ns and cost and dangers of war will not scare men out
of their forgetfulness. The heart of man is incorrigible by fear. God, if
He is little regarded in peace, is hard to come nigh to in war. If
religion in peace and prosperity has not been full of His praise--of joy
_in Him_, it is something to which adversity must drive men, and they
think it as such a little disreputable, and many of the best men, richly
gifted with manly excellences, tend to leave it on one side.

Yet "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ." We can adopt the ringing
note of St. Paul's defiance. For the Christian religion does not spring
primarily out of human anxiety and need. It is not an expedient which may
be left on one side till the hour of need arises. That many men should
think thus of it shows that it has been widely forgotten, misunderstood,
or never known.

VII

The Christian religion is salvation because it starts from what God is.
Everything in it of human benefit and satisfaction is a bye-product
flowing from the fact that it gives to men a focus for their devotion and
attention not in themselves but in God. Its main motive is not self- but
God-regarding. It draws men out of the entanglement into which they fall
through temporising with their own needs, and constrains them to attend to
God's need--His need of them. For the Christian, God is not some shadowy
supreme Being at the back of the universe, or a name given to the sum of
things. God is the Person Who made, and loves, and therefore wants His
children. Hence Christian prayer primarily is grateful and loving
acknowledgment of what God is, and only secondarily the expression of
anxiety, or the "putting in" of this or that claim for what we want.

That is the conclusion which war experience drives home. The special
strain and pressure of war cannot elicit from the majority of men the
religion which is occupied with the saving of self. The spiritual law is
that we find our life by losing it, not by saving it. In a vague and
unexpressed way, as they show again and again by their cheerfulness and
unconcernedness, hosts of men in this war have laid hold on this law. They
have found a purpose to which to cleave, something to give themselves away
for. Only it is hardly acknowledged, but rather lies below the level of
mental apprehension and expression. It is the function of Christianity to
raise this unacknowledging trustfulness and self-giving out of dumb
subconsciousness, a