SPIRITUAL REVIVAL

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 107, 6 May 1916, Page 16

SPIRITUAL REVIVAL

IN ADMIRAL'S QUEST,

"It' has been left to an Admiral (writes the New Statesman) to play the part of a Hebrew prophet in regard to the war. In a letter to a meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, Sir David Beatty wrote :— " 'England still remains to be taken out of the stupor of self-satisfaction and complacency in which her great and. flourishing condition has . steeped her, and until she can be stirred out of this condition, and until religious revival takes place at home,, just so long will the war continue. When she can look out, on the future with humbler eyes and a prayer on her lips, then we can begin to count the days towards the end. Your society is helping to this end, and helping to bring the war' to an end, a successful end, and without success it cannot end.' '"'Surely,' writes Sir David Beatty, 'the Almighty God does not intend this war to be just a hideous fracas, a blood, drunken orgy. There must be purpose in it all; improvement must be' bom out of it.' This (comments the New .Statesman) is rather an expression of hope that the war will have good effects than a certainty that it must. To the militarist like Treitschke war is a 'drastic medicine' which can result only in good. To more religions minds like Sir David Beatty's it is rather in the nature of an occasion of spiritual crisis which may cither be used to great, ends or ruinously neglected. He has undoubtedly a notable example in the Athenians of a people who threw their city to the dogs because they could not lay aside their private greeds and suspicions and hatreds and discontents, either for heaven's sake or their city's.

"Admiral Beatty definitely asserts.that' without a religious revival, shaking England out oE her 'stupor of self-satisfac-tion and complacency,' the present war cannot come to an end.

"How much chance is there of such a revival taking place in England? Some people declare that there are already signs of it in France. Others insist that it is going on in Russia. But it is diffi. cult to estimate either the extent or the nature, and especially difficult .to estimate the future) possibilities, of such -a revival.

"A certain number of people will no doubt become religious for three years or the duration of tfiVwar.

"But will the passage of the war leave England and the rest of Europe of a soberer mind, passionately in quest of truth for truth's sake, seeing life in some measure under the- comparison of eternity? It seems quite possible that the immense tragic character of the war will only* begin to break on the human imagination when the war is over.

"Even if it is difficult to foresee a religious revival on the lines prophesied by Sir David Beatty, one may expect with a certain amount of confidence after the end of the war a great movement towards a better human society, juster, bolder, and more generous than has yet been known," continues the New Statesman. "But that, too, like a religious revival, involves a change of the heart, and the heart is a notoriously disorderly and wandering thing. It is apparently quite possible to change it, but what prophet has revealed the secret of preventing it from changing back again? Utopia itself would live under the constant threat of this danger.

. "Perhaps this would make even Utopia interesting.".