Victory out of Ruin.

by Norman Maclean.

PREFACE

There is a joy in battle; but the greatest of all joys is to take some part, however humble, in the fight for the triumph of righteousness.

There is a thrill such as can be found nowhere else in facing a ma.s.s of people whose prejudices and social customs are as an unscalable wall, in compelling their attention and, at last, in winning them to espouse your cause. To fight your opponent, loving him all the time, is the essence of Christianity. The excitement of betting on races or watching football matches is nothing compared to the excitement of facing an audience not knowing whether you are to be trampled on or to be applauded. Those who have fought under the banner of the King of Kings know the indefinable joy there is in it. That is why the young and the chivalrous give a swift response when the call is to a forlorn hope in the service of Christ.

And the joy of it is this, that, whatever may happen, you are bound to win. The Infinite has infinite resources. Those who array themselves against Him are up against all the forces in the universe. The fight for the Kingdom of G.o.d is the greatest in which man ever fought; it goes on ceaselessly without any discharge; the big battalions seem always on the other side; but G.o.d always wins. There never has been a fight for deliverance, a struggle for progress, but the forces of righteousness conquered at last.

This book is the third of a series. The Great Discovery portrayed the spiritual emotions of the Great War; Stand up, Ye Dead dealt with the soul of the nation in the midst of its travail; and this third book seeks to point out the way of deliverance and renewal. The malady of the world is spiritual. The fountain of healing is with G.o.d.

N. M.

EDINBURGH, _September_ 1922

CHAPTER I

THE ONLY HOPE

'To a large extent the working people of this country do not care any more for the doctrines of Christianity than the upper cla.s.ses care for the practice of that religion.'--JOHN BRIGHT in the year 1880.

It is wonderful how quickly, when a peril is past, men forget about it and straightway compose themselves to slumbrous dreams again. It was so after the Great War; it is so already regarding the great strikes.

'Don't disturb our repose,' they as good as say; 'we have had an anxious time; do let us sleep.' But wars and strikes are only symptoms of the hidden disease; and the allaying of a symptom without the healing of the disease is of all things the most dangerous. What we must consider is the disease and set ourselves to find a remedy. Then, and then only, will the symptoms hara.s.s us no more. It was a little bald man with a straggling beard and one eye that had got a little tired of the long-continued effort to look at the other, who set me thinking. The burden of his contention was that this country and the world at large is sinking back into paganism. Though I endeavour to keep an open mind and refuse to accept opinions ready-made, however much inclined I may be to shirk the preliminary fatigue of forming opinions of my own, yet the opinions of my friend are worth recording.

They are at least gropings after the truth.

I

'What is the test of a Christian?' asked the little man, trying to bring his vagrant eye to bear on me; 'if we once settle that we shall be able to judge whether this is now a Christian world. The test is not beliefs or opinions regarding the Founder of Christianity (for trifles such as that men used cheerfully to burn their fellows aforetime, thinking they were doing G.o.d service); to find the true test we must go back to the only test known to those who knew Christ. What was their test? It was this--'If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.' That spirit was love enduring even the Cross--love emptying itself that it might serve. Now, apply that test to our social organisation to-day. In the one city you find in one street mansions such as a Roman emperor could only desire in vain; and a few yards away a street of crowded closes and airless dugouts and fetid tenements where little children perish. Herod slaughtered a score of babies and the centuries pour the vials of infamy upon him.

But this holocaust goes on, year in year out, ceaselessly. Yet the dwellers in the terraces tolerate that. The causes that produce slums and keep slums full are manifest. Yet they will not rouse themselves to remove them. Is that being a Christian? We a.s.semble in church and recite, "I believe in G.o.d the Father," and every fact of the faith we profess condemns our callous indifference. If we realised that G.o.d is the Father of these babes, we would die to save them; yet we leave them a prey to vested interests. Is that toleration of evil compatible with Christianity?'

