V

Such was the condition of the nation when the trumpet of judgment sounded and civilisation went reeling into the furnace. The slum-dwellers and the slum-infected were alike shaking back into paganism and the beast. For the time we have emerged from the greater horror of sin into the horror of war. But what is to happen after?

Saved as by fire, are we to hug our slums again?

Surely it cannot be for the perpetuation on earth of life after this order, that five millions of men have arisen {171} and faced death. If we are to be worthy of the price that has been paid for our deliverance, by a resurrection from the dead we must cleanse our souls and transform our slums. It is not for us as we are, or for our cities as they now are built, or for a State that denies to its children the decencies of life, or for the continued reign of that plutocracy that has darkened the windows of the soul--not for the continuance of these have our brothers died right joyfully in the glory of their youth. It was for another England, another Scotland--the kingdom of the heart's desire wherein shall be found no more either the slum-dweller or the slum-lover--that they fought and died. When we think of them we know what the early Christians felt when they said one to the other, 'We are bought with a price; we are no longer our own to do as we like; we are His.' And we--we are _theirs_. We must be worthy of them. We dare not any longer leave their children in noisome slums; we dare not {172} any longer suffer our own lungs to inhale the vapours of the spiritual slum. To show that we are in some little measure worthy of the price paid for our life, paid for the Britain that shall be, we will arise and straightway rebuild--until our cities shall be the cities of G.o.d, and our straths and valleys shall be filled with the songs of happiness and love and praise. They will not then have died in vain!

{173}

CHAPTER VIII

BEHIND YOU IS G.o.d

The greatest need of our day is the reinforcement of the soul. Our mistake has been that we thought the supreme good was the development of the brain. We went on steadily increasing our power over the forces of nature, but we neglected to develop the soul-power which could control and direct the material power thus created. The result has been the greatest catastrophe in history. The industrial civilisation which we reared through the painful toil of a century, is pa.s.sing in the smoke of the howitzer sh.e.l.ls. And the end is not yet. Unless man becomes master of himself, it can bring nought but misery that he should master nature. The war of the future will be war in the air.

From the {174} experience of one or two air-craft raining destruction on a city one can imagine that dread future when thousands of air-ships and aeroplanes will rain bombs like hail on doomed cities. The old security of this sea-girt isle has vanished for ever. In the air there are no frontiers which can be fortified or guarded. Every fresh triumph of science will be only a new engine of destruction, a new weapon of devilry. Humanity will be driven underground, burrowing like rats. It is quite conceivable not only that civilisation should perish but that the world itself might be destroyed. The development of power, without the development of soul to control it, means ruin to mankind. The amazing thing is that men should to-day declare with pa.s.sionate conviction that the future safety of England depends on the increase of that knowledge which has given us the poison clouds of chlorine gas, without ever a word to indicate that salvation can only come through the {175} development of self-mastery and self-control--even through the soul. We have stood for two years in the centre of the maelstrom of human history, and have heard the hurricane of judgment sweeping through the world, but as yet we have not heard the still, small voice of G.o.d.

I

The lesson we have to learn is that the power of the soul must be enforced. And that can only come by laying hold upon G.o.d. The power that ever lay behind human progress, that worked out law and order and security, has in all ages been the power of religion--of G.o.d. But religion has been in our day a matter of contempt. It was merely a 'grotesque, fungoid growth which cl.u.s.tered round the primeval thread of ancestor worship,' more or less a 'pathological phenomenon closely allied with neurosis and hysteria.' There are few things more pitiful in human weakness {176} than the contempt expressed by the scientist and the learned for that power of the soul which created the civilisation of which the contemners are the fine fruit!

Though religion has been contemned, yet it cannot be denied that those forces which create abiding races and powerful empires are the very forces which have never been found to exist apart from the sanctions of religion. The development of the Roman Empire was profoundly influenced by its religion. To religion virtue owed its power, and from it patriotism drew its inspiration. And that religion claimed a supernatural origin--the source of its might was in the Unseen. When religion became a matter of public ridicule and the G.o.ds an 'object of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened,' and the philosophers 'concealed the sentiments of an atheist under their sacerdotal robes,' then the restraints of morality were flung aside and Rome went headlong to ruin. It was the same in Greece; {177} the same everywhere. All religions have issued their commands: 'And G.o.d spake all these words, saying...' And so long as men felt the supernatural behind the mandate, they trembled and obeyed; when behind the mandate they discerned only superst.i.tion, they surrendered to their base desires. Morality can only be based on the Divine. Its commands are operative when these commands are recognised as those of the Moral Governor of the universe. If these commands do not affect issues beyond the grave, if they have no sanction in the eternal order, then there is no value in obeying them, and no crime in disregarding them.

