American essays -- 20th century; Child development; Children; Education
More and more as the sense of big cleansing and chastening came home
to us, the everlasting principles of reason and order and beauty also
appeared out of the chaos and the pain.... They were saying in Europe
that this war was a war without morale. We believed it would be a war
with morale before the destruction was finished. One of the cleanest
dreams we had was that America would bring, with its guns and knives
and instruments of flagellation, something of the almighty spirit of
the human heart to light the blackness where the Pale Horse has passed.
That's all morale is, and war without morale hasn't any cause or effect
on the constructive side, and will continue to destroy itself against
itself as all such forces do in their madness.
If any one concludes that we were a group of religionists gathered in
Stonestudy that night it will be well to point out that this planet
will be a whole lot more religious before war ends, and no one will be
louder about it than the trade-mind everywhere.
War brings death, and death enforces the faith of the human heart,
and faith is one of a trinity (as we learned in Sabbath School and
variously since) that inclines the heart of man to God. You take a
loved object from the Seen and place it in the Unseen (thousands each
day the soldiers pass) and faith is born of the agony of separation.
The human heart forces a bridge across the abyss from the Seen to the
Unseen. It's the old story of the bereaved turning to God. Saints are
thus made--thus tenderness and purity come to be.
Within the next ten years there will be heroisms before our
eyes--heroisms such as seers and saints and sages have dreamed of as
the consummation of the human heart. And those who have lost most and
mourned most will read the eternal joy of the Plan from the Book of
God's Remembrance.
* * * * *
When you see the remnant of a race of people crying out that there
is no God--then you begin to know what war means. When a country has
given its tithe of human blood, _or one in five is gone_--then you
begin to know what an Austrian woman meant, when she spoke of the
"horrible grinding of war and the answer of the women to man's cries
of pain afield." ... When peace brings a worship of materials and a
dulness that cannot look beyond existing institutions--the end is war,
and after that a sitting in black upon the ground.
We didn't know what death meant before this war--but many have learned.
The very word death has the sweetest sound of all uttered names to many
a lonely heart to-day. We didn't know enough about death. We had the
habit of thinking this was all. The end of such thinking is war, and
after that, a sitting in black upon the ground.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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