The Great Discovery Part 3

But self-interest answered with cold disdain: "What sickly sentimentalist is this? Let Him be crucified." He faced to-day the l.u.s.t of conquest, and declared that the conquering of men's bodies was nothing; that the only way of attaining power was to conquer men's hearts and minds and wills, thus clasping them to us with hooks of steel; that the will of G.o.d for His children was that they should love their enemies and not pour upon them the vials of wrath, trampling them under foot; but the arrogance of man answered with the hoa.r.s.e cry, "Crucify."

And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the holocaust of war--ten millions of men consigned to the h.e.l.l of reeking trenches. In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before, bearing its awful woe. In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal Love is crucified. It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred door of the House of G.o.d.

The most wonderful thing in history is that from a peasant done shamefully to death in a remote corner of the Eastern world there should flow through the ages such an inexplicable power. And yet there must be some explanation of it. Why should a pa.s.sion for righteousness be evoked in the human heart by the fact that a Galilean was crucified by a petty Roman official? There can be no explanation but this--that that deed of shame revealed to men the hatefulness of the power which wrought so evil a deed. That power was self-interest--selfishness.

The eyes of men turned to Jesus Christ, and they saw one holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sin, whose journeying was the journeys of healing among the sons of men, whose words were words of blessedness, declaring that G.o.d loved and pardoned His children, and yet men reviled, scorned, scourged and at last crucified Him. The power that moved men to this dread crime was sin, and thus the word sin became a word of horror. (For the selfishness that crucified was only one fruit of sin.) Out of that realisation of the horror of sin there sprang an ethical pa.s.sion--a pa.s.sion which in the heart and in the world waged ceaseless war on selfishness and all the devices of evil.

Thus humanity was lifted out of the mire. They girded themselves to fight that dread and hateful power which crucified the Holy One.

Like the wind blowing in from the sea that sweeps before it the foul miasma that lies over the valleys, so that men look up and see the heavens and feel a new vigour moving in their blood, so a breath from the living G.o.d came stirring the foul places of humanity, and the eyes, no longer blinded by the exhalations of evil pa.s.sions, saw the ideal of purity arise before their eyes, and they turned to climb towards the clearer vision. Through the revelation of purity in the face of Jesus Christ and the realisation of the awfulness of that power which crowned that purity with thorns, there came to humanity the dawning of deliverance from sin--a deliverance still going on to its fruition.

History is for ever repeating itself, and to-day the process of humanity's deliverance from evil will gather momentum and advance a long way towards the final triumph. For just as men only realised the hatefulness of sin when they saw it laid upon Jesus Christ, so will it be also to-day. A generation that had lost the sense of sin beholds sin laid upon millions of men, working woe unspeakable, and, beholding, learns anew what sin is and the hatefulness of it. For these millions of men grappling with death, what are they but humanity's sin-bearers.

On them is laid the burden of the sins of this generation. The selfishness, greed, ambition, l.u.s.t--all the pa.s.sions which sweep men to wars of conquest--have poured the vials of misery on their heads. The son of the widow sitting on the mort-safe, who now lies in a nameless grave, he bore it. The bearing of it killed him.

And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that pa.s.sion for righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust. There will ring round the world the compelling cry that this power of h.e.l.l must not for ever hold humanity in its grip--that ruthless ambition, militarism, despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth. Once more the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men.

There was another power also that stirred the world under the shadow of the Cross, and that was the power of self-sacrifice. There came to men an overwhelming realisation that at the heart of the universe was the Spirit of self-sacrifice, and that the Cross was but the expression of it. They realised that the greatest thing a man can do with his life is to lay it down. And as men realise to-day that the Cross still abides in the heart of G.o.d, so that in all their affliction He is afflicted, there comes to them the feeling that the one way of coming nearest to His heart is the way of self-sacrifice.

Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of self-sacrifice. What is it that sustains the men who go down to the earthly h.e.l.l of ruthless war? It is just this--the consciousness, newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and country, for home and kindred. They are content to be blotted out if only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be exalted. Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure. Men charge across fields of death with the light of it in their eyes. They are raised into the fellowship of the Cross. And we are raised with them.

