Read Ebook: The Great Discovery by Maclean Norman

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If we have not had the name of God constantly on our lips it is not because we do not feel that we are fighting His battle, but because He is so great, the Lord of Heaven and Earth before whom we are but as dust, that we shrink from coupling His great name with ours. "Are you sure that God is on your side?" Abraham Lincoln was asked in the dark days of the American Civil War. "I have not thought about that," he replied; "but I am very anxious to know whether we are on God's side." And when the causes of this war are examined the assurance grows stronger and stronger that we are on God's side. That is why the whole nation has been welded into the unity and consistency of polished steel; why the fire of patriotism burns in our midst with an intenser heat than ever before.

It is not merely from the righteousness of our cause in this war that our patriotism draws inspiration, but also from the ideals for which our Empire stands over all the world. As we look out to-day on the Empire which our fathers bequeathed us, taking it all in all, it stands for righteousness as no other on earth. It stands for the freedom of the soul and the freedom of the body all over the world.

Think of India, whose three hundred millions have been rescued from tyranny and ceaseless bloodshed, whose widows have been saved from the flames, whose starving have been fed in famine, and to whom the British race brought security and peace. "When I think," said ex-President Taft, "of what England has done in India ... how she found those many millions torn by internecine strife, disrupted with constant wars, unable to continue agriculture or the arts of peace, with inferior roads, tyranny, and oppression; and when I think what the Government of Great Britain is now doing for these alien races, the debt the world owes England ought to be acknowledged in no grudging manner."

No work ever done on earth for the elevation of humanity can compare with that wrought in India by our race for the uplift of humanity; and it is the same wherever the standard of Britain waves. In our own day we have seen in Egypt a whole race rising out of the mud and clothed anew in the garments of self-respect. Through Africa, wherever the sway of Britain extends, though yesterday the land reeked with blood, to-day mercy and kindness are healing the woes of men, and millions who knew not when death lurked for them in the bush now sleep in peace under the palms. It was the might of Britain that destroyed the slave trade, and it is nothing except the might of Britain which prevents the slave raider resuming his nefarious traffic, and slavery under the guise of other names being imposed on the natives of Africa. Wherever you go, to the tropics or the Orient, there the great power for righteousness is the British Empire. It does not exploit inferior races for gold; it is the trustee of the helpless native.

When one thinks of these little islands floating in the western sea, of the power that has gone forth from them to heal and bless, of the vast multitudes to whom the King-Emperor is the symbol of justice and security--his is a poor heart which cannot feel the thrill of gratitude for citizenship in an Empire girdling the whole earth, whose foundations are thus laid in righteousness.

Patriotism is not, however, a mere sentiment. It was not sentiment which built up the Empire. It was self-sacrifice--the spirit that faced and endured death. For us, too, patriotism must be more than sentiment; it must be action and the self-sacrifice which action requires.

What our fathers reared we must defend. And the startling thing is that there are still so many of our people who shrink from the burden which patriotism imposes. Many thousands refuse to prepare themselves for war; who are as the Romans who could not leave their baths to go and fight.

Vast multitudes congregate to gaze on football matches and gamble on the issue. The call of King and country falls on ears grown deaf. We thank God for those who, hearing the call, have gone forth to fight, counting everything but loss as compared to their country's gain. But these others, they cannot have paused to think. They have not pictured these fair lands, that have not heard the sound of war for seven generations, given over to that devouring enemy which has made Belgium a wilderness.

They have not thought of Oxford and St. Andrews sharing the fate of Louvain; of London and Edinburgh become as Brussels; of the millions of Glasgow and Birmingham thrown on the mercies of the world, women and children fleeing, driven by nameless fears, with no place to flee to but the mountain fastnesses of Wales and the Highlands of Scotland--the last refuge of the miserable and the broken. And yet these miseries would surely befall were all the manhood of the race such as these.

Think what it would mean were the walls of our defence broken down. Supposing that a shattering blow were struck at the heart of the Empire and our fleet crushed. What would follow? The crumbling of the Empire in a week! It is not we alone, with our wives and children in these little islands, who would be swept to ruin, and on whom despair would fall. From the far north-west to the long wash of the Australasian seas the shadow of devouring misery and death would fall on humanity. The millions of India would be forthwith swept into the whirlpools of war and mutiny. Egypt would be thrown back into chaos. Africa would be left to Islam and the merciless rule of a nation which knows but how to smite. Australia and New Zealand would be at the mercy of the yellow races.

