THEOLOGICAL HALL

Evening Star, Issue 16990, 12 March 1919, Page 7

THEOLOGICAL HALL

OPENING OP THE 1919 SESSION.

ADDRESS ON 'RELIGION AT THE FRONT."

A service in Ross Chapel opened the 1919 session of the Presbyterian TheoloI gical Hall at Knox College yesterday afternoon. A number of visitors attended; and it was to them a pleasure to see the ; spacious grounds, to enter the serene establishment, and to participate in the simple ceremony. The Rev. W. Gray Dixon; Moderator of the General Assembly, presided, and conducted the service, and the Rev. H. H. Barton, convener of the Theological Hall ■Committee, read the lessons (Ephesians vi., from the Bth verse). Tho hymns were ' 0 God of Bethel' and ' Fight the Good Fight.' Chaplain-captain H. W. Burridge, of St. Paul's, Invercargill, gave the address, his subject being ' Religion at the Front.' He said that after the better part of three years he had the honor of serving at one of the New Zealand bases, and in one way and another he had seen something of nearly everything relating to*his duties. It would have been a waste of his time if he had not brought back some impressions that would be of use to the Church at large. One had to be careful about impressions gathered under war conditions. Army conditions did not encourage the men to talk about relicion, and our New Zealandera were distinctively silent. It would be easy to generalise falsely. -There was no such person as an average New Zealand soldier in regard to religion. War was an exhibition of the power of sheer materialism, and so little was to be seen of anything but that power that unless a chaplain guarded himself against the influence he was likely to become simply a kind of holy grocer, ministering to animal wants. The tendency was to grow pessimistic. The chaplain found it hard to condemn men for breaking out when he knew what horrors they had passed through. It was easy to lapse into something like atheism. The war was the very fiercest test of religion. All organisations had by it been tested as never before. And the testing was not yet over. Very much had been scrapped, and we had not seen the end of the scrapping. The people here and elsewhere would have to face a new order of things. He had noted the effects of war upon the individual character—how it forced character into the open and showed the eternal opposition between black and white. He had observed, also, how soldiers on service were inclined morally to fall back on their supports. Their supports were very often Home traditions, the recollection of mother, wife, or sweetheart. Sometimes the support was a definite Christian profession ; sometimes it was a man's church. These influences were tho stronger in companionship. Many men, standing alone In their tents, had practically no such support to fall back on. It was a surprise to see that few, comparatively, went down morally when set free by holiday from the rigid discipline; and he „had seen how tho influence of one man in a tent, standing for the right, acted upon the others. He would catalogue some of the things that had melted in the crucible of the war. The religion that was based on convention, or custom, or emotion—such a religion would not endure the monotony of war service, the lack oi privacy, and other hostile influences. A certain traditional idea of God—the idea that was largely Jewish, the idea of God the Invisible King—that had been much weakened. It seemed to be prevalent, but it would not star.d the test the men applied themselves in their questionings as to why. if God was supreme, He did not intervene. They argued that since He did not intervene there must bo a personal Devil of great strength. Thero was need for the chaplains to stress the New Testament God —the God that sympathised with men and had Himself suffered. Religion based upon material sentiment also went by the board, and in this connection he mentioned thai only a few hymns could be sung at the field services, many of them not being suitable to the conditions. Anything like a revival was hard to get. Ho saw only one, and that was at Salisbury, and not amongst the New Zealanders, but amongst the English troops, who were more easily affected 1 . Denominational barriers were broken down everywhere in actual service, and the constant association of all sorts of Protestants would doubtless holp to some extent the proposals for church vnion. Personal prayer was rare at the front. Those men who prayed in time of imminent danger seemed to regard the act as a kind of mascot. Scripture-read-ing, he found, was mostly desultory and unprofitable; in fact, he gave up giving out Testaments A sort of fatalism was common. 'lf my name is on the bullet I shall go out; if it isn't I'm all right." That was a common way of stating the view. If one could join this fatalism to the fact that He who 'guides the bullet is He who heals the broken-hearted and also He that counts the stars —if the_ chaplain could put that combination into the thoughts of the men he would be showing their, the full cyclo of the Providence as revealed, in the Bible. We had to face the truth that in war the standards of morality become weakened. Our men saw the standard in Egypt., the standard in France, the standard m London as brought" down by the war; they compared those standards with our own, and heard them defended, and these observations left an influence. It was no use shutting our eyes to all these and other results of the war. But it would be a mistake to suppose that everything good had failed in this terrific fire/ Many things in war brought one to the thought that perhaps the soldier J was getting nearer to the heart of true religion. For example, he had seen Christian qualities displayed under stress by men who in creed were frankly pagan. He never before saw such selflessness and true comradeship. These distinctly Christian virtues were at their very beet; and if- Christian ministers could hold those qualities before the men, and prove that they reached their apex in Jesus Christ, a great deal would be accomplished as the men came back. He feared that the splendid comradeship of tho army would be lost in civil life. He thought that our men would miss it in the church. It would pay to leave one's studies now and then and walk with the men down the street. It should be remembered, too, that a good soldier was unswervingly loyal to a good | leader, and the ministers must preach tho < Christianity that brought in persona! a-lle- j giance. They should call to adventure for the Kingdom of God. Another thing that survived was the belief in a future life. That belief had been strengthened. The power of Jesus Christ to hold a man in life and in death had also been proved. He believed that a great feeling of gratitude to God for being spared would quicken the religious epirit in many men after the war, and that their world-wide experiences would excite their intere&t in such things as foreign missions. At the conclusion of the address votes of thanks to the speaker and of congratulation to Br Dickie on his recent academic j honors were carried unanimously.