If I could only tell the bowed widow sitting there on the mort-safe the glorious fellowship with which her son is numbered, she would again lift up her face to the light. He has died that we may live. Greater love hath no man than this--nor yet greater glory. But she needs not to be told; she knows it already. She knows it far better than you or I do, for she feels it. In the deep places of life where words are meaningless, her dumb heart feels the mystery of sin-bearing and the glory of self-sacrifice.

By a faculty deeper and truer far than reason, in the depths of the soul where the Unseen Spirit moves revealing the things that are of lasting worth, she has learned in meekness and suffering that divine wisdom which is hid from the wise. She knows that the road that goes by Calvary up to the Cross is the one road along which the feet can come to G.o.d. She knows that her son has walked along that road, and that, because of his bearing the cross laid upon him, and his dying while bearing it, G.o.d has brought him into that joy which all the cross-bearers see shining beyond the darkness and the woe. And because she has thus entered into the secret place of the Most High, and has felt the touch of G.o.d, she is ready to greet the day of still greater sacrifice.

In the evening, when the curtains were drawn, I took up a magazine and read an article. It was a bitter invective against Christianity and the Church. Nineteen centuries of the religion of the Cross--and this holocaust as the fruit. It is amazing the blindness of the jaundiced eye. It would be as reasonable to blame the Founder of Christianity for His own crucifixion as to blame Christianity for the fact that the wicked have continued to crucify Him. These things are so not because, but in spite, of Christianity.

Grievous as war now is, yet it is not war as in the days before the Cross was erected on Calvary. When Ulysses asked Agamemnon for sanction to bury the body of Ajax, the King was greatly annoyed. "What do you mean?" he answered, "do you feel pity for a dead enemy?" That was the spirit of war in the old heathen world--the spirit which had no mercy on the living and no pity for the dead. Slowly but surely the spirit of Christ fettered the spirit of hate and dethroned the spirit of revenge. We now minister to the wounded and bury the dead enemy with the pity and the honour we render to our own.

We can trace the evolution of peace through the centuries. Wars between individuals have ceased. A century and a half ago warring clans in Scotland dyed the heather red; to-day wars between tribes have ceased. There remains only war between nations, and already there are great nations between whom war is unthinkable. If we in these days wage war with Germany, yet we in these days also celebrate the hundredth anniversary of unbroken peace with the United States of America. If we bewail the failure of Christianity in the former, let us be grateful for the triumph of Christianity in the latter.

Formerly war was the normal condition; now to the moral consciousness of Christendom war is an outrage. We only need to look beneath the surface to realise that Galilee is conquering Corsica, and will conquer at the last. Beneath the shadow of the Cross men will at last find healing for their grievous wounds.

And as a symbol thereof the doors of the sanctuaries of peace will be flung wide open, and no burdened heart will find the House of G.o.d locked and barred against groping hands. One fruit of these grievous days may well be that the Church will realise that it does not become her to occupy a lower plane than that heathen temple in ancient Rome, whose door was shut not day or night while men were dying in battle.

In the coming days when the mothers of sorrow come to their dead, over whose graves the falling leaves flutter as a benediction, they will not be left sitting on the iron mort-safe. The open door will invite them into the sanctuary of peace, and they will croon the coronach of their woe in the holy place. For they are the priesthood of this generation, offering up the most precious sacrifice--and the door of the holy place must be open to them. And there, in the sanctuaries of peace, their sorrow will be trans.m.u.ted into joy.

IV

The Power of Prayer

IV

For eight centuries the Church of St. Giles has been the centre of the religious life of Scotland. At all times of sorrow the nation has turned to it, and within its walls, consecrated by the prayers of so many generations, the surcharged heart has voiced its woe in the presence of the Unseen. But in all the years of the dim and fading past there never was a day like this in which we now stand. Death has come as a grim spectre, and has looked into our eyes. The winds carry to our ears the moans of our perishing sons, dying gloriously for freedom on the b.l.o.o.d.y fields of Flanders. The great ships guard our sh.o.r.es, and we know that if that vigil failed, our cities and villages and fair countryside would become as Louvain and the Low Country.

Death itself would be welcome rather than that.

