The Potter and the ClayWinnington Ingram, Arthur F. (Arthur Foley)
Religion
The Potter and the Clay
Winnington Ingram, Arthur F. (Arthur Foley)
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 20th century; World War, 1914-1918 -- Sermons
No one believes more absolutely than I do in the righteousness of
the present war; as I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as
a war for purity, for freedom, for international honour, and for
the principles of Christianity. I look on everyone who fights for
this cause as a hero, and everyone who dies in it as a martyr; but,
at the same time, I believe that if every Christian throughout the
world had fully risen to his responsibilities and had fully lived
up to his Christianity, for the last hundred years, we might have
done more to avert it. You cannot say more than that. Slavery was
undoubtedly as much opposed as war to Christianity, but it took
eighteen hundred years to abolish that; it may take another eighteen
hundred years to abolish war. We must not hurry GOD, but we must not
fail to help Him; we can hasten the kingdom. It is no good praying
"Thy kingdom come" by itself; we must also make it come, and the
only sure way to make the kingdom come, and with the kingdom the
extinction of war, is to spread throughout the world the knowledge
of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
We were beginning to find this out before the war.
A striking pamphlet by Canon Holland, "The White Man's Burden,"
has been published by the great Society which for two hundred years
has tried, amidst much indifference, apathy and discouragement, to
propagate the Gospel throughout the world. He showed how our skilled
and devoted Governors and statesmen throughout the world found after
a time that their ability and hard work reached a point at which
they could go no farther.
For instance, quite naturally their system of education broke down
the old beliefs of India; quite naturally the ideals and ideas of
freedom and personal responsibility which they taught produced a
desire among individuals also to be free, and a longing in every
nation to realise itself. The great statesman rubbed his eyes; he
couldn't quarrel with this result of his own teaching. But who was
to bind this transformed nation with new cords? where was he to
find the new restraints to take the place of the old ones which had
been broken through from sheer life and vigour? Where were the new
wine-skins to hold the new wine?
And, pathetically, even before the war such men were turning to
the religion which they had been partially taught at their public
school, but which in their blindness they had half despised, as
having no bearing on a practical workaday world; but, lo! practical
common sense had broken down; could the secret be, after all, in
what they had heard in their Confirmation preparation, in that
school sermon to which they had only half attended, in the prayers
which they had said rather as a matter of form ever since they were
taught them at their mothers' knees?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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