N. S. Talbot

“ What is needed is a new joy in God as Love and Purpose, here and now. Need, whether the pressure of sickness or danger or anxiety or age or guilt, will often operate in turning the heart God-ward. The sense of being thrown in entire dependence upon God can be the God-given turning-point in a man's life and an end to his godlessness. But need will never provide the lasting religious motive which sets the chord of what is noblest in men vibrating within them. The peculiar glory of the Christian religion is that it provides that motive—it is the motive of God's need. He wants us, for He loves us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What the world needs is theocracy. That is, not the imposition of ecclesiastical shackles upon secular life, but the consecration of all life, with all its ever-multiplying treasures of knowledge and power, to one object—the glory of God. If so, then God, as the centre and magnet of consecration, must be all vitally apprehended. He must fill the horizon of the soul. He must be the delight of men, to draw them out of themselves into childlike selflessness, so that as children they may enter into the Kingdom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ This religion of Jesus then is that to which all can turn, as their hearts are full beyond expression with proud and thankful sorrow for the great company of those who have trustfully given themselves to death for others. Jesus is the Word, that is, the full and crowning expression of that which is hardly articulate in others. His open-eyed self-consecration to do the will of the Father seals and ratifies their confused yet steadfast devotion. ”

“ 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? ”

“ He came calling men to a great adventure, to non-calculating and self-regardless co-operation with the active energy and will of the Father. How much He knew beforehand of whither that will would lead Him can never be known. To suppose that He knew all and saw the end in the beginning and had no steps in the dark to take, would be to deny to Him the essential element of human faith and trust, which is that it has to step out beyond the light of knowledge into the darkness of uncertainty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We all need to be so possessed before peace comes back. For peace, as I have said, is the real test of our religion, not war. We have been plunged into war, rejoicing little in God. We have got to put Him and His will and desire first before peace returns. Or else the thought of Him will sink out of our attention, and we shall return to the getting of gain and to self-service in a mood of perpetual postponement. God will come last again. He did so in the minds of soldiers at the beginning of the war. Often they looked upon chaplains as no more than preliminary undertakers. ”

“ At the front the Lord's Prayer—as the one island of religious ground, amid marshes of ignorance, common to Englishmen—is the padres' great stand-by. It declares better than any words which we can frame what distinguishes the Christian religion from others—that it begins with and glories in what God is Whose Name is to be hallowed, and Whose kingdom is in arrival and Whose will is in accomplishment not only in heaven but on earth. ”

“ The whole view is that through the entire order—here and there—the will of God is at work, and His Kingdom in arrival, but that their full result and accomplishment lies beyond this world. Here are the partial and unfinished stages, there the end whither they lead. To fall back on metaphor, a city is in the building, a whole righteous social order—a kingdom of souls. ”

“ It is one great light which we need to walk in—the light of the knowledge of what God is, as it shines upon the face of Jesus Christ. The specific Christian thing that makes Christianity salvation is not—as so many men in the army think—just goodness nor negative and kill-joy propriety, but the fact that in the ardent, venturesome, and self-regardless sacrifice of Jesus, we see the Love of God Himself coming out to win the souls of men. ”

“ The Christian thing which we look for is the Good News of God in Christ. It is not only the religion of Jesus our Brother, but religion in Jesus, in Him revealing God to men. It is not only His human richness towards God, but in Him the richness of God towards men. It is the Cross not only as the climax of free loving self-offering to the Father, but as itself the laying bare [Pg 46] of the Father's heart—it is God reconciling the world unto Himself.
It is this—the revelation of God in Christ—of which the experience of the war shows we are above all else in the world in need. ”

“ In the field, the mind and manner of a gross peace-life is kept alive by [Pg 24] 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. ”

“ We need in peace the free and conscious realisation of that of which men are perforce, and dumbly, aware in war. It is that there is something going on in the world which demands primary allegiance, and the putting second of every self-interest. At the front men hardly know what it is. They are suspicious of rhetoric and unreality in talk about liberty and international equity, and right against might. They only know—a wonderful majority of them—that something great and righteous wants them and requires of them their help. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ After all, in every sphere of human relationships, whether in home or neighbourhood or business or municipality or commonwealth, what is lacking is not the knowledge of what the kingdom of God requires, but the will and motive and power to accomplish it. We are not short of knowledge; rather we are weighed down by the power derived from new knowledge, for want of an end other than our own selves to which to consecrate it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why do some men write every day? Is it for what they can get—the cakes, the fags? Does the constraining motive lie in their own need? It does not. It lies in the joy which letters bring to loving hearts at home. Likewise there is joy in Heaven when one forgetful wayward son turns in heart thither homewards. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 83] 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. ”

“ 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, [Pg 17] 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 84] 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ She has strongholds to storm—the entrenchments where the forces of private-mindedness and apathy and money-worship are dug in. In the attempt she can exhaust to its depths the capacity which is in men for dauntless sacrifice.
Secondly, if the Church's conception of her own interests must be changed, so must the individual's conception of personal religion. Self-preoccupation is as fatal to the latter as to the former. Personal piety is travestied by being thought to be a respectable prudence here for the sake of a reward hereafter. It is not a careful self-salvation at all. ”

“ There has been in this war a wonderful display of the heroism of men. But their thoughts about God and religion are for the most part at a level below the highest in themselves. They have come to themselves in giving themselves away. But they think that religion is mostly concerned with self-saving. They tend to recognise most easily the signs of God's favour in this or that instance of safety or escape. This means that they do not think of God in terms of Christ, but that they think of Him as outside the trouble and pain and cost of life, and in the immunity of heaven. ”

“ Therefore I would say to a man going into battle—"Pray now if never before. Set God before you as you see Him, as you can clearly apprehend Him, in Christ. He is your Father, you are His son, however unworthy. Lift up your heart to Him Who, in and through all the turmoil around you, presses onward with the business of His kingdom and the fulfilment of His heart's desire. ”