Defenders of Democracy Part 29

I saw in Orleans three years ago the celebration of the 487th Anniversary of the deliverance of the ancient city by Joan of Arc.

The flower of the French army pa.s.sed before me, the glorious sunlight touching sword and lance and bayonet tip until they formed a shimmering fretwork of steel. Then came the City Fathers in democratic dress--and following them, the dignitaries of the Church, in purple and crimson and old lace, and a host of choir boys singing Glory to G.o.d in the Highest, and finally in his splendid scarlet robe, a cardinal symbolical of power and majesty and dominion.

In whose honor was all this gorgeous pageantry? In honor of a simple peasant girl, who saw or thought she saw visions--it is perfectly immaterial whether she did or not--and who heard or fancied she heard--it matters not--voices calling to her out of the silences of the night to go forth and save France. Soldiers and clergy and populace, Catholics and Protestants and pagans united in paying homage to the courage of a woman. And I thought as I watched the brilliant spectacle in the shadow of the old cathedral, that thousands of women in the twentieth century in England and America, and France and Germany and all the Nations are serving in a different way, it is true, from the way in which Joan of Arc served France, but none the less effectively. Aye, even more so, as they go forth clad not in mail, but in Christian love to help mankind. In the very forefront of this shining host are the trained nurses, following the standard uplifted by Florence Nightingale.

When I see a trained nurse in her attractive cap and gown I always feel that a richer memory, a finer intention has been read into life. Wherever they go they carry healing with them.

To maintain this army of militant good will and helpfulness, and to increase it as occasion requires is an obligation so imperative that it cannot be evaded.

Never was it as urgent as it is to-day, that there should be generous response to the appeal for nurses.

If we are often discouraged in our philanthropic work, it is not because we consider what we are doing in a detached way, independent of its world relationships. If we could only realize that we are part of the mighty army composed of all nationalities and races and creeds, an army of life, not of death, marching past disease and suffering and misery and sin, we would be inspired to wage the conflict with greater vigor, until our vision of the world freed from suffering, was realized.

When the realization comes, it will not come with shouting and tumult, but will come quietly and beautifully as the sun makes its triumphant progress through the heavens, gradually conquering the night until at last the earth is flooded with glorious warmth and light and all the formless shapes that loved darkness rather than light silently steal away and are forgotten.

John Lewis Griffiths

Note: Although the above selection was part of an address delivered in London in 1911, its truth is more apparent today than ever before.

Things Which Cannot Be Shaken

There are season in life when everything seems to be shaking. Old landmarks are crumbling. Venerable foundations are upheaved in a night, and are scattered abroad as dust. Guiding buoys snap their moorings, and go drifting down the channel. Inst.i.tutions which promised to outlast the hills collapse like a stricken tent.

a.s.sumptions in which everybody trusted burst like air-balloons.

Everything seems to lose its base, and trembles in uncertainty and confusion.

Such seasons are known in our personal life. One day our circ.u.mstances appear to share the unshaken solidity of the planet, and our security is complete. And then some undreamed-of antagonism a.s.saults our life. We speak of it as a bolt from the blue!

Perhaps it is some stunning disaster in business. Or perhaps death has leaped into our quiet meadows. Or perhaps some presumptuous sin has suddenly revealed its foul face in the life of one of our children. And we are "all at sea!" Our little, neat hypotheses crumple like withered leaves. Our accustomed roads are all broken up, our conventional ways of thinking and feeling, and the sure sequences on which we have depended vanish in a night. It is experiences like these which make the soul cry out with the psalmist, in bewilderment and fear,--"My foot slippeth!" His customary foothold had given way. The ground was shaking beneath him. The foundations trembled.

And such seasons are known in the life of nations. An easy-going traditionalism can be overturned in a single blast. Conventional standards, which seemed to have the fixedness of the stars are blown to the winds. Political and economic safeguards go down like wooden fences before an angry sea. The customary foundations of society are shaken. We must surely have had such experiences as these during the past weeks and months. What was unthinkable has become a commonplace. The impossible has happened. Our working a.s.sumptions are in ruins. Common securities have vanished. And on every side men and women are whispering the question,--Where are we? We are all staggered! And everywhere men and women, in their own way, are whispering the confession of the psalmist,--"My foot slippeth!"

Well, where are we? Amid all these violations of our ideals, and the quenching of our hopes, in this riot of barbarism and unutterable sorrow, where are we? Where can we find a footing? Where can we stay our souls? Where can we set our feet as upon solid rock?

Amid the many things which are shaking what things are there which cannot be shaken?

