First World War Centennial

III

THE EFFECT OF THE WAR ON CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS AND IDEALS

But has not the war produced an atmosphere in which the Church if it conceives its business in the terms just described, will be speaking without any audience? And are not the values which now appeal to men utterly diverse from all that the Church can offer? Not a bit of it. The experience of the war has clarified and con­firmed our fundamental religious ideas and revealed the power of their appeal to the present day mind. It has unmistakably set in the supreme place those moral and spiritual principles which constitute the message of the Church and it has revealed the responsiveness of men to the essential ethical ideals of Christianity.

The war has not dissolved the great convictions of Christianity about God and man, about the Church and the Cross, about prayer and about Jesus Christ.

It has disclosed the depth of our human belief in God. One met no atheists in the army and navy. The skep­ticism and materialistic doctrine of the last fifty years may have left deep moral scars upon the western world. It undoubtedly made the war possible. But it evidently affected only in the most superficial way the real instinct of men toward the idea of God. It was never necessary in the camps or in France to prove the existence of God. The enormous tide of life which was running swept men past the traditional intellectual difficulties and made the mechanistic chatter of the past generation seem meaning­less. Men knew God was awaiting just beyond the next moment. Or they had a rendezvous with him the day following or that day fortnight. What nonsense was this that there was no God? They knew better. They felt, confused as the idea might be, that they were en­gaged in His business and expected to report to Him soon. A Belgian chaplain told me that in the first year of the war the Belgian soldiers, free thinkers, Roman Catholics and men of no thought at all poured in their questions for help and strengthening and their ideas cen­tered on four great themes—God, sin, prayer, and nour­ishment, not for the body but for the soul. So among our own soldiers and sailors the outstanding fact has been an instinctive trust and assurance regarding God. And the war has not only revealed this widespread, almost universal, theistic attitude, it has strengthened it. It has done so by assuring men of a righteous moral govern­ment of the world. They have seen in the war the judgment of God striking home upon the third and fourth generation of Frederick the Great who pretended to believe in Him and who mocked the law of His righteous­ness. Sin has paid its penalty before their eyes, the sin of Germany, their own sin. There is God, they have said to themselves, and He is a just and almighty God. Furthermore the very sufferings of the war, its pain and agony, have helped many men in their faith in God. The suffering and pain of the universe have often been a difficulty in the way of a theistic belief. And the agony and blood of war have made it hard to reconcile war with a divine government of the world. But why? Is, there not anguish and blood in maternity? And yet maternity is the divinest and holiest thing we know in human life. It brings God nearest. St. Paul even made a bold declaration about it, which theologians have been busy ever since in explaining away, to the effect that it had a redeeming grace in it. Now men have experi­enced a sort of moral equivalent of the pain and peril of childbirth. So the soldier has found the suffering of war not a stumbling block in the way of a faith in God but a positive reassurance. "God is righteous and He suffers," the wounded man has said to himself, "I am suffering and I have been ready to die for righteousness. I know a bit about God. I am sure He is there." The soldier knows the truth which Walt Whitman put in words:

"And I say to Mankind, Be not anxious about God,

For I who am curious about each am not curious about God.

No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about Death."

And this is not all. The soldier and sailor believed in God indeed. But also it is the God of the Bible they believed in, not the God of natural theology or the differ­ent God of the new theology. The war has influenced more than the soldier in this. It has been interesting to see the change that has passed over some of the liberal theological journals. Some of those which before the war could not tolerate a God of judgment and righteousness, but would allow only a God of such good nature that He could be trusted to pass over everything, are now sternest in their faith in a God "most just and terrible in His judgment; hating all sin and who will by no means clear the guilty." The war has restored and made clear and firm to multitudes of men, for a little season at least, the assurance of a just and good and real God.

