Preaching in London. Iii

(No sooner had the Armistice been signed, than there followed, not simply a rebound, but a collapse, which no one who lived through it will ever forget. Swiftly, tragically, the high mood of sacrifice yielded to a ruthless selfishness, and the solidarity won by the war was lost, together with most of the idealism that had stood the stress and terror of it. The moral demobilization was terrifying; the disillusionment appalling. Men had lived a generation in five years; and instead of a new world of which they had dreamed, they found themselves in a world embittered, confused, cynical, gray with grief, if not cracked to its foundations — all the old envies working their malign intent. Such a chaos offered free play to every vile and slimy influence, making the earth an auditorium for every hoarse and bitter voice that could make itself heard. It was a time of social irritation, moral reaction, and spiritual fatigue, almost more trying than the war itself, the only joy being that the killing of boys had stopped.

Old jealousies and new envies began to make themselves felt — among them a very emphatic anti-American feeling; a reminiscence, in part, of the impatience at our delay in entering the war, joined with suspicion of our wealth and power. The same was true in America, in its feeling toward England and the other Allies. Mrs. A. Burnett-Smith — ‘Annie S. Swan’ — in her admirable book, America at Home, tells how fine and warm the feeling in America was before the Armistice, and how quickly it changed: ‘There was a reaction, of which was born a coolness, a new, subtle hostility, which one could sense everywhere.’ Her book, I may add, is one of the few of its kind that never fails of that fineness of feeling which should always exist between kindred peoples. Her observations are interesting, her comments frank but kindly, and the whole book is informed with a charming and sympathetic personality. As Mr. W. L. George has said, if the war did not make us love our enemies, it at least taught us to hate our allies.)

November “20, 1918. — For one who has set great store by the coöperation of English-speaking peoples, the new antiAmerican propaganda is like a personal bereavement. The feeling in England with regard to America is certainly, as the Scotch would say, ‘on the north side of friendly,’ and manifests itself in many petty, nagging ways. To read the London papers now, one would think that America, and not Germany, had been the enemy of England in the war. Every kind of gibe, slur, and sneer is used to poison the public mind against America. My mail at the City Temple has become almost unreadable. It takes the familiar forms — among the upper classes an insufferably patronizing and contemptuous attitude toward America and all things American; among the lower classes an ignorant ill-will. The middle classes are not much influenced by it, perhaps because, as Emerson said. America is a ‘middle-class country’ — whereof we ought to be both grateful and proud. This feeling against America is confined, for the most part, to England, — it hardly exists in Scotland or in Wales, — and, like the anti-British feeling in America, it is a fruitful field for the venal press and the stupid demagogue. Naturally, a journal like John Bull — leader of the gutter-press — is in its glory; but even in the better class of papers one reads nasty flings at America and its President. As for the Morning Post, no one expects anything other than its usual pose of supercilious condescension and savage satire, and it is at its brilliant worst. Six weeks ago we were regarded as friends; to-day our country is the target of ridicule as clever as it is brutal. No doubt it is mostly nerves — a part of the inevitable reaction— and will pass away; but it is none the less a tragedy.

November 22. — It is nothing short of a calamity that in this ugly hour of reaction and revenge there is to be a national election. There is no need for an election, no demand for it. But to those who can see beneath the surface, there is a deeper meaning. Three months ago Arthur Henderson said: ‘If we have a national election in Britain, you will not get a Wilson peace.’ I did not realize at the lime what he meant; but I can now say to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.’ There is to be a khaki election, such as Chamberlain had following the Boer War, the better to coin into political capital all the anger, suspicion, resentment, and disillusionment burning in the public mind. In other words, it is a deliberate scheme of t he Prime Minister — or a group of strong men who use him as a tool — to mobilize the least admirable elements of England, — not the great, noble England, but a reactionary, imperialistic England, — and have them in solid phalanx behind the Peace Conference. And in the mood of the hour the scheme will work, with consequences both for England and for the world w hich no one can predict. Reaction in England will mean reaction elsewhere, if not everywhere.

