"A tale of little meaning, Though the words are strong."
(2) But if the case against religion at all is strong owing to the War, still more is the War supposed to be fatal to the _Christian Religion_. Here into the world it came two thousand years ago with a great flourish of trumpets about "Peace on earth, good will to men," and what is the result?
After two thousand years, the bloodiest war which has yet taken place on earth; waste of treasure beyond counting every day, and waste of something much more precious than material treasure, the precious blood of the best manhood of the world. I have received their broken bodies into my own arms in the front dressing stations; I have consecrated the graveyards where their dear bodies lie. I know that tens of thousands of those who would have been the fathers of the future race of mankind are lying beneath these little crosses in Flanders or Gallipoli, and that many a maiden will die childless to-day, because those who would have been husbands in the fair days of peace are buried now in a soldier's grave.
And all this--and here lies the bitterness of the accusation--started by the great Christian nations of the world. The Mohammedan Turk joins in as the war goes on, but then only under the influence or domination of a Christian Power. "Could you ask," cries the triumphant opponent of the Christian religion, "for a more complete proof of the breakdown of your Christianity than the spectacle of Europe to-day?"
II. It is clear then that we who stand for religion, and especially those of us who stand for the Christian religion, have got our work cut out for us to-day to answer these accusations. I want the men and women whose work lies largely in other spheres to enter into our difficulties. We are asking people not only to pray, but to pray more earnestly and with greater faith and hope; we are not sitting down with Buddhist resignation under the inevitable. "If it rains, it rains, and if it doesn't rain, it doesn't rain," was represented to me as the philosophy of the Indian troops whom I had the honour of entertaining for a week in my grounds at the Coronation of King Edward VII. On the contrary, we are in the midst of a great National Mission of Repentance and Hope; we have the fullest intention of winning the nation to GOD; we are adopting as our text the saying of that grand old man, Lord Roberts, "We have the guns now, and the men and the ammunition; what we want now is _a nation on its knees_."