It would not be a calamity for us in these islands alone. It would be a calamity whose withering blight would be cast over all the world. The ideals of righteousness which this Empire upholds would be trampled everywhere under foot. Covetousness and the lust of gold would hold the field of the world.

There is only one thing to be done, one duty summoning us with an irresistible call--the duty that calls us to stand between our country and destruction. Were the fate which has overtaken the Low Country to overtake us; were this fair land to be made a wilderness, our women and children driven into the wilds, and the Empire wrested from our hands, the men who failed in their duty would never be able to hold up their heads again.

What a terrible load would lie on him who, beholding the ruin of his native land, could say, "This might not have happened if I, and others like me, had done our duty." That would be a hell from which there would be no escape. "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell."

There can be no limit to the sacrifice which patriotism requires, so great a heritage is our native land. It does not require of us as Christians to engage in wars of conquest for the gratification of pride and greed, but it does require of us even the sacrifice of our lives in the defence of our homes or in the defence of our brother's home.

There are those who find themselves faced with difficulty. They are called upon to fight with every force in their power, to slay, withholding not their hand, while they hear the commandment, "Thou shall not kill," ringing in their ears, and across the centuries the voice of their Lord saying, "Resist not evil; whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." They are bewildered. Is not the attitude of non-resistance that which Jesus Christ enjoins? If they fight with sword and shell are they not lowering themselves to the level of Nietzsche, Bernhardi and B?low, and submitting to the arbitrament of the sword, which decides nothing except its own sharpness. The call of patriotism summoning to resist even unto blood comes to them, and they are uncertain whether to obey.

But we must interpret the will of God, not by isolated sentences, but by the whole content of the divine revelation. The commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," does not mean that we are not to kill in any circumstance whatever. If the commandment is to be taken literally, then no limit is to be set to it, and we must not kill any animal--not even the parasites of uncleanness. There is, moreover, another law which runs: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God created He him." So far from the mere physical life being for ever sacred, the very altar of God Himself was to be no sanctuary for the murderer. The man who owned a vicious ox and knew him to be vicious, and the ox killed a man, the owner thereof was to be slain. There are therefore circumstances in which the law, "Thou shalt not kill," is abrogated, and its place is taken by the law, "Thou shalt kill."

The law demanding the conservation of life rests on this foundation, not that physical life itself is sacred, but that human life bears the image of God. There are things far more sacred than the physical life--even those things which constitute the image of God stamped upon man. There are things for which men in all ages have been content to die--truth and loyalty to truth, the principles which are dearer than life. Those things which God ordained that men might through them grow more and more into His image, for these things man must be ready to die, and among these things is nationality.

Men cannot develop in isolation. What poor creatures men would be if they were solitary units. They would be as the beasts that perish. It is through the heritage of nationality that the soul is enriched. What poor stunted lives would ours be if we had not behind us the great and noble deeds which built up our Empire, if the words of the high souls of many generations did not come thrilling to our hearts, if Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Scott and Burns did not pour their treasures into our laps. The soul grows into the image of God through the riches of nationality. And whosoever warreth against nationality warreth against the soul. And the men who warreth against the soul must be resisted to the death.

We dare not appeal to Jesus Christ to cloak our shrinking from sacrifice. No doubt His gentleness has been the wonder of history; but His strength also summons us to be strong. For Jesus Christ was not a quietist. His religion is not a mere hospital for wounded souls. His place is among the strong of the earth. He faced the evil of this earth unflinching in His resistance. "Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites" is His denunciation of the oppressor; "Go tell that fox" is His message to the tyrant. When we think of Him making the whips, and falling, with holy anger in His eyes, on those who desecrated the courts of the temple, overturning the tables of the money changers, we know that the ideal of non-resistance is not His.

No doubt He laid it down as the law for the individual that he should turn the other cheek; but He did not lay it down as a law that a man should turn another's cheek to the smiter. What the individual can do, the nation may not do. It no doubt is the duty of the Ruler to turn his own individual cheek to the insulter; it is not his duty to turn the cheeks of the millions over whom he rules to those who would smite them, committing their children to shame and their homes to devastation.

No doubt Jesus Christ enjoined the law of forgiveness, but it was not unconditional. "If he repent, forgive him," is His law, and until the wrongdoer repents and ceases from his evil, it would be immoral to forgive him. Duty demands that every means be used to bring the evildoer to repentance; for only so is there a chance of his soul being saved. It is manifest that Christianity is not a religion of non-resistance to evil, but the religion of Him who Himself resisted evil, and who resisted it even to the death.