"Things which cannot be shaken." Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circ.u.mstances of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement.

And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent and the transient. Behind the uncharted riot there hides a power whose invisible energy is the real master of the field. The ocean can be lashed by the winds into indescribable fury, and the breakers may rise and fall in crushing weight and disaster; and yet behind and beneath all the wild phenomena there is a subtle, mystical force which is exerting its silent mastery even at the very height of the storm. We must discriminate between the phenomenal and the spiritual, between the event of the hour and the drift of the year, between the issue of a battle and the tendency of a campaign.

All of which means that "While we look at the things which are seen, we are also to look at the things which are not seen." Well, look at them.

THE POWER OF TRUTH can never be shaken. The force of disloyalty may have its hour of triumph, and treachery may march for a season to victory after victory; but all the while truth is secretly exercising her mastery, and in the long run the labor of falsehood will crumble into ruin. There is no permanent conquest for a lie.

You can no more keep the truth interred than you could keep the Lord interred in Joseph's tomb. You cannot bury the truth, you cannot strangle her, you cannot even shake her! You may burn up the records of the truth, but you cannot impair the truth itself!

When the records are reduced to ashes truth shall walk abroad as an indestructible angel and minister of the Lord! "He shall give His angels charge over thee," and truth is one of His angels, and she cannot be destroyed.

There was a people in the olden days who sought to find security in falsehood, and to construct a sovereignty by the aid of broken covenants. Let me read to you their boasts as it is recorded by the prophet Isaiah: "We have made a covenant with death, and with h.e.l.l are we at agreement: when the overflowing scourge shall pa.s.s through, it shall not come unto us, for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves." And so they banished truth. But banished truth is not vanquished truth. Truth is never idle; she is ever active and ubiquitous, she is forever and forever our antagonist or our friend. "Therefore thus saith the Lord G.o.d...your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with h.e.l.l shall not stand...and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-places."

Thus said the Lord! We may silence a fort, but we cannot paralyze the truth. Amid all the material convulsions of the day the supremacy of truth remains unshaken. "The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

"Things which cannot be shaken!" What is there which cannot be shaken? THE Pa.s.sION OF FREEDOM is one of the rarest of spiritual flames, and it can not be quenched. Make your appeal to history.

Again and again militarism has sought to crush it, but it has seemed to share the very life of G.o.d. Brutal inspirations have tried to smother it, but it has breathed an indestructible life.

Study its energy in the historical records of the Book or in annals of a wider field. Study the pa.s.sion of freedom amid the oppressions of Egypt, or in the captivity of Babylon, or in the servitude of Rome. How does the pa.s.sion express itself? "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may my right hand forget her cunning!" Study it in the glowing pages of the history of this country, that breath of free aspiration which no power of armament, and no menace of material strength was ever able to destroy. The mightiest force in all those days was not the power of threat, and powder, and sword, but that breath of invincible aspiration which was the very breath of G.o.d. And when we gaze upon stricken Belgium to-day, and look upon her sorrows, and her smitten fields, and her ruined cities, and her desolate homes, we can firmly and confidently proclaim that the breath of that divinely planted aspiration, her pa.s.sion of freedom, will prove to be mightier than all the materialistic strength and all the prodigious armaments which seem to have laid her low. It is a reality which cannot be shaken.

There are other spiritual forces which we might have named, and which would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight, unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith which hold on and out amid the ma.s.sed hostilities of all its foes.

You cannot defeat spirits like these, you cannot crush and destroy them. You cannot hold them under, for their supremacy shares the holy sovereignty of the eternal G.o.d. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord;" and these spirits, the spirit of truth, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of meekness and love, are in fellowship with the divine Spirit, and therefore shall they remain unshaken.

[signed]J.H. Jowett

Somewhere in France

"Somewhere in France"--the day is tranquil, the sky unvexed, the green earth without a wound as I write; yet "somewhere in France"

