“Who am I,” he said in bitter self-humiliation, “that I should judge my comrades? How little I knew myself.”
“A man of God,” his superintendent had said in his last letter to him. Yes, truly a man of God! A MAN not God! A MAN not to sit in God's place in judgment upon his fellow sinners, but to show them God, their Father.
Barry thought of the frequent rebukes he had administered to the officers and men for what he considered to be their sins. He groaned aloud.
“God will forgive me, I know,” he said. “But will they?”
He tried to recall what the burden of his message to his battalion had been during these past months, but to him there came no clear and distinct memory of aught but warnings and denunciations, with reference to what he judged to be faulty in their conduct. To-day it seemed to him both sad and terrible.
How had he so failed and so misconceived the Master's plain teaching? He moved among sinners all His days, not with denunciations in His heart or voice, but only with pity and love.
“Be not anxious,” He had said. “Consider the birds of the air. Not one of them falleth to the ground without your Father. How much more precious are you than the birds.”
What a message for men going up to face the terrors and perils of the front line. “Be not anxious!”
“I was afraid,” his father had said to him. That to him was inconceivable. That that gallant spirit should know terror seemed to him impossible. Yet even he had said, “I was afraid.” And for the loneliness, what a message he now had. In their loneliness men cried out for the presence of a friend, and the Master had said:
“When ye pray, pray to your Father. Your Father knoweth. When ye pray, say, 'Our Father'!” And he had missed all this. What a mess he had made of his work! How sadly misread his Master's teaching and misinterpreted his Master's spirit!
Barry looked down upon the grave at his feet.
“But you knew, dad, you knew!” he whispered.
For the first time since he had become a chaplain, he thought of his work with gratitude and eagerness. He longed to see his men again. He had something to tell them. It was this: that God to them was like their fathers, their mothers, their brothers, their friends; only infinitely more loving, and without their faults.