As to man, also, the war has confirmed the traditional doctrine of the Church. The Christian doctrine of man has quite openly and boldly asserted a paradox. It has denied that man holds by the beast. It has taught that he was a son of God, that God Himself took on his nature in the Incarnation, that he was made a little lower than the angels, that he was not of the order of nature alone but had kinships out of nature in God, that however sin and moral failure might have damaged him there were still indestructible possibilities and moral ca­pacities, which would respond to the call of God or to the summons of duty which is the Voice of God. Christi­anity flatly denied the materialistic theory as to the nature of man. On the other hand it unflinchingly recognized the facts of man's appalling gift for moral degradation. It knew and proclaimed the untruth of those transcen­dental exaggerations of the loftiness of human nature which still lingered among us and of all those rosy pictures of man's character which forget sin and the deadly realities of moral deficiency. Christianity, which began with the experience of the rejection by men of the highest and holiest character ever known and which saw in the cruci­fixion of Christ the limit to which human nature could sink in its self revelation of shame and cowardice, simply told man the truth about himself, that he was the son of a brute with a brute's possibilities latent in him. This double, self-contradictory view, constituted the tra­ditional anthropology of the Church. The war has sub­stantiated it in every detail. It has revealed the divinity in man. The world itself, we may say, to borrow a phrase of St. John's, could not contain the books that might be written of the heroism, the unselfishness, the modesty, the good cheer, the love, the sacrifice, the loy­alty, the devotion, the honor, the kindness, the forgiveness, the courage, the tenacity, the justice, the goodness, the true Godlikeness which have been displayed by soldiers, sailors, civilians, fathers, mothers, wives, boys and girls, young and old. " When I think of this war and of the hell which men are making of the world,"said a woman at the beginning of the struggle," I wish I were a dog."" Was there ever a more glorious day,"said a man who heard of her remark." I am proud to be alive now. Why, you can get a man to die for anything."Man­kind has shown itself to be capable of any task or sacri­fice however great. Out of the lowest, leadenest lives the golden and shining deeds have come. The trans­forming influences of duty, of a comrade's call for help, of hardship without resting, of dogged persistence in a cause seen to be God's cause and worth life and death, have worked in hundreds of thousands of men the miracle of glorified character, of character glorified at least in the moment and article of utter loyalty, derisive of all melodrama, simply and stodgily doing what had to be done and what was right, that God's truth might not be trampled down. The war has shown what a glorious work God did in making man. But it has shown too what a beastly, degraded, unspeakable thing man can be. War itself in its reality, not in its idealization, is of the dirt. It requires dirt life." Yes,"said an experienced Belgian soldier," there are glories of war but war is blackness. The glories are like a few stars shining in dark night and the dark night is war." War has shown the soldier's responsiveness and his irresponsi­bility, his willingness to give up everything and his easy subsidence into the idea that everything must be given to him, his tenacity and his vacillation, his self control and his self indulgence, his good nature and his ingrati­tude, his discipline and his disloyalty, his thrift and his wastefulness, his nobility and his bestiality. The atroci­ties and crimes which have been perpetrated have shown what man will do to make war frightful and to prove that man is not a son of God but a son of the devil. But apart from these evidences of man's depravity we see against the background of honor and light among our own people, soldier and civilian, those who have gone and those who have stayed, the shadows of weakness and reaction and failure. The war has reaffirmed the Christian view of the anomaly of the dignity and depravity of man.

But has not the war once for all discredited the Church? We have been told that it has, that it has won for the Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. and the K. of C. and the Salvation Army a place of undying affection and gratitude in the mind of the soldier, but that the absence of the Church as such and of its direct representatives from the camps and from the army and the recollection among the soldiers of the sectarianism and dead tradition­alism, the negative morality and the religious selfishness and want of democracy in the home churches contrasted with the unity and vitality and unselfishness and brother­hood of the army, have bred in the soldier a disgust with the Church from which it will suffer for many a day. All this and a great deal more we have heard over and over again from all sorts of people and in all sorts of places, troop-ships and troop-trains, hospitals, pulpits and magazine articles. But the facts, what are the facts? I venture to say in the teeth of all this that the Church and its ministry came out of the war with more of the respect and affection of the soldier and the sailor than any auxiliary agency, however useful and efficient it has been. A great deal of criticism has fallen upon some of those agencies, but not more than the soldiers and sailors have poured out on the army and navy them­selves. Some of it has no doubt been warranted: most of it wholly unjust. It will soon pass over and the good and faithful service rendered will be forever remem­bered. But the Church has not been dishonored by their usefulness. They have avowed their right relations to the churches and have acknowledged that all their service was in the name of the Church. It was the Christian Church which accomplished whatever good was done and as they reflect upon it soldiers and sailors will see this. And the Church was there in army and navy not only in all forms of auxiliary service but also in the 3,000 chap­lains, including the pick of the younger men in the min­istry and the priesthood. Hundreds of these men won the eternal love and admiration of those they served, and represented to them the noblest ideals of character and comradeship. Whether the soldier has learned to abhor sectarianism, selfishness, negative morality, and the want of democracy in the Church will remain to be seen. Let us pray that he has. If he has it will be to the vast advan­tage of the Church. For there is scarcely one American community where there is not more factionalism in poli­tics, in racial and national sentiment and in society than there is in any church in the community or between all the churches of the community, where there is not more selfishness in business and in social life than there is in theology and religion, where the churches do not repre­sent more ethical positiveness than the courts, the local philanthropies and especially the modern agencies of social service, and where the ordinary Christian congregation does not represent a meeting place of more classes and social groups than are brought together in any other association of the community and of far more democracy than characterizes ordinary personal or neighborhood re­lationships. All impulses such as these in men's hearts to-day are helpful, not hurtful to the Church and to the churches, even as they are, with all their shortcomings. But in deeper ways than these the war has confirmed the doctrine and ideal of the Christian Church, has re­vealed the strength of its appeal to men's hearts and has prepared the way for a more effective approach on the part of the Church to the men as they return home. The word "Church" is a word used in many meanings. I am speaking of it now as a mystical body, visible in partial and defective forms, representing as in a human body unity of life rather than uniformity of function, and embodying in the richest and subtlest ways of which we can conceive the social, collective principle. The war has shown the reality of forces in which the mechanistic interpretation of life has disbelieved and which may be partially de­scribed but cannot be accounted for by genetic psychology. It has demonstrated the reality of the unity of the life spirit, its immense momentum, the power of corporate interests and sentiments to pick up individuals and endue them with the energies and ideals of the body. There has been something mystical and infinitely hopeful in the evidence of the truth of social character, social purpose, social consecration. Society has furnished multitudes of men with spiritual conceptions and ethical impulse of which they had been individually wholly incapable. The army picked up the weakling, the helpless, the incompetent and again and again by the sheer upholding force of the mass bore these men along on a tide of service and achieve­ment possible only to a corporate and communized devo­tion. We have seen in military and political life proof of the reality, and faint illustration of the measure, of the truth of the New Testament idea of the Church as the body of Christ, in which the life of the body controls and feeds and uses all the members. What we felt after in the war under the necessity and compulsion of national unity the Church of Christ was established to interpret and to provide. Men have experienced now its possi­bility and have seen what any small measure of its pos­session may do for the nation and for mankind.

