Part 5

Here are heights where the air is charged with potentiality of new life, hardly dreamt of by our faith on its low stagnant levels. Here are heights to be stormed by faithful unself-seeking love. This way lies deliverance and new creation, and the breaking of prison bars and the turning of our captivity such as shall fill all our mouths with laughter.

A few know that these words are not rhetorical. They know, with St. Paul, the riches of the glory of Christ's inheritance in the saints. Such was Mary Slessor, pioneer missionary in West Africa, the leaves of whose biography I happened to turn over as I was writing these pages. She had frequently to take journeys through forests with leopards swarming around her. She wrote: "I did not use to believe the story of Daniel in the lions' den until I had to take some of these awful marches, and then I knew it was true and that it was written for my comfort. Many a time I walked along praying 'O God of Daniel, shut their mouths,' and He did."

This is the prayer of faith. It is the prayer which asks "not to be hit." It is more than resignation, it is the prayer of power. It believes that there are hardly-tapped powers and possibilities in God for those who seek first His kingdom and righteousness. We do not know much about such prayer in our present spiritual sickness. But it is there, a weapon to be wielded by dauntless, simple faith. There is an inheritance to be claimed by little-loving sons, who yet are sons--"heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with Him."

FOOTNOTES:

Prayer after the mind of our Lord depends greatly on how we think of Him. The following lines, written by a barrister, are, I think, a wholesome corrective of that which is too soft in our conventional thought about our Saviour. Despite a false or partial note here and there, they are nearer to Him than the thought underlying the first verse of the hymn--a great favourite among the men owing to its tune--"Jesu, Lover of my Soul." At any rate they suggest the right association of ideas in which our Lord should live in the mind of a young man:

Jesus, Whose lot with us was cast, Who saw it out, from first to last: Patient and fearless, tender, true, Carpenter, vagabond, felon, Jew: Whose humorous eye took in each phase Of full rich life this world displays, Yet evermore kept fast in view The far-off goal it leads us to:

Who, as your hour neared, did not fail-- The world's fate trembling in the scale-- With your half-hearted band to dine, And chat across the bread and wine: Then went out firm to face the end, Alone, without a single friend: Who felt, as your last words confessed, Wrung from a proud unflinching breast By hours of dull ignoble pain, Your whole life's fight was fought in vain: Would I could win and keep and feel That heart of love, that spirit of steel.

I would not to Thy bosom fly To slink off till the storms go by. If you are like the man you were You'ld turn with scorn from such a prayer, Unless from some poor workhouse crone, Too toil-worn to do aught but moan. Flog me and spur me, set me straight At some vile job I fear and hate: Some sickening round of long endeavour, No light, no rest, no outlet ever: All at a pace that must not slack, Tho' heart would burst and sinews crack: Fog in one's eyes, the brain a-swim, A weight like lead in every limb, And a raw pit that hurts like hell Where once the light breath rose and fell: Do you but keep me, hope or none, Cheery and staunch till all is done, And, at the last gasp, quick to lend One effort more to serve a friend.

And when--for so I sometimes dream-- I've swum the dark, the silent stream, So cold, it takes the breath away, That parts the dead world from the day, And see upon the further strand The lazy, listless angels stand, And with their frank and fearless eyes The comrades whom I most did prize: Then, clean, unburdened, careless, cool, I'll saunter up from that grim pool, And join my friends: then you'll come by, The Captain of our Company: Call me out, look me up and down, And pass me through without a frown, With half a smile, but never a word-- And so I shall have met my Lord.

Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary, p. 106. Hodder & Stoughton.

There is also the objection that the view implied in the preceding pages leaves out or passes over too lightly our need as sinners in the sight of God all Holy. Is not our need for forgiveness to impel us towards God? Is not our need--our need in anxiety, our need in guiltiness--to be a motive in our religion?

Yes, a motive, but not the motive. It is a question of order. What must come first is not our need, whether as anxious or guilty, but God's need, or else our religion will be at the level of natural religion and below the Christian level. It is because men are poor towards God and think coldly and ungenerously of Him that they 'are not worrying about their sins.' Men are not sorry for sin (except with the seedy remorse of 'the morning after') until their sin has come into contact with love. The more vital a young man is, the less will he brood in self-regard over his wrongdoing. "Anyhow, I have lived," he will say. But if it comes home to him what his wrongdoing has done to another who loves him, then he begins to be sorry. "I didn't care," he will say, "for myself. I had my fling. But now I see that what I did has broken my mother's heart. I wish to God I hadn't done it."

Our religion must begin from God. It must spring out of love fuller and more hungry than our desirous hearts. It must spring out of love, not--how could it?--out of our love for God, but out of His love for us. If God's love for us, manifested in the utterly real and suffering love of Jesus, and in no insipid fancy of our sentimental moments, wins its way past our guard and over the barriers of self, hatred of sin and sorrow for sin will follow. But it is a question of order: first, what God is; second, what we are. The more vivid the first is to a man, the more inevitable his candid consciousness of the second. The more he is taken captive by the assurance that God is his Father, the more glaring it will be to him that he is an unworthy son. And the more men set out to give effect to their sonship in service for the kingdom of God, the more they will realise their strange impotence. The dreadful hiatus between aspiration and performance, between acknowledged and realised ideals will widen. The eager impulse to disregard self and to serve God with love and praise and joy, will be found horridly at variance with a natural and rooted impulse towards self-devotion and indulgence. The worship and praise of God, not only in thought and word but in deed, will stumble and fall short of its goal--and then the tears of tragic failure will start and the cry of despair ring out. It was so with Peter in the porch and Paul beaten down in bondage under the Law. "Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?"

