No. TWO.
(Continued from page 191)
My most marked recollection of both you and your sermon is taken from a church parade somewhere down on the battle-swept Somme. It was an ordinary church parade, but two things make it specially memorable. It was a bitterly cold day with snow on the ground and you read your sermon.
Of course it snowed at other times and in other places in France, and of course other ministers as well as you read their sermons. But something impressed both these circumstances on my mind. Well do I recall how miserable we were. Snow on the ground well over our boots, a biting wind, and an unsheltered spot were things not very conducive to comfort were they? Added to these discomforts we had to listen to your reading, or rather mumbling over numerous pages. Our patience flowed out as our misery filled in, and for once we wished that we were padres. We could then keep our feet and hands warm by movement.
I wanted to omit the telling of what was, for me, an extra misery but I cannot do so. I feel that I must tell you the truth. The men were miserable beyond endurance and do you know what they were doing? Silently yet forcibly and audibly they were cursing. Yes sir, they cursed the padre, the sermon, your papers, the sergeant-major, the weather, church parades in general and this one in particular.
And your text? A grand text truly. “I was not disobedient to the Heavenly vision.” Paul said that on one occasion. I wondered then and I wonder now what Paul would have said about your interpretation of it. According to you, all men who had joined up had a Heavenly vision. Every soldier received as clear and as real a vision to come to France and to fight for his country as Paul had to go and to preach the Gospel. You tried to make angels of the men but you failed. They—well I have told you what they were doing.
Then you began to speak of another vision. The vision of the home-land after the War. As a politician’s vision it was not very bad. No slums, higher wages, a better chance for all and so on. You preached a “social Gospel” and the returning Tommies were to be the preachers of it. I am sure that you thought you had something to interest the men that day, and that you thought that you were paying them well for their long, motionless attention in the cold. Well, so far as I could judge your imposing sheaf of papers fell as flat as a dud “Whiz-bang.”
I heard no one discuss whether you were a saint or a preacher, but I did hear, however, one man say to another, “I wonder what that bloke is in politics,” but that was as far as any interest went.
Well what do you think some of us would have rejoiced to hear that day? Yes, cold or no cold, actually we would have rejoiced. Seeing that you had to speak about houses why did you not begin to tell us about the “House of many mansions?” You knew quite well that you were addressing soldiers, and that some of them would never occupy any house whatever under any new political scheme; that in fact the only house many of us were sure of getting was one smaller than the proverbial “six feet by two.” Seeing that some of us were shortly to die and all of us were in circumstances full of death, do you not think that your sermon, to say the least, was most unsuitable? What we needed was, not to be told about dream houses to be secured in some dreamy future, but of that “City whose builder and maker is God,” that city “Eternal in the Heavens.”
If you had only addressed the men firmly but graciously something on this fashion—”Well men, I speak to you as one sinner to another. It seems to me that our most urgent necessity at the present is to be prepared for death. We are living very near to eternity, so near in fact that it is hardly worth our while building on anything here below. It is no use our speaking of what we are to do after the war for “after the war” comes to us daily. Death finishes our concerns with the war and this life. How thankful we ought to be that there is another world, a city in which there is no war.” Then in reliance on the Spirit of God why did you not bring this wonderful city near to us? Why did you not press it on our attention? Why did you not take fire with its glory and certainty? Why did you not speak so as to make it most desirable to the men? War conditions were for the moment your best ally. You would have got a hearing. Then with what joy you might have told us of God’s readiness to bestow all things needful for entry into His city. Who wants to hear about increase of wages when everything within him cries aloud for the forgiveness of his sins. Slum clearance! Stop it padre! Why man, our eyes were straining to see the walls of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Some of us were at the very gates of that city, others would fain have known the way thither, while others had their earthly plans and prospects so shattered that they were beginning to turn wistful eyes towards a better world. As this world was not clear to them; they did not know what they wanted, but God put a glorious opportunity into your hands. You were given the work of making Heaven and the way to it a real and practical thing in their thinking. But you failed them, you failed in your calling, you failed to your God.
Why were you so indefinite about these solemn matters? Is a “whizz-bang” indefinite, or a six-inch shell or a machine-gun bullet? Are the commands, ‘Advance,’ ‘Forward,’ indefinite? I think not. If this was the best your pen and paper could produce I think that you might well have saved yourself the trouble of crossing the channel for all the good they did.
Am I being ungrateful? I have no wish to be so. But on that cold morning on the Somme I went through agony. I wanted to call out. A voice so forcible, so urgent, so tremendous, struggled to make itself heard. I felt the force of it, I felt as if it would break my breast in pieces and striking the heavens above rend them in twain. “Oh, padre,” it said, “padre, PADRE, stop your talk about wages and houses. We want you to tell us about the mansions above. By the Bible before you, by the God above you, by your profession, by your commission to preach the Gospel, by your love for our souls, do tell us in a few but very exact words how we can get to Heaven. This time next week some of us will be beyond knowing it. Tell us it now, tell us it quickly tell us it so clearly that it will be impossible for us to miss our way.” But to this, the agonising and final appeal of lost souls already struggling amidst the shadows of death you were silent. You set yourself up as a leader to life. You turned out to be a guide to death. I ask you, how can I be grateful to you?
No. THREE.
I saw you only once, but I hope to see you again. The place we met in was most suitable indeed. It was in a little church in Germany and it was while we were in the army of occupation shortly before I was ‘demobbed.’ A little Lutheran church, so plain and unostentatious yet so clean and serviceable; so full of light and good air; not a dark nook anywhere and not a whiff of mustiness. The twelve Apostles and other saints were at their best and most congenial task—effacing themselves in the house of God. They did not stand in the windows obscuring God’s full light from the worshippers. Nor was there an organ to divert the praises of the congregation back on itself. A change indeed after the many formal parades in the open.
I found myself wondering if the preaching would be in the line of Luther since everything else seemed to suggest it. Then you stepped into the pulpit. Tall, thin, flat of chest; glasses and with a stubby moustache, serious but friendly and warm in expression. I cannot soon forget you.
Your text was, “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” You spoke of sin of nature, sin of practice, sin of civilian life, and sin of army life; sin in its guilt and sin in its power; of the results and the wages of sin. Yes you had a lot to say about the sin of the world, but then it was always with a right hearty invitation to behold God’s Lamb, God’s provision for taking it away. How I drank it in. No beholding of the Lamb meant no taking away of sin, but to every beholder was given the assurance that the beholder’s sin had been taken away. That was your theme, and oh, it was a good day for needy souls. The thing rang true to the Bible, it rang true to human life and need. It rang true to the glorious Gospel with which you were entrusted. It was in the line of the apostles and it was in the line of Luther.
I have just looked up a sermon on this text by Spurgeon and I have found this. “If as a poor guilty sinner I leave my sin upon Christ the Lamb of God I leave it where God has hidden me cast it; namely on the appointed scapegoat, I rest on a sacrifice which God has ordained of old to be a sacrifice for sin. God’s appointment is the guarantee of the acceptance of everyone that believeth in Christ “This was the point you insisted on most. Yes padre, you gave such a sermon that day that a man could hopefully ask a blessing upon.
My only regret was that we had heard so little from men like you throughout the war. I tried hard to see you again, walking quite a distance, but it was not to be. I never met you. But I am sure that we shall meet. Unknown drawer at the well, a thirsty soul in passing salutes you and gives you this as a token until we meet again, “I thank God on every remembrance of you.”—A 4th Seaforth.