Thoughts on religion at the front | Page 7

is the crown and fulfilment and corroboration of the good
and the true in natural religion. It is not a question of clear separation
and abstraction, but of distinction, emphasis, and proportion. I believe
that things not characteristically Christian have acquired a
disproportionate place in our religion as handed down to us.

I suggest (but will not work it out here) that many of the hymns in use
are evidence of this, and that is why so often they do not ring true. I
also believe that an unhistorical use of the Bible has proved a distorting
influence. From early Christian days Scripture, which is a story of a
process and growth containing many stages and imperfections, has
been treated as something timeless and absolute. In particular, the
partial answers to the problem of suffering to which the Jews in their
development were led, have been made to bear weights heavier than
they can sustain. Some of the Psalms, for instance, over-emphasise the
connection between righteousness and immunity from misfortune.
They can be used to justify a calculating and self-saving religion which
is below the level of Christ's religion. A soldier, recently wounded on
the Somme, handed to me at a dressing-station a small copy of the 91st
Psalm as his religious handbook. Yet by itself the 91st Psalm, though a
wonderful expression of trust in God, promises a security to which our
Lord, and others akin to Him in spirit, have not put their seal. He did
not ask--He resisted the temptation to ask--that no evil should happen
unto Him, nor that angels should bear Him in their hands lest He should
hurt His foot against a stone. He would not have men set their face in
the day of battle in the assurance that, though a thousand should fall
beside them and ten thousand at their right hand, the same lot would
not come nigh them.
I think, too, that Christianity fails to make its characteristic appeal
through the Church, owing to two prevalent "isms"--ecclesiasticism and
subjectivism--both of which may be said to be the being primarily
occupied in religion with something other than God. I doubt whether
any Church-party advantage can be scored by any one in this matter.
Roughly speaking, the weakness of Catholic Christianity is to get
involved in the little things of "mint and anise and cummin"; whilst the
weakness of Protestantism is to become absorbed in the luxuries of
one's own religious experiences. The upshot of either is the same,
namely, to be very religious, and yet to forget the living God. I
remember being very much startled by an eminently pious
Anglo-Catholic undergraduate at Oxford saying to me, "The fact is, I
am not interested in God the Father." It is unwise to argue from one
instance, but I seem to see there a symptom of a widespread and tragic

estrangement of institutional Christianity from the mind of Christ. But I
doubt whether things are much better on the other side of the
ecclesiastical street, where so often the worship of God has
downgraded into sitting and listening to sentimental music on Pleasant
Sunday Afternoons. Single instances are misleading, but I can never
dismiss the belief that there is something radically wrong with the
world of religion of which the representative was a Chapel, in my old
parish at Leeds, that indulged in a "fruit-banquet" on Good Friday.
Right through organised Christianity of all kinds there is, I think, a
great absence of the real Christian thing.

IX
But this brings round again the question, "What is this Christian thing?"
What are the characteristic and specific elements which, though they
cannot be nakedly abstracted from other elements, yet have to be kept
salient amid everything else? What is the Christianity which is
generally not in the conscious possession of men at the front, and yet
receives the seal of their glorious excellences? What is the Christianity
which lies hidden by traditional disguise and contemporary practice?
Where is it to be found?

X
At any rate, in the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. We are blessed by the
privilege, given to us by the work of realistic historians, of going to
Him as our real Brother. We can study the religion of this Man. It was
rooted first and last in one dominant reality--the Father and His will.
From the first sight given to us of Him as a boy and onwards He was
rich in one thing--He was rich towards God. He looked at the world
without insensibility to its pain, without evasion of its evil--rather with
uniquely sensitive insight into both--as God's world and the scene of
God's sovereign activity. And He expected others to share His view. He
was repeatedly astonished to find those around Him heedless of the air