R. Thurston Hopkins

“ The grand finale in which the Engineer had turned into a pig on all fours and had been mercilessly put to death with the fat sergeant's bayonet, had filled Boudru's soul with joy. He reflected and gloated on the scene far into the night. Then he fell fast asleep and met with most dazzling adventures with a German soldier who had been hiding in the Jacobean oak chest with the fleur-de-lis carved on the side, which stands beneath the bulgy leaded window. ”

“ How can a man's soul pass into a bronze statue?' I asked rather testily. 'Good heavens, man, do you realize that you're trying to make me believe that which is beyond the pale of all human possibility!'
"'Human possibility! What is human possibility? I tell you that all this is fact; simply.' Ombos rose and began to pace to and fro over the Persian rugs like a tiger. ”

“ It was a small oak room with a stone floor, and a curious smell at once attracted his notice. It was there—there, close to him—under his very nose—the strong, acrid odour of decay—the nauseating smell of the grave. Looking about he saw the floor was paved with grave stones. In one corner stood a fine seventeenth century lead coffin. A curious greyish light shone from it. O'Hagan's conjecture had been right: there was something awful in the room, and with the terror of nightmare seizing him swiftly by the throat and throttling him, he awoke in a spasm of terror. ”

“ That was the reply of war's wreckage to those who pitied. It is a wonderful Gospel that produces this. But the invisible, while full of awe, does not daunt him, the soldier reaches out towards the rather unknown searching for light and finding it. Under fire means so much, it is filled up with so many experiences, you march through a lifetime in a few seconds, you get new views of the past years from another angle of vision. ”

“ War throws light on some of its stray pages as they flutter for a second on the wings of time and then disappear, but not before it has flung its cressets of light upon the black pall of doubt. Everyone now talks of psychic phenomena. In a paltry generation of superficial thinking the subject was one for jest, but there is far more in it than jesters are likely to discover. Mocking laughter never discovered anything except the vacuous fool. The appearances of spiritual beings give but scant opportunity for examination but serious investigation has now taken the place of cheap sneering. ”

“ To-day the revival comes from actual experience rather than from church teaching. The antagonism to such belief amounts to unreasonable heights of folly. Luther has so long occupied the place of Christ that dissent has forgotten what Christ taught us in regard to angels. We ignore the fact that He claimed to have seen angels, and to have had their help and ministration. When politics mix with religion, spirituality dies, there is no vision, for there is little belief and less sincerity. No wonder the soldier's vision of angels strikes them as something altogether beyond the pale of belief. ”

“ Lay thy annulling seal upon the o'erlabored heart: drop thy healing nepenthe into the weary brain. Teach us not to fear that which brings us nearer to Thee. Suffer us to go to sleep with no more consciousness than the flowers that take no care for their awakening. Give us this last and best of all thy gifts—Parva domus, magna quies!
Hilaire O'Hagan sat in the September sunshine on the grass that skirted the roadside. ”

“ As O'Hagan walked the night deepened in throbs of gathering darkness. The sense of uneasiness that had been with him ever since the priest in the cassock had appeared to him was not to be easily thrown off. He set himself to argue down the uneasiness for which there was no more foundation than a bad attack of "nerves" after the gloomy life in prison. He told himself, till he believed it, that a man—just a human man—had been crossing the fields, and that being smitten with religious fervour he had quoted the Scripture aloud, as he had often heard such people do. ”

“ Few thinkers now, worthy of the name, seriously dispute the existence of super-natural forces and influences. The whole system of Christianity, of belief in all ages, is founded upon such things. To-day front-rank men are investigating in avenues of research where once they sneered. There is much fraud and cheap talk in ordinary life, but not under fire. Men are not cheap then, nor are they paltry. Strange that where death is busiest the evidence of life beyond and above it all should abound. The invisible, full of awe, is also full of teaching, it is pregnant with whispers. ”

“ This was a voluntary statement of a French soldier who called me to [22] his side simply to light a cigarette for him. I left him perfectly happy and it was quite true about his number of wounds. He lived only a few hours and he knew that he was dying. Men do not usually tell lies on their death beds.
Wonderful is the warp and woof of life under fire. It is the parade of the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears playing hide and seek with each other. ”

“ O'Hagan coughed and held down his head.
"A man without scruple and without heart," the stranger remarked to himself.
O'Hagan looked up with a start. "Look here," he began. "You've no right to——"
Then of a sudden the mist began to rise from the clump of bushes and the stranger vanished. O'Hagan was back in the flesh. He stood there dazed for the moment, with the little cross clutched in his hand. ”

“ The vicar told me that if I could make up my mind to have the statue removed or destroyed, it might dispel all my troubles. I ought to make an application to the authority on bronzes at the British Museum, who would be only too pleased to accept it. An application to escape the company of Albertus Magnus! A request that the British Museum would graciously take over a bronze statue, the soul of departed Ombos, and a blind terror that walked at twilight! The vicar's proposal sent me into a paroxysm of hysterical laughter. ”

“ The spiritual sense of man is his faculty of response to the spiritual world around him, just as his musical sense is his measure of response and his reception of the world of music around him. By some magic in the red surge of war, this spiritual response is sharpened and quickened as every other sense is, and the soldier sees visions. Man working within time and space is influenced by what is beyond the one and the other, the full significance of this world would seem to be in another scheme of things to which this is only the vestibule. ”

