Part 4

Lastly, if these changes are to be they depend on one thing--a new vision of God in Christ, such as shall be for Church and individual the over-mastering counter-attraction to self. What the world needs is theocracy. That is, not the imposition of ecclesiastical shackles upon secular life, but the consecration of all life, with all its ever-multiplying treasures of knowledge and power, to one object--the glory of God. If so, then God, as the centre and magnet of consecration, must be all vitally apprehended. He must fill the horizon of the soul. He must be the delight of men, to draw them out of themselves into childlike selflessness, so that as children they may enter into the Kingdom.

XVI

There are objections, I know, which arise in the mind to this insistence on God and the will or kingdom on which He is at work in the world, and they must be faced. It is easy, I feel, to speak of the will of God in general terms. But what does it mean in particular? Can it be known or defined? Is it practicable?

I remember being puzzled by a great religious teacher to whom I owe much--Father Kelly of the Society of the Sacred Mission, Kelham. It was almost comic to me that in the same breath he would urge (1) that the one thing needful was faith in God and in the will which He is accomplishing in His world, and--with equal energy--(2) that no one could say what in the world that will is. It reminded me of those philosophers who liken the meta-physical pursuit of the Absolute to Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark.

But there is something essential here. Christian faith in God and in His will is not sight, else it were no venture. It does not bring with it a particularised programme to meet all the changing and complex circumstances of life. It does not carry with it anticipatory knowledge. Yet it is not an agnostic gazing into the mist of heaven. It is the looking unto Jesus. There is light--light on His Cross, telling of the love and will and desire of God Who is marching on.

Given the attitude of faith in God and the belief that He is at work in human affairs, the practical corollaries have to be worked out by the exertion of our faculties. If God and His will be the end of our endeavour and the object of our co-operation, then the means towards the end and the ways of co-operation must be arrived at, step by step, by effort and experiment, by science and common sense. The endeavour to do God's will, will disclose what that will is.

After all, in every sphere of human relationships, whether in home or neighbourhood or business or municipality or commonwealth, what is lacking is not the knowledge of what the kingdom of God requires, but the will and motive and power to accomplish it. We are not short of knowledge; rather we are weighed down by the power derived from new knowledge, for want of an end other than our own selves to which to consecrate it. The means for transforming life and suffusing it with new radiance abound as never before. It is the will which is lacking. If we will lift up any department of life to God in the faith that He cares about it and has desires for it, the next step to be taken will be apparent to conscience and reason.

XVII

Akin to the difficulty that the will of God is inscrutable and hard to know, is the protest that to speak of Him as at work in the world to bring in His kingdom, is remote from the actualities of daily life. As I have walked about in Flanders, turning over thoughts about the onward movement of God's purposes in the world, I have met those matchless monuments of patient and unchanging daily toil, the peasants working in the fields. Harnessed into the perpetual cycle of seed time and harvest, what can this talk of movements and purposes in the great world be to them? Is enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God possible only for those who are so removed from the drudgery of existence that they can sit in the exhausted air of committee rooms and talk about it? Or is it that under God's heaven and close to the soil men know better? Is there no room for great expectations in those pressed down into the thick of things?

There is telling truth here, but it is not the last word. The old man in the fields--or is it the old wrinkled woman doing more than one man's work?--knows that. They know that life cannot fully be measured by the gauge of the individual's daily round. A word will bring pride and light to their eyes. It is 'Vive la France!' They are citizens of a world wider than their fields. They belong to 'La Patrie.' Their common tasks count--only a little--but they do count in the world of great events. Life is monotonous and cyclical, and yet it is more than that. Great changes do arrive in days of crisis and convulsion--yes, in days of judgment, and the victims of changelessness are caught up by movement. They are awakened out of the sleep of humdrum existence, and are asked to give proof, and proudly do give proof, that, plodders though they be, they belong to no mean city.

This is true in the sphere of patriotism. It is true in the wider sphere of the Kingdom of God. The difficulty here considered is one of the products of our incorrigible individualism in religion. Christianity is not narrow preoccupation with 'my soul.' It is an entrance into a sphere as wide as the world. It is membership in a universal society which is concerned with great causes and astir with deep movements. And be the individual never so anchored in the daily and local necessities of existence, he can nevertheless share with loyalty and pride and prayer and service in the fortunes and onward march of the commonwealth of Christ.

XVIII

There is also the objection to an insistence upon the will of God in accomplishment in this world, that there is so much in the New Testament which declares (and, as we have seen in the last paragraph, experience seems largely to corroborate the view) that the Kingdom of God does not come in this world but in the next. I refer (only I dislike using a word which few soldiers at the front will understand) to New Testament "apocalyptic," which seems to present a vision of this world as immediately to pass away in catastrophe and of the arrival of another order of things.