And still further the war ought to have dispelled com­pletely the foolish idea that historic and sacramental religion is an anachronism, to be displaced by pragmatic or purely ethical religious conceptions. The religion which appealed to men was a religion of full loyalty to the actual person, Jesus Christ, which could speak an authentic word about Him, which could say, "I know Him. Let me introduce you to Him." And it was the Churches which could feed men upon Him in the sacra­ment, and nerve them by the power of the sense of His communicated life, to which men came with hunger and respect. In the British army there were regiments that would not go into battle without their chaplains or until they had been led to the Lord's Supper. Among our American troops the Communion Service filled an ever enlarging place. A friend who was serving at Camp Merritt, the embarkation camp at Tenafly, N. J., told me that one night he had gone to bed weary at mid­night. About one o'clock he was awakened by the open­ing of his door and the shining of a light on his face. He opened his eyes and saw an officer standing in the door­way. "I am sorry to trouble you," said he, "but the men are leaving to-night and they do not want to go without a prayer. Would you come out to them?" It was customary for the troops to be sent out during the night to the trains or to the lighters which took them to the transports at Hoboken. My friend rose at once to go out to the men for a last prayer before they started overseas. The officer waited for them. As he came out of the door the officer said, "If it could be, sir, they would like the sacrament too." My friend took his chalice and a package of wafers which he felt sure would suffice and went out into the night. The moon was shining and the men were standing in the company street with their packs beside them. He spoke a few words and offered prayer and then invited those who wished to partake to pass by and as they passed he dipped the wafers in the wine and served them one by one. Soon he realized that his supply would run short and he broke the wafers in halves and then in quarters and then as the men still came could only touch the wine to their lips. They were not all church members. Probably only a few of them were. There may have been elements of superstition in their desire. But there was reality. And when the last man had come they stood for a moment of silence and then passed on into the night and across the sea to France and to death and to the life that is beyond death where One drinks wine new with men in the Kingdom of His Father. Incidents like these happened by the score. Men wanted the nourishment of the body and blood of Christ. The idea of it was no fanciful idea to them. The sacramental service of the Church gained a new recognition and a grateful acceptance amid the horrors and night of the war. But the symbol of Christianity which the war made most conspicuous was the Cross of Christ. Three of the great principles which are embodied in the Cross were dominant principles in the war, the principle of abandon­ment, of the letting go of all agencies and tasks but life, of achievement by life and by the power of the spirit; the principle of freedom, of contempt for all accouter­ment and acquisition; and the principle of atonement, of the work of unity by means of surrender, of the use of death to end death, (a) The Cross represented the principle of abandonment. "When He had by Himself purged our sins," says the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "He sat down on the right hand of the Maj­esty on high." The later texts reject the words "by Himself" as a gloss, but the idea is there none the less in the mood of the verb. He did it by Himself, not by anything outside of Himself. He used His life for it. That was the central lesson of the war. We have read all over the nation the challenging signs, "Food will win the war." "Ships will win the war." "Bonds will win the war." But while the war would not have been won without bonds and ships and food, they did not win it. Why were they needed at all? In the interest of men. Bonds were needed to equip them, ships to transport them, food to sustain them. But it took life, not the weapons or agencies of life, to achieve victory. The war has shown, as Paul taught, that we are saved by His life, poured out on the cross, poured out now through men. (b) The Cross represented the principle of free­dom. Jesus Christ moved on an orbit of liberty. Neither property nor tradition nor conventions ever bound Him. He and His disciples lived an unencumbered life. He was no foe of private property. He believed in it and sanctioned it. But He never allowed Himself to be enslaved to it. It was for use not for impediment. When He died the only loot for His murderers was the one robe that He wore. One secret of the soldier's joy and fellowship lay in this freedom from the trammels of possessions which need to be guarded and which deflect action. In the war and for the nation's life all things were held common and valueless except as they were ministers to life and to human ends, (c) The Cross represented the principle of Atonement. Christ suffered that men might not suffer. He met the anguish of separa­tion that man might be delivered from it. "In my thinking," writes a thoughtful Christian lawyer, "I have felt that perhaps the most succinct statement in reply to the suggestion that it is inconsistent for those who are opposed to war as itself an evil, yet not only to submit to the war, but enthusiastically to support it, is to point out that a war to end war is no more anomalous than is the death of the Lord Jesus Christ to end death. The whole scheme, as I interpret it, of our Christian faith, implies that. The sending of the Son of God to earth was, in the purpose of the Father, to make him a Saviour and Lord; to destroy the enemies of man, sin and death; in the accomplishment of that purpose, He who knew no sin was made sin for us, and He who was the conqueror of death died for us. If this war is really waged as a righteous war, it has in it all the elements, not of a crusade to recover an empty tomb, but of a sacrifice unto death to break the bonds of human enslavement, and with a new meaning we can sing the old stanza of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

"'In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!'"