“ They rushed us in the dawning—a living, greenish-grey wave rolled over our trenches, shooting [181] and hacking at the heart of what had once been a regiment of British Infantry. When the second wave lapped over, our men were overborne but they were trying, by common instinct, to reach the second line trenches where they could re-form. Then I saw O'Hagan who had dropped from God knows where, standing silhouetted against the red of dawn on the front line trench. He was waving a brass cross and the bullets were pattering around him and making a noise like rats skipping about an empty house. ”

“ Shadow and darkness and doubt are lifted, the soldier is frank and honest, he is not hide-bound by petty superstitions, he is willing fairly to consider and weigh all sensations, visions and inner illuminations. He is not blinded with the dogma of either agnosticism or sectarianism, while his sense of humour saves him from many of the errors of the various "Christian" brotherhoods. Curious enough, the people who object to duty, who are unwilling to strike a blow for righteousness, invariably belong to some of the freak sects and are devotees of sectarianism in its narrowest meaning. ”

“ Gods do not grow in one night like mushrooms. Every great masterpiece is an evolution, be it a statue, a poem, a painting, a man—or a god. If it is ever given to you to see my Albert of Cologne as I see him you [63] will understand what I mean.' He turned round to me and I gave a start, I can tell you. Never have I seen such lurid gleams of light as those that danced from those two deep-set eyes! I say 'lurid,' for at times, the colour of them took a blood red hue, and changed quickly again to a glittering green. ”

“ We see this in the glow of the soldiers' letters to those he loves: he has come within the shadow of the Divine Reality as the wondrous book of Life and Death opens on the battlefield. The result is the Soldier's Gospel. It would cause the devotees of little Bethel to faint with its crude "superstitions" and absence of meaningless and stupid dogma yet its grip of spiritual things and Divine Aid would make the ordinary "go to meeting" Christian gape with astonishment. ”

“ Christ's atonement is no isolated fact in history to make men cowards, but a sustained attitude of devotion in which every man and woman is to take a part. Instead of thanking Christ for hanging there upon the Cross in our place we should strive for the same courage, the same endurance, the supreme devotion to duty and the vision of Divine Aid will be ours perhaps in Angel form. To the brave in all ages has come the vision of higher things. ”

“ When it grew dark the flick-flack of lightening played across the sky and it showed the men's faces white and drawn. Presently Tim's Company lieutenant came up with the news that they would not be able to rest until morning as they had anticipated. There could be no stopping, for the regiment had to reach the rendezvous at daybreak. As the storm rolled nearer, the wind got up, in puffs—first warm and then cold, and a few drops of rain fell—great drops that fell flop-flop-flop—on Tim's face. With a flash that leapt crackling over the plain, the storm loosed itself. ”

“ The hardworking priest in the slums fearlessly proclaims this one sacrament of life with the Divine Life, his belief in angels and their help, in saints and their prayers, and because he believes he is able to work under conditions which make life for a cultured man almost intolerable. But he works, thankful to be left alone by his bishop: for war has declared a close time for ritualistic curates. But the soldier whose patriotism he has nurtured writes home to him telling frankly his experiences, his dreams, his visions. ”

“ The soldier's simple faith, his willing endurance, his quiet heroisms, his silent self-sacrifice, though they call for no louder name than duty, are just those chords which link him to the Great Heroism which saw its culmination in Calvary. After all, deeds only are the words of love. ”

“ Take premonitions, for example. How shall we account for the British soldier's actual versions of the matter? There are countless stories in this war, in every war, of men having a warning, a sub-conscious certainty of death. The battlefield is armed with a full battery of shot, which thrill with human interest and have around them a halo of something uncanny, supernormal. It may be that in the stress and shock of battle the strings—some of the strings—of the human instrument get broken ”

“ I walked towards it, when suddenly the shadow shot upwards and was lost to sight. Then the springs of the chesterfield creaked and wheezed, the same as they will when suddenly released from pressure. Clayton came in at that moment holding a candelabra aloft and the feeble flames disclosed poor old Price. He was on his back, his knees slightly drawn up. The face was not the face of a man at all—it was a horrible mask of contorted terror. ”

“ There was a lull after about an hour's rain of every kind of missile that man has invented to batter his brother with. Then the Huns came on in earnest. Some reached the trenches only to be met with a murderous fire: they fell in little huddled heaps in the blood and the mud and the slime of the trenches. But the whole German race seemed to be flowing in on the British, and they fairly got into the trenches, though they were twice driven out. Yard by yard the battalion retired. The next moment an unearthly, fluorescent light shot and flooded along the trenches. ”

“ M. Rochas speaks of an externalized consciousness which feels a touch. Within man is the plant and machinery of all kinds of faculties, one is the perception of the spiritual. Had it been trained like his sense of music, we should no longer be in the dark of despair over our dead. The trend of thought to-day is to show man a spiritual being in a spiritual universe, that death is merely transition. ”

“ The German [175] shells had gashed and ripped the sides and roof, so that birds flew in and out at will. Hundreds of sparrows chirped in the oak beams above. The shells had pitted, starred and jerked up the blue flagstones in the porch on which O'Hagan stood. Parts of the old church had been shelled nearly level; little twisted fragments of beautiful leaded windows had been swept up in a pile outside with other wreckage. As O'Hagan walked up the aisle a feeling came over him that he knew much of the old place. ”

“ I'm a normal man, Ombos, and I object to having my free imagination harrowed over things that don't count. Behind that curtain is a bronze statue, and it never can or will be anything else but a bronze statue, and that's about the sum and total of it all.'
"'I was merely telling you a few cold and scientific facts,' returned Ombos argumentatively. ”