Supernatural; World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Wonderful is the warp and woof of life under fire. It is the parade of
the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the
whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears
playing hide and seek with each other. The tragedy and the comedy follow
close on each other's heels. Deep calls not only to deep but to shallow
as well, and in the end all notes harmonize. Where the swathe of the
scythe is wide men's souls expand in heart qualities. Amidst the
wreckage of a battlefield he picks up all kinds of things, every faculty
picks up something and they become contributions to soul force. The
greater the gloom the more the soldier searches for the gleam. Religion
and resolution meet in the soldier and give him deeper vision. He hears
his comrade say, "I shall be taken to-day, give this to ----." Examples
of this premonition abound. He enters a bombarded village, the only
thing standing intact frequently is a figure of Christ crucified, or the
Madonna looking down upon a mass of crumbling ruin. These facts are
again and again verified by photographs. Often the talk of the camp as
the men settle down by the fire is of the weird and the uncanny that
has happened during the day; and there are pauses when the soldiers
stare into the embers and forget to suck their pipes.
To explain the book of life, one would require the scrolls of eternity.
War throws light on some of its stray pages as they flutter for a second
on the wings of time and then disappear, but not before it has flung its
cressets of light upon the black pall of doubt. Everyone now talks of
psychic phenomena. In a paltry generation of superficial thinking the
subject was one for jest, but there is far more in it than jesters are
likely to discover. Mocking laughter never discovered anything except
the vacuous fool. The appearances of spiritual beings give but scant
opportunity for examination but serious investigation has now taken the
place of cheap sneering. After all religion is founded upon a philosophy
of apparitions. The vision of angels at Mons is no new thing.
Catholicism is founded on such visions and no religion worthy of the
name is without its story of angels. New aspects of matter have laid
many materialistic theories in the dust, the mysterious potencies of
matter which the latest science is revealing, the energy of electrons,
and radium are giving us a new science of super-sensual physics and with
it new vistas of thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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