Victory Out Of Ruin Part 4

VI

The march of events is the proof that the woe of humanity is too deeply seated to be healed by any human salve. There is no balm in any Gilead for these wounds. The first step towards the rehabilitation of the world would be the mutual cancelling of the nations' debts to each other. The United States alone makes this impossible. Money that we borrowed for our allies, and which we cannot recover from our allies, America insists that we pay. And yet that money was spent to save America as well as ourselves. To realise that one has only to think what would have happened if Germany had won? The greatest day in the history of Scotland was when the German fleet, its crimes against the laws of Neptune for ever ended, came sailing into the Forth to surrender. Through the mist that shrouded it there never moved a procession so humiliating and so woeful. Judgment at last overtook the murderers who gloated over the _Lusitania_! But supposing Germany had won, what then? The first condition would have been the surrender of the British fleet at Kiel. And we would have no choice; for a starving nation must sacrifice everything to feed its children. But what would have happened then? Think of the Emperor William master of the British and French fleets as well as his own. What would have become of the Monroe Doctrine next morning? What would have become of the scores he had to settle about the supplying of munitions to his foes? In face of the might confronting her, America would have been helpless. New York would have been given to the flames if America came not to heel. We saved the great Republic as well as France and ourselves. And now, having given our sons and our treasure, we are being bled white that we may pay America for the munitions which we used in her defence. These payments are earmarked for the payment of American war-pensions! The world has never seen so grotesque a situation. The protected and the delivered demand that their protectors and deliverers should pay for the privilege of protecting and delivering them! What is at the back of so preposterous a state of things? It is this, that there is the shadow of a Presidential Election looming ahead, and the cancelling of the debts guaranteed by Britain would be unpopular. One can quite realise the use the Irish orators would make of that. We forget that Anglophobia is still the staple of American history as taught in her schools. The Boston Tea Party and the War of Independence were due to British vices and the triumph of American virtues. To cancel the debts for which such a nation is responsible would be to repudiate the makers of America! ... What is required, of course, is the right education of the American democracy. Schools should teach that it is impossible in so imperfect a world that all the right can be on one side. Yet that is how history is taught, not only there but here. Our foes also were always wrong! There will be no peace in the world until the spirit of spread-eagleism is replaced by that of meekness; until nations and men realise that we are members one of another, and that we are here to help and serve each other. Until that new spirit breathes through the ma.s.ses of humanity, there will be war. And we shall have to endure.

We who saved America must pay for the privilege of saving her; and we must do it while every opportunity of doing so is s.n.a.t.c.hed from us. A tariff that will exclude our goods has been established; the only way left to pay is by acting as carriers on the seas! Now we are to be driven from that service by nationally subsidised mercantile American fleets! And yet we must pay! ... If anything could waken humanity to the fact that the conversion of the people can alone save the world, it would be this. Missionaries to convert the hearts of the American voters is the world's supreme need.

VII

One of the most impressive sights in New York is the tomb of General Grant. Its site overlooking the deep-gorged Hudson river is most impressive. It is a square building of white granite without and white marble within, surmounted by a cupola with Ionic columns. Above the door, between two figures emblematic of peace and war, are inscribed the words, 'Let us have peace.' These are the closing words of his letter accepting the Presidency. Grant had a right to use the words, for he was a great peace-maker. He made peace by conquering the forces of disruption. He kept stubbornly at it. But when he won at last he would not humiliate Lee by taking his sword from him; and when he was told that Lee's men owned their own horses--'Let them keep them,' said Grant; 'they will need them for the spring ploughing.' Nor would he allow any salvos of victory. 'We are all citizens of the same Republic,' said he; 'let us have peace.' To-day the whole world is one Republic woven together by the mighty shuttles of steamships, airships, and wireless. In that world there can be no hermit nation. In that world, 'let us have peace.' In the Governor's garden at the base of the slope that leads to the citadel, in Quebec, there is an obelisk that stirs the heart. It is a monument to Wolfe and Montcalm. The one died content that he had won a dominion greater than he knew for the nation that he loved; the other, dying, comforted himself with the thought that he did not live to see the surrender of Quebec. There, these two heroic souls, near the scene of their heroism, share a common monument. The inscription is the most beautiful I know:--

Mortem, Virtus, Communem, Famam Historia Monumentum Posteritas Dedit.