If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our ears. And that call soundeth not in vain. To-day[1] the two great Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country--for all the things which make life beautiful. They have come through days of alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one place. And in their hearts only one purpose--to seek the blessing of G.o.d for their nation.

[1] November 18, 1914.

As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many b.l.o.o.d.y fights for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of time.

Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing for their dead. The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of the surf wailing on the sh.o.r.e, and their sobbing as the cry of the grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide. But the city fathers could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to pa.s.s to the kyrk, and pray whane tyme requires for our Soveraine Lord and his Army, and neichbouris being thereat."

That proclamation stirs the blood! They are dust, these fathers of ours, but their spirit is all alive, throbbing in the heart of us--their far-away children. Never did a race meet its Sedan in a sublimer spirit than that. The strong, at toll of bell and tuck of drum, manned the ramparts, and the women filled St. Giles' and sent heavenward their cries. The bodies of such a race may for a brief season be brought to subjection, but their souls are invincible--and it is the soul that always conquers.

And here to-day it is the same. From every part of Scotland men have come, and they pa.s.sed "to the kirk to pray for our Sovereign Lord and his Army." True, there has been no Flodden and no Sedan; but it is by the good hand of G.o.d upon us that the enemy was frustrated in his eagerness for another Sedan. And it is in part the prayer of thanksgiving that is laid to-day upon His altar, and in part the pet.i.tion that His mercies may be continued to the nation in the cruel days to come.

What a sanctuary for a nation's prayers, this church, where Kings have prayed and gone forth to die in battle; where Queens have wept as the voice of judgment, grim and stern, untouched by tenderness or love, sounded in the ear; where three thousand people dissolved in tears as the good Regent, foully slain, was borne to his grave. Over it pa.s.sed wave after wave of fanaticism and barbarism; and at last it fell into the hands of the restorers--more ruthless far than Goths or Vandals!

But, through it all, the house of G.o.d survived; and, apparelled once more in some of its pristine glory, it opens its doors to a nation that once more seek after its G.o.d.

And above us, as we sit there, hang the colours of our Scottish regiments stirring our patriotism, a.s.suring us that the men who guarded these flags on many b.l.o.o.d.y fields were guarded by G.o.d, and that we are still in His keeping.

What a place this is in which to set vibrating that note of patriotism which now quivers from Maiden Kirk to John o' Groat's. These colours there--they are the most eloquent things on earth, for they pertain to the realm of symbols. Words are poor compared to tears, and that is because tears belong to the world of symbols. That tattered banner there belonged to the Gordon Highlanders, and was carried through the Peninsula and the Crimea. Woven in faded letters you can read on it still Corunna, Almarez, Pyrenees, Waterloo. Ah! these flags tell of a devotion stronger than death, rekindle the memories of the day when stern silence fell on the ranks, as the Highland Brigade breasted the slopes of the Alma until Sir Colin Campbell lifted his hat and they rushed on the foe with the slogan of victory; and that other day when "the thin red line tipped with steel" rolled back the surge of the Cossacks; aye, and of a hundred such days when men went down joyously to death that the race might be free and live.

Waterloo!--it is on many flags. And we remember how the Man of Destiny himself, as he saw his ranks yield before the onslaught of the Highlanders, did not restrain his admiration for his enemies, but exclaimed with the true soldier's generosity, "Les braves Ecossais"--"Brave, brave Scotsmen" (what a contrast to "French's contemptible little Army"). The hands that carried, the hearts that thrilled at the waving of these flags, their fame will never perish.

"On the slopes of Quatre Bras The Frenchmen saw them stand unbroken.

On the day of Waterloo The pibroch blew where fire was hottest.

When the Alma heights were stormed Foremost went the Highland bonnets.

As it was in days of yore, So the story shall be ever.

Think then of the name ye bear, Ye that wear the Highland tartan.

Zealous of its old renown, Hand it down without a blemish."

As the eye looks along the nave up into the choir and sees the gleam of red, colours after colours, there comes the memory of words--"We have heard with our ears, O G.o.d, and our fathers have told us what work Thou didst in their days in the times of old.... Through Thee will we push down our enemies...." The unseen G.o.d who has led His people through so many and great dangers will not forsake them now.