Thoughts on religion at the front | Page 5

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 a Sunday, and, after good sport, on
returning home was met by a grizzly bear. Taking refuge up a tree this
was his prayer:
O Lord, who delivered Daniel from the lions' den, Also Jonah from the
tummy of the whale--and then Three Hebrew chilluns from the fiery

furnace, As the good Book do declare-- O Lord, if you can't help me,
don't help that grizzly bear!
Here is an epitome of a far-spreading incredulity about the Bible. It is
the higher criticism in its crudest popular form, and men are at the
mercy of it. I have known a mess of officers engage in argument about
the Bible with a sceptical Scots doctor, cleverer than they. As
old-fashioned believers in the Bible they had to admit to being
thoroughly "strafed" in the argument, yet they had no way out, such as
an intelligent understanding of the Bible affords. One at least of them
maintained stoutly that nevertheless he was going to stick to the old
view, however indefensible. Such men are not free intellectually to
follow the movements of religious revival. They are immobilised by
the dead weight of Biblical literalism.
Yet if the main verdict to which I have committed myself is to be
radically accounted for, it is necessary to reach deeper reasons than any
I have mentioned. I sympathise with those who have high hopes of the
good effects of Church and Prayer Book and Bible-teaching reforms.
Yet such are relatively superficial matters. The main reason for the
comparative absence of religious revival among men at the front is that
we all have been overtaken by the cataclysm of war in a condition of
great poverty towards God.

VI
War, when it breaks in on peace, reveals in a fierce light the condition
of men in peace. It would be ungrateful and disloyal not to acclaim the
main sound heart of our country which this war has revealed. It would
be treasonable to the great company of good men and true--not least out
of the school and university world most familiar to the writer--who
have risen to "the day" and have gladly given their all. Yet, after
generous allowance for that, a great poverty of allegiance to God has
been laid bare. Indirectly, in the answers made to the claims of duty,
honour, service, and self-sacrifice, He has been acknowledged, but of
direct devotion to Him as the one and pre-eminent reality there has

been little. After all, can it be denied that the war has found us devoted
rather to the idols of money, pleasure, and appetite than to God and His
righteousness? We have had to be aroused from a great sensual
preoccupation with worldly traffic. "As it was in the days of Noah," so
in a measure it has been to-day: "as we ate and drank, and bought and
sold and planted and builded, the flood has come upon us" and has all
but swept us away. At home, as the thinly-veiled wantonness of some
of our weekly illustrated papers reminds us in the field, it seems that a
mass of self-pleasing and luxurious folk cannot yet find an escape out
of the prison-house of Vanity Fair, though thousands bleed and die by
their side. In the field, the mind and manner of a gross peace-life is kept
alive by pictures of smirking nudities placarded in dug-outs and billets,
and the farther back from the front one travels, as the hot breath of war
grows more tepid, the more heavy grows the atmosphere of
materialistic indulgence. That God minds is hardly thought of, for at
home and abroad we have been carried into war in a peace-condition of
great heedlessness of Him. And the strains and cost and dangers of war
will not scare men out of their forgetfulness. The heart of man is
incorrigible by fear. God, if He is little regarded in peace, is hard to
come nigh to in war. If religion in peace and prosperity has not been
full of His praise--of joy in Him, it is something to which adversity
must drive men, and they think it as such a little disreputable, and many
of the best men, richly gifted with manly excellences, tend to leave it
on one side.
Yet "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." We can adopt the
ringing note of St. Paul's defiance. For the Christian religion does not
spring primarily out of human anxiety and