Rather is there a merit in flouting them--the mere products of ignorance and superst.i.tion. To despise them and disregard them was the mark of an emanc.i.p.ated and superior mind! Thus it ever came that first the supernatural vanished and afterwards morality vanished. And thus has it been also in our day.

The amazing thing is that men should {178} ever have been blind to this--that, however much G.o.d may hide Himself at the end of other avenues of approach, at the end of this He stands forth clear before our eyes. There is nothing predicated regarding G.o.d which we cannot doubt and deny save this, that there is operative in the world a moral order conformity to which means life and disobedience death. It is thus with individuals and thus with nations. Let a man surrender to evil, and instantly nature begins to marshal its forces against him and digs for him the grave. The road by which humanity has marched is marked by the ruins of empires and civilisations upon which destruction came through the very same laws that we see working to-day, if we choose to look. Whatever race or empire surrendered to the base, sacrificed purity to sensuality, the good of the common weal to its own selfish ends, made selfishness and pleasure its aim, upon that race or empire, sooner or later, fell the consuming sword and the {179} devouring flame. There is no sentence in all literature more pregnant than that which tells how the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. So it has been and ever will be. The whole forces of the universe are arrayed against evil, and carry on a ceaseless war against it. It is because of this divine surgery that humanity has been saved from a corruption which would have entailed the world's destruction.

All history is the proof that there is a mandate which means life or death for individuals and nations. Along this road we can touch the hand of G.o.d and see the sword of His divine justice. Righteousness is the law of the world, the will of the Supreme Ruler who orders the universe that righteousness must at last prevail. The source of morality and all righteousness is--G.o.d.

II

It is manifest, then, that there is but one safety for individual or race, and {180} that lies in getting into line with the Moral Order of the world--with G.o.d. But the startling thing is that though we have come through a discipline such as no generation ever experienced before, at the end of two years of it there is no sign that we have learned our lesson. The measure of our blindness is that politicians summon the nation to cultivate its brains that it may be saved, without ever a hint that salvation lies along the road of character and morality--the road that leads to G.o.d. (If salvation lay in the brain, the Greeks would have saved the world, for theirs was the greatest brain-power ever developed on the earth.) And even the Church is uncertain, and fails to summon the nation with clear and uncertain sound back to G.o.d. For it is manifest that there can be no penitence where there is no consciousness of transgression. There can be no return except for those who realise that they have strayed.

The first step, then, back to G.o.d must spring from the soul wakened to the {181} realisation that it has sinned and that G.o.d is fighting against sin. But so far from the nation realising its true state, the amazing fact is that the nation is hypnotised with the sense of its own righteousness. It is only conscious of its own shining virtues. It has drawn the sword for freedom and in defence of little nations. It is waging a 'holy war.' Self-blinded, unable to believe that virtues such as shine on its face could suffer repulse, in days of humiliation and of defeat it has shouted 'Victory.' And from pulpit after pulpit the doctrine is propounded that this war is not a judgment of our sins; that to speak of war as a judgment of sin is 'antiquated.' The Church has thus cut itself adrift from the teaching of prophet and seer, and the Bible, which is aflame with the judgments of G.o.d upon sin, is but the antiquated record of unenlightened ages. Thus the conscience of the nation is narcotised. And it is manifest that a nation whose conscience is chloroformed can hear no {182} call summoning to repentance. When the Church is blind to the sword of G.o.d flaming in the heavens, how can any expect the nation to behold it, and, beholding, to repent?

This obsession that we are not living in a great day of divine judgment is all the stranger when we consider that every day of our lives is a day of divine judgment, and that we are ever standing at the bar of the great a.s.size. No sooner does a man sin than judgment begins to operate. Let him surrender to intemperance, and the judgment of disordered nerves and enfeebled frame is immediately declared. And so with every violation of the divine order. And the judgment ever operative against the individual is also ever operative against the nation. It requires but little thought to see how the national sins brought on the nation the judgment of these dread days.