'You forget,' I objected, 'the law of environment. No man can live ahead of his own time--at least only the great can--and we are waking up to social duty as never before.'

'Waking up!' he exclaimed; 'we are going to sleep. A Christian should never need to waken up to facts like that. He would have them as a burden ever on his heart until they were for ever banished. He would be constantly hearing the voice of Him who said of little ones like these that it was better for those who did them wrong that a millstone were hanged round their necks and that they were cast into the midst of the sea.... If only we were Christians, endued with Christ's spirit of love, we would make an end of that at once.... We are only semi-pagans.'

II

'It isn't merely what you see outside,' went on the little man, polishing his shining poll, 'but look inside the churches themselves--any one of the hundreds in this city--and what do you find?

You find the house of G.o.d given over to an unholy merchandise. Every church is parcelled out into so many square feet, and these are bought and sold as ecclesiastical allotments. Did you ever think of that gruesome traffic, and the weirdness of it? That good news of Love brooding over all, caring even for the gra.s.s and the sparrow, has now become the monopoly of the renter, while the poor are shut out. And it was at first proclaimed to the poor without money and without price, committed to the winds of Galilee.'

'Put like that,' I said, 'it is rather weird.'

'Aye,' he went on, 'and every half-year managers and deacons a.s.semble in the houses of G.o.d to traffic in these square feet of pews. There is a story how One long ago knotted a whip of cords and drove the traffickers out of His Father's house, His eyes blazing with anger.

Would He not wield the same whip on these deacons and managers, and drive them out to-day? How astonished they would be, with all the law and all the vested interest on their side ... and yet that whip!'

The little man fell silent, and his strange eye looked as if he were seeing it all. And he smiled curiously.

'Did you ever trespa.s.s on an ecclesiastical allotment?' he asked jerkily. 'No! Well, it is a thing not to be done. I once trespa.s.sed on a garden allotment out in Kelvinside, just to admire some wonderful sweet-peas, and the man who owned it found me and welcomed me like a brother, and sent me away with a radiant bunch of flowers; but an ecclesiastical allotment is another story. An old heritor once said to me that the only thing that really roused the devil in a Scotsman's heart was trespa.s.sing on his ecclesiastical allotment.'

'That only shows,' I retorted, 'how dear to a Scotsman's heart his part in the Church is.'

'That is only quibbling,' jerked out the bald man.

III

'Last Sunday evening,' went on the bald man, speaking very rapidly and walking up and down the room in his excitement, 'I went to a church situated in a mean street, surrounded by closes that each holds the population of a spa.r.s.e parish. A tattered bill on the door proclaimed the traffic in seats. There seemed to be no demand. There were only eighteen present. A cheap church, with varnished pews, that could hold a thousand--and only eighteen there--old people and two or three children--none who could lay hold on life with both hands. To that handful a discouraged and hopeless preacher proclaimed the evangel of the love of G.o.d ... but his voice died in the disconsolate and empty s.p.a.ces.... But when I came out, there in an open s.p.a.ce were ma.s.sed thousands of men, and the air throbbed with vitality as they listened to an orator denouncing capital and proclaiming the coming of the new day when every man could have his heart's desire--money and more money.... Eighteen at the church where the salt had lost its savour, and thousands where the chaff of worldliness was the only bread served to perishing souls.'

'But you must remember that there were some churches quite full in the city that evening,' I interjected.

'Quite so,' resumed the bald man, 'but who were they that filled them?

Only the one cla.s.s that has still kept its hold on the seriousness and the duty of life--the middle cla.s.s--the one layer of health in the nation.'

'You forget,' I protested, 'that the other two cla.s.ses have proved that they know how to die.'

He came to a sudden halt, and his tripping sentences suddenly stopped.

'Yes,' he answered, 'they know how to die; but what is the use of knowing how to die if they do not know how to live?'

