alone made men realise that a man's life consisteth not in the things that he possesseth, but rather in the thoughts that he thinks, in the motives that sway his action; in the ideals towards which he presses; in the God whom he worships and makes his own. How great a revolution He made. That one hour in the manger has changed the world. Every time I sit down to write a letter and head it 1922 I bear witness to the truth—that the world I know began when a Child laid in the manger brought to earth the realisation that all the great and noble things in life can be mine—though my raiment be shabby and though my banker never thinks it worth his while to throw me even a word when I reluctantly pass in through his swing door. What a wonderful new wine He brought, and how generously does He pour it into our bottles. Still new—after nineteen centuries! Still bursting the old bottles on all sides! I can be quite patient. There is no need for passionately tearing them in pieces. Nineteen centuries! What are they in the arithmetic of eternity! Give the Child time—and all the bottles of Mammon and vulgarity will at last be burst.
No wonder Christmas sends a glow of warmth round the heart, and causes joy bells to ring in the souls of even the drooping. It is to-day as it was of old, when the disciples—poor, dull, purblind men—were disputing even near the end as to which of them would have the greater position and the greater wealth and honour. And Jesus placed a little child in the midst and said, 'Except ye be converted, and become as a little child, ye cannot enter the kingdom.' And in a world weary of disputing, sated with strife as to who is to have the higher place and the greater portion, Christmas places the Child in the midst and says, 'Except ye be converted...' What men need is not the sharing of a booty, but the regenerating of a Spirit. The faith, the trust, the purity, the love of the childlike spirit—that's what we need. What we do or what we get matters nought, if only that spirit be in the heart. One man may whirl past in a Rolls-Royce, befurred, bejewelled, and may be the most pauperised soul on earth; while the stone-breaker at the roadside may be the inheritor of all things and rich beyond all dreams. Christmas is the surety of that. That was the wisdom of 'Stonecracker John,' who sang:—
'The good Lord made the earth and sky,The river and the sea—and me!He made no roads, but here am IAs happy as can be;For it is just as if he said—"John, that's the job for thee."And so in my appointed place,By God's good grace,I work, according to his plan,And would not change with any man.'
To-day, as it has done for the centuries and the years that are so many that one wearies in counting them, Christmas throws the halo of beauty over all shepherds abiding in the fields calling on their dogs; over all toilers in mines and workshops; over all stonebreakers and street-sweepers; over all mothers and all babes. It proclaims to-day with a voice whose certainty changes not that the man who serves Mammon and gains the world while he loses his soul makes a grievous and a profitless barter.
If there be no will guiding the affairs of men towards a predestined end, what a meaningless welter it all is! What a record of wars and feuds, of rising and of perishing empires, of civilisations born and civilisations overwhelmed: in very truth
'A taleTold by an idiot: full of sound and furySignifying nothing.'
There is unity and a new dignity in the tale when one gets up on a hill and sees it in far perspective. Things did not happen by chance. There was through it all a purpose at work, welding humanity together with the cement of blood, throwing down the barriers of race and language, silencing the sound of tumult and war until at last the song is heard on the plain of Bethlehem that has sung itself into the hearts of men, ushering in the dawn of peace and goodwill. In the fulness of the time the Child was laid in the manger.
Every advance of humanity in its upward struggle has sprung from some divine dissatisfaction. It was the fulness of the time in that the world, disillusioned and dissatisfied, realised its need. The Greek found no answer for their moral needs in the pantheon of gods that filled the heart with the passion for beauty alone. Socrates before drinking the hemlock advised his disciples to search for another teacher; but that other could not be found. The only remedy for the ills of man that they discovered was that he should cut himself loose from the world—a gospel of suicide. The Roman made a god of power. But when he had conquered the world, invested it with roads and bridges and by force had imposed peace on it, then he confronted the awful mystery of his own personality, and his questioning was baffled by a silence in which there was no voice nor any that answered. His gods became objects of derision. In the gratification of his bodily cravings he sought to lull the hunger of his soul. At last Rome presented the dread spectacle of a Nero who was at once 'a priest, an atheist, and a god.' There is preserved a record which visualises the awful depths to which that pagan world descended. Nero had murdered his mother, and he comes back to Rome nervous as to how the people will receive him. But the citizens poured out to meet him in their thousands, and rent the welkin with their shouts of welcome—'Hail, Nero, the god!' If that world was to be saved, it had to be saved then. If God was ever to intervene in the affairs of men, He had to intervene then. The extremity of man was God's opportunity. The Unseen Ruler must either come and deliver a world such as that or abdicate. The coming of the Child was a necessity.
