1. There is no doubt that war has sometimes been a cleansing and invigorating power to a nation. The Scottish nation would have been much poorer and less effective today had it not been for the invasions of earlier times, which left a rich deposit of various races; while its later wars of independence prevented its spirit from being broken, and its individuality from being swamped, by the masterful personality of its English neighbour.
We travelled in the print of olden wars ;
Yet all the land was green ;
And love we found, and peace,
Where fire and war had been.
They pass and smile, the children of the sword—
No more the sword they wield ;
And O, how deep the corn
Along the battlefield! [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Underwoods.]
Professor J. H. Snowden finds that certain gains have come from the European War.
(1) One of these is the idealism of the war. This conflict was fought through by the Allies not for land or colonies or a larger place in the sun, but for justice and liberty. It was at bottom a battle between materialism and idealism, and idealism was the victor.
(2) Another principle of the war that we should bring over into the new world is co-operation. When the Allies were forced by the alarming state of affairs in March 1918 to agree on a single supreme command and put all armies on all fronts under Foch, the tide immediately turned, and never went back until the enemy were beaten to their knees, begging for mercy. It was an instance of co-operation on the grandest scale the world has ever seen, and it won the greatest military victory of all time.
(3) Another gain of the war is a vastly liberalized spirit of giving, the devotion of our means to our cause. The war has cost America about twenty billions of dollars, and the other Allies far greater sums. This amount of money obtained by borrowing and taxation from our people a few years ago would have been thought impossible and a wild dream or absurdity. Yet it was poured out with the greatest willingness and enthusiasm under the inspiration of the great cause.
(4) Still another asset of the war is the spirit of service and sacrifice that won it. This was the fundamental means that achieved this victory: not munitions, but men and morale; not shells, but souls. Men put their spirit and strength and skill, their patience and endurance and courage, their determination and devotion unto death into this conflict, and then the gates of hell could not stand against them. [Note: J. H. Snowden, Is the World Growing Better P, 120.]
2. Is this purifying and strengthening due to war as war? Professor Fugmann of Leipzig, in a book which has recently appeared called The Blessing of War, draws the following picture of Germany before the outbreak of the war: “There was dissension on all sides. The people were engrossed in the pettiest interests of the day. The life lived by the bulk of Germans was indescribable, even though serious men lifted up their voices against the iniquity of it all. Fidelity and faith had disappeared. A man’s word had no value. Contracts were made only to be broken. Business in general assumed a shape resembling a huge organized deception. The corruptions of life grew apace in town and country, and there was no prophet, no preacher of morals, no apostle of nature, no seer capable of stemming the overwhelming stream of sexual and commercial immorality, decay and degeneration. Every man who professed an ideal was ridiculed. Such was Germany before the war.”
But Mr. Edmond Holmes, who quotes that passage, writes a commentary on it. “Professor Fugmann believes that the war will excise this moral cancer. But operations for cancer are seldom permanently successful; and the stories of German cruelty and treachery in the field and of German criminality at home incline one to believe that the moral taint which has produced the decay and degeneration of which Professor Fugmann complains is still in the ‘blood’ of the German people.” [Note: E. Holmes, The Nemesis of Docility, 245.]
War is a curse, but God is able to change it, and often has changed it, into a blessing. It is not easy to understand—and indeed it may appear to some to be inconsistent to say—that war is a sin of colossal magnitude which is contrary to the will of God, while yet He has used it for the accomplishment of His own wise and holy purposes. But the fact is undeniable that He has so used it. He has made the wrath of man to praise Him. He has brought good out of the evil. Not only has He restricted the range and impeded the action of the wasting and destroying forces, but He has actually made them contribute to higher ends which did not fall within the view of the intention of those whose ambition or rapacity brought war upon the earth.
The Jewish wars were cruel, bloody, sinful, godless. We know all their vileness and savagery. Yet God did not fail Himself for all that. He still took the material that man gave Him; and in spite of man’s sin He steadily pushed forward through man His own Divine purpose. In this He does not excuse or justify the sin. But He refuses to be baffled or beaten by it, and forces it to yield Him a peaceable fruit of righteousness. So it is that we come to the greatest historic sin ever perpetrated by man: the Cross of Christ. It was wicked hands that nailed Him to the tree; it was a revelation to man of his own sin that he could kill the Prince of Life. It was savage; it was horrible; it was damnable. But, nevertheless, God’s Divine purpose drove its way even through that sin, and forced it to become the moment of His highest manifestation, the signal of His final victory. The Fire burned on in the furnace of the Divine purification; and through that crime man was saved. The sin remains wholly unjustified and unexcused. Indeed, it was convicted as inexcusable by the very crime it had committed. We learn from the Cross of Christ to loathe the sin which slew Him We could never have known how vile the sin was except through the Cross. [Note: H. Scott Holland, So as by Fire, 68.]