IV

'What is the use of facing death,' went on the bald man, resuming his walk up and down, and pointing now and again an accusing finger, 'if death does not teach the way of life? Through death we conquered the greatest tyranny that ever threatened the world, but the enemy has really been the victor, for the spirit of the enemy has now conquered us. That spirit is the covetousness that knows no law but force. It does not matter whether the goal aimed at be the hegemony of the world or more and more of gold--the spirit is the same. And now it has seized us. There is the profiteer living on the results of other men's industry and fattening on the plunder of the public--his G.o.d is covetousness. There are the millions who are ready to march over the ruins of the Empire, careless of the sufferings of others if only they will get their demands on the world. n.o.body realises the futility of gaining the world and losing the life. Eighteen in church and thousands out for their share of the world.... It is covetousness triumphant.'

The old man came to a halt and began to speak as one weighing his words. 'We are just sinking into savagery,' he went on. 'The savage knows no weapon but force--and Christianity knows no weapon but love--but we have chosen force. We have, in truth, abolished the bludgeon of force as between man and man, but pagan Rome did that. We have never learned that law must rule between cla.s.s and cla.s.s, as well as between man and man. We remained pagan in our jealousy and distrust as between cla.s.s and cla.s.s, and failed to make law supreme. We failed because we had no brotherliness, no love. If we had been Christians we would have made the law of love supreme long ago.... What a hollow mockery our actions are. Our statesmen become rhetorical over a tribunal of the nations that will make wars cease for ever, while war reigns in our own midst. Tribunals and treaties are nothing if truth be not supreme in the heart. But there is never a word about that....

We think we can raise the world to a level higher than we have attained ourselves, as if water could ever rise higher than its source.... The law of force is honest paganism, but this covering up of the world's foulness with sc.u.m--that is nauseating pharisaism. Where the spirit of love and truth is not, there peace cannot be.'

V

Whether the bald man with the one piercing and the other straying eye was right or wrong I am no great judge. But it is clear that there is something very far wrong. It is not in our country, the fairest on G.o.d's earth, that the evil lies, nor in the Empire, the greatest and richest ever reared by man. The evil is not without but within us.

The only hope for us is in a regenerated spirit. And there is none who can give us that new spirit but the Carpenter of Nazareth. He was Himself a poor working man toiling for twenty years, wielding heavy, clumsy tools as he shaped rude ploughs in a village of poor fame. He can feel for poor toiling working men; it was He who first taught brotherhood. To a generation that says, 'Let me get all I can, however much others may suffer,' He says, 'Say not so, but rather say, Let me serve all I can, however much I may suffer.' If He were here now He would be talking to men in public-houses and at the street corners and on the fringes of crowds, and He would say, 'My brothers, why excite yourselves over the world? Life is not money. Life is love and beauty and sonship with G.o.d. It is not what the hand grasps but what the eye sees and the heart feels that makes life great. If you want the fulness of life, lose it.' And to rich men He would say, 'Your riches are only yours in trust that you may serve: consecrate them or they will be taken from you.' He would have but one law for all--Love. If they but loved there could not be any more profiteering, or ca' canny, or any injustice. For love never says 'Give,' only 'Let me give.' ...

But, alas! we make room for every spirit but that. For forty years we have taught the children by statute, but they have not been taught that. They have been taught figures and the records that are mainly the records of crime, and the explanations that are no explanations.

We must begin again and teach our children what duty is, what the love of G.o.d and man is, what reverence is, and how there is a moral purpose working out life and death--life if men conform to it and death if they defy it. We teach everything by statute except that--the one thing needful. We teach that man is to be saved by the brain; we have forgotten that salvation is of the soul. There is but one power known among men that can turn the self-willed and self-centred life into the self-sacrificing and the G.o.d-centred life, and that power is the spirit of the Carpenter of Nazareth. If we but sought it, then it would fuse the poor fissiparous sand of our national life into the unity and potency of steel. It is our only hope.

CHAPTER II

THE SUPREME NEED