It is very hard to understand how things do happen; and our only comfort is that we really understand nothing. We have in these last years been mesmerised into thinking that we understand a great deal when in reality we understand nothing at all. We camouflage our ignorance by speaking of law—but what is it? Why do like causes produce a like result always? No answer. We used to explain the heavens by gravitation. What is it? No answer. We ushered in the new age of electricity. What is it! Silence! There is no reason, then, for rebelling against the fact that we cannot understand the greatest of all mysteries—the coming of God more fully into the lives of men. All we can hope to do is to realise how natural it is that God should so come to men. As the years pass that thought becomes more and more natural. In other days God was thought of as dwelling far removed from the world. That is not now the great thought regarding God. 'Whatever sort of being God may be,' writes William James, 'He is nevermore that mere external inventor of contrivances intended to manifest His glory in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction.' (The conception of our great-grandfathers may have been limited; but it is more important that we should try to be as good men as they were.) This conception of 'an absentee God outside the world watching it go,' has given place to another. The world is now realised as spiritual through and through; the shrine of an indwelling life. God is in the world, has always been in the world, and man's reasoning and loving is but a reflection of his Maker's reason and love. Through all the weary centuries God has been with men, in men, striving with their spirits, never absent from them, the source of all their aspirations, visions, and dreams. If that be so, it is the most natural thing in all history that in the fulness of the time, when the need was greatest, God should come in fuller measure into the lives that He had made. Surely natural that the glows and flashes preceding the dawn should at last break forth into the glory of the sunrise. God, who has been with man from the dawn, guiding and leading, at last in the noontide speaks with the articulate Word, making His purpose clear. If once we realise that there has never been an impassable chasm between God and man, then the incredible becomes credible. For this is not an isolated event; it is rather the beginning of another great stage in man's spiritual evolution by which God comes and dwells more and more in the hearts of men, becoming incarnate in lives risen from the dead; in souls renewed after His image.
With us, too, it is the fulness of the time. If God intervenes when the need is sorest, and when man realises the need—then we can well cherish the expectation that another manifestation of God is at hand. Nineteen centuries ago He came to a world whose religion was dead. With us it is not dead; it is sore stricken. The glow has vanished, and those who bow down in the house of God in our day do so largely from force of habit, and not because they believe. Religion to-day curbs few evils, and is powerless against the selfishness that sacrifices the well-being of nations on the altars of self-interest. And, just as in Rome the unrest of soul made the degenerate a prey to every charlatan and soothsayer that came out of the East, so the spiritual hunger of our day brings men and women to crystal-gazers and table-rappers, bowing down before every superstition, however gross. And if the Rome of the Cæsars sought to allay its soul hunger at the banquets of pleasure, so also with us. Low forms of pleasure have led the multitudes captive. The London of Charles II. could not hold a candle to the London or Glasgow of to-day in the way of refinements of material sensation. The old cry of 'bread and circuses' has given place to the cry of dancing-halls and doles! In that old world at last there was no room for the cradle in the family life—the babe was shut out. And so to-day. There is every sign that God must again intervene and save, or the civilisation we know will be buried with the civilisations of all the past. The fountain of inspiration, of cleansing, of righteousness must be opened afresh, and its reviving waters sent flowing over all the land. Unless God does so come there is no hope. But all history is the proof that He will so come. We can hear the rumble of His chariot wheels as He comes. Here and there the Spirit is moving on the face of the waters. Of old it was shepherds and fishermen who first received the glad tidings. That fishermen should be the first to feel the coming outrush of spiritual power in our day is wholly natural. The glad tidings of Christmas is that God is ever coming to His own. The duty laid upon us is that we prepare His way, and make room for Him. It will be a new Edinburgh and a new Glasgow when the renewing Spirit shall have swept through them. It is the one hope. In Melrose Abbey there is an old inscription, 'When Jesus comes the shadows depart.' Some monk who felt the shadows gathering round him realised Christ as a living presence—and the shadows were wafted away. And he carved the words. And our shadows will vanish when He who lay in the manger will come again, in the fulness of His reviving and quickening Spirit. Then God will again work marvels in transfigured lives and in nations reborn.