'Valour gave them a common death; history a common fame; posterity a common monument.' That obelisk visualises the hope of the future. It would indeed be a miserable world in which men went on hating for ever.

Only the spirit of Him who for the love of men stooped to a cross can dig the grave of hate and war at last. When the world shall awake from its nightmare and shall listen to Him, then the world will have peace.

VIII

When I shall have forgotten all else, I shall remember a morning spent in Trinity Church, New York. The oldest grave in the graveyard surrounding it is that of a little child, Richard Churcher, 'who died the 5 of April 1681 of age 5 years and 5 months.' The child's name has outlived the city; for the old city is gone. A few years ago the spire of Trinity Church was a landmark. Now they are completely hidden by the buildings of enormous height that surround them. By contrast the church and spire look like toys. One building soars to 724 feet--49 storeys, with elevators rising 41 storeys in one minute, and express elevators 30 storeys in 30 seconds! Even St. Paul's Cathedral surrounded by buildings such as the Woolworth, rising to 800 feet, would be dwarfed into significance, and Trinity Church is small compared to St. Paul's. It is when one ponders such a scene that one realises what it is that is wrong with the world. The towers and pinnacles of Mammon soar everywhere high above the puny sanctuaries of faith. The evangel of the Carpenter of Nazareth is jostled aside and crowded out. What the world has to do is to make room once more for love and self-sacrifice--for idealism. That is the only road to salvation. n.o.body knows that better than the American. He likes to listen to oratory about world-peace; but when the oratory is done he smiles. 'We might as well,' says he, 'try to lift ourselves by our bootlaces.' And that is the moral of it all.

The United States refused the mandate for Armenia, and the mandate for Constantinople, and dishonoured the signature of its chief magistrate guaranteeing the security of France. To-day the blood of the slain cries to Heaven, and Britain is left alone holding the gates of Europe against a race whose only rule is government by ma.s.sacre. And from America the Press reports a cablegram to the Prime Minister:--'Win civilisation's everlasting appreciation by keeping the brutes out of Europe. Americans expect every Englishman to do his duty.' What a strange species of humour! In very truth the regeneration of the world's democracies is the only road to peace.

CHAPTER VIII

THE WAY OF PEACE

The supreme need of the world to-day is peace. Europe is sinking into the mora.s.s of despair because across their frontiers a dozen nations drilled and armed are watching each other with sullen eyes. From the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific to the long wash of Australasian seas everywhere it is the same. Civilisation is perishing; but it is a civilisation armed to the teeth that is awaiting its obsequies. Every newspaper proclaims the one need is Peace. The Conference on disarmament has but one word to express the sum of all its desires--Peace. There must be some stupendous barrier in the way when all this yearning and endless talking fail to reach the goal of humanity's striving. However eagerly the nations pursue it, peace seems to be for ever a receding horizon.

If on one spot of an anguished world statesmen confer as to the things that make for peace, yet behind their fortified frontiers the nations are still sharpening their swords. It is, as it has ever been, a mad world.

I

There must be some hidden cause of this failure of humanity to work out its own deliverance. And our duty is to find out that cause. It is quite possible to make an idol even of peace. Peace is not necessarily the supreme good. If there have been wars which call for repentance and humiliation on the part of those who waged them, there have been again and again periods of peace which call for even deeper humiliation and keener repentance. If we have waged war when we ought to have been at peace, we have as often been at peace when we ought to have waged war. Time and again, a generation ago, we heard of Armenians being ma.s.sacred. But we kept the peace. There never was a more disgraceful peace in the history of the world, and awful has been the price that we have paid for it. To keep the peace when the innocent are being ma.s.sacred is d.a.m.nation. Peace is not then the supreme word in man's vocabulary. By mouthing it man often falls into the mire. There is a greater word by far, and that is--righteousness. The only peace worth having is the fruit of righteousness. That is why peace flies faster than its pursuers. The votaries of peace have forgotten that fruit does not grow without roots and soil. Eloquence can do much, but it cannot grow grapes without vines deep rooted in the soil. And peace is a fruit of the spirit deep rooted in righteousness. And the nations pursuing peace have forgotten that pilgrimages to Washington or The Hague may be good, but the supreme need of humanity is to go on pilgrimage to the fountains that will cleanse the heart. The deliverance of the world is not by way of renewed or remodelled treaties, but by the old, old way of renewed and converted souls.

