Norman Maclean

“ The votaries of peace have forgotten that fruit does not grow without roots and soil. Eloquence can do much, but it cannot grow grapes without vines deep rooted in the soil. And peace is a fruit of the spirit deep rooted in righteousness. And the nations pursuing peace have forgotten that pilgrimages to Washington or The Hague may be good, but the supreme need of humanity is to go on pilgrimage to the fountains that will cleanse the heart. The deliverance of the world is not by way of renewed or remodelled treaties, but by the old, old way of renewed and converted souls. ”

“ That childlike faith in treaties!—they have forgotten that treaties were unable to save even one fragment of Europe eight years ago. But this time the treaty is to be so very big that it will save. But, alas! no treaty is of value beyond the truth in the soul of its signatories—and of that there is never a word. No treaty can exorcise greed, ambition, and lust out of the heart—and it is from these wars spring. If the hearts of the nations be not changed, one more mirage will be added to the many humanity has pursued across the burning sands, strewing the barren desert with bleached bones. ”

“ Looking back on that long road by which humanity has marched forward even to this hour, it is strange to think how the great days on which the epochs turned have not been the days of mammon-worship or of military glory, but the days on which the Cross suddenly blazed forth in the heavens, as it did to Constantine, when the summons rang—'By this sign conquer.' It was then that men set their faces to climb upward, realising that the greatest thing a man can do with his life is to lay it down. ”

“ Before the flood of terror generated by the crowd all the decencies of civilisation vanish, and man becomes once more the animal with but the one instinct—to fight for one's life. And it is the same with anger. Let a skilled orator set himself to rouse the passion of a crowd, and he will soon generate a spirit that utterly obliterates the individual. Let him depict the wrongs they suffer, and anger sweeps through the multitude, bending them to the spirit of the orator as the corn field bends before the wind. ”

“ What is required, of course, is the right education of the American democracy. Schools should teach that it is impossible in so imperfect a world that all the right can be on one side. Yet that is how history is taught, not only there but here. Our foes also were always wrong! There will be no peace in the world until the spirit of spread-eagleism is replaced by that of meekness; until nations and men realise that we are members one of another, and that we are here to help and serve each other. Until that new spirit breathes through the masses of humanity, there will be war. ”

“ Out of filth and mud and horror the cleansed soul does not emerge. There was a king long ago who saw ten horrible plagues succeed each other until at last the first-born lay dead—but he was the same until the sea overwhelmed him. And man is the same in all ages. Cataclysms do not work renewal. Miracles do not regenerate. Not even the millions dead will mean a new earth or a new Britain. That new Britain of the heart's desire will only come if men and women whose souls are quickened will arise and make their world anew. The world's supreme need is not reorganisation, but a new spirit. ”

“ There is unity and a new dignity in the tale when one gets up on a hill and sees it in far perspective. Things did not happen by chance. There was through it all a purpose at work, welding humanity together with the cement of blood, throwing down the barriers of race and language, silencing the sound of tumult and war until at last the song is heard on the plain of Bethlehem that has sung itself into the hearts of men, ushering in the dawn of peace and goodwill. In the fulness of the time the Child was laid in the manger. ”

“ There came first the unity of one ideal, of one law, of one faith—and out of that there came the four kingdoms merged at last in the unity of the one Kingdom of Scotland. Until at last, after weary centuries, the sounds of war hushed into silence: clan no longer lifted up sword against clan; brethren in Christ could no longer slay one another. Peace lay at last like a golden shaft across all the land. One fearless unarmed man faced a king with the weapons of the Spirit, sowed the harvest which we are now reaping. ”

“ For there is no way of peace save one—the way of love. No nation has as yet tried that way. And there is no sign that they mean to try it. The world waits for the man who will convince it that the new order must be based on fraternity and not on fighting. But the world will applaud him instantly. Fraternity—that's the word! Most excellent! But when the new Columba will go on to show that fraternity without a Fatherhood to rest on is meaningless and powerless; that humanity can only realise its brotherhood in a common Father—even God. Then the world will once more shrug its shoulders. ”

“ When the great war of the five kings against four reached its consummation, and Lot was a prisoner going north with a halter round his neck, he often groaned, 'If I ever get out of this I'll never look near that filthy Sodom again.' Like a bolt from the blue came deliverance and victory and spoils—and back he went to Sodom and its filthy conversations as before. It is such a wonderfully modern story. In every age men get so accustomed to the filth that it no longer seems filth. The mud of their daily habit becomes their gold. ”

“ Let the cry 'Fire' be raised in a crowded building, and though the separate individuals be of the gentlest and most considerate, yet instantly the crowd becomes dæmonic, a wrestling, writhing, struggling mass trampling the weak under foot, with no thought but self-preservation.
There are various explanations. One is the law of sympathy, by which an emotion is intensified in being shared. At the first cry of peril a wave of fear passes through the crowd; and as each looks at the faces around him he sees fear in every eye. ”

