Warfare is the chief characteristic of our life as we know it, whether we look upward or outward or within. And it is not to be wondered at that many who realize the horror and the waste and the apparent futility of a world of strife should preach to us “peace at any price” as the one cure of that world’s disorders. But yet, in proportion as we realize how radical these disorders are, we shall see also that a cure must go deeper than this. What is needed is not that the discordant energies of the universe should be silenced—that the contending elements should be congealed, so to speak, in all their-present antagonism—but that they should be refined and purified and brought into their right relation. “Peace at any price” would be no cure for anything that was really wrong, nay more, it would itself be the most unrighteous of all possible failures.
In a world where good and evil are mingled in an apparently inextricable confusion, it cannot but be a duty to fight. The truth, even in our blurred and partial vision of it, must of necessity come before peace. Our aspirations may be marred by self-seeking, our ideals may be mingled with much that is false, but we are bound to fight for them, such as they are. Our methods may need correction, for we may not fight the Lord’s battle with the world’s weapons, but even that, it may be, would be less heinous than to cry “peace at any price.” The temper which is born of fighting needs to be constantly chastened and controlled; but evil may not be acquiesced in. Quarrelling, no doubt, is a device of the devil, but fighting is a Christian duty.
Life was to them the bag of grain,
And Death the weedy harrow’s tooth.
Those warriors of the sighting brain
Give worn Humanity new youth.
Our song and star are they to lead
The tidal multitude and blind
From bestial to the higher breed
By fighting souls of love divined.
They scorned the ventral dream of peace,
Unknown in nature. This they knew:
That life begets with fair increase
Beyond the flesh, if life be true. [Note: G. Meredith, “The Thrush in February.”]
A shrewd thinker said the other day, speaking of the truth which underlies Nietzsche’s perversions, “This call to conflict, this glory in danger, is very splendid, rightly understood, yet it is not a truth that appeals much to a man over fifty years of age.” No doubt, as a rule, that is true, and yet surely the Gospel is something more than the mild and kindly touch of a hand that smooths the pillow of those whose climax and struggle is past or passing. The peace which Christ came to bring, the peace of souls reconciled with God, their neighbours, and themselves, is not a mere glorification of comfort—“The ghastly smooth life dead at heart” “No cross, no war to wage.” The air of the Mount of the Beatitudes is sharp and tonic. The dew which descends into the heart of the disciples is a spirit which makes those hearts “first pure then peaceable.” [Note: C. E. Osborne, Religion in Europe and the World Crisis, 21.]
Goethe’s saying: “I have been a man and that means a fighter,” is a fine comment upon an incident which Treitschke gratefully records in his History.. The Secondary Schools of East Prussia presented the famous old castle, the Marienburg, with a costly painted window, and the inscription they chose was: “He who is not a fighter shall not be a shepherd.” [Note: A. Mugge, Heinrich von Treitschke, 30.]
With the north-east wind the soul is fain to fight as an armed man—
The joy of combat is ours at least, and let him conquer who can:
Let the strenuous warfare be swift and brief or weary and long to win,
Who meetly wrestles with foe so fell, may surely rejoice therein. [Note: May Byron, The Wind on the Heath, 11.]
1. Where is life free from battle? It was an ancient thinker who said of strife that it is the parent of everything. St. Paul’s words concerning the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain suggest at least, if they do not anticipate, the modern idea of struggle in the evolution of the universe, in the movement of nature from chaos to order, from the first dawn of life on the earth to the advent of man. The story of all living things is the story of struggle. In recent years much emphasis has been laid on the struggle for existence in the lower creation; but the struggle is not one for existence merely, but for higher life. The necessity for it is organic in the structure of the world. A compulsion is upon every form of life to reach its ideal. There seems to be no other way of producing even physical excellence—of bringing to perfection plant and animal. And what is true of nature is equally true of man. Its conflicts are reproduced in human experience. Man is born to strife, born to live in a world where everything must be fought for. He comes to the consciousness of his life in the midst of struggle with the elemental forms and forces of nature. To exist at all, he has to fight a continuous battle for food and shelter. The sun will smite him by day, and the moon by night, water will drown him, the frosts of winter, earthquake and tempest will kill him, unless he is alert and vigilant. Not to be destroyed, to come off victorious with the powers of earth and sea and air, he must fight through all his life a battle in which there is no discharge. And the same law of struggle holds good when evolution introduces a new and nobler aim, and moral excellence becomes the ideal. All human progress has been through conflict. The law of conflict is the law of growth. It is under hard and stern conditions the life of man on the earth goes forward. Not anything which man has won has been won without struggle. Danger and difficulty have developed, and trained his faculties and virtues, and to them we owe his intellectual and moral achievement, the noblest fruits of human power and character.
