Thoughts on religion at the front | Page 4

hazard
the belief that this has been more or less true of all soldiers in history.
Religion regarded merely as a resort in trouble, as a possible source of
good luck, as a charm or insurance policy is as old as man; but I believe
many of the best soldiers 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