Norman Maclean

“ Men can conquer their fellows, but there is only the devouring of hell for those who fight against God. When God ceased to be a reality, the destruction of life was but a natural sacrifice to our ease. There being nothing higher than ourselves, then to ourselves let us sacrifice even life. When God in His divine majesty will again shine forth before the soul, and the eyes behold the Divine Life everywhere waiting its realisation, then human life again shall become precious and desired, and the race will measure its felicity by the multitude of its children. ”

“ It is waging a 'holy war.' Self-blinded, unable to believe that virtues such as shine on its face could suffer repulse, in days of humiliation and of defeat it has shouted 'Victory.' And from pulpit after pulpit the doctrine is propounded that this war is not a judgment of our sins; that to speak of war as a judgment of sin is 'antiquated.' The Church has thus cut itself adrift from the teaching of prophet and seer, and the Bible, which is aflame with the judgments of God upon sin, is but the antiquated record of unenlightened ages. Thus the conscience of the nation is narcotised. ”

“ Who can compute the laughter and joyousness, the happiness and the riches thus consumed at the shrine of our self-indulgence? And every sign points to this vast sacrifice of life increasing with the years. For we are emancipated; and we smile at any restraint emanating from—God! Science has delivered us from that. We know it now—the voice of law is only the echo of outworn superstitions. And science, which has broken the chain of restraint, and which has provided the means for gratifying desire without incurring responsibility, has blessed us also with the high-explosive shell. ”

“ The rising generation in the country places in Scotland are made unfit for country life by a false education, and, through its neglect of their higher needs, many of them are ruined. A nation that spends five millions a day on war would not in its education system provide for the social and moral needs of its sons and daughters. It sacrificed everything to the brain. And the result has been desolation in many a family in Scotland in lonely glens and by the sea. Our education machinery has, in truth, been Prussianised, and in the process the soul has been grievously wounded. ”

“ The horror of the battlefield pales before the horror of sin in our streets, sweeping souls to death. Our surrender to pleasure, our pursuit of vanity, our sacrifice of the State to party, of the race to our ease, our refusal to {186} make the sacrifice that would make the Empire secure—these are the conditions which made war inevitable and which evoked it. As alcohol and the drunkard's palsied limbs are cause and effect, sin and judgment; so the national sin and the horrors of war are cause and effect, sin and judgment. ”

“ To many the preaching of repentance is the dreariest of all things. It is but the voice summoning them to the impossible—to mourn for sins of which they are unconscious. They cry out for life—and they are offered tears.
But far from being compact of all weariness and sorrow, repentance is the most thrilling of all that the soul can experience. It is the essence of all romance. For what is it but this—the turning back to God. And in turning to God comes the vision of the glory of life. The eyes are illumined with radiance when they behold no longer processes and laws—but God. ”

“ When to the masses that have been despoiled there is again restored the privilege of designating a little portion of the land of their fathers, their own, then, and only then, will the country places once more waken to life, and the desolation of generations be at last removed. A nation for which millions have been found ready to die must surely provide for the living such social conditions as will enable them to live joyous and clean lives. In kingdoms teeming with riches, no heart must be starved of beauty, no life starved of bread, and no soul starved of God. ”

“ It is the great tide of the creative life that they set themselves to dam. The joyousness of the creative genius that ever creates but never repeats itself, they bring to nought. They deny to God on earth the temples for His indwelling. Only when the soul realises God thus brooding over the face of the world, thus waiting for the fulness of the divine enrichment, will men realise the heinousness of life-suppression. Lives based on the code of morals which prefers coffins to cradles are lives which fight against God, and as such are doomed to be ground to powder by His judgment. ”

“ If we are to be worthy of the price that has been paid for our deliverance, by a resurrection from the dead we must cleanse our souls and transform our slums. It is not for us as we are, or for our cities as they now are built, or for a State that denies to its children the decencies of life, or for the continued reign of that plutocracy that has darkened the windows of the soul—not for the continuance of these have our brothers died right joyfully in the glory of their youth. ”

“ Our mistake has been that we thought the supreme good was the development of the brain. We went on steadily increasing our power over the forces of nature, but we neglected to develop the soul-power which could control and direct the material power thus created. The result has been the greatest catastrophe in history. The industrial civilisation which we reared through the painful toil of a century, is passing in the smoke of the howitzer shells. And the end is not yet. Unless man becomes master of himself, it can bring nought but misery that he should master nature. ”

“ We ceased to produce the population that could possess the vast territories we held. We could think of nothing but the vapourings of politicians who sacrificed the State to their faction. When Europe was an armed camp and Germany was piling up armaments, we were preparing for civil war in Ireland. Vision and genius were dying among us. For the devotees of Aphrodite and Mammon are blinded to the stars. A nation which sinks into degeneration, and which, holding the world's wealth, refuses even to prepare to guard its riches, is loudly inviting the robber. ”

“ There is no ground left on which religion can appeal to the conscience of such a generation. In the eighteenth century Wesley and Whitefield sent through the decaying masses of England a vitalising breath as they proclaimed the joyful gospel of deliverance from sin, and men arose from the mire with lives transfigured. In our day religion can find no such approach and no such triumph. For like the whispering of an idle breeze is a proclamation of sin's forgiveness to those who know no sin. ”

“ As one considers the moral condition to which we have come, the worse condition to which we are hastening, the destruction which befell those of old in whose footsteps we are now treading, the dust accumulated on buried cities and vanished races who made their pleasure their god, and the flaming of the sword wherewith God removed in all ages the cankerous growth from the body of humanity,—the question leaps forth: How can we escape the righteous judgment of God? ”

