Thoughts on religion at the front
N >> Neville Stuart Talbot >> Thoughts on religion at the frontTHOUGHTS ON RELIGION
AT THE FRONT
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THOUGHTS ON
RELIGION AT THE
FRONT
BY
THE REV. NEVILLE S. TALBOT
ASSISTANT CHAPLAIN-GENERAL
LATE RIFLE BRIGADE
FORMERLY FELLOW AND CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL
AUTHOR OF 'THE MIND OF THE DISCIPLES'
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1917
COPYRIGHT
_First Edition January 1917
Reprinted March, April and November 1917_
PREFACE
I send out this little and fragmentary book with the consciousness that it
calls for apology. I have had to write it hastily during a short period of
leave. Yet it touches upon great subjects which deserve the reverence of
leisurely writing. Ought I not, then, to have waited for the leisure of
days after the war? I think not. Such days may never come. And, in any
case, _now_ is the time for the Church to think intently about the war and
its issues, and to learn from them. The Church is far more than a
department of 'the services,' the resources of which it is convenient to
mobilise as so much more munition of war. She is the perpetual protagonist
in the world of the Kingdom of God. War for her, if for nobody else,
should be an apocalypse, that is, a vision of realities for which at all
times she is bound to fight, of which, nevertheless, she is apt to lose
sight during the engrossments of peace. It is as lit up by the cruel light
of war's conflagrations that the things concerning the Kingdom must be
seized anew. If anybody has thoughts which he feels he must share with
others, he should not postpone doing so. He should communicate his
thoughts to others in order that he may learn from their comments and
criticism. I can claim, whilst asking pardon for whatever may offend in
them, that the thoughts represented by the following pages have not been
come by hastily, but have been growing in my mind during the long months
at the front since the beginning of the war. They have, so to say, been
hammered out as metal upon the anvil of war.
They are thoughts about religion. Nothing is so important as religion;
nothing is more potent than true ideas in religion. Deep fountains of real
religion--of simple and unself-prizing faith--have been unsealed by the
convulsion of war. Yet this religion is weak in ideas, and some of the
ideas with which it is bound up are wrong ideas. Men of our race are very
sure that it matters more what a man is than what he thinks. British
religion is deep and rich, but it is, characteristically, deeper and
richer in what it is than in what it knows itself to be. It sorely needs
a mind of strong and compelling conviction. If these pages were to help
ever so few readers towards being possessed anew of the truth of the
Gospel of God in Christ, their appearance would be justified.
I have written, perhaps, as one who dreads saying 'Peace, where there is
no peace.' I would rather err on the side of emphasising criticism and
difficulty than the other way. There is, indeed, little room for
complacency in a Christian, still less in an English Churchman, at the
front. Yet in 'padres' hope and expectation should predominate, and these
as based less upon results achieved than upon the mutual understanding,
respect, and indeed affection which increasingly unite them to the men
whom they would serve. And in them, too, if they are 'C. of E.,' there
should be growing, along with an unevasive discontent, a sanguine loyalty
to their mother Church. For all that she now means so little to so many
she will yet win a more than nominal allegiance from many of her wandering
children. For there is in her, beneath the surface of her sluggish
confusion, a living heart and candid mind, upon which is being written
afresh the good news in Christ. She is being vivified, as perhaps no other
part of Christendom, into readiness for the future.
N.S.T.
B.E.F., _November 1916._
'And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the
haughtiness of men shall be brought low: and the Lord alone
shall be exalted in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass
away. And men shall go into the caves of the rocks, and into
the holes of the earth, from before the terror of the Lord and
from the glory of His majesty, when He ariseth to shake
mightily the earth.'
* * * * *
'Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.'
I
I write this little book in order to help towards an answer to the
question, How is it with the Christian religion at the front? With the
flower of British manhood massed in the Army this and like questions are
bound to arise--How is it with the men? Where are they religiously? What
do they want? What will they need when they return? and so forth. There
never has been such an opportunity of taking a comparative view of British
Christianity and of framing answers to such questions. Perhaps those who
are working as chaplains at the front are especially challenged to attempt
these tasks. Their answer must not be loose or sentimental. There is a
danger of that. The emotions aroused by the war may encourage sentimental
verdicts. That may be the reason why a good many ideas which are current
at home about religion at the front, are a good distance removed from
reality.
