be entertainment indeed, and we should be delivered from that
remorse which must one day face us if we have eaten and urged
others to eat far more than is needed, while some 30 per cent. of
our fellow creatures even in this land were always on the verge
of hunger. Ideally and actually the war should help us to a
simple, genuine hospitality.
Conclusion.—All that has been said can have little appeal to
us unless we see home life in a new setting because of this war.
If to our thinking the war is merely a repetition on a vastly
larger scale of the wars of other generations when men settled
down again to former ways on the declaration of peace to live
lives modified in minor respects by their losses, then we shall
have lost the greatest opportunity of expiation, purgation and
progress that will ever come to us as a people. If on the other
hand we see this war as an evidence and not a cause of a deep
disquiet among us, then we shall recognize that we are in a great
upheaval of ideals of civilization and we shall be in touch with
the thoughtful in all the nations in perceiving that the conflict is
not the mere clash of arms, but the clash of principles and of the
relation of man to man. There is nothing before us henceforth
as alternatives, but the haunting of ruins or the strenuous pursuit
of newness of life. Perhaps in our quiet retired way we are
being asked for a courage and fearlessness to admit and face the
new circumstances of modern life which is comparable in a dim
way to the courage and sacrifice of our brothers in arms. To
some of us it is painful to be detached from former neutral
positions—cosy corners—f{rom which we could look out on the
movements of life with complacent approval or comfortable
regret. But progress is inevitable, and not an honest mind among
us could dare be content with things as they were.
{t is on our homes that the blow of war has fallen first and
most; it is there that we must become alive unto God, and it is
because they are so good that they must be so much better.
Fathers, husbands, brothers, sons have not hesitated to leave
them in order to preserve them, for a grim task stripped of all
its glamour. As brave men go deep down to dig up coal or raise
a sunken ship they have soberly and unquestionably gone to war
as a terrible duty. On the battlefields their simple religious
faith has been apparent to us all. The Bishop of London tells
us that it has been learned “in quiet English homes.” They have
received the Holy Communion to their comfort at all hours and
in all places before facing their death in action, and time and
again we are told that when they had fallen it was the loved
names of those in the home that were last upon their lips.
Those left behind—fathers, mothers, wives, and sisters—have
been worthy of their great ordeal. They have proved their
heroism by their silence, even when pent up anxiety has almost