For what was it that brought down upon us the cataclysm of war? It was the degeneration into which the nation {183} had fallen. Like all empires we had risen from poverty, through hardship and discipline, to riches, and in days of luxury we lost our soul. We gave ourselves to pleasure and self-indulgence. We worshipped at one shrine--that of Mammon. We refused to bend the back to discipline or to exercise ourselves in enduring hardship. We annexed a fourth of the world's surface, but we were determined that we would have the world without paying the price. With an army equal in size to that of Switzerland we were holding against the rest of mankind an Empire which included most of the world's riches. Our rulers knew of our danger, but they dared not summon the people to arms, because whoever did so would risk office. Those who were on the watch-towers saw the enemy mustering, but they gave no warning, for the spoils of office were dear. Prophets arose to warn us, but we meted out contempt to them. That was our fashion of stoning them. (We have, {184} however, improved upon the chosen race, for the very men who stoned them are already rearing statues in their honour!) Crowds of thirty thousand would a.s.semble to shout and gamble over football matches, but the few days requisite for the training of our Territorial forces were not to be endured! We ceased to produce the population that could possess the vast territories we held. We could think of nothing but the vapourings of politicians who sacrificed the State to their faction. When Europe was an armed camp and Germany was piling up armaments, we were preparing for civil war in Ireland. Vision and genius were dying among us. For the devotees of Aphrodite and Mammon are blinded to the stars. A nation which sinks into degeneration, and which, holding the world's wealth, refuses even to prepare to guard its riches, is loudly inviting the robber. Germany concluded that we were degenerate and a negligible factor. Does any one think that, if we had begun to prepare after {185} Agadir, there would have been war? If Germany had for one moment thought that the British fleet would have been arrayed against it, and that Britain would have marshalled five millions of men to fight to the death, there never would have been a war. It is not enough to say that in that case the war would only have been postponed, for a war averted is not necessarily a war postponed. Pendjeh and Fashoda might at least teach us that.

Do not let us blind ourselves to the facts. One source of this war is in ourselves. We bewail the horrors of war; what we ought to bewail is the horror of sin. For war is only a symptom of the hidden disease, as raving is the symptom of fever. And one of the sources of the blood and tears that overwhelm the earth is our sin. The horror of the battlefield pales before the horror of sin in our streets, sweeping souls to death. Our surrender to pleasure, our pursuit of vanity, our sacrifice of the State to party, of the race to our ease, our refusal to {186} make the sacrifice that would make the Empire secure--these are the conditions which made war inevitable and which evoked it. As alcohol and the drunkard's palsied limbs are cause and effect, sin and judgment; so the national sin and the horrors of war are cause and effect, sin and judgment. Only the self-blinded are unable to discern that they are living in a great day of judgment: judgment on Germany for its greed and l.u.s.t and covetousness: judgment on Britain for wasting at the shrine of self-indulgence that wealth committed to it for the serving and the uplifting of the world. And if the Church cannot see the divine judgment, then it cannot call the nation to repentance. For the nation, unconscious of wrong, will but say along with the Church: 'I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing.' After the war it will rush down the slope faster than ever before. The real fact is that the vision of G.o.d is hid from us by the mists of our sin. We cannot {187} imagine the sword of the divine judgment unsheathed over the world, for a sword hanging from heaven must be gripped by some hand. And if there be no hand of G.o.d, how can there be a sword of His justice?

III

The one way of salvation for the human race is that of conformity to the righteous will of G.o.d. On the side of those who seek to walk along that road all the forces of nature fight; against those who resist the will of G.o.d all the forces of the universe are marshalled. Those who would conquer must walk with G.o.d. To return to G.o.d is the only hope.

Let us try and realise the truth of this.

The greatest danger threatening the race is, as we have seen, that of racial suicide. The mentally developed have made the devitalising of life a code of conduct. Unconscious of sin, they have made sin a science. For the race that sets its face towards this goal there awaits {188} nought but ruin. The problem is how to save the race from the coffin.

A great many remedies have been proposed, but almost all of them are not only futile but pernicious. A system of bounties to parents for each child would be no inducement to the cla.s.ses which have already surrendered to this degeneration. Such a policy would only encourage the further multiplying of the poor and the unfit. And the remedy is not to be found in the multiplication of agencies for the preservation of child life. The conservation of the child in the slum will not compensate for the destruction of the child in the mansion-house. A policy which aims at the survival of the unfit cannot enrich the race.

Such methods are to be commended, but they are mere palliatives. When the bone needs to be sc.r.a.ped, it is futile to go on applying poultices.

The true remedy is in the realisation of G.o.d and in the return of the nation to Him. It is when the soul is awakened {189} to G.o.d that men realise the heinousness of sacrificing life to selfishness. For G.o.d is the fountain of life; and it is not merely the physical life that is atrophied by racial limitation. The blow is in reality aimed not at the race but at G.o.d.