Patriotism, therefore, demands that we resist even to the shedding of blood. When a hostile army would destroy a nation, as in Belgium, it warreth against the soul, and it is as Christian to kill as it would be to shoot a tiger which leapeth out of the jungle to devour a man. And that Irish soldier whose face in the hospital in Paris was irradiated with joy when he was told that the enemy was put to flight and Paris saved, and who died with that gladness in his face, died in the spirit of Jesus Christ.

To say that the Founder of Christianity would not strike a blow for home and kindred and truth is to forget that He struck a blow in Jerusalem and wielded the thongs on the shoulders of those who polluted His Father's house. It is His will that we should strike a blow in defence of the house of our soul--the sanctuary of nationality.

Patriotism must be vibrant with the spirit of religion if it is to be a power rousing the nation to heroism and self-sacrifice. There never was a nation so patriotic as the Jew. No city ever gripped a nation's heart-strings as Jerusalem gripped the heart of the Jew. No suffering, no defeat, no exile however far, could quench the fire of patriotism in the heart. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I remember thee not, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy"--such was the cry of the Jew by the rivers of Babylon, yearning after Sion.

How was it that Jerusalem thus pulled at its children's heart-strings until they hurried back to rebuild? It was because Jerusalem was the seat of the worship of God. It was not the material stones or the hills round about that thus compelled the heart. It was the light of eternity shining over them. It was because of the "house of the Lord our God" that the Jew counted no good worth his striving except the good of Jerusalem. It is only when God standeth at the heart of a nation that the heart cleaveth with all its fibres to its native land, for then the whole of the man--not only the cravings of the body and the heart and the mind, but also the deeper cravings of the soul--wind themselves round the thought of the nation.

Thus we find that the days when the fires of patriotism burned brightest were ever those in which God held sway over the nation. It was with God that the sailors of Queen Elizabeth swept the main, that the soldiers of Wellington hurled the enemy far from the shores that face England--they were fighting not only for England but for England's God.

The testimony of history is this, that patriotism cannot maintain its power if once it be divorced from religion. Let God's face be veiled and lost and everything is lost. "Without God nothing, with God everything," says the ancient Celtic proverb, and all ages testify to its truth. And the last proof of it is now before our eyes in the condition of France.

A hundred years ago France dominated Europe, erected thrones and deposed kings at its will. But little by little France lost the vision of God, until at last M. Viviani celebrated the final triumph over the Church in 1907 by exclaiming: "With one magnificent gesture we have extinguished the lights of heaven, which none shall rekindle." France, in the words of its present Prime Minister, "extinguished the lights of heaven," but in so doing it extinguished something else. For to-day that nation, that not so long ago dominated Europe, can only protect its capital city by the help of the two nations which have not yet extinguished the lights of heaven.

Without God patriotism becomes impotent, for God is the source of that moral law, conformity to which means for a nation life, and defiance of which means the degeneration that leadeth to destruction. With the departure from God came moral decay and racial suicide. The hope of France is this, that through the descent of the nation into the valley of death the lights of heaven may be once more kindled; the hope of Britain, that these same lights may shine more brightly.

The spirit of patriotism will again vivify the nation when we seek after God. In years of prosperity we have forgotten our high calling. We have pursued vanities and forgotten the living God. When we again realise our calling and our election as instruments in the hand of God for the establishment of His Kingdom of Righteousness over all the earth, our hearts will be filled with ardour, and we shall face whatever perils may assail us strong in the assurance that the Omnipotent God is in our midst and that nothing can resist His will.

And this true patriotism will mean the salvation of the nation. For it will strive to realise at home that righteousness which alone exalteth a nation. Its first task will be to raise the life at home nearer to God, for we cannot raise the world to higher levels than that on which we ourselves stand. The vision of the new Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven will again flame before our eyes. "And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride for her husband."

That new Jerusalem is not a city remote in the inaccessible heights, but a city which descends and permeates the material city now so polluted by sin, until it becomes the "holy city," with the law of God obeyed and the will of God done in it. Its citizens shall walk its streets, pure in heart, seeing God everywhere. "And they shall bring the glory and the honour of the nations into it." There the nations shall be one in the streets of the city of God, all their contendings forgotten in the sense of their brotherhood, following the one ideal, obeying the one law, loving each other in the love of God. They will strive then as to who shall bring the greatest glory within the compass of its walls, and that will be the only striving.