There are some good people to whom the word Revival is anathema. There have always been such people. 'Their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect to their superiors,' wrote the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady Huntingdon, regarding the early Methodists. 'It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth. This is highly insulting, and I wonder that your Ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.' Yet it was that same Revival of religion in the days of Wesley and Whitefield that saved England when the evil days befell in the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. There is no nobler figure in all history than that of John Wesley riding over the whole country, reading as he rode, contesting all England for God, everywhere wakening the dead. To duchesses and highly refined folk that Revival seemed to be 'repulsive' and 'monstrous.' Religion was good enough in its own place, but it must not interfere with their amusements. They wanted their religion well iced. To-day when only another such outrush of spiritual energy can save a poor sick world, there is no need to trouble about the mocker. There is only reason to rejoice that there are manifest stirrings in the depths of human life which no earthly theory can explain. Often and often on wearied men there comes the breath of a new life, and armies, long worn out, arise and snatch redemption out of ruin. The prelude to these triumphs of the Spirit has always been a sense of expectation springing up mysteriously out of the depths. That expectation is wholly natural. We have come through the most awful carnival of blood and tears in the world's history, and so far there has been no result commensurate with the sacrifice. The old world is dead and the new tarries while men are left
'Wandering between two worlds, one dead,The other powerless to be born,'
If man's extremity be God's opportunity, then, once more, it is the fulness of the time.
The world has always been a hard place for minorities. Majorities are capable of crimes which, as individuals, they would shrink from in horror. And no crimes that stain the pages of history can equal in ghastly cruelty those which have been perpetrated under the influence of religious passions. The Founder of Christianity was crucified at the frenzied call of those who were the most devout and religious of their day. The Pharisees prayed nine hours a day! Their cry, 'Crucify! Crucify!' still rings in the ear.
Human nature has not changed very much in these nineteen centuries. And the majority of mankind are still pretty much as they were. There is not much good in getting suffused with sentiment over a minority of one crucified so long ago. It is more important to realise that the grim tragedy is for ever and for ever being repeated. It is a grim thought to think that the very passions of self-righteousness and self-interest which crucified the Galilean are now operating in His name. In a little village in the Hebrides well known to me, four Presbyterian churches celebrate the Communion in August. Here they are—the Parish Church; the United Free Church; the Free Church; the Free Presbyterian Church! If you attended a service in any of these you would not know any difference between them. On all vital matters they are at one. But there they are in the very name of Christ negating His purpose and breaking His law. For His purpose is to unite men together; bring them into the fellowship and unity of love. And they break up that small community into four fragments—and they do it from the highest motives and under the sanctions of the name of the Highest. They act exactly as the Pharisees acted nineteen centuries ago. They too were moved by the highest motives; they too had a passion for the Sabbath. The Christians to-day, like the Pharisee of old, make the gospel vain by their traditions. If He came Himself and said to them, 'You are wrong: my law is that ye love one another: the sign of my faithful followers is the love their lives evince,' ... He wouldn't be listened to. They would not cry 'Crucify.' ... No! They would only give Him a nickname and declare that He had no right principles! ... But it isn't in remote villages one beholds that. It can be seen anywhere. Moderators and bishops and dignitaries have met for a quarter of a century in Edinburgh to knock at the door of heaven with petitions asking God to unite them! And they will meet anywhere—in licensed premises even—except in a church; they will do anything except have the Communion together.... And they go on praying! To-day the very bigotry that sent the Lord stumbling to Calvary under a Cross is glorified by the name of Christ. That to-day is His crucifixion.
That, however, is but half a truth. When we take long views we can realise that there is no day in the year when we have more right to cherish the spirit of hope than on this day when the world waits for the Easter joy bells: Rejoice, Rejoice. The message of a day such as this is that no cause that has in it the seed of righteousness, however feeble it may be and however overwhelming its opponents, need give way to despair. There never was a minority so feeble on the face of the earth as these Galileans whose Master had been crucified. The cause was lost. They had not even understood what He had tried to teach them. While He spoke of a kingdom not of this world they could think of nothing but pitiful thrones such as Herod's! They left Him in a minority of one—and that minority was crucified. Nobody in all the wide world knew or understood why He hung there.... He who was to smash the Gentiles, as the Jew believed, was there crucified by Gentiles; He who was innocent was stamped for ever with the criminal's brand—done to death with two thieves. If ever there was an end made of any cause there was an end made of that personified by the Carpenter of Nazareth. The majority trampled the minority into extinction.
