Does God Care?

Manawatu Times, Volume XL, Issue 13948, 29 July 1918, Page 7

Does God Care?

By Hall Caine, in * 1 Sunday Herald.' * A few days ago the Wesleyans of London gathered at their Central Hall to call for intercession on behalf of the nation and its defenders. Their prayers included several forms of petition, and every one of them seemed to me injurious to true religion and harmful to the national spirit. I deplore them deeply, and feel compelled to condemn them completely. The first of the prayers of the Wesleyans was for "deliverance from our traditional sins of drunkenness and pride. " In the abstract, apart from the central purpose of the gathering, and as a general supplication against two besetting human infirmities, no exception, but that of slanderous exaggeration, can be taken to this petition. But it is impossible to take it so. Offered on a day of special intercession for the nation and its defenders it was plainly intended to apply to the war—not as a prayer against one principal cause of our slackness in prosecuting it, but as an effort to probe the mystery of the world’s suffering, and to account to humanity for the purposes of God. THE CRY OF BLEEDING HEARTS. Why does God allow the war to go on ? If He is r a almighty and benefieient Providence, why does He not put an end to this cruel, merciless, meaningless carnival of barbarity f For what reason that is intelligible to the mind, and appreciable to the heart of man, does He permit it that for four awful years the right shoilld be wronged, and the weak and the innocent should suffer intolerable outrages at the hands of the strong and guilty? In the midst of a cataclysm that is shaking the foundation of the world—robbing millions of mothers of their sons, millions of wives of their husbands, and millions of children of their fathers—is God doing anything? If not, why not? Is it because He does not care? Such is the cry hardly daring to become articulate, that has gone, up from the bleeding hearts of suffering people all over the world. And the silent answer of hundreds of millions of humble and reverent souls, confronted by this most dread mystery, has been, and will continue to be. "I do not know; I do not see; only God knows and sees; and before His awful Will I bow and wait.’ ' "MAN HAS SINNED; THEBEFORE * But throgh all the ages there has been a typo of the religious mind w'hich has ben unable to maintain this attitude of devout humanity. It must reconcile God's ways with man, and being forbidden by the cardinal doctrine of its faith to believe that God docs nothing, still less that he does not care, it falls back to the explanation that, the evils..which are permitted-to; befall ‘humanity are God's Jchastisement of man for his transgressions. Man has sinned; therefore God wills it that he must suffer. If the suffering is to be removed, the sin must first be wiped away. , . _ ■ ,■ That has been the meaning of thousands of pious pilgrimages in time of plague, and days of fire famine, and slaughter, and (whatever other words surround it) it is the central motive of the prayer of the London Wesleyans at .Central Hall to-day, when, in the face of the tragedy of the war, they call on God for "deliverance from our traditional sins of drunkenness and pride." TREASON AND COWARDICE. But think of the impiety of it! The treason and the cowardice of it! Put into plain words, it means that not German treachery, and the spirit of a baser plot than had ever before been hatched by cruel greed and heartloss ambition against the peace and welfare of the world, but our own sins were the true authors of this war. It means that in punishment of our British drunkenness and pride God has permitted Germany to fall on our country, to fall on Belgium, too, and destroy it; to fall on Serbia also, and leave it desolate. It means that in order to purge us of sins that date back to old time, the Almighty has willed it that with every barbarity of warfare our enemies shall scourge us —that our young men who have done no wrong, shall die on the battlefield, and our little children, and the children of our brother-nation across the ocean, shall be drowned in the open sea. THE HUN AS GOD'S INSTRUMENT. Oh, I well know with what theological conjuring and juggling a certain type of the religious mind has throughout the Christian ages made efforts to escape from such manifest deductions. There is no escape from them. If the German is God’s instrument for the chastisement of our sins, why should we resist him? If the war is God's punishment of our transgressions, our duty is to submit to it, as the Christian of the dark ages submitted in helpless blindness to famine and plague. "Moa culpa" should be our ouly cry. To charge the war to our national sins, and to pray for deliverance from them as a. means of propitiating the Almighty that He may end the horror, is to belittle God, to degrade man, and to weaken our will to overcome our enemy. Therefore ( however sincerely intended) it is impiety, profanity, blasphemy and treason. The Wesleyans of Central Hall did not intend any of these things. Their sincerity and devotion are entirely above question. But their prayers do little justice to either, and none at all to their intelligence. Brains,

Wesleyans, brains! For God’s sake, in this hour of peril, let ns have not only your piety but your brains. PACIFISTS AND PRAYER. I fully expoet., and indeed already know, that an attempt will bo made to prove that the prayer in question meant something less and perhaps quite other than I. say; but lest there should bo any unworthy effort to escape from the only logical interpretation, look at the. terms of this second petition, which agree with the spirit of the first and carry it to its natural conclusion: “That God will give us a pcaec that will not mean the breaking down of any other nation, nor the

destruction and humiliation of anj people. ’ ’ We have sinned, and, as the jusl punishment of God, we have suffered Lot us not, therefore, seek to break down, destroy, or humiliate the instru ments of God’s revenge. Now, here is the authentic voice oi the shallowest and most mischievous "pacifism" that masquerades under the face of the sun. If I believed that the Wesleyans fully realised the whole dangerous and damnable disloyalty of it, I should say (though some of them are among my life-long friends) that their proper place, in this hour of the world's travail and agony is not the .Central Hall, but the inside of an internment camp. I cannot believe they do. THE RELIGION OF THE SWORD. The surface meaning of the words of this second prayer is almost entirely without value. No sane man, as Mr Balfour said, desires to break up and destroy the German nation. No rational being expects that, whatevery victory comes to us, we shall be able to carry on the world In future as if one hundred millions of our fellow creatures did not exist in it, or existed only under our feet, and so far we are all pacifists, as the Founder of our Faith was a pacifist. But what we do desire and expect is to destroy the evil system which threatens to destroy humanity, civilisation, liberty, morality religion and everything w r e hold dear. That evil thing is gathered up and embodied in the German military system, which (as the greatest of Germans, Goethe, shows) takes a good man and turns him into a brute, which encases society in a coarse shell, which transforms justice into harshness and cruelty, which enthrones brazen necessity as the only goddess to be worshipped, which sets force above faith, and Corsica above Calvary which blunts the impulse of mercy, and reduces the conception of humanity to ruin. A TRAVERSTY OF THE WORLD'S TRAVAIL: Against this evil thing, the. free nations of the world are waging war, and (cruelly hard as it is to say so) they cannot cease until it is broken down and destroyed. It must die if we arc to live. There can be no quarter shown to it. For no lower end can we justify to our bruised and bleeding souls all the sacrifices we are making of our bravest and best. To say that our young men must die at the hands of the Germans to appease God's wrath against our traditional drunkenness and pride is blasphemy. To say that we must not pray for a peace that will break the idol of our enemy is treason. Which of us who is unable, by reason of age or weakness, to take an active part in the war will dare go to the feet of God with that prayer on his lips? But that the youth and hope of the human family, as God gives them strength, should lay down their lives in an effort to slay the enemy of mankind, and that we, who are old, should stand by with aching hearts * and see <it ‘done,. that is -right and as God himself could will it. Let us, then, in our days of intercession, put aside these "defeatist" doctrines, which tend to sap away the national spirit, and thereby to lose,, hot win, the warU Wc have had too many of them in too many of the churches- They are unworthy of a great religious denomination which for more than a century has been eminent in piety and illustrious in loyalty. Wesley himself would have had nothing to say to them. HALL CAINE.