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feeling that it doesn't make much difference so long as you know you're doing the right thing.' 'No,' I muttered, 'Yet, how can you know it's the right thing?' He shook his head. 'But I do know it!' he said. 'To fight-to die for one's country is bound to be the right thing. It doesn't matter that I can't tell you why. It's the thing itself that's worth whilenot the reason.' 'Listen, Jack,' I whispered, 'Years ago I heard a Memorial Day address by Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, and it made such an impression on me that I learned it by heart. It is the answer to my question. What he said was this: "I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt-that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt-and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. For high and dangerous action teaches us to believe as right beyond dispute things for which our doubting minds are slow to find words of proof. Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism."

"That's pretty good stuff,' Jack said in an embarrassed fashion. 'You might send it to me-if you will. I'd like the other fellows to see it.'"'

I think that is a very fair statement of what seems to be coming more and more to be the popular idea of religion. Of course it isn't religion at all, any more than clean, honest, upright, temperate living is necessarily religious, though it is, in most individual cases, the result of some religious conviction.

What did not occur to Jack or to his father, in the story, is the thing that does not seem to occur to the rank and file who are making this gospel their guiding light:—that if all this is true for us, it is equally true for the Germans, the Turks and Bulgarians. If patriotic heroism is (as many today would have us believe) a passport to the Kingdom of Heaven; if death for the cause of right, as a man sees right, is indeed martyr

dom, and to go bravely "over the top" to die is a sort of plenary absolution for the life which (if reports can be believed) some of our soldiers live behind the lines, or were living before they went to the Front, then indeed, the new cult of Self-sacrifice for Patriotic Principle may well become the world-religion after the war is ended. Certain it is that the men who have "looked death in the face without flinching," who have endured the hardships of military life, whose manhood has been reconstructed by suffering, or whose old religion, such as it was and whatever it was, failed to sustain them in their hour of agony, will come home to demand something better and truer and more definite than they have ever known before.

And there is a widespread fear that the Church, which seems to have been shown to have fallen short in its ante-bellum preparation of its sons and daughters for the meeting of the present hour, may prove unable to interest and inspire and hold its sons and daughters in the new life which they must face after peace has been declared.

This leads us to ask, What is the Church? I have no intention of trespassing on the controverted field of inter-denominational comity. The utter failure confessed by sectarianism is too apparent to need more than statement of the pregnant fact that the old barriers must be levelled, the old animosities forgotten. The mission field, with its waste of effort and money, ought to have taught us that lesson long ago, but it took the war to drive it home, just as it took the war to make us realize the sheer necessity of temperance, soberness and chastity in our national life. The issue is being forced, as so many long discussed problems are being forced, to practical solution in the crucible of the world's agony.

But what is to take the place of sectarianism? Are we presumptuous in thinking that the Church has a part to play in the world that is to come after the war, a part which will dwarf into insignificance the old Via Media idea of Anglicanism as the meeting place of Romanism and Protestantism? "The Ministry of Reconciliation!" Is the Church ready, are we ready, to perform such a mediatorial and redemptive office?

And what, after all, is the purpose for which the Church exists? Am I wrong in seeing, as I think I discern from a study of the development of the thought of a large portion of Christendom during the last two or three hundred years, a complete bouleversement of the ethos of the Gospel message as delivered to, preserved and transmitted by, the primitive Church? Is the terminus ad quem of the Church's teaching and practice only the production of moral integrity and ethical excellence? Or has she somewhat to say to the souls of men, as well as to their intellects and of their bodies? That Christianity has been and is the greatest civilizing force in the world does not necessarily mean that it was founded for that purpose, any more than it was designed primarily to be the greatest force in art or architecture or music. I have an old-fashioned idea that God the Son came into this world that He might save His people from their sins and from the eternal consequences of them, and that all the other results of His fructiferous Incarnation are, as it were, by-products of His redemptive and atoning activity in regard to the souls of the children of men. And I have somewhere picked up the idea of the Church as the extension of His Incarnation. If the Church is indeed the divine organism we think it to be, then its object must be primarily to attain spiritual results by spiritual means. That this is best accomplished in conjunction with the corporal works of mercy is a point that needs no pressing. But the question is whether we have put first things first in our teaching and practice: whether it may not be because we have not that so many men in the rank and file of our armies, representative, democratic, American if you like, are not as religious as they should be.

