A WAR-TIME APOLOGETIC
By F. E. HARRISON
WAR has a profound effect on religion. It not only calls it in question, and divides, as every crisis does, alienating some and attracting others, but like a powerful searchlight in this general black-out of civilisation, it shows us ourselves and our surroundings, and reveals the very structure of our beliefs. War and Christianity are often supposed to be a contradiction in terms. There are difficult problems behind that generalisation which will not be dis- cussed here. But it remains true that each elucidates and interprets the other to a remarkable degree. Christianity is war, even if war is not necessarily Christianity—but we had more than half forgotten it ; and it has taken the events of the last few months to stab us awake and turn metaphor into fact.
After all, it was so easy to sleep. Civilisation had cushioned most of our lives. It had smoothed away rough edges, refined our pleasures, anaesthetised our pains and lapped us in warm comfort. Outside this lamp-lit, well-fed world were the poor ; but the poor, we hoped, were diminishing every day: ours was the normal world, and in the natural course of things they would soon catch us up. Into this upholstered world broke the war ; and we were confronted with a choice, and crossed a frontier.
But if a choice is the end of one process, it is the beginning of another ; and we began to take a look at the consequences. The first implication we discovered was that our choice was a communal thing, extending through the whole of society, and with its roots in a past which we had either depreciated or taken very much for granted. This is too naive! Yet how easy an assumption, brought up as we were in a society soaked in individualism, where we could live our private lives and pursue our private satisfactions—till the giant hand of war picked us up and set us in camps and barrack-rooms ; and we remembered that a common end implied a common life—and we hated it, and learnt from it.
But it did not stop there ;. and we bent our backs, and went back to school, and learnt to obey. A rigid, uncom- fortable, humiliating discipline at times ; but it had some redeeming features: it distinguished clearly between a man and his office ; it swept away superficial differences and had a way of breeding humility and mutual charity ; and like a great fly-wheel it imposed its own momentum to carry us forward as one. For the effort demanded was sometimes too hard for the individual, some- times too petty ; and it would need the whole weight of the community to carry us up the long slope to the broken ridges and the sheer falls. That was the ultimate goal. Meanwhile, we had two subsidiary gains to comfort ourselves with. We had the new communal life of mutual tolerance and charity—not unsalted with distaste; and we rediscovered the old life, stripped of its inessentials and its fuss, and saw that it was good. If for the moment it gleamed out of reach, it was not so much a land of lost delight as one to be re- trodden.
So much for our discoveries. But all this is the common- place of history. It is not this, it is we who are exceptional, if in our particular time and place and level of society, in a short interval of deluded optimism, we escaped the experience of our own predecessors and of almost every generation before us. Nor is there necessarily anything exalted in this type of patriotism. When it is not engaged in self-preservation, it can be exploited as an instrument of the Most unscrupulous aggression. If this is all the war has taught us, Germany has beaten us hands down. Her mere peace-time discipline has exceeded any of the efforts exacted from us by war ; and in the sacred name of the community she is preparing to roll on victorious over all our prostrate bodies.
No: if nationalism and patriotism merely mean bigger and better wars, we have reached an inadequate end to our progress ; and we may well feel that our slippered ease was at least no madder than this suicidal exertion. But the war has not only lit up the civic virtues in its lightning flashes, and the heights of patriotism: it has shown beyond these another range of peaks, whose foothills we had half unsus- pectingly wandered among, and which now outsoar and challenge the rest. To drop metaphors, beyond patriotism we have rediscovered our religion ; and we have rediscovered it not as a refuge from our troubles, but because it has all the characteristics of war. It has the same structure on a grander scale ; it is not less exacting but more exacting ; it is not an opiate but a stimulus. The metaphor of the Church militant is as old as St. • Paul ; but the familiarity of centuries lies upon it, and we had summed up our post- war mood in all the associations of the word " militarism " —until metaphor became fact, and every phase of the Church's warfare came to life in the light of our own experience.
There is the same approaching challenge, the same long process of recognition, and the same single act of choice. War and Christianity—they are hard choices ; and they have been so hidden and implicit in our environment that for long we have managed to disbelieve in them, to defer them, or to ignore them. There is the same complexity of factors, and behind each a long historic tangle of cause and effect ; yet for both the final choice, once it is made, is clear-cut and simple. We leave behind a world of delicate half-shades and compromises. We must make up our minds at last: either we are at war or not ; either we are Christians or not.
By that choice we find ourselves implicated in a society— Church or nation—far older and larger than ourselves ; and in accepting it we realise that we belonged there all the time, and that we had always been nourished by its life and enjoyed its privileges even when we thought ourselves most free. And what a mixed and often topsy-turvy society! If we expected to find the Church or the army a collection of saints and heroes, we are soon disillusioned. Both have their shirkers, their frauds, their easy-going ways, their irre- sponsibilities. Both are most of the time well below the level of their great purpose: 'in other words, both are in- tensely human. But that does not discredit them, and each, for all its imperfections, is the only place to be. Both are bound by a discipline which runs counter to most of our impulses ; and we accept in the Church a life- long yoke of beliefs and practices with an obedience some- times glad, sometimes blind, and often reluctant. But there is no escaping this claim: it is rooted in the very nature of Christianity and the Christian Church. Besides, in each case the discipline is merely the instrument of a unity of purpose which subordinates all lesser aims to itself, and brings with it its own peace and security: a peace which can be safe where no safety is, and can snatch comfort out of discomfort, and remain unperturbed, since it holds together in a single vision all the harshness and the loveli- ness of the world. Not that the vision remains unobscured, ar its demands within the bounds of reason. Instead they force us up and on: another shall gird thee and lead thee whither thou wouldest not. As for the daily life of the two communities, both have their moments of intense activity, and their months of monotony and slow preparation for a distant end. Both are dominated by renunciation and sacrifice. Both demand everything, including life itself ; but both look for an ultimate victory, though it is a victory only to be won at the price of unceasing vigilance. We are never clear of the hazards of the Christian life until we have left them behind for good.
War, observed Thucydides, is a harsh schoolmaster. But for Thucydides war was merely an instrument of political and military and psychological education, which should incidentally help to explode the superstition of his con- temporaries. For us it can add religion to its curriculum, and we can rediscover under its tuition a religion as large as life, and yet larger ; more stern, more tender, more exacting, and triumphant.
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