nteer for
service."

"May God bring you safely back, my friend! If I were younger. . . .
And the Army will want chaplains."

"But I am not offering myself as a chaplain."

"How, then?"

"I am asking leave to _fight_. . . . Don't stare, man; and don't
answer me until you have heard my reasons. Well, you have read your
newspaper and must have noted how, all over Britain, the bishops,
clergy, and ministers of all denominations are turning themselves
into recruiting sergeants and urging men to fight. You note how they
preach this War as a War in defence of Law, in defence of Right
against Might, a War for the cause of humanity, a War for an ideal.
In to-day's paper it has even become a War against War. . . .
Well, if all this be true, why should I as a priest be denied my
share in the crusade? Why should I be forbidden to lay down my life
in what is, to these people, so evidently my Master's service?
Why should it be admirable--nay, a fundamental of manhood--in Tom and
Dick and Harry to play the Happy Warrior life-size, but reprehensible
in _me?_ Or again, look at it in _this_ way.--You and I, as
ministers of the Gospel, have gone about preaching it (pretty
ineffectively, to be sure) for a Gospel of Peace. Well now, if these
fellows are right, it turns out that we have been wrong all the time,
and the sooner we make amends, by carrying a gun, the better.
Any way--priest or no priest--I have in me certain scruples which
deter me from telling Tom or Dick or Harry to take a gun and kill a
man, and from scolding him if he is not quick about it, while I
myself am not proposing to take the risk or earn the undying honour--
or the guilt--whichever it may be."

"My mind moves slowly," said the Minister after a pause, during
which the Vicar drew breath. "And often, when confronted in a hurry
with an argument which I dislike but see no present way to
controvert, I fall back for moral support on the tone of the
disputant. . . . I have a feeling at this moment that you are in the
wrong, somewhere and somehow, because you are talking like an angry
man."

"So my wife assured me, half an hour ago. . . . Then let me put it
differently and with a sweet reasonableness. If this War be a Holy
War, why may I not share actively in it? Or on what principle, if
the military use of weapons be right for a layman, should it be wrong
for a clergyman? What differentiates us?"

"In a vague way," said the Minister, "I see that a g