That is the ideal, that we should become a nation so permeated by the spirit of God, so brought into obedience to His will, that our cities shall become holy cities, even as the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven. When we shall set ourselves to realise that ideal once more, then will the nation evoke the devotion of its citizens, for devotion to the nation will also be devotion to God.

It was that ideal which fired the patriotism of the Jew. The same ideal alone will make our patriotism glow as a white flame. When the vision of the Supreme Ruler whose throne is established in righteousness once more blazes forth before the people, then once more the throb of patriotism and the passion to make righteous law operative to the ends of the earth will stir the heart, and the manhood of the race will once more thrill with the call summoning to service and to sacrifice. The answering shout will everywhere arise--For God and the King.

The Shadow of the Cross

The churchyard of our parish lies in a deep hollow, and a little river half encircles it. In the midst of it stands the church beneath whose shadow the parish has garnered its dead for centuries. There the generations have lain down to sleep, their hearts reconciled one to another, and the beadle has drawn the coverlet of green over them. As he goes about his allotted task he pats a mound here and there gently with the back of his spade--for roadman and belted earl are at one here.

The last time I wandered down to the hollow it seemed as if eternal peace brooded over the living and the dead. The leaves, russet and gold, glowed in the sunlight. At the stirring of a gentle breeze, like the dropping of a sea-bird's feather, leaf after leaf fluttered silently down on the graves. The great bank of trees across the river glowed with rivulets of dull flames running hither and thither. In its stony bed the river sang its endless song. The immemorial yews, beneath whose branches successive generations of children have played with now and then a thrill of pleasing terror because of the overhanging graves, stood regardless of the sun. The crows, sated with the gleanings of harvest fields, fluttered in their rookeries with scarcely a caw. It seemed as if no sound of discord or strife could ever break in that enchanted hollow.

As I turned away to retrace my steps through the gate I came on a woman sitting on the mort-safe, a handkerchief moist with her tears in her hand. She had come up from the quarries and she had visited her dead. And she came because yesterday she received word that on the battlefield of Marne her son was killed. He was her eldest. The others were not old enough yet to fight. Her husband was killed in an accident, and she had reared her children, refusing all help from the parish. The pride of the blood sustained her. And now that her son was dead she came hither, driven by an irresistible instinct to visit her husband's grave. It was as if she wanted to tell him about John, and how he died a hero, trying to carry a wounded comrade through the hail of the shrapnel.

She was weary, and from her husband's grave she turned to the church. She would go and sit in the corner under the gallery, where John used to sit. He had sat with her there at his first Communion. The memories wrapped her round, and she would feel her son near her there. But the door of the church was locked and barred. With an added ache in her heart she turned away, and weariness compelled her to sit on the iron mort-safe, which the parish provided in a former century to protect their dead from sacrilegious hands. "But the church used to be open," I said. "Aye," she replied tremulously, gathering up her handkerchief into a round ball; "but some did-na like it; the boots on the week-days are na sae clean, and they dirtied the kirk. That must be why they lockit the door." It was not that she complained. Those who locked the church were wise men, and no doubt they knew best. So she sat on the mort-safe.

"I have other sons, and when they are older they will go, too," she said. "I'll no' keep them back. And if they die it'll be for God's great cause." Her lips quivered as she spoke. The moist ball in the right hand was clenched tight--there were no more tears to shed.

And as I looked at the worn, lined face, the bent shoulders, the faded rusty black mantle with its fringe, and the sunken lips that quivered now and then, there came a sudden realisation. I saw no longer the one grief-burdened figure sitting dejectedly on the mort-safe--I saw the unnumbered host of mothers throughout the world who have given their sons over to carnage, and who are as Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they are not. Millions of men locked in the death grapple means millions of mothers given tears to drink in great measure, bound in affliction and iron.

The song of the river went on ceaselessly, the russet-leaves fell softly, and the sun shone on a world wrapped in peace--all nature utterly regardless of the millions of Rachels that weep. And as she sat there, behind her, under the campanile, showed the church door, locked and barred. Nature was heedless of her; the church shut its door upon her. She seemed to me the Mater Dolorosa.

As I went up the brae there came the memory of a school lesson long ago. Out of the subconscious it leaped as a diver might come up from the depths of the sea with a gleaming coin in his hand. Among the temples of ancient Rome there was one temple always kept open in time of war. There the Roman General clashed the shield and the spear, invoking the god ere he went to the battle-line, and its door was shut not day or night. And I have no doubt but that the Eternal Ruler heard that clashing of spear on shield, and marked that open door. But over wide districts of Great Britain we have left these pagan habits far behind us. We shut the doors of our temples alike in war and in peace--excepting two hours on one day of the week, or in many cases one hour in the week. Nor do I doubt but that the same Ruler marks these doors now shut on the mothers of sorrow, and these sanctuaries locked and silent.

