THIS is a favourite expression these days. Our leading statesmen and high ecclesiastical dignitaries have it often in their speeches. After the War is over a new world is to be built, the civilized nations are to make sure that they will lay the gaunt spectre of war so effectively that it will never trouble the world again. Foolish dream! What a shallow view it takes of human nature and of the heart of man—that heart which is laid bare in God’s Word as deceitful and desperately wicked. We need not recall to the minds of many of our readers that we had the same kind of talk over twenty years ago. This country was to be made a land for heroes. These empty speeches came to nothing and we are certain that all the forecasts made at present will have the same ending unless Britain mends her ways and turns to the Lord. Such a sentiment may appear to multitudes as the idle vapourings of men whose outlook is narrowed by the biblical conception of right order and government. Nevertheless we have seen enough in our own lifetime to shake forever our confidence in man’s proposals, works, and anticipations carried out without respect to God’s will. For years the minds of the civilized nations were trained to regard education, the arts, music, science and philosophy as the summit on which they should fix their eyes. That ideal came down with a tremendous crash in 1914. If the eyes of the civilized nations are not now opened to see the rottenness of the foundation on which this boasted structure was erected they may be before this struggle is over. Men express horror at the barefaced covenant-breaking of the German leaders but if they had watched how German theological teaching was undermining the assured truths of heaven they need not be surprised at what is happening now. God is not mocked and what Germany sowed for years this generation is now reaping and it is a harvest of desperate sorrow. Our own country, of all the other countries, had its hand deeply dyed in this crime against the God of Truth and His Holy Word. During the last War associations were formed for the purpose of refusing to buy German goods. No such associations were formed in England or Scotland declaring to the world that English and Scottish theologians were for ever done with the God-dishonouring, higher critical theology of Germany. Our statesmen and ecclesiastical leaders may not have seen this great evil or if they saw it they shut their eyes to it but what was sown was to be reaped and God watched over the evil and brought it upon us. After all what is the breaking of treaties between nations compared with the ruthless undermining of the integrity of the Word of God who cannot lie. No doubt there are many other sins of which we are guilty as a nation, and perhaps more public, but the sin we have referred to is not, we are afraid, one of the sins which we would find in a catalogue of the sins of Germany and Britain. We are not to be understood by what we have said that we have doubts about the righteousness of our cause in this conflict. We have no hesitation in affirming the justice of that cause but that does not necessarily mean that those who have a righteous cause are righteous in God’s sight.
If a new order of things is to be built up honouring and glorifying to God it certainly will not be built up on the foundation of the religious views of the Prime Minister, a Unitarian, Lord Halifax, an Anglo-Catholic, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, whose ritualistic and religious views are far astray from the truth but upon those sure foundations set before us in God’s Word. Material greatness and the raising of the standard of comfort for the people in this country may be quite commendable and a praiseworthy work for statesmen, but if they ignore the foundation on which all true greatness rests, a right attitude to God, the righteousness which alone exalteth a nation, it will not receive the only blessing that is worth having. It is to be feared that in the building of the new world which is in the statesmen’s mind such a vision does not come within their view. In the past God raised up true patriots who added to their love of country love to God and placed the claims of God in the forefront and the claims of their country second. Such were John Knox, the noble Reformer of a Kingdom, and William, Prince of Orange. These were men who moved kingdoms and set them on a basis that stood the shock of ages even to the present time. No doubt both Scotland and the Netherlands have travelled far from the course mapped out to them by their great leaders. Would that Scotland and Holland had a Knox and a Prince of Orange to help them in these troubled days!
The efforts to build a new world at Geneva and Locarno ended in a miserable fiasco. The whole foundation of these efforts rested on pious ideals which were unworkable in a fallen world. Huge sums of money which could have been better used for the help of our own country were thrown without hesitation into the maelstrom of the exchequer of the League of Nations and what have we received in return for it?
Perhaps in no country more than our own was the great and important doctrine of the crown rights of Jesus Christ so clearly set forth and so faithfully contended for. Christ’s place in the Church and in the nation were doctrines which were clearly set forth by John Knox, Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, George Gillespie, Samuel Rutherford, Richard Cameron, Donald Cargill, James Renwick and the Disruption Fathers. In the building up of a new world these great leaders in our Zion insisted on the foundations being cleared before any building began. They called the nation to repentance with a trumpet call. They would not begin to build with unsuitable material. During the first and second reformations there was abundance of material but the great leaders of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland were exceedingly careful as to the material they used in building a strong kingdom in Scotland, hence their many divisions which owing to excess of zeal in some cases led them into harmful courses, yet behind all these divisions there was the supreme desire that the Lord’s cause should be built with the best material. It is useless to think of a new world as long as the people of these Islands remain in their present mood. We have to a deplorable extent gone away from God, and nothing but a revival from heaven will bring us back. As far as Scotland is concerned there are too many shipwrecked schemes lying on the shores of time to remind us of the utter futility of man’s efforts. Rededication Movements, Forward Movements, and Calls to Religion have all proved themselves to be human efforts to do what the Holy Ghost alone can do. When He is come He will convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. It is His coming that we need, and when He comes we will not need eloquent speeches by statesmen or ecclesiastical leaders for the people will be moved before Him as the corn is moved before the wind. When we hear our statesmen and leading ecclesiastics calling on the nation to repent we will have some hopes of a better day and a better world. We must ever keep before us the truth that unless the Lord build the house they labour in vain who build it (Ps. cxxvii. 1).