3. The Cross still holds the secret of what is happening; and in and through Christ God is working out His Judgment. For it is a Judgment. It will sift and search; and there will be much that this flame, as it purifies, will consume. Jerusalem, which in its sin crucified the Lord of Glory, perished in the flame that its sin had kindled. All the sin that has gone to the making of the crime of war should perish also in the heat of the burning. What is there, then, that will be consumed? What is there in us that cannot live with this devouring Fire?
(1) First, there is an evil thing still in us which now stands condemned and must go—and that is, the assumption by the white man of the supremacy of his own civilization, and of his right to exploit men of another colour. The German Professors, in their answer to the Archbishops’ retort on their first attack, denounced England for having betrayed the white man’s cause, and having given away the white man’s supremacy by bringing up the Indians into the firing-line. That is their distinct challenge and accusation; and our counter-challenge is to accept the accusation and glory in it. War has forced us to realize the principle which in peace we may have recognized with our lips but have always denied in action. The white man can make no claim to stand on a different level from other races, and to impose on them a civilization better than their own, simply because it is his. Any such claim is a denial of Pentecost, when it was declared that all nations had the right to hear in their own tongue the wonderful works of God. They may vary in capacity, in equipment, in education, in a thousand ways: and one may have many gifts and another few. But each is equally sacred; and each has an equal right to be itself; and each has a contribution to make to the whole of humanity—contribution which none other can make, and which in every case is equally essential to the purpose which all exist to complete. This is the law which in the name of Christ we have been proclaiming all along; and now that which was always true in the spirit is inevitably to be applied in the letter to secular affairs and international politics.
(2) There is some other matter that may pass into the flame. It is embodied in phrases familiar enough, such as “Society rests on force.” “The last word lies with force,” “National necessity knows no law.” We have rolled these phrases round our tongues often enough, and they have served to disguise from us much wrongdoing. It needed a desolated Belgium to reveal to us, in the light of its flaming cities, the cruel fallacies involved. We have found ourselves fighting these very fallacies to the death. We were compelled to face and denounce them when they were used to justify the breaking of the neutrality which we had guaranteed. Force, we saw, is never the last word, it can only act under direction, and that direction is given it by will and mind A society can never claim sheer force as its authority, for it exists only through the right which justifies the force. The will to “power,” if it means the will to be powerful without regard to the quality of the power, is a profession of immorality. Any nation that finds its sanction in this immoral law raises the whole world in antagonism against it as the enemy of mankind. The war, therefore, has at least done this second good deed for us. It has not only compelled us to recognize the equality of races, but also the iniquity of an appeal to force as the elementary basis of society.
(3) Then, lastly, there are some things that had better be gathered in bundles and burnt at once; and these are class jealousies, class antagonisms, class hatreds. The England that we knew was cloven by bitter and savage strife between men and women. It was drifting down to a Labour War, deliberate, organized, terrifying. Was it this divided England which could invoke the rally to the one flag? The glorious Calls died off our tongue with shame, as we thought of what they assumed, and of what we were. Now that the War has shown us what England means to us all, we shall have, after the War, to make our assumptions good, to justify our appeals. We stand pledged to realize that very England which we assumed. It shall be what we supposed it to be. It shall be every man’s own England. There will be an unparalleled opportunity. For out there in the trenches, officers and men discovered each other. Class distinctions broke down. They stood shoulder to shoulder in sodden bloody hours of stress and storm; and they understood one another: their lives fused. They can never forget the brotherhood which a common peril sealed with blood. They cannot, now, fall apart into two camps; or become unintelligible to one another as aliens. They will be ready to let the flame burn the barriers that hold classes apart—the stupid obstructions that block the channels of human intercourse. So, together, in the glow of recovered fellowship, we will set to work to build the city of our dreams—to create, in living actual flesh and blood, the real England, the true ideal England, the England for which we have dyed with our best blood the fields of Flanders.