The body can be crucified and can be sealed up in a tomb, but majorities are powerless against the spirit. When his disciples asked Socrates where they would bury him he replied: 'You can bury me anywhere if you can catch me!' The soul can never be caught; can never be sealed up in a tomb. The wind bloweth where it listeth; and no walls, however high, can imprison it; no tomb hold it. Out of the dust the new life arose—the life of the spirit. And suddenly men realised that a kingdom not of this world—an empire without legions—was not only thinkable and possible, but was actually established. So has it always been since: the perishing of the body has been but the triumphing of the spirit.
One of the miracles of history is the way in which that crucified ideal arose and conquered; in which peasants and fishermen went forth to sow the seed of an invisible kingdom beneath the feet of militarists and tyrants, who though they rooted it up could never destroy it, until at last the minority was transformed into a majority. And that same miracle is for ever being repeated. What happened then happens now. And there are two reasons for that. The first is that man is much nobler than he is himself aware of. Beneath the subliminal consciousness there are untold riches—golden ore waiting to be mined. Under the influence of the herd-instinct and of crowd-psychology a man can on Friday yell, Crucify! Crucify! but on Saturday he may enter the valley of repentance and be made anew. Memory awakes in him when he is alone. He recalls the face and the words of the Crucified; doubts arise as to whether it was right—that cry of Crucify. No malefactor could have borne himself like that.... Long-forgotten feelings are let loose. Truly that Man had a regal spirit. However much a man may sink, he never sinks below the capacity of feeling the contagion of a triumphant spirit. Where is the man who cannot thrill as he hears Livingstone say, 'I'll go anywhere, provided it is forward'? It is in that hidden depth the hope of humanity lies. The cause that seems lost rallies to its side the multitudes that no sooner do the wrong than they are smitten with shame therefor and repent thereof. From the ranks of its enemies the cause of righteousness ever recruits its most valiant fighters. The Sauls are transformed into Pauls, and powerless minorities into triumphing majorities.
Not only are the laws of the spirit on the side of the righteous minority, but also the laws of the universe. The cause of reform cannot ultimately be defeated because the unchanging laws of nature are arrayed against evil. The great ally of every righteous minority is death. That was how Christianity conquered at the first. The Christians lived righteous lives, and by the very laws of life outlived the Pagans. So is it now. The life of self-indulgence and self-interest has no vitality to resist. Death removes it. The ranks of the devotees of pleasure are being swiftly depleted. Death is the great ally of righteousness. The multitude, who wanted to turn back to Egypt, 'died by the plague before the Lord' in the wilderness. Some virulent influenza came—and they hadn't the stamina to resist! ... That's how majorities vanish and room is made for the vigorous and healthy minority to possess the land.
The Calvaries of Christ are to-day everywhere. Wherever a child hungers or perishes, wherever men and women decay and die, there He, who identifies Himself with men, is again crucified. Where little babies die, 200 out of every thousand; where in proportion to the number of licensed premises is the death-rate among the babes—there He is crucified. Here, in this capital city, an hour in the evening has been added to the hours on which the monopolists in alcohol prey on the people, that more homes may be ruined and more children perish. It seems utterly hopeless. What is the use of trying to arouse people so dead to the decencies of life as this? But, to-morrow, the city will begin to be ashamed. The Church will begin to rouse itself. When Lord Shaftesbury was toiling to free 35,000 children from five to thirteen years in Lancashire alone from the Moloch of the factory he wrote—'The sinners are with me and the saints against me.' That is indeed weird: how often has the Church looked on, indifferent, while wrong triumphed. There is nothing more pathetic than to see the Church mustering up courage to condemn what the world has already judged and set aside! ... But to-day the message that comes across all the centuries to the heart of all minorities struggling for the right is this—'Be of good cheer: victory is on the way: though it tarry, wait for it!' The darkness of Calvary is but the prelude to the triumph of Easter morning.