II

How has peace ever come to men? It has come in one way only--the way of the renewed spirit. I have been reading again the wonderful story of this Scotland of ours, and that old, simple truth has come home to me afresh. The problem that confronted Scotland in the dawn of its history was how to unify and pacify warring tribes that were ceaselessly drenching the land with blood. And the way the problem was solved here is the way in which alone it can be solved on the greater stage of the whole world. Fourteen hundred years ago there was no Scotland anywhere on the map. There were four kingdoms in North Britain--the Picts north of the Grampians, the Britons in Strathclyde, the Angles in the Lothians and southward to the Tweed, and in Kintyre a small and feeble colony of Scots who had crossed from Ireland. (In those days a Scot was invariably an Irishman.) In those distressful days wars in North Britain were as common as strikes are now, and women went forth to battle along with the men. And they were wars of extermination--without mercy. Out of that welter how did unity and peace come? The uniter and pacifier came out of Ireland. The Scots in Kintyre were Christians, and the pagan Picts under King Brude inflicted on them a shattering defeat. It looked as if Christianity were on the eve of being stamped out in Kintyre. To Columba in Ireland there came the cry of his kinsmen's woe--'Come over and help us.' To a man burning with ardour and longing for new fields to conquer for his Master, that cry was like a bugle summoning to battle. He came to their help, but not with spears and arrows. He came with the might of the Cross. The greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that instead of material weapons he went straight to the fountain-head of the misery. He realised that there was only one way of salvation for the Christian Scots in Kintyre, and that was by converting to Christ the wild people in the North that had braved the Roman arms and were still in their primitive savagery. In those days to convert a clan one had first to convert the chief; to convert a nation one had first to convert the king. The goal towards which St. Columba set his face was the castle of King Brude at Inverness. Iona was but the base for the great campaign that was to make North Britain safe for Christians. If to-day the problem be how to make the world safe for democracy (though the problem is really greater--how to produce a democracy worth the sacrifice of making the world safe for it), in the sixth century the problem was how to make Scotland safe for Christ.

III

The greatest story in our history is that which tells how Columba made his venture of faith and conquered. He never lacked courage this man.

'Do you think, Columba, shall I be saved?' asked the King of Ireland.

'Certainly not,' answered Columba, 'unless you break off from your sins, repent, and be converted.' The courage wherewith he faced his kinsfolk, with that same courage he now faced his enemy. We can see his galley sailing up Loch Linnhe with the Cross at the masthead, and the face of the leader set like a flint. He would go to the stronghold of paganism. Up the great glen the little band trudged with death lurking behind every bush, but there was never a thought of faltering.

In vain did King Brude bar his gates against him. No walls can shut out the Spirit, no gates of iron can debar the Word living and powerful. Outside the gates Columba and his band begin to chant a Psalm--'We have heard with our ears, O G.o.d, our fathers have told us, what work Thou didst in their days ... how Thou didst drive out the heathen with Thy hand....' And as that voice of his rolled like thunder the King and the people 'were affrighted with fear intolerable.' The gates were flung open and King Brude surrendered to the amba.s.sador of Christ. The wild race, whom the legions of Rome could not subdue, were conquered by an unarmed man. What a light must have been in that man's eye: what a fire in his heart! From that day Scotland was safe for the followers of Christ, and the little band of Christians in Kintyre could now sleep peacefully at night, for King Brude was learning the law of love and the way of peace. From that day the good seed was sown broadcast over all the land. That dauntless messenger traversed sombre, uncharted gulfs, trod his way along rock-strewn sounds, and the darkness of the centuries faded before the Cross that gleamed at the masthead. The Picts became Christians, and in due course united with the Christian Scots in Kintyre, and Scotland found a name. In time the Angles and Strathclyde were merged in the unity of the Kingdom of Scotland. There came first the unity of one ideal, of one law, of one faith--and out of that there came the four kingdoms merged at last in the unity of the one Kingdom of Scotland.