Men who could not put this in words felt it. They knew that it was right and reasonable to die to diminish death, to suffer pain that there might be less pain to suffer, to accept the contradiction and separation of the grave for the sake of the affirmation and unity of life. Deeper and more religious meanings than we have ever proclaimed are discerned in the Cross of Christ, revealed and illustrated in the war.

Prayer is another of the Christian realities which has been unquestioningly accepted. All the theoretical objec­tions to prayer which have grown out of modern inter­pretations of the universe were simply ignored. No one needed to advance an apologetic for prayer. Men just prayed. It did not matter whether they had ever prayed before or not. They did it now. They did it in thou­sands of homes from which the sons had gone out to battle. They did it in the aviation bases before the men went out to peril in the air. They did it on the war ships and the transports and the submarines. They did it in the camps at home. The lads who had known how were sometimes diffident about beginning but the diffidence dis­appeared and men who had not known how came under a contagion of prayer which was new to them and which with many seemed so natural as, in the moments of su­preme danger at least, to become irresistible. Henry B. Wright who has done a piece of work at Camp Devens whose results will be enduring, early in the war had the following experience: "Two recruits came to him one night with the request that he give them a little advice. 'You see,' said one of them, 'we don't exactly know what to do about praying. Both of us have been in the habit of saying a short prayer at home every night before we got into bed, but since we came to camp we've cut out the kneeling and said them after we were safely between the blankets. Do you think this is all right, or ought we to kneel, as we always have done since we were boys, regardless of what the other fellows may say or think?' Professor Wright hesitated a moment, realizing that the situation might be a delicate one. He didn't exactly like to advise them to kneel and perhaps call down the ridicule of the entire barracks upon what might easily seem to some to be a flaunting of their religion, but on the other hand he admits that he was anxious to learn what the result of such a course would be. 'That's really a personal problem for you to settle for yourselves,' he finally replied, 'but it would certainly do no great harm to try kneeling once, and see what happens. If the result is satisfactory you can keep it up. If it isn't, why go back to saying your prayers after you have gone to bed.' The young men thanked him and departed. A few days later he ran into one of them on the street. 'Well, how did you come out?' was his first query. 'What happened when you knelt the other night?' 'Nothing at all—nobody made a sound,' said the sol­dier, 'only last night three other men knelt when we did.' 'And,' said Professor Wright, in ending the story, 'if you will believe it, at the present moment in that one barracks, where 167 men sleep, every one with the exception of about a dozen kneel regularly at night and say their prayers.'"

And at the front, prayer was as natural to men as danger. "O God, give me courage. Don't let me flinch. Go with me now. Help me, O God, help me. Don't let me get killed if it can be so. I wish I were home but I am glad I am here. I want to do my duty. Help me to do it. Bring me back safe. But help me to do my part. And if this is my end, don't let me drop. Save me, O God, and keep me. Here goes." How many thousands made such prayers in those last moments and then when the shock had been met and they were going on, or lying still waiting for help to come, men who had never thought greatly of God in peace, felt that He was there and prayed for the power that could not be stopped or for the patience that could bear all pain and wait. It is quite true that the instinct that prays in danger often dies down in security. But even so it has borne its testimony. The man has believed and there can be no disavowal of his belief.

Above all, the war has illumined and glorified the figure of Christ. A good many persons and institutions and ideas have been discredited by the war. Philosophies which jauntily assumed that they had conquered the world are a laughing stock now. But Christ towers alike over all the wreckage and all the glory of the war. Some soldiers thought they saw Him on the battlefield. Others know that they saw Him in the hospital. The one prob­lem which thousands of them regarded as the fundamen­tal problem and which had to be answered for them was, "Would Christ approve of this war?" And the death­less determination which came to them arose from the conviction that Christ did approve. They came to see clearly, also, that until Christ is made the real master of human life there can be no assurance that it will not have to be done all over again. Christ's friendliness, His superiority to race prejudice. His unselfishness, His righteousness. His forgiveness. His truth, His principles of a new and different human order, they realized, are the only hope of the new world. Men have discovered also that something more is necessary than pronunciamen­toes, programs of Utopia. The world needs a Saviour, a Redeemer, a Master, a Person who is new life to men and nations, who can say the words, and do the deeds which only Christ can say and do. Mr. E. S. Martin who has written with wisdom and earnestness throughout the war bore testimony to the truth in his Christmas edi­torial in Life:

"If you ask who was the greatest mind that humanity has produced, most people hereabouts, after considering whether it was Napoleon or Cæsar or Lincoln or some one else, will assent if you suggest to them that it was Christ. For us of European descent, at least, Christ is the great mind that is the basis of the civilization that we live in and practice to improve. The life and teachings of Christ conferred new importance on the individual, and in that way they are the foundation of modern democracy. Christ saw in every man the expectation, or at least the possibility, of immortality, and a chance to attain to fitness for it. To Christ no one was unimportant. Rich or poor, slave or free, every man had in him the germ of immortality and the making of a saint, if only the spirit of him could be caught and inspired. What wisdom, what manner of conduct, what aspirations would be the fruit of such inspiration, Christ showed by His own life.