It is certainly very perplexing that there seems to be so little in the New Testament outside of the Gospels which is plainly on all fours with the first part of the Lord's Prayer. At the front the Lord's Prayer--as the one island of religious ground, amid marshes of ignorance, common to Englishmen--is the padres' great stand-by. It declares better than any words which we can frame what distinguishes the Christian religion from others--that it begins with and glories in what God is Whose Name is to be hallowed, and Whose kingdom is in arrival and Whose will is in accomplishment not only in heaven but on earth. But elsewhere in the New Testament the terrain, as it were, of these wonderful happenings seems to be changed, and to lie in the hereafter.

It is very hard to say anything simply and shortly about this.

At any rate it is no good blinking the fact that the New Testament expectation of an immediate ending of this world was mistaken.

Yet there remains the reasonable faith--surely burnt into us by the fires of war, surely revealed to us in apocalyptic vision--that this world is but a part of another, and that the other gives to this and to its concerns their supreme importance.

We need to be two-eyed here. It is a one-eyed view to hold that because this life is a pilgrimage to another and this world is passing away, therefore nothing matters here and nothing is happening here. It is equally one-eyed to shut out the goal whither we all journey, and to concentrate on the affairs of this life as alone and sufficiently important.

The whole view is that through the entire order--here and there--the will of God is at work, and His Kingdom in arrival, but that their full result and accomplishment lies beyond this world. Here are the partial and unfinished stages, there the end whither they lead. To fall back on metaphor, a city is in the building, a whole righteous social order--a kingdom of souls. The building is going on now,--in Birmingham and Bermondsey,--and that gives eternal importance to their perishing and trivial affairs. What whole structure is being built, and how much of Birmingham and Bermondsey can be built into it, is only partially known now. It is partially known here, as days of testing and catastrophe break in on periods of monotony, and lay bare their soul. But full knowledge lies in the future--the great and final 'Day shall declare it.'

FOOTNOTES:

Indeed we see it change, with surprising ease of adjustment, within the limits of the New Testament itself. In its first form it was not of the essence of the new truth.

XIX

There is also the objection that too hard things have been said here about the turning to God under pressure of anxiety, and the expression in prayer of the natural desire for safety. After all, as a Jesuit fellow-padre reminded me at the front, Our Lord at His hour of trial, when "exceeding sorrowful even unto death," prayed in agony. And further it is plain that prayer to Him, and as He would have it be to others, was far more than a trustful harmony of self with the will of the Father. He urged men to take their requests to God. "Ask and ye shall receive." I can imagine that the conception of prayer at times of emergency, as suggested in earlier pages, might be so full of resignation as to be reduced to the fatalism extraordinarily prevalent at the front--"If it 'its yer, it 'its yer," as the men say. Are we not to ask not to be hit?

It is nearly enough to recall the Lord's Prayer in regard to this objection. As I have said, men on service widely associate prayer with the expression of need or anxiety. To restrict prayer thus is to begin the Lord's Prayer half-way through, at "Give us this day our daily bread." It is a question of order and emphasis. Christian prayer begins with God. It turns away from self to the glory of God. It begins with praise and acclamation--the glad acknowledgment of what God is and is doing. It is only in the second place and because of what God is--because He is our Father and is at work to bring in His kingdom and has a will for us and for all--that the prayer which expresses our need comes in aright.

Therefore I would say to a man going into battle--"Pray now if never before. Set God before you as you see Him, as you can clearly apprehend Him, in Christ. He is your Father, you are His son, however unworthy. Lift up your heart to Him Who, in and through all the turmoil around you, presses onward with the business of His kingdom and the fulfilment of His heart's desire. And commit all to Him. In trustful intimacy give utterance to your longing to be brought through the perilous hour for service in His kingdom to the glory of His Name. Commit all to Him, asking forgiveness. He knows what you have need of in life or in death--and let the rest go!"

For such prayer in the Name of Christ--that is, prayer in accordance with His mind and founded on the character of God as made known in Him--there awaits undiscovered and unexhausted resources of power. So Jesus told men. So Christian experience testifies. We have to pray truly Christ-wise, not asking for stones to be made bread, not seeking to be hidden from life's storms, but to be brought through them in faithful endurance.

We have to pray as Christ prayed in Gethsemane in fellowship with His sufferings. But we have also to pray as knowing the power of His Resurrection. We have to rise in faith to claim the supernatural power which neither He used nor we may use merely for self-preservation, which yet is to be set free in the service of the kingdom.

Prayer in the Name of Christ is not only the prayer of resignation, based on the self-committal of Jesus our Brother into the hands of the Father. Such would ever tend, as uttered by our trembling faith, towards fatalism. But it is also prayer in the Name of Him "Who was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection of the dead, even Jesus Christ our Lord." It is the prayer of power--that power which was at Jesus' command, and was therefore the subject of His temptation, and was drawn upon by the faith of sufferers and yet was unused by Jesus to save Himself. This power is the power of God. It is "the exceeding greatness of His power, according to that working of the strength of His might which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places."