To-Day’s Great Discovery

Huntly Press and District Gazette, Volume 4, 22 January 1915, Page 2

To-Day’s Great Discovery

(From “The Scotsman.”) While the thing is fresh in my mind I will try to put it down on paper, the increditable thing that has happened in our parish. Long years of age dimmed our vision. Those who had six whole days in the week to devote to their own pleasure began to devote the seventh also to the same end. The day of peace was becoming a day of unrest. Thus it was when, with the | suddenness of a lightning flash; the incredible overtook us. If only one could put it into words ! But words can never express this sudden meeting of man and God when that meeting is last expected. It was heralded by the booming of guns across the sea. It was war. All over the seas death would soon be riding on the billows. Faces became stern. Good-byes were spoken. Ah! that word " Good-bye,” which we hear every day, and which, like those old coins which have passed from hand to hand so long until at last the image and super scription are gone, had lost all trace of its original meaning, retaining nothing but a faint aroma of courtesy, which sometimes vanished in the inflection of the voice, until the word became only a discourteous dismissal —that word was born for us anew. We heard it on the lips of mothers clinging to the hands of their sons who were summoned away to join their regiments, and as the white lips said “ Good-bye ” to those whose blood was to water the fair fields of France, we suddenly realised what it meant. The word, meaningless yesterday, to-day expressed the greatest wish that the lips of man can utter —God be with thee. Then, when the harvest was ripening on the slopes and the drum sounded “ Come,” and the young and the strong went forth with a smile to the great harvesting of death, Jwe learned again the meaning of a phrase. But we were yet to learn the meaning of a word. THE MEANING OF A WORD. It was when the dusk sank into the deep night that the word arose high in the firmament of life and burned red into our souls. And that word was God. It seemed incredible to us that we should need that old word. We were so powerful and so rich. Our faith was strong, but it was in the reeking tube and the smoking shard, and in tlie number of our dreadnoughts. Then all things seemed to fail us. A nightmare seemed to fall on us —a nightmare which lifted not night nor day. Our soldiers were driven back, back, back. They fought by day and marched by night, and we heard in the night watches the beating of their weary feet, bloodstained. Was there to be no end to that tramp, tramp of men yielding before death. Was the Empire reared by the heroism of generations to crumble under our feet ? The ghastly deeds of shame —were they to come to our very doors ? We looked at our children and they could not understand the light in our eyes. These deeds of hell —they might occur oven now under shadow of our hills. It was then that the word began to blaze in the heavens. And tlie word was —- God. PRAYER— WHAT IS IT. We have built a new church in our parish. But the desire to worship was dying of attrition. Then suddenly the new church was filled to the door. Those who never before had come down tlie steep brae when the bell was ringing were sitting here and there just as if they had been there every Sunday. In the pew in front of me sat a burly man with a head like a dome. He never came to church. When I met him he would stand for an hour in tlie lane among the hawthorns explaining his views. Prayer was mere superstition. Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the universe in Iftheir grasp. To ask that these laws should be altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to ask that the universe might be shattered. Prayer was immoral, tlie asking for what could not be granted, and what lie knew could uot be granted. If lie went to church it would bo hypocrisy on his part. And yet he sat there in front of me with a hymn book which lie picked up from the shelf at tlie door. “BREAK DOWN THEFIERCE POWER OF OUR ENEMIES.” The minister began to pray for the King’s forces “ on the sea, on the land, and in the air. ” Break thou down the fierce j power of our enemies,” cried tlie minister suddenly, ‘ that with ; full hearts we limy praise Thee, j tlie God of our fathers. ” A I great hush fell on tlie crowded ! church.' The shut eyes saw the I red battlefields, with the lines swaying to and fro, while the shrapnel burst and tlie aeroplanes j whirred in the smoke of the I

cannon. He began to speak of the stricken hearts at home, of fathers and mothers to whom their sons would never come hack, of women in empty houses with their husbands laid in nameless graves, of little children who would never learn to say “ Father. ” It was then my friend stifled a sob. There was something after all. Something greater than cosmic forces, greater than law—with an eye to pity and an arm to save. There was God. And my friend’s son was with the famous regiment that was swaying to and fro, grappling with destiny. He was helpless—and there was only God to appeal to. There comes an hour in life when the heart realises that instinct is mightier far than that of logic, which is the last refuge of the feeble. There came like the sudden lift of a curtain the vision of a whole nation —nay, of races girdling the whole earth to whom the same high experience has come. Everywhere the sanctuaries filled, the eyes turned upward, for instinct is mightier than reason. The smoke of battle has revealed the face of God. AMEN! AMEN!

Only at rare intervals does the minister of our parish give way to passion. Suddenly there came a wave of emotion. He flung his head back, and his eyes glowed. “ When I think.” he exclaimed, “of the things that have been done with the name of God on men’s lips ; of atrocities such as the unspeakable Turk never perpetrated ; of war waged not upon to-day. but upon the centuries of faith that reared great cathedrals now in flames; of women and children laid upon the reeking altars of human passion: and all this in the name of culture, the culture of the superman who deems himself superior to the Ten Commandments —then, I say, may God grant that the culture that beareth such fruit may perish from off the face of the earth. Prayer for the triumph of such of a cause cannot be in Christ's name.” The preacher got no further. A Scotsmen in church is a stoic, motionless and dumb he listens to the Word. Butallthetradiiionsofthe parish were snapped inasecond. In the side gallery sat the General, sitting as he always does, with his back to the minister . . . To-day, little by little as the sermon went on, he turned round. At last he was facing the pulpit. His gleaming eyes were fixed on the preacher. His son was dead. And when the words rang through the church may God grant that such culture may perish. . . . the General sprang to his feet. “ Amen! ” rang his voice through the church. There was a sudden movement; as one man they all rose to their feel. Hands were lifted to heaven. “ Amen !” “ Amen ! ” they cried —and then there rose a cheer, muffled, but still a cheer. In the pulpit the words died on the preacher’s lips. He seemed as one suddenly stricken. He gazed bewildered over the sea of faces. They sank back into the pews as though ashamed. The last man to sit was my friend who stood to the last hand uplifted. The sermon was never finished. The preacher in a low voice said, “ Let us pray.” . . . And that was how ,ve made the greatest of all discoveries: we found God. And in the evening, near the top of the brae, I saw the General talking to the shoemaker, the greatest Radical in the parish —one of a party with which the General has no dealings. But they talked like brothers. For the shoemaker has a son fighting at the front, and the General’s son is dead. And as I came up the brae, I saw the General putting his hand on the shoemaker's shoulder and there was a tender look in the old man’s eyes, In our parish we have truly made the greatest of all discoveries. We have found God, and, finding Him, we have found each other.