CHAPTER XIII

THE BELIEVING CHURCH

The gates of heaven are swinging open so often these days, as the
brave ones pass in, that it would be a wonder if some gleams of
celestial brightness did not come down to us.

We get it unexpectedly in the roar of the street; in the quiet of the
midnight; in the sun-spattered aisles of the forest; in the faces of
our friends; in the turbid stream of our poor burdened humanity. They
shine out and are gone--these flashes of eternal truth. The two worlds
cannot be far apart when the travel from one to the other is so heavy!
No, I do not know what heaven is like, but it could not seem strange
to me, for I know so many people now who are there! Sometimes I feel
like the old lady who went back to Ontario to visit, and who said she
felt more at home in the cemetery than anywhere else, for that is
where most of her friends had gone!

These heavenly gleams have shown us new things in our civilization and
in our social life, and most of all in our own hearts. Above all other
lessons we have learned, or will learn, is the fallacy of hatred.
Hatred weakens, destroys, disintegrates, scatters. The world's disease
to-day is the withering, blighting, wasting malady of hatred, which
has its roots in the narrow patriotism which teaches people to love
their own country and despise all others. The superiority bug which
enters the brain and teaches a nation that they are God's chosen
people, and that all other nations must some day bow in obeisance to
them, is the microbe which has poisoned the world. We must love our
own country best, of course, just as we love our own children best;
but it is a poor mother who does not desire the highest good for every
other woman's child.

We are sick unto death of hatred, force, brutality; blood-letting will
never bring about lasting results, for it automatically plants a crop
of bitterness and a desire for revenge which start the trouble all
over again. To kill a man does not prove that he was wrong, neither
does it make converts of his friends. A returned man told me about
hearing a lark sing one morning as the sun rose over the
shell-scarred, desolated battlefield, with its smouldering piles of
ruins which had once been human dwelling-places, and broken,
splintered trees which the day before had been green and growing. Over
this scene of horror, hatred, and death arose the lark into the
morning air, and sang his glorious song. "And then," said the boy,