II
I can only venture upon a verdict after first acknowledging that it is
inseparably bound up with my own shortcomings. Other men of a truer
devotion and love may well have grounds in a more effective ministry for
challenging and amplifying it.
Further, I have to ask that allowance be made for the fact that men like
myself, who have been working as 'C. of E.' chaplains, are not very well
qualified to speak about the religion of the men. There is something wrong
about the status of chaplains. They belong to what the author of _A
Student in Arms_ calls 'the super-world' of officers, which as such is
separate from the men. As a class we find it hard to penetrate the
surface of the men--that surface which we can almost see thrust out at us
like a shield, in the suddenly assumed rigidity of men as they salute us.
We are in an unchristian position, in the sense that we are in a position
which Christ would not have occupied. He, I am sure, would have been a
regimental stretcher-bearer, truly among and of the men. We are very
unlike Him. We are often liked, and are thought good fellows, but we are
unlike Him and miss what He could discover. Our--my--verdict is not
necessarily His.
Lastly, all verdicts must be rough in war. The nature of war and of its
effects often precludes any one from knowing exactly what is going on in
the souls of men. War is a muddy business, encasing the body in dirt, and
caking over the soul. It forms hard surfaces over the centres of
sensitiveness. It is benumbing to spiritual faculties. That is nature's
way of accommodation with war's environment. To feel things much would
literally be maddening. To brood about danger, to apprehend or anticipate
or philosophise may imperil 'nerve.' Rather the majority of men carry on,
callously, almost gaily, with mental and spiritual faculties if possible
inactive. I have met an entirely devout lover of music (since killed in
action) who told me that he didn't miss music out here because "he wasn't
carrying on with those faculties." I have seen a man of indubitable
Christian conviction come down from the cold clam of the trenches in
mid-winter and take up a religious book which ordinarily would have
excited him and say--"Ah! yes, there is all that." I could almost see the
surface which war had hardened over him. Beneath it in him and all the
rest, who knows what may not be in process, ready to emerge when they can
bathe in the solvent waters of peace?
Meanwhile they 'carry on.' That I think is especially congenial to the
British. There is no doubt that men of our race have an invincibility,
which is due in part to the fact that they do not think about or feel what
is really going on. To be practically and sensually occupied with the
passing moment is the way to carry on in war. It is characteristic of our
men. They are remarkably void of apprehension in every sense of the word.
Had the rank and file who fought the first battle of Ypres--when the whole
of the British forces came to be strung out from Ypres to La Bassee in one
line without a reserve--formed a general apprehension of and as to their
position, they would have been 'rattled' and broken. They were not
beaten, in part because they did not think of being beaten. "You can't,"
as they sing, "beat the boys of the bull-dog breed," but this
invincibility has not altogether the virtue of facts understood, faced,
and triumphed over. In short, British qualities and defects of qualities
are closely interwoven. But my point is, that this being so, any verdict
about what is going on in British souls during a war must be humble and
tentative and patient of qualification.
III
_On the whole_, I venture to say, there is not a great revival of the
Christian religion at the front. Yet I am eager to acclaim the wonderful
quality of spirit which men of our race display in this war, and to claim
it as Christian and God-inspired. Deep in their hearts is a great trust
and faith in God. It is an inarticulate faith expressed in deeds. The top
levels, as it were, of their consciousness, are much filled with grumbling
and foul language and physical occupations; but beneath lie deep spiritual
springs, whence issue their cheerfulness, stubbornness, patience,
generosity, humility, and willingness to suffer and to die. They declare
by what they are and do that there is a worth-whileness in effort and
sacrifice. Without saying so, they commit themselves to "the Everlasting
Arms."
