Thoughts on religion at the front | Page 4

up and down history have had little to do with it, and the more sporting and soldierly the man, the less he has had to do with it. After all, the soldier-man's code goes clean the other way. It is ever insisting on non-calculating and self-regardless service, endurance, and sacrifice. As such, it lies above the ordinary level of life, calling out the heroic and honourable in men. But religion associated with anxiety touches men at a level lower than the highest in them, it has the morbidity of their weaker moments hanging about it, it wears badly, and, above all, often it does not seem to work. I have had the case propounded to me of "Bill who did pray," but yet had had "his head blowed off."

V
I recur, then, to my verdict that on the whole there is not a great revival of the Christian religion at the front. Why is this?
First, war is war, and, what is more, this war is this war. I will not attempt to paint the picture. Every one must realise by now that the main concentration of all military effort is directed at creating in the trenches an ever-intenser inferno of heavy shells. In a great army there is every degree of risk to be run or immunity to be enjoyed; but at the very front, where all is stripped and laid bare, modern warfare is at times a furnace of horror. Its smoke darkens the heavens, thickening the "clouds and darkness" round about God, and deepening His silence. Its white heat scorches out human confidence in Him. He does not seem to count. There are stars in the darkness of war--stars which are the achievements of man's indomitable spirit. But God-ward there seems sometimes to be great darkness.
Further, war, despite all the easy things said in its praise, is a great iniquity. It is, as others have said, hell. As an environment to the soul it is, for all the countervailing heroisms of men, a world of evil power let loose.
And, again, war abounds in a number of trials--mostly associated with the extremes of heat and cold and damp and fatigue--for which, as the phrase goes, religion seems not to afford the slightest relief. It is a very physical business, squeezing out or overlaying the spiritual in men, though powerless wholly to extinguish it. War being what it is, the absence of religious revival during its course is not surprising. I have come to be very doubtful whether there is truth in the prevalent notion that war as such and automatically makes men better.
Secondly, that element in religion which can survive the weather of war must be a very hardy growth, something deeply engrained and habitual--something rock-built. And that is just what is lacking among men of our race. As an Anglican priest I reach here a glaring fact about the English Church. The war reveals that there are few men in its loose membership who are possessed by and instructed in its faith. Religion, as taught by the Church of England, has a feeble grip on the masses. They hold it in no familiar embrace. And if reasons are sought, they are partly found in the want of cutting edge to her sober comprehensive teaching, partly in the characteristics often theoretically so justifiable but practically so awkward, of the Prayer Book. There is little in our Church which corresponds to that elemental regimen or discipline which possesses simple-minded Roman Catholics. The power of cultus, of institutional and family religion, is largely absent.
To explain this brings me to a third reason why, under the stress of war, English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague and somewhat insensible way lost its hold on the common mind. It has not the absolute and simple authority which in religion is a necessity for the little-educated. Few of the general public have thought very much about the matter, but all the more they are influenced by that which has percolated through to them from the more learned, loosening what before was firm and tight, confusing and complicating what before was starkly plain. This has been brought home to me as I have sat at sing-songs and have heard a coon-song sung entitled "The Preacher and the Bear." With apologies to the easily-shocked I will quote. The hero of the song is a coloured minister who, against his conscience, went out shooting on