For from G.o.d all life proceeds, and the whole universe is the process of His self-realisation. The glory of earth and sea and sky are the glory of the outgoing of the divine energy. But the highest of all the processes of the divine self-realisation is in man. In the world there is nothing great but man; and the world is enriched for G.o.d by His children. There is no limit to His creative energy, no failure in His imagination, for each new life is different, and each fresh and new.

In His children G.o.d realises Himself as love and tenderness. They are the only things that can love and laugh and cling. The music of their joyous merriment is G.o.d's best anthems. Each new human life is a temple of the Holy {190} Ghost. Through them the divine life grows more and more. And to each is committed some separate element of the divine treasure, for each is as different from others as if it alone were created. When men, then, set themselves to suppress human life, they are setting themselves to suppress G.o.d. It is the great tide of the creative life that they set themselves to dam. The joyousness of the creative genius that ever creates but never repeats itself, they bring to nought. They deny to G.o.d on earth the temples for His indwelling. Only when the soul realises G.o.d thus brooding over the face of the world, thus waiting for the fulness of the divine enrichment, will men realise the heinousness of life-suppression.

Lives based on the code of morals which prefers coffins to cradles are lives which fight against G.o.d, and as such are doomed to be ground to powder by His judgment. When G.o.d, the source of all life, is once realised, then the soul of the life-destroyer must shrink back in horror and dismay. {191} 'Woe is me, for I am undone,' will be the cry of his lips. Men can conquer their fellows, but there is only the devouring of h.e.l.l for those who fight against G.o.d. When G.o.d ceased to be a reality, the destruction of life was but a natural sacrifice to our ease. There being nothing higher than ourselves, then to ourselves let us sacrifice even life. When G.o.d in His divine majesty will again shine forth before the soul, and the eyes behold the Divine Life everywhere waiting its realisation, then human life again shall become precious and desired, and the race will measure its felicity by the mult.i.tude of its children. The silent terraces will again ring with joyous voices. The race, with its fountains of life overflowing, will again go forth to vivify the earth.

If only the world were realised as of G.o.d, all our difficulties would vanish. Think what it would mean to the man who has devoted a whole parish to his own recreation. The green places where {192} little children called to each other are covered with pheasant coops! The places where children could grow in health are given over to birds.

Let such a man once see that the world was created that love might increase and be multiplied, that on it G.o.d might realise His creative energy in the highest form, and he will be stricken with shame and convicted of sin. Childhood and innocence he has vanished from his land that his ears might hear the whirr of the flying of grouse, and that he might have the joy of killing. When the vision of G.o.d arises upon him he will abhor his selfishness and set himself to repair the desolation that has been wrought. He will have no rest until the green places again are filled with the glory and the radiance of life. The slums will be emptied and the now silent places peopled anew, when the nation realises again that G.o.d created the world to be the home of His children.

In this return to G.o.d is the solution to be found of all our difficulties. For {193} in this return is the discovery of our common sonship, and of the law of love.

We are at present divided into cla.s.ses with warring interests waiting for peace to begin the strife again. The body-politic is fissiparous and there is nothing to bind it together in the unity and consistency of steel. Here is the element through which the disintegrated elements can be united into a weapon that can win victories. At the feet of G.o.d there comes the knowledge that all we are brethren, and that the one law is love. It is love that unites. It is love that bridges chasms and throws down dividing walls. Love does not throw doles to the perishing, it gives itself. Love never says, 'You carry my burden,'

but rather, 'Let me carry your burden.' To the eye of love, man is no longer a mere crank in the great machinery of labour, a unit in the vast ma.s.s designated the 'lower cla.s.ses'--he is a brother. And love will not give a brother over to be the prey of vice, {194} or surrender him as a victim to monopolies that destroy him. Love will sacrifice and fight for the brother's life. The remedy for all our ills lies here--in our return to G.o.d.

IV

To many the preaching of repentance is the dreariest of all things. It is but the voice summoning them to the impossible--to mourn for sins of which they are unconscious. They cry out for life--and they are offered tears.