Then shall I wish for utter peace?
For light with calm around?
For all the stir of life to cease
In apathy profound?
Ah! no, too long
I’ve warred with wrong ;
I’ve loved the clash of battle-song ;
For me, to drone in ease alone
Were heavier than a churchyard stone. [Note: Edmund Gosse, Collected Poems, 354.]
(1) There is the battle of thought. Shall we try to escape from the continual invasions on the creed of our childhood by putting up the shutters, refusing to look and listen, and allowing our belief to be sterilized into dead formulas? Or are we to turn aside and say that nothing can be known on these high themes, and acquiesce in ignorance? Nay, but rather we are to believe in the light, and pursue it without pausing or fearing. The form may pass, but the truth shines as the stars for ever and ever, and is made sure to those who are willing to do the will of God. Truth must come before peace, and it is only as truth is sought and found that we discover the perfect splendour of the Divine religion, and are at rest therein.
In that work with which I am best acquainted, I know that the secret, not perhaps of the most popular preaching, but certainly of the most fruitful, is this: it is the preaching of men who never cease to be students of the deep things of God; men who never cease to train themselves in all high ways, to the end that their sensitiveness and loyalty to the spiritual and Divine aspects of life may ever become truer and finer. For them there is no rest, no vacation, no cessation from thought, no relaxing of energies; in season and out of season they are busy, in times of peace they are preparing for war. And the best work is done by men in those very years when the cost to themselves is sorest. When a man begins to neglect mental discipline and drill, he begins to fail. There is no man, whatever his ability or his attainments, who can afford to live on his acquired power and knowledge, as a merchant lives on his capital; and it is this conception of mental endowments and possessions which has betrayed many professional men to their undoing. Power here, strength of grasp, readiness of appreciation, can only be preserved by unremitting attention, by unceasing discipline, by constant struggle, by a war with foes without and within, in which there is no such thing as a furlough, a discharge. [Note: John Hunter, God and Life, 125.]
(2) And then there is the harder battle of righteousness. There is a moral as well as an intellectual struggle, a battle with appetite, greed, falsehood, envy, pride, and selfishness in all its forms, both coarse and refined. There are dangers in life more serious than the attacks of disease, material failure, the decay of mental power, or the loss of distinction in a chosen calling. We are daily and hourly exposed to temptations which threaten to overthrow us, and which, if yielded to, cannot but work deadly mischief in our moral nature. Hardly a day passes when the fundamental elements of character are not put to the test. Viewed from this standpoint, we may well speak of the inexorableness of life. The years, as they gather upon us, bring no release from moral risk—no discharge in this war. No man is ever safe. No man can ever afford to take his ease and to put off his armour. To the best men, life is never other than a danger and a trial. St. Paul, many years after his conversion, and after multitudinous labours in his apostolic ministry, had not risen above the fear of final failure. He felt it necessary to keep his body under, not to neglect sell-discipline, not to relax watchfulness, that he might not, after all he had overcome, and all the good he had done to his fellows, be himself a moral castaway at the end.
The grey-haired saint may fail at last,
The surest guide a wanderer prove.
The third is Sorrow’s Ceasing. This is peace,
To conquer love of self and lust of life,
To tear deep-rooted passion from the breast,
To still the inward strife.
For love to clasp Eternal Beauty close;
For glory to be Lord of self; for pleasure
To live beyond the gods; for countless wealth
To lay up lasting treasure.
Of perfect service rendered, duties done
In charity, soft speech, and stainless days:
These riches shall not fade away in life,
Nor any death dispraise.
Then sorrow ends, for Life and Death have ceased;
How should lamps flicker when their oil is spent?
The old sad count is clear, the new is clean;
Thus hath a man content [Note: Who Dies if England Live? 27.]
2. But let us remember, also, that every man has a war to wage with evil around him. It is possible to pay too high a price for peace. There are wars of just aggression, and wars of just defence all around us, in which sooner or later every Christian has to take his part. It is not likely, for instance, that the great and precious gift of Revelation from God to man should be allowed to remain unassailed. It is not likely that the Church, that great instrument for doing good, should be allowed to carry out her mission unmolested. It is not likely that in an evil world we should be allowed to work out the pure morality of the Gospel without a struggle.
The very reason why so many of us rarely, or never, enjoy God’s peace is that we are taking no part in the Christian warfare against the wrongs, and unbelief, and devilry which are in God’s world. If we let them alone, the very love of God will desert us, and His peace will follow it. We always despair of the world’s evil so long as we are striking no blows against it. The perfect day seems to shift farther off to those who idly watch for its coming, and have no share in the wrestling for it. It is the man who works, and prays, and flings himself into the battle, who sees with his eyes God working, and believes in his deepest heart in the fulfilment of all the visions which tarry. To him alone, the peace of God is revealed, because he puts on the armour of light.
