I found my own pastor directing the affairs of a busy port-of-entry
canteen with all the earnestness and success that mark his ministry at
home. I saw the pastor of a large New Jersey "First Baptist Church"
levelling the floor in a Y. M. C. A. officers' tent. At a brigade
headquarters another minister was in charge of a hut on the first line,
set out in the woods for the fellows' completer isolation from even the
advantages of a ruined village, and at the point where all lights are
turned out at night by supply and ammunition trucks creeping up to the
line. Another, a graduate of Northwestern University, a strong-bodied,
great-hearted, husky saint, was alone in the dugout, the most advanced
permanent Y. M. C. A. station in any army. Just 1,600 yards it is from
our most advanced trenches, and directly in front of our last batteries
of "75's." I saw a young minister, who is the "informal chaplain" in
a great seacoast city, marching at the head of a little funeral party
that bore three black stevedores to their last resting-place.
But why multiply instances? The American preacher is just short of
omnipresent in France, and he is doing the work of the war from Alpha
to Omega with two-handed masculine energy and unselfish Christian zeal.
His spiritual message may be shoved across a hut counter along with a
can of beans or a bar of chocolate, or it may be quietly spoken about a
red-hot stove just before closing-time at night, when he gathers those
who care to stay, for "family prayers"; it may be whispered in broken
sentences to the lad who has been gassed or to the man dying from his
wounds. In a thousand ways it may be given, but it is being delivered.
The minister who left America to preach to the boys at the front, who
departed with the words of his people, admiringly spoken, ringing in
his ears, and a purse of real American money ballasting his trousers,
has had some heavy seas in passage; but he has arrived. Rude shocks
have awaited him, and his whole plan of campaign has been ruthlessly
changed; but he has not turned back. To-day he is carrying on, and he
will stay through. I saw no more inspiring figures in the beautiful
land where so much of America's future is now shaping, and where so
many of her hopes and fears are centred, than the preacher of the
gospel of the Son of God.
I have not said anything about the formal religious services. They
are not neglected. The number of these increases with the raising
of each hut and the arrival of each new chaplain and secretary. The
pulpit messages our fighters are listening to in France are the most
eloquent and soul-feeding that are heard by Americans anywhere in the
world to-day. Their messengers are from the first line of our American
congregations, and these men of God are preaching as they never
preached before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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