“ It looked as if Christianity were on the eve of being stamped out in Kintyre. To Columba in Ireland there came the cry of his kinsmen's woe—'Come over and help us.' To a man burning with ardour and longing for new fields to conquer for his Master, that cry was like a bugle summoning to battle. He came to their help, but not with spears and arrows. He came with the might of the Cross. The greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that instead of material weapons he went straight to the fountain-head of the misery. ”

“ What others think of us is often a truer gauge than what we think of ourselves, for we can only look at ourselves through the distorting glass of self-love and self-interest. In these last days we have had a wonderful revelation of what others think of us. Our hoardings and our advertisement pages are crowded with appeals which could only appeal to a generation that had ceased to think and ceased to bear upon their hearts the woes of their fellows. In the sacred name of liberty, in the cause of brotherhood and equality, we were exhorted on every horizon to hold fast and change not. ”

“ They spring from greed and lust and ambition—from the life surrendered to evil. We speak of the horror of war; what we should speak of is the horror of wickedness. For war is only a symptom, not the disease. What all these weary discussions about 'Leagues to make an end of war,' and the new watchword 'No more war,' aim at is the doing away with the symptom—leaving the disease to run its deadly course. To suppress symptoms without removal of the hidden cause is the way of death. What the nations must face is the disease and its healing! ”

“ They can command no speed by which they can escape from themselves. And it is vain to wing a flight upwards through the air if heaven be empty overhead; vain to alight five hundred miles away if on earth there be no temple, no holy day, no shrine at which to worship. 'You own the land,' said the poor painter to the new-rich who boasted his land: 'you own the land but I own the landscape.' The great gift is to own the landscape. And no money ever bought that. The only thing Mammon can do is to secure food, shelter, and clothes. ”

“ It is only when I go on pilgrimage to-day to the grotto in the rock in which the asses were stabled in Bethlehem and to the stall where the Child is laid that I can realise the vulgarity and the meanness of Mammon. Out of that manger there issued a power compared to which all other influences that moulded men are as the rushlight to the sun; in that stable lies the fountain out of which sprang the river that has borne on its bosom for nineteen centuries all of beauty and of truth and of love wherewith humanity has been blessed ”

“ It is in that hidden depth the hope of humanity lies. The cause that seems lost rallies to its side the multitudes that no sooner do the wrong than they are smitten with shame therefor and repent thereof. From the ranks of its enemies the cause of righteousness ever recruits its most valiant fighters. The Sauls are transformed into Pauls, and powerless minorities into triumphing majorities.
Not only are the laws of the spirit on the side of the righteous minority, but also the laws of the universe. ”

“ The march of events is the proof that the woe of humanity is too deeply seated to be healed by any human salve. There is no balm in any Gilead for these wounds. The first step towards the rehabilitation of the world would be the mutual cancelling of the nations' debts to each other. The United States alone makes this impossible. Money that we borrowed for our allies, and which we cannot recover from our allies, America insists that we pay. And yet that money was spent to save America as well as ourselves. ”

“ They have only to think what a mighty change for the betterment of humanity has been wrought in the great cities where alcohol no longer seeks and lies in wait for the unwary at every street corner. Instead of liquor seeking him, the drouth must now seek the liquor—and the search is a toilsome one in a dry and parched land. What a deliverance that must be for the weak-willed when the State no longer, by licensed premises every few yards in the crowded streets, tempts them to take the road to pauperism and destruction. ”

“ If custom had not deadened us to the meaning of war and strike, we would shrink back in horror at the very sound of the words. But, instead of that, ere humanity has recovered from the woe of the one, we are plunged into the woes of the other.... It sounds a respectable sort of word! And the right of a man to stop working seems elementary—for we are not slaves. But humanity has learned there is a higher word than rights—and that is duty. We owe service to our brethren. We can pay too high a price for two shillings more a day if they mean starving women and perishing children. ”

“ When William Ewart Gladstone was once asked how a man of his intellect could listen to such dull sermons, he answered—'I go to church because I love England.' There is a wider motive—'I go to church because I love the world, because I can hear there a law that men should love one another with a love that stoops to a Cross, by which alone the world can be saved.' It is vain for nations that forsake the worship of a God of love to spend their days devising schemes for bringing peace to a ruined world. ”

“ The liberty to establish at every street corner a centre for the spreading of disease, misery, and pauperism! Those who make such appeals surely underrate the intelligence of a generation who have not yet quite forgotten the exploits and the sacrifices of their sires. The freedom they achieved was the freedom to worship God as their consciences directed, and to develop that national character of uprightness and understanding that has been so fraught with blessing to the world. ”