ed men to get to know chaplains.
Large numbers of men in ordinary life are very seldom brought into
contact with religion. They have the crude notion of it which they
carried away as unfledged boys from Sunday School, and a sort of
formal bowing acquaintance through the conventions of later life. In
the war, when their minds and affections were put to a severe strain,
it was a revelation to them to find that there were principles and
relationships of divine origin which enabled the ordinary human will
easily to surmount difficulties moral and physical, and which gave a
quiet strength that nothing merely earthly could supply. Certainly the
war gave chaplains a splendid opportunity of bearing witness to the
power of Christ. A great deal has been written about the religion of
the men at the front. Some have spoken of it in terms of exaggerated
optimism, as though by the miracle of the war men had become beings of
angelic outlook and temper. Others have taken a despairing attitude,
and thought that religion has lost its real power over the world. The
truth is, I think, that there was a revelation to most men, in a broad
way, of a mysterious soul life within, and of a huge responsibility to
an infinite and eternal Being above. There was a revelation also, wide
and deep, to many individual men, of the living force and example of
Him who is both God and Brother-man. Where the associations of (p. 117)
church and home had been clean and helpful, men under the batterings
of war felt consciously the power of religion. In the life at the
front, no doubt there was much evil thinking, evil talking and evil
doing, but there was, underlying all this, the splendid manifestation
in human nature of that image of God in which man was made. As one
looks back upon it, the surface things of that life have drifted away,
and the great things that one remembers are the self-sacrifice, the
living comradeship, and the unquestioning faith in the eternal rightness
of right and duty which characterized those who were striving to the
death for the salvation of the world. This glorious vision of the
nobility of human nature sustained the chaplain through many
discouragements and difficulties. I have often sat on my horse on
rainy nights near Hill 63, and watched the battalions going up to the
line. With wet rubber sheets hanging over their huge packs and with
rifles on their shoulders, the men marched up through the mud and cold
and darkness, to fac