Thoughts on religion at the front | Page 6

need. It is not an expedient
which may be left on one side till the hour of need arises. That many
men should think thus of it shows that it has been widely forgotten,
misunderstood, or never known.

VII
The Christian religion is salvation because it starts from what God is.
Everything in it of human benefit and satisfaction is a bye-product

flowing from the fact that it gives to men a focus for their devotion and
attention not in themselves but in God. Its main motive is not self- but
God-regarding. It draws men out of the entanglement into which they
fall through temporising with their own needs, and constrains them to
attend to God's need--His need of them. For the Christian, God is not
some shadowy supreme Being at the back of the universe, or a name
given to the sum of things. God is the Person Who made, and loves,
and therefore wants His children. Hence Christian prayer primarily is
grateful and loving acknowledgment of what God is, and only
secondarily the expression of anxiety, or the "putting in" of this or that
claim for what we want.
That is the conclusion which war experience drives home. The special
strain and pressure of war cannot elicit from the majority of men the
religion which is occupied with the saving of self. The spiritual law is
that we find our life by losing it, not by saving it. In a vague and
unexpressed way, as they show again and again by their cheerfulness
and unconcernedness, hosts of men in this war have laid hold on this
law. They have found a purpose to which to cleave, something to give
themselves away for. Only it is hardly acknowledged, but rather lies
below the level of mental apprehension and expression. It is the
function of Christianity to raise this unacknowledging trustfulness and
self-giving out of dumb subconsciousness, and to give to it speech, and
to crown it with the glory of fully human self-devotion. It is its part to
declare that it is God Whom they find in the offering of themselves, His
love in which they can lose themselves, His purpose to which they can
cleave, His will to be done--and that to give Him joy is the supreme
end of man.
This is the religion which sustains in war, because possessed in peace.
And it is so little prevalent--that is, so little in any one's conscious
possession--in war just because God, and His love, and His desire have
been so little in men's thoughts in peace. Let peace return--let the strain
of war be lifted from a unit as it goes back into rest, or from an
individual as he goes on leave, and the life of indulgence, without an
object except self, threatens to repossess the soul. In the same way it is
peace rather than war, health rather than sickness, youth rather than age,

which really test the reality of our Christianity, when, without the
shame of being driven thereto by need, a man can rejoice in God, and
with full powers be made the instrument of His will.

VIII
There is then little conscious and articulate Christianity at the front, and
yet there are profoundly Christian characteristics in what men are and
do and endure, who have never known or do not understand or have
forgotten the Christian religion. What, then, is this strangely honoured
and yet neglected thing? Does it exist? Is it there for men were they to
awake to it?
This utterly searching war justifies the critical temper which passes
previous allegiances and acceptances under revision and judgment. I
may be forgiven, then, for saying that I do not think that Christianity as
at present expressed and presented to men in the Church (in the widest
sense of the word) is prima facie that which can win and possess them.
It would be a big task and unsuited to the conditions under which I
write to argue this out. What needs discussion is how much of natural
religion has been absorbed into the accumulated deposit from the past
which we call traditional Christianity, with the effect of disguising and
overlaying in it those specifically Christian elements, which make
Christianity not only a salvation from sin or from hell, but from the
morbid and even contemptible in religion. Those elements can never be
clearly abstracted and used by themselves, for Christianity was not a
thing rounded and completed, and deposited upon the world in vacuo,
but was as a seed sown, which grows by drawing into itself the
nourishment of soil and atmosphere. There always must be elements of
natural religion interfused with the Christian religion, for though not
evolved out of natural religion, but rather coming to it as a deliverance,
Christianity