Thoughts On Religion At The Front - free ebook by N. S. (Neville Stuart) Talbot

THOUGHTS ON RELIGION AT THE FRONT

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO...

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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...

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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 th

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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 w

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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

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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 dee

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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. Naturall

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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, w

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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

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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 s

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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? This utterly searching war justifies the critical temper which passes previous allegiances and acceptances under revision and ju

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IX

But this brings round again the question, "What is this Christian thing?" What are the characteristic and specific elements which, though they cannot be nakedly abstracted from other elements, yet have to be kept salient amid everything else? What is the Christianity which is generally not in the conscious possession of men at the front, and yet receives the seal of their glorious excellences? What is the Christianity which lies hidden by traditional disguise and contemporary practice? Where is

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X

At any rate, in the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. We are blessed by the privilege, given to us by the work of realistic historians, of going to Him as our real Brother. We can study the religion of this Man. It was rooted first and last in one dominant reality—the Father and His will. From the first sight given to us of Him as a boy and onwards He was rich in one thing—He was rich towards God. He looked at the world without insensibility to its pain, without evasion of its evil—rather with uniq

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XI

Is not that enough? This simple element—this religion of Jesus—is it not the one thing needful, possessed of which men may slough off all else in the traditional deposits of Christianity? Yes, would certainly be the answer if the men of His day had in fact been so possessed, and if men were so possessed to-day. What was actual in Him was, is, in fact, unrealised in them. He did find, of old, fellow-adventurers to share His enterprise. But they could not share it to the end. He could love God who

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XII

"But the third day He rose again." Peter was not left in the porch, nor are we. His broken hope was remade by the One fully trusted in by Jesus only—by the "God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ." [2] 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

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XIII

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 o

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XIV

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

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XV

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

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XVI

There are objections, I know, which arise in the mind to this insistence on God and the will or kingdom on which He is at work in the world, and they must be faced. It is easy, I feel, to speak of the will of God in general terms. But what does it mean in particular? Can it be known or defined? Is it practicable? I remember being puzzled by a great religious teacher to whom I owe much—Father Kelly of the Society of the Sacred Mission, Kelham. It was almost comic to me that in the same breath he

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XVII

Akin to the difficulty that the will of God is inscrutable and hard to know, is the protest that to speak of Him as at work in the world to bring in His kingdom, is remote from the actualities of daily life. As I have walked about in Flanders, turning over thoughts about the onward movement of God's purposes in the world, I have met those matchless monuments of patient and unchanging daily toil, the peasants working in the fields. Harnessed into the perpetual cycle of seed time and harvest, what

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XVIII

There is also the objection to an insistence upon the will of God in accomplishment in this world, that there is so much in the New Testament which declares (and, as we have seen in the last paragraph, experience seems largely to corroborate the view) that the Kingdom of God does not come in this world but in the next. I refer (only I dislike using a word which few soldiers at the front will understand) to New Testament "apocalyptic," which seems to present a vision of this world as immediately

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XIX

There is also the objection that too hard things have been said here about the turning to God under pressure of anxiety, and the expression in prayer of the natural desire for safety. After all, as a Jesuit fellow-padre reminded me at the front, Our Lord at His hour of trial, when "exceeding sorrowful even unto death," prayed in agony. And further it is plain that prayer to Him, and as He would have it be to others, was far more than a trustful harmony of self with the will of the Father. He urg

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XX

There is also the objection that the view implied in the preceding pages leaves out or passes over too lightly our need as sinners in the sight of God all Holy. Is not our need for forgiveness to impel us towards God? Is not our need—our need in anxiety, our need in guiltiness—to be a motive in our religion? Yes, a motive, but not the motive. It is a question of order. What must come first is not our need, whether as anxious or guilty, but God's need, or else our religion will be at the level of

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XXI

Finally, I would say a word about the charge of pessimism which this report from the front may evoke. Both pessimism and optimism are rather moods in us than qualities which really belong to the facts of a situation. The main point is to try to get down to reality and not to flinch. Anyhow, I do not feel pessimistic about our holy and glorious religion. Far otherwise. It is coming again. Actualities at the front, as I try to learn from them, do seem to me to show a very widespread and deep ignor

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