"Now wars, of course, do not make people Christlike by wholesale. They do diffuse very widely a certain sort of con­secration. They do withdraw people from selfish concentra­tion on their own prosperity and comfort and make them spend themselves and all they have for a common object. This war we have had part in has done that to a wonderful degree. It has drawn together antagonistic persons and peoples and set them to work in a common cause. It has gone won­derfully far to abolish selfishness for the time being, and that has been a Christian result.

"But what we may reasonably expect of wars is not so much the immediate Christianization of individuals, as the bring­ing of world politics into better accord with the Great Mind, so that the kind may have a better chance to enjoy the natural fruits of goodness, and the greedy may be hindered from harrying them. When a war has increased and extended the authority of the Golden Rule, that war is a success. . . .

"Extraordinary, most extraordinary, are the changes that have been accomplished by this war. Even men have been changed to a remarkable degree. Many have been persuaded to new views, and millions have been convinced against their will by weapons that they devised to convince others."

The war has swept away a great deal. With the storm have gone some of the fogs with which men had hid them­selves from the authority and the necessity of Christ.

I venture to say again, accordingly, what was said at the outset of this chapter, that the war has clarified and confirmed our fundamental religious ideas and revealed the power of their appeal to the present day mind. The war also has unmistakably set in the supreme place those moral and spiritual principles which constitute the message of the Church. It has revealed the responsiveness of men to the essential ethical ideals of Christianity. Chris­tianity proclaims that moral and spiritual values are ab­solute and dominant. Much of our modern teaching de­nied this. The war has affirmed it. It has shown that these values are supreme over personal loss and material interest. Fathers and mothers have given up their only sons to die for a cause. Soldiers have served in the war for pay so small as to be negligible. Thousands of men have served for nothing. More than that, they have made untold sacrifices. In the case of Belgium we have seen a nation give up its material interests utterly and lay the very body of its national existence upon the altar. For four years it was a national soul without a body or a home. The war itself in its essence was a moral not a material struggle and it was moral ideas which prevailed. The very materialism of the struggle was marked by the idealism of self denial. It avowed itself as nothing but the vehicle and weapon of a righteous purpose and a human hope. What is idealism but the belief in the pos­sibility of the best, a confidence in the good faith of all who love liberty and are ready to die for it, the brotherly trust of the democratic principle? We succeeded in the war whenever and wherever this was our spirit and else­where and always we failed and will fail. The war says that what Christ said is forever true.

The common axiom and assumption of war is the Chris­tian principle that life is not the great value, neither the lives of others nor our own. "Thou shalt not kill" is not the whole law and it does not forbid all killing. The very code in which the law is found prescribes cap­ital punishment and sets many moral values over human life. It may even be a good thing for some men to be killed. Jesus said it was profitable for a man who was about to offend a little one that he should be drowned first. On Jesus' authority one may believe that it is a kindness to a villain about to rape a child to kill him be­fore he does the deed of desecration and shame, if he cannot be otherwise deterred. And it was better for Germany to have her soldiers slaughtered in the effort to usurp criminal dominion over the world than to have spared their lives and allowed her to succeed. Nor is life the first value to its owners. The commercial theory was fast teaching us that it was, that men and nations alike were free to sacrifice anything else rather than their own lives. The war preached the contrary Christian doc­trine, that life is only a means, not an end, that men have a right to lay it down. The scorn of the crude, familiar lines written long before the war is an accepted scorn to­day.

"A man must live! We justify
Low shift and trick to treason high,

A little vote for a little gold,

To a whole senate bought and sold,

With this self-evident reply.

"But is it so? Pray tell me why
Life at such cost you have to buy?

In what religion were you told

'A man must live'?

"There are times when a man must die,
Imagine for a battle-cry

From soldiers with a sword to hold—

From soldiers with the flag unrolled—

'A man must live.'"

Life is not the great value. Truth and loyalty are above life. The correct estimate of the value and use of life which prevailed in the war ought now permanently to stiffen our resistance to the old sophistries which justi­fied lies to save life and to clear the atmosphere for the doctrine and demand of Christianity which is a doctrine of pure veracity and a demand for the absolute devotion of life to enduring sacrificial service. The loyalty of peace also ought to inherit now the loyalty awakened and offered in war. Loyalty like truth is above life. There are times when men have truly felt that even loyalty to loyalty, though the object to which that loyalty was attached was unreal to it, was worth more than life. Sir Alfred Lyell's poem, "Theology in Extremis" is the tale of such a loyalty. An Englishman taken prisoner in the Indian Mutiny is offered life if he will abjure Chris­tianity. He does not believe in Christianity and he has no religious faith for which to die. A word which he can easily speak will set him free.

"Only a formula easy to patter,
And, God Almighty, what can it matter?"

