nd to give to it speech, and to crown it with the glory
of fully human self-devotion. It is its part to declare that it is God
Whom they find in the offering of themselves, His love in which they can
lose themselves, His purpose to which they can cleave, His will to be
done--and that to give Him joy is the supreme end of man.

This is the religion which sustains in war, because possessed in peace.
And it is so little prevalent--that is, so little in any one's _conscious_
possession--in war just because God, and His love, and His desire have
been so little in men's thoughts in peace. Let peace return--let the
strain of war be lifted from a unit as it goes back into rest, or from an
individual as he goes on leave, and the life of indulgence, without an
object except self, threatens to repossess the soul. In the same way it is
peace rather than war, health rather than sickness, youth rather than age,
which really test the reality of our Christianity, when, without the shame
of being driven thereto by need, a man can rejoice in God, and with full
powers be made the instrument of His will.

VIII

There is then little conscious and articulate Christianity at the front,
and yet there are profoundly Christian characteristics in what men are and
do and endure, who have never known or do not understand or have forgotten
the Christian religion. What, then, is this strangely honoured and yet
neglected thing? Does it exist? Is it there for men were they to awake to
it?

This utterly searching war justifies the critical temper which passes
previous allegiances and acceptances under revision and judgment. I may be
forgiven, then, for saying that I do not think that Christianity as at
present expressed and presented to men in the Church (in the widest sense
of the word) is _prima facie_ that which can win and possess them. It
would be a big task and unsuited to the conditions under which I write to
argue this out. What needs discussion is how much of natural religion has
been absorbed into the accumulated deposit from the past which we call
traditional Christianity, with the effect of disguising and overlaying in
it those specifically Christian elements, which make Christianity not only
a salvation from sin or from hell, but from the morbid and even
contemptible in religion. Those elements can never be clearly abstracted
and used by themselves, for Christianity was not a thing rounded and
completed, and deposited upon the wo