Religious Life

Southland Times, Issue 24651, 24 January 1942, Page 8

Religious Life

By

ICHTHUS

Is There Someone Or Something That Looks After Us?

A few days ago I had a long letter from a young soldier in Libya. He has served in all the fighting in Greece and Libya, and though only 23, is now a battle-worn, veteran soldier—like so many of our young New Zealand lads. He wrote sadly and in a mood of deep thoughtfulness, for though he himself came through the thick of the recent fighting unscathed, his closest friend was killed in action. He described his search among the fallen till at last he found the body of his friend. It makes a man think,” he wrote. “We in the artillery were in the thick of the fighting all through. We were sniped, shelled and bombed incessantly. All around us, day after day, trucks were blown up or set on fire, but our truck with its team of four men came through without even a scratch on the paint. When one thinks of that hail of fire and flying missies and metal fragments, and how a deflection of one of them by a fraction of an inch would make all the difference, one cannot help wondering a lot why and how we came through untouched while others did not. Is it luck, or fate, or is there SOMEONE or SOMETHING that looks after us?” He wanted to know what I think about it. It is a question as old as human life, but it touches many of us deeply just now. I do not pretend that I can answer it. But as an older man, who has seen something of life, including the last war, I have thought much and deeply upon it. I will try to put down today some of my own personal conclusions.

LUCK People who are not accustomed or trained to think deeply, and who are content with an easy answer that saves them the trouble of thinking any more, say it is luck or chance. The man in the street, for the most part, probably closes the question in that way. And on a superficial view there does often seem to be an element of luck and chance in life. But it will not stand looking into. The more we study this strange, mysterious world in which our lot is cast, and the more we build up, fragment by fragment, real knowledge of it, the more clear and certain it becomes that it is not a world of luck and chance, but of law and order, of cause and effect. “For every event in nature there is an efficient cause,” the scientist declares. The astronomer does not find that luck and chance rule the movement of the planets and suns, or those of the earth itself. The fluctuations of weather, which bear upon us farmers so closely and continually, are not due to luck or chance, but to quite definite causes. When a horse, even a rank outsider, wins a race, and a man makes mon?y out of it, he talks about his luck. But it was not luck. That horse did not win by chance, but as a result of a quite definite cause, or combination of causes, and the man did not put his money on that horse by chance. He did so as a result of quite definite causes, which may have been weak enough in knowledge, skill, or judgment. But they were not luck. Ido not find luck and chance operating in my garden, or breeding of sheep, or growing of corn. I find definite causes, I find law and order. I do not suppose that everyone, especially the thoughtless, will agree with me. But my personal conclusion is that we can rule out luck and chance. I am satislied that actually, in spite of surface appearances, there is no such thing. And when, on the battlefield, one is taken and another left, I cannot quieten my mind and my heart by saying; “It is just one s luck.” I do not believe that it is. It is due to quite definite causes. Those causes may be very complicated and intricate, and go so far back as to bewilder our finite minds. But the point just now is that, anyway, they are not luck, and they are not chance. FATE Other people will say that it is fate. In the last war where the casualty rate was so enormously higher than it has been in the present conflict—except, perhaps, on the Russian front—it was commonly held by soldiers that one’s destiny was in the hands of late. “Every bullet has its billet. H your name is on it, it will get you, they would say. Quite likely, the same mood tends to prevail amongst many of the fighting men today. But is this due to thought, to careful examination and consideration of the facts, or is it not rather a popular mood, the result of feeling rather than reason? Is it not a blind conclusion, practically a refusal to try to think where thinking is so hard and painful? I think, also, that it may be an involuntary and subconscious way in which nature tends to arm us from fear and anxiety, and that troublesome gift, imagination. It may be a form of escape. But when you come to study the facts closely fate does not come out much better than luck or choice. A very' great amount of the human slaughter in the last war was not due to fate at all, but to the failure of military commanders to grasp new facts in warfare. General Seely, who served in the South African War, and commanded in the Great War, is very scathing on this point. Tf infantry are called on to face tanks today, or if they are not given adequate air support, their destruction is not due to fate, but to folly, or ignorance, or some necessity beyond the'control of the high command.

When a mine sinks a ship that is not fate; it is enemy action which has achieved its goal. When we bring off an action like that against the enemy we do not call it fate. I do not find that my gardening, or my farming, or my domestic concerns, or the commercial life of the community, are ruled by a blind, unreasoning fate. On the contrary, I find that they are not. By intelligence, and knowledge, and careful preparation, I can set in motion causes that bring to pass the ends I desire. Of course, if by fate we only mean to say that what happens to us is in part at least in the hands of a power outside ourselves, that is manifestly true. I think we must all see and acknowledge that. But that is not what is usually meant by fate. What is meant is that our fate is sealed, one way or the other, by a blind, unreasoning fiat, and that that is all there is about it. That, I say, is not true. It does not meet the facts.

DOES SOMEONE LOOK AFTER US? This whole question is a very deep and difficult one. I do not suggest that there is any easy answer. Indeed, I very much doubt if any answer can be given that will clear up every difficulty. There are a great many questions about the fundamental things of human life of which that must be said. But there is an answer which meets the facts better than any other, and which brings immeasurable comfort to the heart, and inspiration to the mind and the will. It is the answer of Christian faith. We all, and those we love, and the whole world of events, are in the all-wise hands of a loving Father. There is a Someone or a Something that looks after us. “Not a sparrow falleth to the ground,” said Jesus, “without your Father. The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” For myself, I can only say that that is my own most precious faith and hope. I have found, and I still find, that I and mine are cared for in a most marvellous way. And I believe that the same is true of others. .Questions that are

insoluble to me I am well content to leave in those All-wise, All-Loving hands. “Oh, yes,” some bereaved mother may say, “but my boy has fallen.” I know, and I think I understand how she feels. But, however great our pain, dare we conclude that it would be better for us to live if He ordains us to die? If he should decree that I, or one of mine, should not continue here, that, too, is well. Shall we accept life at His hands, and not death? Indeed, of one thing I grow more convinced as life goes on: We make too much of death. It is not so desperate, so final, a matter as it seems to us. One day we shall look back and wonder that we were so afraid and so broken-hearted. The lines of George Macdonald make a fitting close: “I know not where His islands lift The'ir fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.”