The memories of home come back to him—

"Showing me summer in western land

Now, as the cool breeze murmureth

In leaf and flower—And here I stand

In this plain all bare save the shadow of death;

Leaving my life in its full noonday,
And no one to know why I flung it away.

"Why? Am I bidding for glory's roll?

I shall be murdered and clean forgot;

Is it a bargain to save my soul?

God, whom I trust in, bargains not;

Yet for the honor of English race,
May I not live or endure disgrace.

"Ay, but the word, if I could have said it,

I by no terrors of hell perplext;

Hard to be silent and have no credit

From man in this world, or reward in the next;

None to bear witness and reckon the cost
Of the name that is saved by the life that is lost.

"I must be gone to the crowd untold

Of men by the cause which they served unknown,

Who moulder in myriad graves of old;

Never a story and never a stone

Tells of the martyrs who died like me
Just for the pride of the old countree."

If for this, how much more for the pride and the love which include this? "How much more? Unlimitedly," answers the war. "Life is the working stuff of God. Men's blood is the stream of power for His purpose."

And in this also there is fresh support for the col­lective obligation which Christ in His Church lays on men. The war declared the primacy of the corporate claim of society over the right of individual personality. The constraint of the body is upon the members. What gives the flag its power is its symbolization of this col­lective life and its claim. The sacredness of the indi­vidual conscience is a holy thing but not more so than the sacredness of the corporate life. Human good has a right to ask for all that the individual has. If it can demand his life, it can demand aught else. It is recog­nized that he can refuse it and no unjust penalty must be laid upon him if he does. Life itself will judge him and he will know the full mercy and the full righteous­ness of God. If he is right against society's false claim upon him, life and God will justify him and by his pain, if need be by his death, he will have forwarded the prog­ress of mankind even against its unseeing will.

The central act of Christianity was the accepted and unavoided death of Christ. He had a right to lay down His life. But, more than that, He conceived His right to be His duty. The duty of a man to die for his nation saves the principle of the supremacy of collective obliga­tion and interest from any endangerment of the right of the individual person. The good man like the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, whatever the manner or occasion of the dying. We have seen the glory and joy of the happy acceptance of this duty. The war has revealed it and even more vividly it has been revealed in those accessory services which have glorified both the center and the outskirts of the great conflict. There has been no more shining instance than the life and death of William A. Shedd in Western Persia. Dr. Shedd was the senior member of the mission station of Uremia. From the beginning of the war its horrors fell nowhere more darkly and fatally than upon the Christian population of northwestern Persia. They were driven first northward toward Russia and then southward into Mesopotamia. They were shut up in Uremia City in crowded mission compounds. Their villages were destroyed, their property pillaged and their daughters ravished. One can hardly wonder that when power came to them there were unwise and unjust retaliations. Here and in other Persian cities the typhus and typhoid cut down the missionaries remorselessly as they cared for the persecuted and famine stricken people. They were free to come away and save their lives and they stayed and laid them down. Dr. Shedd had been called on by the American Government to act as vice-consul and for months had been the one center of order and justice, restraining wrong doing, whether by Moslem or by Christian, relieving suffering, and seeking to secure the maintenance of at least some form of nominal govern­ment. At last panic-stricken, against his persuasions and appeal, 60,000 Assyrian and Armenian Christians set off in a great flight from Uremia to the south. Unable to deter them Dr. Shedd resolved to accompany them as a rearguard of protection against pursuing Turks and Kurds. They fled without food or transportation over consecutive ranges of mountains, through a barren coun­try without grain or fuel or roads, leaving a trail of death and disease behind them. Those who came last died by thousands. Dr. Shedd like a faithful shepherd followed his flock to shield and protect it and at Sain Kala, a little village, south of the Uremia Lake, he fell a victim to cholera. It had been open to him and his asso­ciates at any time to leave Persia and seek safety, but like his Master, he could save others but he could not save himself. One may justly adapt to him such words as Matthew Arnold used of his father in "Rugby Chapel":

"But thou would'st not alone
Be saved, our brother, alone
Conquer and come to thy goal,
Leaving the rest in the wild.
They were weary, and they
Fearful, and they in their march
Fain to drop down and to die.
Still thou turnedst, and still
Gayest the weary thy hand.
"If, in the paths of the world,
Stones might have wounded thy feet,
Toil or dejection have tried
Thy spirit, of that they saw
Nothing—to them thou wast still
Cheerful, and helpful, and firm!
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of the day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand."

There are still other lines in Arnold's tribute to his father, which might justly be applied to William Shedd, true missionary, lover of Christ and of men, good shep­herd like his Lord. One of the Syrian people, Professor Yohanan of Columbia University, who knew and loved him, has himself used just such speech of him and of his father: "Dr. Shedd," says he, "was a scholar, and thoroughly equipped for the work with something more than the surface-teaching of the ordinary theological doc­trines. His book, 'Islam and the Oriental Churches,' is an able piece of work. He laid, however, his literary ambition and all his scientific attainments upon the altar of God from whom they came, counting them loss for Christ. . . . He did not work for stipend, or honor, or the praise of men, but was impelled by higher motives to the service of his Master. He was the champion of the oppressed, the shepherd of a gentle and humble spirit, to whom the poorest of his flock was not too poor. His greatest joy was in bringing a stray sheep into the fold."

