The spirit that stopped the slave trade, that reformed our prisons,
that regulated our factories, that multiplied our hospitals, {152}
that sent Livingstone to Africa, Coleridge Patteson to the South
Seas, and Selwyn to New Zealand, that inspired Barnardo and General
Booth, that nerves thousands of workers in the slums of our great
cities, is the same spirit that impels Christian missionaries forth
to the Moslem world to-day.
And what is this spirit? May we not dare to say that it is born of a
new understanding of a Life lived among the hills and valleys of
Galilee, and a Cross raised on a lonely hill outside Jerusalem
nineteen centuries ago? There, at the centre of world-history, men
learned to look up into the face of God and say 'Our Father,' and
then look out upon mankind and call them 'brothers,' and gazing on
that Cross see there the World's Redemption, the Son of God lifted up
that He might draw all men to Himself. Every dark corner of the
earth, every place of pain and sickness, every haunt of sin and
shame, every falsehood and every half-truth seen in that light is but
a challenge to the Christian, to lift up Him Who is the Lord of Life
and Light and Glory, to catch His Spirit that He may be once more
incarnate in the Life of His Church.
{153}
So it has been for very many of us in the Great War. It has seemed
that so many of the things He died for are at stake--liberty and love
and gentleness and the sympathy that appreciates the aspirations of
other peoples. And our men and women too have gladly given their
lives and yielded of their best that the eternal things might win
through and that other generations may live in a better world.
And when peace comes to us again, the same call will be there--less
strident but no less urgent--summoning every true man to give his
life for the world's cleansing, to follow as he may the great
Redeemer, who redeemed men by His cross. The ultimate test of
Englishmen will be those years of peace. Will there then be a great
uprising to the truly holy war of love and unselfish service and the
great adventure of the Cross--the war against sin and injustice,
against social and national wrong, the war for love and truth and
purity and the kingdom of Jesus Christ?
[Sidenote: Awakening of the East.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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