The metaphor of human nature being hardened or caked over by war must be
modified so as to allow that war lays human nature bare. It is a grand
fibre or grain of British nature which the war has exposed. It is
inwrought with Christian excellences of humility, unselfishness,
fortitude, and all that makes a good comrade. It is precious stuff. Let
there be no talk hereafter of the decadence of the race. Let no one dare
to disparage the masses of our people; nor let any one, through class
ignorance or prejudice or fear, speak of them contemptuously. They are
priceless raw material. As I have hovered in seeming priestly impotence
over miracles of cheerful patience lying on stretchers in
dressing-stations, I have said--I have vowed to myself--"Here are men
worth doing anything for."
There is a great heart in the people. It is not a great mind. In officers
and men there is little intellectual grip upon what we are fighting for.
Every one nearly is without a saving touch of rhetoric. Ideas are under
suspicion. "Padre, what you say is just ideal, it's all in the air." But
the objectors stick it and die for the unformulated and unexpressed ideal.
They are far wiser and better than they know.
IV
I must modify, then, and say that on the whole there is not a great
articulate revival of the Christian religion at the front. But further I
must add that there is religion about, only, very often it is not the
Christian religion. Rather it is natural religion. It is the expression of
a craving for security. Literally it is a looking for salvation. It is a
very unnatural man who does not feel at any rate more inclined to pray
when danger abounds and anxiety presses, than at other times. Naturally,
then, chaplains find a readier response to their efforts right at the
front than farther back. Men come to a service before they go to the
trenches. Communicants increase before a fight. Chaplains are frequently
told of prayer being resorted to under this or that strain of this
terrific war. There is in short a general association of ideas about
religion and, as I have said, it may be called the association of a
craving for security.
I would say nothing disrespectful of it. I would not pretend for a moment
to be void of this very natural craving. I would recognise that
impressions made by strain and anxiety are often the means whereby God
brings men home to Himself. I thought it a hard saying of an ardent
salvationist lad, who told me of a transport sergeant's prayers one night
in a ditch by a shrapnelled roadside, and of the same sergeant's reversion
to apparent irreligion on return to safety. "I call it," said the boy,
"cowardice." But what I do say about it is, firstly, that religion thus
mainly associated with danger, is not the Christian religion, and
secondly, that many of the best men of all ranks have little to do with
it, or what little they do have is intermittent and rather shamefaced.
I leave the first statement for the moment. About the second I hazard the
belief that this has been more or less true of all soldiers in history.
Religion regarded _merely_ as a resort in trouble, as a possible source of
good luck, as a charm or insurance policy is as old as man; but I believe
many of the best soldiers up and down history have had little to do with
it, and the more sporting and soldierly the man, the less he has had to do
with it. After all, the soldier-man's code goes clean the other way. It is
ever insisting on non-calculating and self-regardless service, endurance,
and sacrifice. As such, it lies above the ordinary level of life, calling
out the heroic and honourable in men. But religion associated with anxiety
touches men at a level lower than the highest in them, it has the
morbidity of their weaker moments hanging about it, it wears badly, and,
above all, often it does not seem to work. I have had the case propounded
to me of "Bill who did pray," but yet had had "his head blowed off."
V
I recur, then, to my verdict that on the whole there is not a great
revival of the Christian religion at the front. Why is this?
First, war is war, and, what is more, this war is this war. I will not
attempt to paint the picture. Every one must realise by now that the main
concentration of all military effort is directed at creating in the
trenches an ever-intenser inferno of heavy shells. In a great army there
is every degree of risk to be run or immunity to be enjoyed; but at the
very front, where all is stripped and laid bare, modern warfare is at
times a furnace of horror. Its smoke darkens the heavens, thickening the
"clouds and darkness" round about God, and deepening His silence. Its
white heat scorches out human confidence in Him. He does not seem to
count. There are stars in the darkness of war--stars which are the
achievements of man's indomitable spirit. But God-ward there seems
sometimes to be great darkness.
Further, war, despite all the easy things said in its praise, is a great
iniquity. It is, as others have said, hell. As an environment to the soul
it is, for all the countervailing heroisms of men, a world of evil power
let loose.