The end came to him on August 7, 1918, among the mountains of Persian Kurdistan. Mrs. Shedd has writ­ten from Hamadan an epic letter of the closing days:

"The roads were crowded with nearly every kind of animal that walks and thousands of vehicles. We estimated that there were about 70,000 Christians in Uremia, or perhaps more, but some stayed with Moslem friends, and some did not get warning. We pushed on rapidly and got along fairly well until the third day when about an hour from Memetabad, in Sulduz, a man came up and told us that the Turks had reached Heydarabad an hour or two behind us. We had been hearing firing but could not locate it. It seemed as if our last hope had vanished and there was nothing but massacre for the thousands of frightened people. We whipped up our tired horses to try and reach Memetyar hoping that Dr. Shedd could find the prominent men there and get them to intercede for the people. Great crowds were encamped there. The report was false. The Turks were not behind us yet, but there had been an attack at Heydarabad and the people left there and ran off leaving their loads and their money. But we did not dare to stay at Memetyar over night and hastened on. Later, those coming after us were fired upon by cannon on that road, and again they ran off leaving their loads which was evidently what the attackers wanted.

"On the fifth day we reached Mianduab, distress increasing day by day. The Van Armenians with most of the mountain tribes, including nearly all the fighters, were ahead, so that those of us in the rear were almost unprotected. On the fifth day we heard that the English were really at Sain Kala so we took heart and camped that night in a garden with a few others at Kara Waran. The next morning we took our time thinking that since the English were near we would be safe. About six o'clock firing began. It was evident we were being attacked from the rear. Dr. Shedd jumped on a horse and tried to rally the few gun men left. We found that nearly every­body had moved on and we were in the extreme rear.

"With great difficulty we got our wagons through the narrow streets of the village and on to the main road by a short cut for the firing was going on behind us and we did not dare to go around. Then fighting began on our front and from the right. After some driving we found ourselves at the tail end of the crowd which was jammed in between two walls where we had to stay for some time. The fighting in the rear was stopped and I was greatly relieved to have Dr. Shedd appear. One of our attacks was from the Majd i Saltana who had small cannon. Our leader claimed to have taken one and showed us the shell. The attacks were repulsed sufficiently to allow the crowd to move forward, but the fighting kept up three or four hours as we traveled on. We ourselves were not in the place where the bullets were thickest. We saw several dead bodies, mostly women.

"Again in the afternoon we were attacked, but one of the Syrian leaders with his men who had been sent back reached us in time, and he soon got possession of the mountain ridges and protected the long line of refugees. This time too, Dr. Shedd got on a horse and tried to rally the men with guns to protect the crowds so that by night he was very tired.

"That night we stopped at a threshing floor a few hours from Sain Kala, and made an early start reaching the English camp at Sain Kala about 9 a. m. August 6th. Thousands and 'thousands, perhaps fifty thousand (I can't say) refugees were camped about Sain Kala, in the orchards, yards of houses, and spread out over the surrounding hills. And still the long line of stragglers reached back for miles.

"From Uremia to Sain Kala, six days' journey for us, I saw perhaps not more than 20 bodies of Moslems lying along the road, evidently shot by the Armenians or Mountain Syrians who were leading the flight. At nearly every village we had the same complaint of plunder and murder by those in advance, so those of us in the rear suffered the penalty. Villages nearly everywhere were deserted. We could buy nothing and were always in danger of attack.

"When we reached the English camp at Sain Kala, August 6th, we were received by Major Moore and Captain Reed, the latter for many years connected with the English Mission in Uremia. They had been sent with ammunition, Lewis guns, money and a handful of men, to save the Uremia situation, but came 'too late, too late.' Dr. Shedd had longed for months to be able to shift some of his heavy responsibilities and he was wonderfully cheered when we reached Sain Kala, thinking now that the people would be safe and there would be some authority that could maintain order. Ever since the middle of February he had been giving himself without reserve, try­ing to save life and property in the midst of anarchy, but that is a long story. We had hardly been in camp at Sain Kala an hour before all hopes of rest vanished.

"A small force of Englishmen sent out about 16 or 18 miles to protect refugees in the rear had been attacked by a larger force. Immediately the camp was astir, and a body of cavalry was sent out. There were only about 150 fighting men in the English detachment at Sain Kala, but they had rapid firing guns which saved them more than once. They tried to get Syrian and Armenian leaders to get their men out but it was very difficult as they were with their families and a terrible panic had begun. The thousands camped around us started to move forward slowly, irresistibly, like a great avalanche. Some armed men were sent back to the town of Mahmudjik to rescue the people there and help the struggling rear of the line of refugees which had been cut off. I am told that quite a number on both sides were killed in Mahmudjik, the Moslems attacking from roofs and windows. They had great provocations for as usual they had been robbed, but the attack was repulsed, all the refugees moved forward and by evening only the English camp remained.