the day is torn with clamors, the sky is soiled with man's mounting hatred of man, and long, open wounds lie cruelly across the disputed earth. "Somewhere in France"--my mind goes back to remembered scenes: the crowd blocking the approach to a depot; white faces and staring eyes, eyes that alternately fear and hope, and in the crush a tickling gray line of returning PERMISSIONAIRES. "Somewhere in France"--on such a perfect day as this I see a little village street nestled among the trees, and hear the sound of the postman's reluctant feet tapping over the cobblestones--the postman that comes with the relentlessness of Fate--and at every house the horror of the black envelope. "Somewhere in France" the great immemorial cathedrals and the dotted, cool, moss-covered churches are filled with supplicating women and the black-framed, golden locks of children lifting their eyes before the Great Consoler as the sun breaks through the paling candle-flames. "Somewhere in France"--in its crowded stations I remember a proud womanhood, gray in the knowledge of sorrow, speeding its young sons and speaking the Spartan words. "Somewhere in France," in its thousand hospitals, the ministering white-clad angels are moving in their long vigils, calm, smiling, inspired. "Somewhere in France"--I see again imperishable fragments of remembered emotions; the women working in the vineyards of Champagne, careless of fate or the pa.s.sing sh.e.l.ls; the orphan children playing in the ruins of Rheims; a laughing child in bombarded Arras running out to pick up an exploded sh.e.l.l, a child in whom daily habits has brought fear into contempt; a skeleton of a church in far-flung Bethany, that still lives in a sea of fire, where a black-coated priest of the unflinching faith was holding his ma.s.s among kneeling men before an altar hidden in the last standing corner from which the shredded ruins had been swept.

"Somewhere in France"--I remember the volcanic earth, the strewn ruin of all things, the prostrate handiwork of man mingled with the indignant bowels of the earth, and from a burrowed hole a POILU laughing out at us in impertinent greeting, with a gaiety which is more difficult than courage.

"Somewhere in France"--in bombarded Arras, was it not?--I remember an old woman, a very old woman, leaning on her cane as she peered from her cellar door within a hundred yards of the smoldering cathedral.

I wonder if she still lives, for Arras will be struggling back to life now.

"Somewhere in France"--what thronged memories troop at these liberating words! And yet, through all the pa.s.sing drama of remembered little things, what I see always before my eyes is the spiritual rise of Verdun. Verdun, heroic sister of the Marne; Verdun, the battling heart of France--whose stained slopes are anointed by the blood of a million men. Verdun! The very name has the upward fury and descending shock of an attacking wave dying against an immemorial sh.o.r.e. To have seen it as I was privileged to see it in that historic first week of August, 1915, at the turning of the tide, at the moment of the retaking of Fleury and Thiaumont, was to have stood between two great spectacles: the written page of a defense such as history has never seen, and the future, glowing with the unquenchable fire of undying France. When I think of the flaming courage of that heroic race, my imagination returns always to the vision of that defense--not the patient fort.i.tude before famine of Paris, Sebastopol or Mafeking, but that miracle of patience and calm in the face of torrential rains of steel which for months swept the human earth in such a deluge as never before had been sent in punishment upon the world. This was no adventure such as that gambling with fate which in all times and in all forms has stirred the spirit of man. Regiment after regiment marched down into the maw of h.e.l.l, into the certainty of death. They went forward, not to dare, but to die, in that sublimest spirit of exultation and sacrifice of which humanity is capable, that the children of France might live free and unafraid, Frenchmen in a French land.

They went in regiment after regiment, division after division--living armies to replace the ghostly armies that had held until they died.

Days without nights, weeks without a breathing spell--five months and more. They lie there now, the human wall of France, that no artillery has ever mastered or ever will, to prove that greater than all the imagined horror of man's instinct of destruction, undaunted before the new death that rocks the earth beneath him and pollutes the fair vision of the sky above, the spirit of man abides superior. Death is but a material horror; the will to live free is the immortal thing.

[signed] Owen Johnson

The a.s.sociated Press

It is worth while to explain how the world's news is gathered and furnished in a newspaper issued at one cent a copy. First, as to the foreign news, which is, of course, the most difficult to obtain and the most expensive. In normal times there are the four great agencies which, with many smaller and tributary agencies, are covering the whole world. These four agencies are, as above noted, the Reuter Telegram Company, Ltd., of London, which a.s.sumes responsibility for the news of the great British Empire, including the home land, every colony except Canada, and the Suzerain, or allied countries, as Egypt, Turkey, and even China and j.a.pan; and the Agency Havas of Paris, taking care of the Latin countries, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland and South America as well as Northern Africa; and the Wolff Agency of Berlin, reporting the happening in the Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Slav nations. These three organizations are allied with The a.s.sociated Press in an exclusive exchange arrangement. Subordinate to these agencies is a smaller one in almost every nation, having like exchange agreements with the larger companies.

Thus it happens that there is not a place of moment in the habitable globe that is not provided for. Moreover, there is scarcely a reporter on any paper in the world who does not, in a sense, become a representative of all these four agencies. Not only are there these alliances, but in every important capital of every country, and in a great many of the other larger cities abroad there are "A.P."