And, again, war abounds in a number of trials--mostly associated with the
extremes of heat and cold and damp and fatigue--for which, as the phrase
goes, religion seems not to afford the slightest relief. It is a very
physical business, squeezing out or overlaying the spiritual in men,
though powerless wholly to extinguish it. War being what it is, the
absence of religious revival during its course is not surprising. I have
come to be very doubtful whether there is truth in the prevalent notion
that war as such and automatically makes men better.
Secondly, that element in religion which can survive the weather of war
must be a very hardy growth, something deeply engrained and
habitual--something rock-built. And that is just what is lacking among men
of our race. As an Anglican priest I reach here a glaring fact about the
English Church. The war reveals that there are few men in its loose
membership who are possessed by and instructed in its faith. Religion, as
taught by the Church of England, has a feeble grip on the masses. They
hold it in no familiar embrace. And if reasons are sought, they are
partly found in the want of cutting edge to her sober comprehensive
teaching, partly in the characteristics often theoretically so justifiable
but practically so awkward, of the Prayer Book. There is little in our
Church which corresponds to that elemental regimen or discipline which
possesses simple-minded Roman Catholics. The power of cultus, of
institutional and family religion, is largely absent.
To explain this brings me to a third reason why, under the stress of war,
English Christianity is hardly in revival, namely, Bible difficulties. The
Prayer Book comes down to us from men who were held by a belief in the
literal truth of the whole Bible. In so far as it has been an effective
manual for ordinary people, it has been on the strength of an absolute
dogma in their minds as to the "Word of God." That dogma has in a vague
and somewhat insensible way lost its hold on the common mind. It has not
the absolute and simple authority which in religion is a necessity for the
little-educated. Few of the general public have thought very much about
the matter, but all the more they are influenced by that which has
percolated through to them from the more learned, loosening what before
was firm and tight, confusing and complicating what before was starkly
plain. This has been brought home to me as I have sat at sing-songs and
have heard a coon-song sung entitled "The Preacher and the Bear." With
apologies to the easily-shocked I will quote. The hero of the song is a
coloured minister who, against his conscience, went out shooting on a
Sunday, and, after good sport, on returning home was met by a grizzly
bear. Taking refuge up a tree this was his prayer:
O Lord, who delivered Daniel from the lions' den,
Also Jonah from the tummy of the whale--and then
Three Hebrew chilluns from the fiery furnace,
As the good Book do declare--
O Lord, if you can't help me, don't help that grizzly bear!
Here is an epitome of a far-spreading incredulity about the Bible. It is
the higher criticism in its crudest popular form, and men are at the mercy
of it. I have known a mess of officers engage in argument about the Bible
with a sceptical Scots doctor, cleverer than they. As old-fashioned
believers in the Bible they had to admit to being thoroughly "strafed" in
the argument, yet they had no way out, such as an intelligent
understanding of the Bible affords. One at least of them maintained
stoutly that nevertheless he was going to stick to the old view, however
indefensible. Such men are not free intellectually to follow the
movements of religious revival. They are immobilised by the dead weight of
Biblical literalism.
Yet if the main verdict to which I have committed myself is to be
radically accounted for, it is necessary to reach deeper reasons than any
I have mentioned. I sympathise with those who have high hopes of the good
effects of Church and Prayer Book and Bible-teaching reforms. Yet such are
relatively superficial matters. The main reason for the comparative
absence of religious revival among men at the front is that we all have
been overtaken by the cataclysm of war in a condition of great poverty
towards God.
VI
War, when it breaks in on peace, reveals in a fierce light the condition
of men in peace. It would be ungrateful and disloyal not to acclaim the
main sound heart of our country which this war has revealed. It would be
treasonable to the great company of good men and true--not least out of
the school and university world most familiar to the writer--who have
risen to "the day" and have gladly given their all. Yet, after generous
allowance for that, a great poverty of allegiance to God has been laid
bare. Indirectly, in the answers made to the claims of duty, honour,
service, and self-sacrifice, He has been acknowledged, but of direct
devotion to Him as the one and pre-eminent reality there has been little.