"An hour or so after reaching camp I noticed that Dr. Shedd did not look well. Soon he complained of the great heat in the tent. I told him I would fix him a place to lie down in our Red Cross cart which had a canvas cover, where it was cooler. After a time I saw he was very weak and miserable to I had the baggage taken out and arranged a bed for him with quilt and pillows on the floor of the cart. The English doctor was out with the cavalry. Dr. Jesse Yonan was there but had no medicine. I feared cholera and suggested calomel which I had. We gave him several doses of that.

"About four or five o'clock Captain Reed told me they were going to move their camp to a place under the shelter of the mountains. I made arrangements for our baggage and we started before dark so that we could see the road and Dr. Shedd would not be jolted so much. The three or four Syrians besides our two drivers were with us and I thought they under­stood perfectly well that we wanted to stop at the English camp where we would see the English doctor. It soon grew dark and I was entirely absorbed in my care for Dr. Shedd and did not watch the road. After what seemed like hours, I noticed that the riders behind were leaving us, and I called out and asked if we were not near the English camp. They replied we had left it several miles behind. I cannot tell you my feelings; the roads were too rough and uncertain to return. We got into a gully and could not go on. It was very dark.

"We called to the riders who were leaving us to come back and help us back the cart up to the level, but they went on. However, the men who were with us succeeded in backing the cart up to a level place where we decided to stay until morning. Then we were alone on that desolate mountain road in the darkness with my husband dying and no medicine, no nourishment, no comfortable place for him to lie, and only a limited supply of water. I lighted the lantern and looked at his face, saw he was very bad and told the men some one must go back for the English doctor. Two of them went, but the doctor did not reach us until midnight. There was an old cart left by the roadside and the men set fire to it to have heat and light. The lantern had only a few drops of oil so we could not keep it lighted. I had some coffee which the men made and Dr. Shedd drank it eagerly. He was very weak but we had no nourishment to give him. From the first he had severe cramps in his legs and was very cold. I heated the water bottle for his feet. The doctor came and suggested ptomaine poison and left us saying we should wait till they came up in the morning. Dr. Shedd was not conscious after that. A little after light the man said we could not wait there as there was firing behind and the English were probably attacked, so we took him in his dying hour over those rough mountain roads, two hours or more, when Captain Reed and the doctor caught up with us. We drove the cart to the side of the road. The doctor pronounced it cholera and at my re­quest gave him a small injection for I still hoped that God might let him stay. In a few minutes he breathed his last about 10 A.M., August 7th, just one week after leaving Uremia. Captain Reed said we had better go on as far as the carts could go and find a burial place. We went on for an hour or so and found a place on the mountain side near a rock. There was nothing to dig with but a small adz. But with the aid of fingers and sticks they made a shallow grave quite a distance above the road. We sewed him in a blanket and then wrapped him in a heavy canvas from the cart and bound it with ropes. Dr. Yonan read a part of I Corinthians xv and led in prayer. After a layer of earth we placed stones and again on the top and then smoothed it over so that no enemy might know where the grave was. We cut a cross on the top of the rock and on the front, and Captain Reed had a drawing made of the place so that it can be found. It is about six or seven miles west of Sain Kala. It was terrible to leave him there in that wild desolate place but I hope to take him to Seir some time."

This is what life is given for, that men may lay it down for their fellow men. The awful sacrifices of the war sanction and support the call of Christ for men's lives now in peace.

For the setting of duty and truth and glory above life does not mean always that we are to die for them. More often it means that we are not to die at all but to do the harder thing and live for them. That will be our problem and our testing now. It is easy to draw mis­leading inferences from the war analogies. We think that because war beheld such unity of national purposes and readiness of national sacrifice we shall now see the same in peace. War has always been able to draw out what peace commands in vain. War is a transient in­terest. Peace is an unending task. War appeals to all that is worst in men as well as to all that is best. Peace can only call upon the highest and truest self. War can use the unifying energy of a common hate. Peace knows that it is the hater who is hurt by his own hate.

What war brought forth had its splendor. One can understand what the British officer meant, of whom Mr. Masefield spoke, who wrote, "I do not know what I will do when this lovely war is over." It had its glories and they are gone. But if that which passes away, as Paul said, is glorious, how much more glorious is that which remains. And what remains? The great religious con­victions and moral ideals of which we have been speaking, remain. The need of loyalty and devotion and sacrifice remains. The task and summons, and the test and en­treaty of peace remain. Can men meet these as they met the challenge of death? Can the man do this harder thing?

"So he died for his faith. That is fine—

More than most of us can do,

But, say, can you add to that line

That he lived for it, too?

"In his death he bore witness at last

As a martyr to truth.

Did his life do the same in the past

From the days of his youth?

"It is easy to die. Men have died

For a wish or a whim—

From bravado or passion or pride.

Was it harder for him?

"But to live—every day to live out

All the truth that he dreamt.

While his friends met his conduct with doubt

And the world with contempt.

"Was it thus that he plodded ahead,

Never turning aside?

Then we'll talk of the life that he led,

Never mind how he died."

The war has borne its testimony to the truth of Christianity and to the validity of its ethical ideals. And now the war is over and gone. But the testimony is still here to be used by the Church as it seeks to lead men to achieve the manhood and to render the service which shone with so bright a glory in the war and which are needed not less but more by the nation and by mankind in the long days of peace.

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