But far from being compact of all weariness and sorrow, repentance is the most thrilling of all that the soul can experience. It is the essence of all romance. For what is it but this--the turning back to G.o.d. And in turning to G.o.d comes the vision of the glory of life. The eyes are illumined with radiance when they behold no longer processes and laws--but G.o.d. Who can compute that enrichment when suddenly the veil is rent and from some hill-top the eyes behold {195} no longer meadow and moorland and the gleam of waters afar, but the Life behind them all--G.o.d; and everything created, the green sward and the clouds swimming in glory, the mist-caressed mountains and the great sea heaving in all its waves, become but one vast transparency through which G.o.d flashes His splendour on the enraptured soul. And in this return to G.o.d the soul is ever led on from glory to glory. That is the alluring power of Christianity. The Shepherd of souls leads us ever on until we come to the Cross and realise that the G.o.d of heaven and earth is the G.o.d of sacrifice; that His love stoops to agony that He may save. And onward from the Cross He leads until on our enraptured hearts there rises the vision of the Cross abiding still in the heart of G.o.d, and our eyes behold over all the universe the sheen of that love which still stoops to death that it may save. As we tread the way back, and go on ever nearer to the hidden fire, we feel the flame of His love filling all our {196} being. And beauties undreamed of leap into light at each bend of the road. To come to G.o.d is to journey from death to life. The world has nothing great comparable to this.

V

But to return to G.o.d means not only a transfigured soul in a transfigured world, it means also a transfigured life. To turn the face G.o.dward is to change one's ideal, and the change of ideal eventuates in a change of life. When the new light illumines the secret places, the soul, quickened by the fellowship of G.o.d, sees the unclean with new eyes, and sets itself to conquer whatsoever is unworthy of G.o.d. National repentance with us will realise itself in peopling the waste places, in emptying the slums into the country, in destroying the vested interests in the vice of the people, in making a healthy and beautiful life the birthright of every citizen. For the Church that will give itself to the realisation of this {197} repentance there will never be the stagnation of monotony. Life will be electric with conflict, triumphant at last with victory.

It is the thrill and romance of life--this experience of the soul to which we are summoned. It heralds every great day of G.o.d. 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,' is the herald of every dawn. It is a message to be preached with yearning and wonder and love, and not with clenched fists. It can be preached with fierceness, but that will little avail. The prophet can call to the people: 'Return, for the precipice is in front of you and destruction yawneth at your feet--return.' But terror is feeble to move the heart. Better far is it to call to the people as Hosea called to Israel: 'Return, for G.o.d is behind you; your own G.o.d who saved you again and again when there was none to help, who bore you and carried you through the terrible wilderness.... Return, G.o.d is waiting for you, just behind you.' The gospel of repentance is the gospel of the love of {198} G.o.d. When the soul realises the love and the tenderness and the glory of G.o.d waiting to enrich and save--then the soul will return. The greatest adventure in life is just this: the way of repentance leading back to G.o.d. If only the Church would voyage forth anew on this enchanted sea, the day of its power would again dawn.

VI

If there be, thus, the wonder of riches untold, the gleam of virgin peaks summoning our feet to climb, a glimpse of the land afar, and the clear shining of G.o.d's face in the call to repent, let us not forget that there is also something very terrible bound up with it. And the terrible thing is that it is possible so to disregard it that at last it becomes impossible to obey it. In vain did the prophet call, 'O Israel, return unto the Lord thy G.o.d,' for their paralysed wills had become incapable of effort. 'Their deeds will not let them return,'

was at last the prophet's {199} mournful verdict. To every nation there comes, after long decline, the stage when recovery is impossible.

When the warnings of the wise have been flouted and disregarded; when the prophets have not been stoned but treated with mere contempt; when there is no discernment because there is no longer any consciousness of sin; when no call of the divine is audible any longer even when G.o.d speaks by terrible things and the heavens are shaken; when the hearts steeped in self and surrendered to the flesh can see no longer the beauty of purity,--then the call to repentance is heard as one hears voices in sleep. Their deeds will not let them return.

It is not very far away from us that last irrevocable stage when national repentance becomes impossible. A nation such as this, that spends over half a million pounds sterling a day on alcohol when the greatest crisis in the world's history requires all its strength and all its resources; that turns grain into a {200} waste when food is so dear that the poor can scarcely buy; that cries out for economy and offers daily at the shrine of Bacchus the ransom of a province; that suffers vice to wound and slay its children, narcotising its conscience the while; that in G.o.d's terrible day empties its churches and crowds its music-halls; that sacrifices its children to the Moloch of its pleasure, or to the greed of its property exploiters; that suffers its people to be ma.s.sed in slums until the body-politic becomes a gangrene,--for such a people the last stage, where no return is possible, cannot be far removed. Arise, O Israel, and return to the Lord your G.o.d, ere the day of repentance sinks into night!