I have a good deal of sympathy (not disloyal to my cloth I hope) with the young lady who remarked so cleverly "Why is a Clergyman?" Just what are the Clergy of the Church supposed to be and do? Is our consciousness of our Office, or perhaps I should say our lack of consciousness of our Office, responsible for the ineffectuality of our work as Ministers of Christ and Stewards of the Mysteries of the Kingdom of God? They used to speak of the Priest as "a man of God." Nowa

days we talk of him as "a good mixer," an organizer, a financier, sometimes as a pleasant reader or orator. I would be the last to decry the Ministerial and Prophetic function of the Priesthood, or to exalt the sacerdotal and hieratical aspect of the Ministry to the derogation of Social Service. But the Priesthood, whatever view you may take of it on theological grounds, is something more than a philanthropic ministry, just as the Church itself is something infinitely more than a social organization with certain ceremonial and quasi-intellectual adjuncts.

It is as we lose the sense of the primarily Godward aspect of the Christian Ministry, the essentially sacerdotal meaning of it, that we fail to realize its inherent dignity, its vital necessity, its peculiar and real value. In the eyes of the world the Clergyman is becoming more and more what his personality, his work, his own natural effectiveness makes him, just like any other man in any other business. We are a long way from the time when the poorest and least learned Priest was honored and esteemed for the sake of his Priesthood in itself. And this, I think, is because we have lost our sense of the essential position to which Ordination admits a man. We have lost the sense of the supernatural, of the mysterious, we have yielded to the view of the world which regards "making good" as the supreme and pragmatic test of any claim human or divine. With the decline of the practice of supernatural religion, outside the Church, and to a certain extent inside the Church, the tendency is for the Priest to become more and more, in an unpauline sense, "all things to all men"-and less and less to God-to be too busy to pray, to study, to meditate. We yield all too readily to the demand of the people for a secularized Clergy, and spend our energies in the effort to foster Guilds and Societies and Clubs how often do we find a Priest exerting the same activity and effort to establish the Daily Celebration of the Eucharist implied if not required in the Book of Common Prayer?

Please do not think that I am decrying Social Service, or advocating a clericalism which shall shut itself away from the temporal needs of the people. The Priest must, of course, be a well-rounded man, touched with the feeling not only of the

infirmities of those among whom he is sent to labor, but with the feeling of their strength as well, and of their need for greater and more spiritual strength. The Priest, filled with the sense of his own sacring, will not tarry in the sanctuary, though he will find there the Source of his power; he will go forth to the people with his face shining, as Moses did, to be a real leader, a real friend, a real man among men. Yet always with a distinct motive, to lead men back with him into the Sanctuary, that others still may take knowledge of them that they have been with JESUS. He will be "a good mixer" because so he can best get close enough to men to be able, on occasion, to speak to them of the things that concern their peace and their salvation. He will foster guilds and societies in order that through them his people may come to a deeper and more real interest in the things of God. And if he is forced (as he never ought to be) to turn aside from time to time to raise money to pay the coal bill, it will be that the church building may be a place where the people will be willing and eager to come that their souls may there take the flame of divine love from the Altar where the Sacred Heart of JESUS burns and shines with transcendent and transforming love for the souls of men who pass Him by in carelessness, and make any excuse rather than seek Him early in the morning.

The world is waking up out of its religious indifference. This is also a truism, of the sort with which this essay must inevitably abound. It is also an observable fact that people generally are asking for definiteness in the statement, or restatement (take your choice) of religious truth. The classic example is the agonized way in which people of slight religious cultivation, or of no religion at all, are asking "what of the dead?" For men and women cannot look into the face of death without seeking what lies beyond those closed and inscrutable eyelids, any more than they can look into the face of life and not seek to penetrate beyond the outward aspect into the vital and incommunicable truth of being. Has the Church, have the Priests of the Church, a message for those who mourn, a word to say to those who go out to face, with what courage the moment may

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