Until at last, after weary centuries, the sounds of war hushed into silence: clan no longer lifted up sword against clan; brethren in Christ could no longer slay one another. Peace lay at last like a golden shaft across all the land. One fearless unarmed man faced a king with the weapons of the Spirit, sowed the harvest which we are now reaping.

IV

It is only by that road that humanity can come at last to the great goal of universal peace. It is the road that nations are unwilling to tread. They still are following the mirage that has strewn the deserts of time with the bleached skeletons of those who set out to reach it.

The mirage is salvation by treaties. That idol has had hecatombs offered on its altars, and unless there comes a change it will have hecatombs in the future. If there be no truth and righteousness in the heart that signs, then treaties are valueless. The history of the centuries is the proof of their futility. The treaties of to-day can no more save than the treaties of all the yesterdays. For the nations that sign cannot trust each other. In the hearts of the nations there is not throned that righteousness which can be trusted.

The world's sickness is of the soul. What the nations need is that truth and righteousness be enthroned in their midst. Without that, peace is only the sc.u.m on the surface of the foul and stagnant pool.

And the witness of the centuries is that righteousness is the fruit of the vision of G.o.d. The foundation of righteousness is the realisation of the ceaseless operation of the laws whose source is G.o.d. If only the vision of G.o.d could blaze forth before the eyes of democracies as it blazed forth before the eyes of King Brude, then the way of peace would open up for groaning humanity. How can there be lasting peace in a world of conflicting ideals? Can Christianity be at peace with Mohammedanism stained with the blood of millions of Armenians; with paganism still brooding over the ideal of an empire based on force?

Can the ideals of unselfish service and of pride and greed lie down in peace together? There can be no peace until humanity is brought into a unity of the soul--of allegiance to one King, of obedience to one law.

The only hand worthy to wield the sceptre of the world is the hand that was nailed to a Cross. What the world has to realise is that the Manger overthrows the Caesars, and that the road leading to a Cross is the way of peace. When we shall send forth over all the world men endued with the spirit of St. Columba, then there will be hope of the world. But that is the last thing we think of. We fondly believe that while we ourselves are sinking back into the mire we shall be able to lift the world up into light; while we ourselves turn our backs on the Prince of Peace, that we will bestow peace on the world. It is the weirdest of all obsessions. When William Ewart Gladstone was once asked how a man of his intellect could listen to such dull sermons, he answered--'I go to church because I love England.' There is a wider motive--'I go to church because I love the world, because I can hear there a law that men should love one another with a love that stoops to a Cross, by which alone the world can be saved.' It is vain for nations that forsake the worship of a G.o.d of love to spend their days devising schemes for bringing peace to a ruined world. For there is no way of peace save one--the way of love. No nation has as yet tried that way. And there is no sign that they mean to try it. The world waits for the man who will convince it that the new order must be based on fraternity and not on fighting. But the world will applaud him instantly. Fraternity--that's the word! Most excellent! But when the new Columba will go on to show that fraternity without a Fatherhood to rest on is meaningless and powerless; that humanity can only realise its brotherhood in a common Father--even G.o.d. Then the world will once more shrug its shoulders. 'This is the same old wheeze,' it will say--and go its way. For we have no longer any use for G.o.d. That is the root of our misery.

CHAPTER IX

NO ROOM

There is an old Gaelic proverb that says: 'Where there is heart-room there also is house-room.' There was room enough in that mean inn for the farmers with their pouches filled with money for the tax, for the soldiers that swaggered with the pride of empire, for the village-talebearers with their rude jests; but for a poor woman in the hour of her need there was no room. She was shut out because there was not found in that inn any with heart big enough to make room for her.

What was she anyway?--a mere chattel; and what her child?--already there were too many children; and the only course to adopt was to let most of them die! And so at its dawn we can see what a mighty change Christianity has made in the world. Though the mother and the Child were shut out of the inn and consigned to the a.s.ses' stall, yet because of that mother and Child womanhood is to-day honoured and childhood most precious. To-day, in whatever land on which the shadow of the Cross has fallen, there is heart-room and house-room for mother and child.