The glory was now gone from the day. I could not forget how the iron mort-safe gave the rest that the Church refused. The shadow lay heavy over the valley, and the mind tried to give the shadow a name. But it could not. So up the long flight of stone steps I climbed, and turned along a tree-shaded road. There, where three roads meet, stands a little chapel within whose walls a small section of our parishioners worship. I have passed it times out of mind without so much as glancing at it. But to-day its open door arrested my eye, and I stood in the roadway and gazed. And there came to me there a sudden sense of thankfulness for that there is one open door in our parish which witnesses to the fact that the power and solace of religion are not shut in within the confines of only two hours of one day in the week.

While I yet stood in the highway there came forth from the little chapel an honoured parishioner, who is passing the golden evening of a useful life in researches regarding Calvin and the Pope. Amazement possessed me, for he is a power in the parish church, whose door is locked and barred. We walked together towards the hills. There was a trace of apology in his explanation. Since this dreadful cataclysm has burst and the boom of the guns has come drifting from the sea across the high-perched city, he has felt the need of quiet meditation. Thus he has often on his walks slipped through the open door of the chapel that stands by the roadside.

"And you have locked the door of the parish church," I exclaimed, "and you deny to the poor the privilege you yourself enjoy." He stopped and faced me in the roadway, blinking at me. "We never locked the Church door," he said. "It used to be open," I answered; "I remember being glad to sit in it myself." "Oh! I remember," he exclaimed, "it was open every day for a few years, but the authorities were never consulted when it was thrown open--a most lawless proceeding!--and when a suitable opportunity occurred the beadle locked it up. Law and order have to be vindicated."

"What you did then," I replied, "was to allow the beadle to deprive the poor parishioners of a privilege which you and a few others enjoy elsewhere." At that he started off walking along the road very quickly, but I kept step with him. "You see," said he, waving a deprecatory hand, "I am only one among many, and I was so absorbed in these old Reformation controversies that I never gave it a thought, and it is only since the war began that I realised...." And as he spoke I felt that my old friend, learned in many controversies, had experienced a revolution. The great tide had swept him past all controversies right up to the fountain head. He had learned that man's high calling is not to dispute, but to pray.

As we walked under the darkling hills I told him of that shadow which had so suddenly fallen upon me that day, and he at once gave it a name. "It is the shadow of the Cross," said he. And thereupon he began to explain out of the wisdom and ripened experience of seventy years how across nineteen centuries the shadow of the Cross lies still over all the world. One thinks so seldom of these things, and if occasionally one hears them spoken of, familiarity with the words has deadened the hearer to their significance. It was because I listened to him talking in the lane that his words gripped me. They might have made no impression if he were in a pulpit.

We are accustomed to think of the greatest of all tragedies as an event consummated in six hours. It is, however, far from consummated, for it is an age-long tragedy. Its roots lay in self-interest. A degenerate priesthood in an obscure Syrian town saw nothing in the Greatest of Teachers but an unbalanced enthusiast, who struck at their ill-gotten gains, and whose triumph would make an end of them and their system. So self-interest cried "Crucify." And though the Roman Governor saw through them and wanted to save Him, self-interest again was brought into play, and when threatened with an awkward complaint to Rome, he said "Crucify." And ever since then self-interest on innumerable lips has cried Crucify, Crucify. Not only cried, but did it.

For this Teacher identified Himself with His followers, saying that He was the Vine and they the branches. It follows that whatever is done to the branch is done to the vine. A branch cannot be cut and severed from the vine without the vine bleeding. He declared it to be so. "Whosoever receiveth you receiveth Me," and it follows that whosoever crucifies you crucifies Me. And the history of the centuries is the history of how the poor and unlearned and the toiling have been persecuted, harried by war, driven to death and crucified.

Generation after generation have raised the Cross anew, and in the crucifying of the dumb multitudes have crucified Him. Along with His own He fought with wild beasts, went through the flames, and suffered many bloody and diverse persecutions, and He was with His people now. He confronted to-day the mighty of the earth as He did that blinded priesthood of old, and He declared that there is only one way of conquering, and that by love; that gaining the whole world was a miserable bargain if in exchange a man parted with truth and righteousness and purity--those things that constitute the soul's very breath.

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