Yet much remains
To conquer still; Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than War: new foes arise,
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose Gospel is their maw. [Note:Milton, 16th Sonnet (Works, ed. Masson, ii. 484).]
3. It is a great and sacred thing for any man or nation to be able to say in the words of Luther, “Here I stand, I can no other, God help me, Amen.” With all my faults, my wickedness, my sins, which I pray God I may feel more deeply, yet I know that in this awful conflict I strive and suffer on behalf of freedom and of justice and of peace. That was the underlying conviction of our young men at the war, not love of glory, or of power, nor hatred of the enemy. There is something in these things which fills us not merely with admiration but with reverence. It is not mere heroic actions we acclaim. We have a sense of the divine in man, of something that passes understanding. That sense of being right and being called to give everything for right in the midst of awful peril makes for a deep peace of mind and heart. The two things are closely united, the anguish of peril and suffering, and the peace of being right. If I am merely arguing comfortably with a friend over the fire, and expressing truths of which I am quite certain, and trying to convince him of their truth, there is no deep sense of peace. If I am doing something in ordinary life which I know I ought to do, but which does not mean any great sacrifice or danger, there is no exaltation in my gladness. It is when loss and pain are involved, when the present is dark and the future uncertain, when a man is called to make the utmost sacrifice for right without seeing the issue, without any certain promise of success, that the sense of right and standing for right brings with it the deepest sense of peace. That peace does not exclude hot indignation against evil, but it excludes all bitter malice, all thoughts of revenge, all desire to inflict pain for our own pleasure. We are not worthy to fight for good against evil unless we keep ourselves free from the contagion of the evil against which we fight. The spirit of militarism against which we fight must not be ours. The spirit of violence and cruelty, and grasping lust of power against which we fight must not be ours. The more convinced we are of the evil in the system against which we strive, the more determined and anxious we must be to keep ourselves unstained by it.
Garibaldi’s words have been often quoted during the last few years, and just because the war is over, it will be well to quote them once again. “I offer you forced marches, short rations, bloody battles, wounds, imprisonment and death; let him who loves Home and Fatherland follow me!”—and all Italy followed him. If only we could convince the young that Christ’s service meant no tame content with conventional religion, but was “a great adventure” which might land them in poverty instead of riches, dislike instead of shallow popularity, Central Africa instead of the comforts of home, and, as a matter of fact, is bound to involve a total revolution in all the world’s views on morality, and many Churchmen’s views on “what is the right or correct thing”—then we might see a rallying round the standard of the Cross such as gladdened the heart of Garibaldi, and it would need no new war to prove that the “Way of Service was the Way of Peace.” [Note: Bishop A. F. W. Ingram, in The Way of Peace (ed. E. A. Burroughs), Introduction.]
4. It is possible day by day to go out to toil and care, and anxiety, and change, and suffering, and conflict, and yet to bear within our hearts the unalterable rest of God. Deep in the bosom of the ocean, beneath the region where winds howl and billows break, there is calm, but the calm is not stagnation. Each drop from these fathomless abysses may be raised to the surface by the power of the sunbeams, expanded there by their heat, and sent on some beneficent message across the world. So, deep in our hearts, beneath the storm, beneath the raving winds and the curling waves, there may be a central repose, as unlike stagnation as it is unlike tumult; and the peace of God may keep, as a warrior, our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
I remember in an old church in Italy a painting of an archangel with his foot on the dragon’s neck, and his sword thrust through its scaly armour. It is perhaps the feebleness of the artist’s hand, but I think rather it is the clearness of his insight, which has led him to represent the victorious angel, in the moment in which he is slaying the dragon, as with a smile on his face, and not the least trace of effort in the arm, which is so easily smiting the fatal blow. Perhaps, if the painter could have used his brush better he would have put more expression into the attitude and the face, but I think it is better as it is. We, too, may achieve a conquest over the dragon which, although it requires effort, does not disturb peace. [Note: A. Maclaren, Expositions: Romans, 392.]
Now are they come unto the place of quiet,
Into the heart of silence, where God is,
Far, far away from all the mortal riot
Safe in the home of lovely sanctities.
And there they rest, who fought with no surrender,
Lapt round with peace like water cool and bright
Till God shall armour them again in splendour,
To battle with the spirits of the night!
My soul, forestall awhile the ultimate fiat,
A moment doff the body’s hindrance,
And come thou too unto the place of quiet,
Into the heart of silence, where God is. [Note: D. F. Gurney, in The Fiery Cross, 63.]