I

As one reads the old beautiful story, this foot-note that explains how the Founder of Christianity was born in a stable because 'there was no room for them in the inn' stirs the mind with a wistful poignancy. The book slips down on the knees and the imagination awakes. The essence of nineteen centuries of Christian history is here. The web of all the centuries is woven after the one pattern. Shut out at His birth, His fate has been the same ever since. He came with the message of humanity's renewal. He proclaimed the most revolutionary doctrine ever preached to men--that the pariahs of humanity, publicans, sinners, slaves, those ignorant of the law and therefore accursed, were all the sons of G.o.d; and that only one law was requisite, that men should love one another with a love that gleamed red with sacrificial blood. But what have men done with this evangel? They have shut it out! It was too beautiful for their gross hearts and their self-clouded eyes. It was also very difficult. It required the changed heart and the transfigured life. And that has always been most difficult--to trans.m.u.te the self-centred into the G.o.d-centred and all it means. So men set themselves to circ.u.mvent that demand for the surrendered heart--and they offered the surrendered brain. That is quite easy.

They formulated logical propositions setting forth that thus and thus G.o.d acted, and they said--'Believe this and be saved, or disbelieve and be d.a.m.ned!' Christianity that came into the world as spirit and life became mere intellectual gymnastics! And with the name of the Lord of Love on their lips Christians cheerfully burnt each other because their definitions differed.... What an amazing fate to overtake the most beautiful thing that ever was seen on the earth! ... A Borgia sits on the throne of St. Peter; Calvin burns Servetus; the Jesuit exterminates his opponents; the Covenanter proclaims that he prefers to die than to live and see 'this intolerable toleration'; and all the time the Lord Jesus Christ is shut out. Not wholly shut out, however, for He has in every age found a shelter and a welcome in the stables and the sheds, among the ragged, the mean, and the outcasts of humanity.

II

It is not only in the great organisations that bear His name that there has often been found no room for the Christ; but still less has there been found room for Him in the social order. This great revolutionary identifies Himself so closely with humanity, that He declares that whosoever receives a little child and loves it receives and loves Him.

How then do we deal with the Founder of Christianity as He comes to us in the form of a little child, saying, 'Receive Me'? ... This is the way we deal with Him. Every five minutes of the day a baby dies somewhere in the United Kingdom. There are districts in great cities where two hundred out of one thousand perish in the first year of life.

A third of the possible population die in the years of childhood. The horrors of war are small compared to the horrors of peace, to which we have become so inured that we scarce notice them. We have taken the sunshine and the fresh air and the starlight from millions of our fellow citizens and shut them up in barracks and surrounded them with forces of degeneration, and have provided them a narcotic for their misery, so that womanhood becomes degraded and childhood pines and dies. Still, after nineteen centuries, Jesus Christ is shut out from the social order we have laboriously created. And we celebrate Christmas Day without so much as a sense of incongruity between our beliefs and our actions.

II

One of the weirdest symptoms of decay in our day is the way the whole social system seems to have conspired to shut out the child. In the last years property-owners had one condition that was unaltered: they would not let their houses to tenants with children. 'How many children and how old are they?' was the deciding question that always shut the door. The coming of a baby was often the signal that brought an ejectment warrant. The penalty for bringing a child into the world was being thrown into the street. The men who filled the inn at Bethlehem with mirth nineteen centuries ago have had a mighty mult.i.tude who shared their spirit. Rents have been to them more to be desired than babies.

Here is an advertis.e.m.e.nt that appeared in the _Daily Chronicle_ of 29th May 1917: 'Chapel-keepers, man and wife (no children), for large Congregational church, Central London; must be total abstainers ... 5 rooms, coal and light provided.--Write ------, hon. secretary, ... E.C.

4.' I forbear giving the name of the Christian church that provides five rooms for its 'keeper' and slams the door in the face of the child. (The curious can find it in the files.) Even in this day, when the child is so precious to the race, one can see unblushing advertis.e.m.e.nts for gardeners and lodge-keepers with the clause 'no children.' That the children of this world should act so is deplorable; but that the children of the light should have 'five rooms,' and in them all no place for a cradle--that suggests doom.

Think of that congregation hailing, with songs of rapture, the coming of the Child; the preacher getting dewy over the callousness of the inn in Bethlehem--and their own servants forbidden a child! ... It was something like that which caused a prophet of old to exclaim--'Judgment begins in the House of G.o.d.'

IV