“ There was no sacrifice the nation would have shrunk from, if the demand were made. The nation knew that it needed discipline, and it asked for discipline, but asked in vain. And to-day the same pusillanimous policy sacrifices prohibition to the fear that the munition-workers might give trouble. They knew not, and they know not, the heart of this nation. But the fact remains that to-day the nation is spending 180 millions or so a year on alcohol, while the Government calls on the people to exercise the greatest economy that the war may be waged to the end. ”

“ But the growth of knowledge and the triumphs of science gradually shut that window, so that now scarce a glow of light penetrates to the dusty and dark recesses of the soul. The soul no longer thrills with the Divine; all the thrill they can know is that of gratifying the body. And that way leads only to the self-loathing of repletion. To escape from themselves they rush in clouds of dust along the roads, demanding 'speed in the face of the Lord.' But all in vain is a sated body hurled from London to Brighton, for at the end it is sated still. ”

“ To turn the face Godward is to change one's ideal, and the change of ideal eventuates in a change of life. When the new light illumines the secret places, the soul, quickened by the fellowship of God, sees the unclean with new eyes, and sets itself to conquer whatsoever is unworthy of God. National repentance with us will realise itself in peopling the waste places, in emptying the slums into the country, in destroying the vested interests in the vice of the people, in making a healthy and beautiful life the birthright of every citizen. ”

“ The prophets who prophesied doom have been abundantly justified. To-day France, risen from the dead, is wrestling for her life; she is impotent to drive back the foe without the help of Britain and Russia—she who dominated Europe a century ago! When we read of a Russian army, after a journey round half the world, landing at Marseilles to take their place in the trenches that Paris may be saved from the devastators of Belgium and Poland, we see the fields ripe for the harvest of that policy which sacrificed the race to the individual. ”

“ One whole winter they denounced the iniquity of the State making any provision, however pitifully small, for the decayed veterans who fall out of the ranks of toil; another winter they declaimed with bitterness against the crime of the State making provision through insurance for the ill-health of their servants and employees! They have little taste for books, and money cannot buy the sense by which beauty floods the heart. There is nothing left them but self-indulgence. To that they sacrifice everything. Food and clothes and physical pleasure fill up the circuit of the days. ”

“ When the vision of God arises upon him he will abhor his selfishness and set himself to repair the desolation that has been wrought. He will have no rest until the green places again are filled with the glory and the radiance of life. The slums will be emptied and the now silent places peopled anew, when the nation realises again that God created the world to be the home of His children. ”

“ Love does not throw doles to the perishing, it gives itself. Love never says, 'You carry my burden,' but rather, 'Let me carry your burden.' To the eye of love, man is no longer a mere crank in the great machinery of labour, a unit in the vast mass designated the 'lower classes'—he is a brother. And love will not give a brother over to be the prey of vice, {194} or surrender him as a victim to monopolies that destroy him. Love will sacrifice and fight for the brother's life. The remedy for all our ills lies here—in our return to God. ”

“ Three-fourths of the whole population of Scotland has been massed in the industrial belt of country that lies between the Forth and Clyde estuaries, and which includes Edinburgh and Glasgow and the towns round which are centred the iron and coal industries. We have driven our manhood and womanhood out of the sunshine {56} and the clean air and the silent spaces into the foetid, sunless closes of monstrous cities. There the clanging of machinery leaves no place where the soul can be still. ”

“ The new atmosphere in which men lived made it impossible to present the Christian appeal to them as that appeal came home to the heart of humanity for nineteen centuries. For the life-blood of religion was ever the passion of love and gratitude evoked by the forgiveness of sin. But the sense of sin died in the heart, and a generation that knew not sin could only wonder at the meaning of a gospel which proclaimed the forgiveness of sin. No golden age lay behind when man was sinless ”

“ There is no limit to the evil wrought by even one such leaflet. Down the streets, by word of mouth, the secret goes. And wherever it goes, death begins to reign. And the nation disregards the undermining of its existence. It is not enough that bomb and shell and gas should be laying its manhood low in swathes; it suffers a campaign {29} in its streets and alleys that wages war on the life that is struggling to be born. If the hands that sway the destiny of the race were not paralysed such a propaganda would not be suffered for a day. ”

“ And it is manifest that a nation whose conscience is chloroformed can hear no {182} call summoning to repentance. When the Church is blind to the sword of God flaming in the heavens, how can any expect the nation to behold it, and, beholding, to repent?
This obsession that we are not living in a great day of divine judgment is all the stranger when we consider that every day of our lives is a day of divine judgment, and that we are ever standing at the bar of the great assize. No sooner does a man sin than judgment begins to operate. ”

“ The world can nowhere show a desolation such as has overtaken rural England. Elsewhere, be it France or Germany, Serbia or Bulgaria, the cottages are scattered over close-tilled land, and the labour of man is rewarded by the earth yielding its increase. But England presents the spectacle of decayed cottages, of vast spaces 'laid down to grass,' of stately houses with the silence of tree-shaded parks round about them, and of a land which yields no longer food but sport. ”

“ These houses stretching for miles in their regular uniformity are replete with appliances of luxury and comfort such as a Roman emperor might have sighed for in vain; every desire of their heart they have the power and the will to gratify;—and yet life is dreary. The people that ought to be supremely happy are on the whole miserable. They have reduced life to a series of sensations. But the dread spectre of satiety dogs the footsteps of the devotees of sense. If they were mere animals they would be perfectly happy. Their misery is that they are endowed with souls. ”

“ In a free country this power of planting down places for the sale of alcohol independently of the will of the people is an anachronism by which the poor are enslaved. When we speak of freedom let us consider this freedom—freedom for the children of the poor to grow up untempted. Let us remember that the race has now to depend mainly upon {111} the poor for its continuation and for its virility. A nation that will doom the rising generation to the atmosphere of gin and whisky round its cradles, seals its own doom. ”