After all, can it be denied that the war has found us devoted rather to
the idols of money, pleasure, and appetite than to God and His
righteousness? We have had to be aroused from a great sensual
preoccupation with worldly traffic. "As it was in the days of Noah," so in
a measure it has been to-day: "as we ate and drank, and bought and sold
and planted and builded, the flood has come upon us" and has all but swept
us away. At home, as the thinly-veiled wantonness of some of our weekly
illustrated papers reminds us in the field, it seems that a mass of
self-pleasing and luxurious folk cannot yet find an escape out of the
prison-house of Vanity Fair, though thousands bleed and die by their side.
In the field, the mind and manner of a gross peace-life is kept alive by
pictures of smirking nudities placarded in dug-outs and billets, and the
farther back from the front one travels, as the hot breath of war grows
more tepid, the more heavy grows the atmosphere of materialistic
indulgence. That _God minds_ is hardly thought of, for at home and abroad
we have been carried into war in a peace-condition of great heedlessness
of Him. And the strains and cost and dangers of war will not scare men out
of their forgetfulness. The heart of man is incorrigible by fear. God, if
He is little regarded in peace, is hard to come nigh to in war. If
religion in peace and prosperity has not been full of His praise--of joy
_in Him_, it is something to which adversity must drive men, and they
think it as such a little disreputable, and many of the best men, richly
gifted with manly excellences, tend to leave it on one side.
Yet "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." We can adopt the ringing
note of St. Paul's defiance. For the Christian religion does not spring
primarily out of human anxiety and need. It is not an expedient which may
be left on one side till the hour of need arises. That many men should
think thus of it shows that it has been widely forgotten, misunderstood,
or never known.
VII
The Christian religion is salvation because it starts from what God is.
Everything in it of human benefit and satisfaction is a bye-product
flowing from the fact that it gives to men a focus for their devotion and
attention not in themselves but in God. Its main motive is not self- but
God-regarding. It draws men out of the entanglement into which they fall
through temporising with their own needs, and constrains them to attend to
God's need--His need of them. For the Christian, God is not some shadowy
supreme Being at the back of the universe, or a name given to the sum of
things. God is the Person Who made, and loves, and therefore wants His
children. Hence Christian prayer primarily is grateful and loving
acknowledgment of what God is, and only secondarily the expression of
anxiety, or the "putting in" of this or that claim for what we want.
That is the conclusion which war experience drives home. The special
strain and pressure of war cannot elicit from the majority of men the
religion which is occupied with the saving of self. The spiritual law is
that we find our life by losing it, not by saving it. In a vague and
unexpressed way, as they show again and again by their cheerfulness and
unconcernedness, hosts of men in this war have laid hold on this law. They
have found a purpose to which to cleave, something to give themselves away
for. Only it is hardly acknowledged, but rather lies below the level of
mental apprehension and expression. It is the function of Christianity to
raise this unacknowledging trustfulness and self-giving out of dumb
subconsciousness, and to give to it speech, and to crown it with the glory
of fully human self-devotion. It is its part to declare that it is God
Whom they find in the offering of themselves, His love in which they can
lose themselves, His purpose to which they can cleave, His will to be
done--and that to give Him joy is the supreme end of man.
This is the religion which sustains in war, because possessed in peace.
And it is so little prevalent--that is, so little in any one's _conscious_
possession--in war just because God, and His love, and His desire have
been so little in men's thoughts in peace. Let peace return--let the
strain of war be lifted from a unit as it goes back into rest, or from an
individual as he goes on leave, and the life of indulgence, without an
object except self, threatens to repossess the soul. In the same way it is
peace rather than war, health rather than sickness, youth rather than age,
which really test the reality of our Christianity, when, without the shame
of being driven thereto by need, a man can rejoice in God, and with full
powers be made the instrument of His will.
VIII
There is then little conscious and articulate Christianity at the front,
and yet there are profoundly Christian characteristics in what men are and
do and endure, who have never known or do not understand or have forgotten
the Christian religion. What, then, is this strangely honoured and yet
neglected thing? Does it exist? Is it there for men were they to awake to
it?