rtain crisis, so the crisis of death, where man must
pass alone, demands a still higher Leader. With the admission that no
man is self-sufficient, that sin of pride, which is the strongest
barrier between a man and his God, falls away. He is forced, if only
in self-defence, to recognize that faith in some all-sufficient Power
is the only thing that will carry him through. If he could cut away
the thousand sins of thought, man would automatically find himself at
faith. It is the central but often hidden point of our intelligence;
and although there are a hundred roads that lead to it, they may be
completely blocked. The clean flame of the disciplined life burns away
the rubbish that chokes these roads, and faith becomes a nearer and
more constant thing.

The sadness of war lies in the loss of actual personalities, but it is
only by means of these losses that this surrender can be attained.

It must not be thought that faith comes overnight as a free gift. It
is a long and slow process of many difficult steps. There may be first
the actual literal crumbling, unknown in peace-time, of one's solid
surroundings, to be repeated perhaps again and again until the old
habit of reliance upon them is uprooted. Then comes the realization
that this life at the front has but two possible endings. The first is
to be so disabled that a man's fighting days are over. The other is
death. Instant death rather than a slow death from wounds. Every man
hopes for a wound which will send him home to England. That, however,
is only a respite, as his return to France follows upon his
convalescence. The other most important step is the loss of one's
friends. It is not the fact of actually seeing them killed, for in the
chaos and tumult of a battle the mind hardly registers such
impressions. One's only feeling is the purely primitive one of relief,
that it is another and not one's self. It is only afterwards, when
the excitement is over, and a man realizes that again there is a space
of life, for him, but not for his friend, that the loneliness and the
loss are felt. He then says to himself, "Why am I spared when many
better men have gone?" At first resentment swallows up all other
emotions. In time, when this bitterness begins to pass, the belief
that somehow this loss is of some avail, carries him a little farther
on the road to faith. This all comes to the man who before the war
believed that the world was made for his pleasure, and who treated