As Becometh Saints

Ever since the war began, a certain incident, which occurred one Sunday morning a few years ago, has repeatedly come to my mind. I had drifted into a stately old Colonial meeting-house, in the centre of a little city that had been my childhood home. It was very still in the church. The last late-comer had rustled into place, when the preacher rose to speak. He was a man with elements of greatness, grown old in the service of this particular congregation, and there was something like despair in his face as he looked over the church. There were very few present, but they represented the old families of the city, and they were all correctly attired in quiet and conventional clothes, and they were almost all women, and for the most part middle-aged or elderly.

He began abruptly; there was a new note in his voice, and we were all startled into quick attention.

‘If the church-bells had rung an alarm this Sunday morning,’ he said, ‘ for every citizen of our city to come forth to fight and to die for Christ, the streets would be thronged — I have faith to believe that. But they rang for people to come to church, to hear his Gospel, to worship and to pray, and the pews are almost empty, and the streets.’

There was a moment’s pause; then he took up his manuscript, and very quietly preached one of those intellectual and spiritual sermons which only he could write.

I seem to hear the preacher’s voice again in that ringing challenge, whenever I see our boys in khaki, marching and counter-marching on the campus of the little city where I went to church that Sunday. I wonder now, as I wondered then, where the trouble lay, what was wrong. Here was a thoroughly sincere and able man, preaching in a New England city, where, less than a century before, every man, woman, and child came to church, — many of them in this very building,— and the preacher’s despairing appeal reached only a handful. Were wo too comfortable in that quiet place, too conservative and self-complacent? We were not living dangerously, — I could feel certain of that, as I glanced about me, — but there were faces that suggested a phrase I love well: ‘As becometh saints.’ For me, used to another form of worship, there was great charm in the place — the rest and peace and Sunday quiet; the intellectual treat in store; the spiritual help I was almost sure to carry home. But the young men of the city were not there, nor the young women. Why was it?

Is it a pathetic or an inspiring experience to live in two eras, as we, who were born in the latter part of the nineteenth century, arc doing? So many things that happen to-day seem a challenge to our gentle, conservative, middle-aged thinking. We had an ideal of womanhood, — very beautiful and quite unalterable, we believed, — and behold! the modern girl, to shatter all our old conceptions. We readjust our minds to accept the new woman. But there are surely spiritual values that are fixed and certain, and they include Sunday observances and sanctities, and then our splendid young people confuse and confound us by relentlessly staying at home from church. We conceive of sainthood in terms of the non-resistant, martyr type, and as pacifists hurl the whole calendar at our belligerent friends; and suddenly we remember Joan of Arc, clad in shining armor, leading armies.

Did it take the war to show us that we may have been limiting God terribly — we pious, church-going people? Certainly war demands all sorts of readjustments — mental, moral, spiritual. All great catastrophes do that. But war differs from most natural catastrophes, in that it is not over suddenly, but goes on and on, and gives us time to think our way into the heart of the thing. And to some of us a new idea of war and peace, of sanctities and Sunday observances, and of sundry other things, including saints, is slowly beginning to dawn. It is not a very clear idea as yet, but it has to do with the look in the eyes of our boys on their way to France (the very boys who stayed at home from church), serious, purposeful, a little sad. They were going forth to kill, and they did not like it; to be killed, perhaps, and they liked that even less; but they were eager to go. And we have to ask ourselves the question, — we pacifists, — what was wrong with our peace, that going forth to kill had somehow come to seem to the majority right and necessary while staying at home seemed inglorious and wrong?

And now that the war is over, can we ever be just pacifists again, or shall we have learned for the first time, through war, what Pacifism really means? Are all our foundations shaken? Have we nothing fixed or stable left?

There is something left, and at times we almost see what it is — as if a curtain were lifted, and then let down again suddenly. In that fleeting impression have we caught for a moment God’s sense of duration and values? Does He hold human life cheap, and yet care supremely — strange paradox! — for personal life? Is the type of saint of little importance to Him, but the essence of sainthood precious beyond our thinking? Of one thing we may be very sure: ’God makes saints as He chooses,’ and He will take care of what He really values. But for us here and now, we seem to be forever striving to comprehend the Infinite sense of humor of a mind which delights in paradox, and which shatters ruthlessly all our dear little limited ideals, to make room perhaps for his larger vision.

And now, after the war, do we hold this fleeting vision? Some of us, perhaps. And we shall go to church as of old; but we shall not worry over the empty pews. We may find a way of making churchgoing so dangerous that it will appeal even to our young people, and the gospel as thrilling as news from the front, and peace a great adventure. But if we do not, it will be because something holier will take the place of church, and something more significant will have come out of war, than peace as we have known it hitherto.

And we shall certainly enlarge our Calendar of Saints to include a new type — the British Tommy, who goes forth laughing and joking, but without one trace of hate in his heart, to kill or to be killed as God (he calls Him Chance, perhaps) wills it.

‘As becometh saints.’ The sweetfaced ladies in the old church and our British Tommies may not seem to have much in common, but the test of Sainthood is knowing how to die, as well as knowing how to live. From now on, my Calendar of Saints shall include both.