I think there is no fear but that, if we do set out to put into practice our inheritance as sons of God, we shall come to the Cross of Christ in genuine "Rock-of-ages" fashion, bringing nothing to it in the end, except our lovelessness. His, after all and in fact, was the one, free, utterly loving and obedient offering of self to the Father. He did something others could not do--He died for them, and in Him and through Him alone did they come unto the Holy Father. I cannot work it out here, but along this way I seem to travel home into the great evangel of the Atonement.

Only, I plead, this propitiatory work of Christ must come second in the imagination, and His Love-of-God-revealing work first. And I think in the course of the history of Christianity an inversion has come about. In hymns and liturgies the prima facie and predominant emphasis seems rather to rest on our sinfulness than on God's goodness. Before they do anything else the Prayer Book, as it is at present used, asks men to embark on the overloaded phrases of the General Confession. I know that this may be justified by arguing that the Prayer Book assumes that the other parts of the Christian religion are in the minds of 'the faithful' members of the Church. But this assumption is unwarranted as regards the mass of soldiers whom we keep on inviting to use the more or less mutilated forms of Morning and Evening Prayer.

And even when we come to the Eucharist, though everything can be found in it, I often wonder whether there the Church has not come to lay more stress upon the Cross as the offering for sin than as the disclosure of the Divine pity for the sinner. If so, is it that too much has been taken for granted, namely, the Love of God which alone can evoke sorrow for sin and be worthy of the offering for sin? Has familiarity tended to disguise and overlay the wonder-compelling revelation of God? In the Eucharist has He been thought of rather as the Father sitting back in reception of placation, than as the Father Who, while we are a great way off, runs out to fall on our neck and bring us home?

I think that a re-ordering is needed. For Christianity, stressed as it appears to be at present, will never catch the souls of men. I think of the flying boys who, more than any one else, are winning our battles (I have been chaplain to a squadron of them for a little time). They are far from unsinful, but they will nevertheless, I am sure, not begin with the avowal "that there is no health in them"; they will not sing "that they are weary of earth and laden with their sins." For as they live almost gaily and unconcernedly on the edge of things, they know that that is not the primary truth about themselves. Yet Christ, if in Him they see the all-hazarding and all-enduring Love of God, can win the love and worship of their eager hearts. He can catch those living creatures alive.

There must be a re-ordering and simplification and correction of emphasis. It is possible, now that historical science is unravelling the Bible and Church history, and extricating from their many levels and complexities what is simple and specific in the glorious truths of God and of man in Christ. Some exaggerations must be sloughed off. I think a little of the sepia, for instance, that was in the brush of Paul must be washed away. Has not he, or rather have not the great men of his school, over-obsessed us with the dogma, derived from Scriptural literalism, of human corruption flowing from Adam?

There is, by contrast, a more radiant and yet as realistic view of the world as Christ saw it, to be recovered. Some of His glories, dimmed by the veil of inadequate conceptions in the minds of His witnesses, will shine as never before, as the Holy Spirit takes of Him and shows it unto us.

XXI

Finally, I would say a word about the charge of pessimism which this report from the front may evoke. Both pessimism and optimism are rather moods in us than qualities which really belong to the facts of a situation. The main point is to try to get down to reality and not to flinch. Anyhow, I do not feel pessimistic about our holy and glorious religion. Far otherwise. It is coming again. Actualities at the front, as I try to learn from them, do seem to me to show a very widespread and deep ignorance of the good news of God in Christ. But that seems only to make more wonderful and precious those treasures of truth and joy in Christ which God has ready for those who seek them. They are the more wonderful because one knows that, in the silence which has fallen on many loud voices amid the thunderous cataclysm of war, the Word of God in Christ alone rings out anew. It is the truth of God in Him for this mysteriously muddled and cruel world, and yet the truth which includes every partial element of truth or goodness in the world. And there are such elements. Only second to the wonder of the Gospel of the Cross are the achievements of the souls of very ordinary men under unparalleled afflictions. Without knowing it, they are seen to be worthy of Jesus, Who loves them and gave Himself for them. If there are nearly virgin resources in God, there are also deep unused treasures of potentiality in men. There are in them excellences and simple heroisms which make plain that Christianity is no artificial thing superimposed on human nature, but is the laying bare and setting free of its inmost native quality. There is everywhere about, over here, a diffused Christianity in men who are better than they know. It seems like so much material that needs but a spark to set it ablaze. May there be a great conflagration--the flaming out of the Light of the world, to illuminate, to cleanse, to fill it with the heat of love, both human and divine! AMEN.

THE END

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THE MIND OF THE DISCIPLES

By the REV. NEVILLE S. TALBOT

"He deals with his subject in a manner completely free from the shackles of the schools and with a reverence which is welcome after the over-confident handling of some young dons."--Daily News.

"Should be a help to many whose belief in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity has been shaken, and to whom 'learned books' do not appeal."--The Guardian.