November 24. — Nothing was left hazy after the speech of the Premier in Westminster Hall, launching his Coalition campaign. It was a skillful speech, intimating that even the Throne may be in danger, and playing upon the fears and hates of men. He wants a Parliament, he said, in which there shall be no opposition, — no criticism, no discussion, — and this proposal to prostitute Parliament was greeted with applause. There is protest in the Liberal press; but men in the street and tram give each other the knowing look and the approving nod, praising ‘the Little Welsh Wizard.’ It is called a ‘Coupon Election,’ since each Coalition candidate must have the indorsement of the Prime Minister, and the food-coupon is the most detestable thing in the public mind. Sir George Younger — master brewer of the kingdom — is the organizer and wire-puller of the campaign.

As for the Prime Minister, he is both the author and the hero of the most remarkable blood-and-thunder movingpicture show in political history; what the papers call ‘The Victory Film, or How I Won the War.’ He goes to and fro, shrieking two slogans. First, hang the Kaiser! Second, twenty-five thousand million pounds indemnity! What sublime statesmanship! Behind this smoke-screen of rhetoric and revenge the most sinister forces are busy; and the trick will work. Liberals and Laborites are unable to unite. Even if they should unite, they could not stem the tide. Two things are as plain as if they were written upon the wall. First, the President is defeated before he sails; and second, if the war is won, the peace is lost.

November 26. — Once again opinion is sharply divided as to the motives and purposes of the Prime Minister. By some he is held to be a messiah, by others a light-minded mountebank. Still others think he is only a political chameleon, taking color from the last strong man, or group of men, he meets. Obviously he is none of these things, but merely an opportunist, without any principle or policy, — except to retain power, — feeling his way to get all he can. The story is that, walking in the House of Parliament with a friend the other day, he suddenly slopped, tapped his breast, and said: ‘ I sometimes wonder if this is Lloyd George.’ His wonder is shared by millions of people. Certainly it is not the Lloyd George we used to know, who had the light of morning in his eyes. Limehouse is far in the distance. The fiery champion of justice for the Boers is a pathetic memory. The man who defied the vested interests of England in behalf of the poor, the aged, the disinherited, is a ghost. There is another Lloyd George, so new and strange that he does not know himself. With his personality, his power of speech, his political acumen, which almost amounts to inspiration, he could lead England anywhere; but he has turned back. It is one of the greatest failures of leadership in our time.

November 28. — Often one is tempted to think that the Labor Movement is the most Christian thing on this island. In its leadership, at least, it is spiritually minded; its leaders, as I have come to know them, being sincere, earnest, honest men who have worked their way up from the bottom, or else have been drawn into the Movement by the opportunity for service. Not all of them are so minded, but the outstanding leaders and spokesmen of the Movement — who, unfortunately, are in advance of the rank and file — are men of a type unknown, or nearly so, in American labor. Henderson, Thomas, Snowden, Webb, MacDonald, Clynes, and the rest, make a goodly group. Henderson is a lay preacher; so is Thomas. As for Robert Smillie, I do not know what his religious affiliations, if any, may be, except that he is a disciple of Keir Hardie, and that his relentless idealism is matched by the nobility of his character. Tall, gaunt, stooped, his face reveals the harsh attrition of earlier years; but his smile is kindly, and his eyes have in them the light of an unconquerable will. He helps one to know what Lincoln must have been like.

In this campaign the leaders of Labor are almost the only keepers of the nobler idealism of England, and their programme is essentially Christian. Alas, they have a heavy weight of inertia to carry, and one wonders if they can fire the apathetic mass, fatalistically submissive to its lot, and suspicious of anyone who tries to alter it.

November 29. — Anyway, I am having the time of my life, going to every sort of political meeting and listening to every sort of speech. It is a big show and a continuous performance. The best address I have heard, so far, was delivered by a Methodist preacher at a Labor meeting in Kingsway Hall. His sentences cracked like rifle-shots, and they hit the mark. The campaign makes me first sick, and then homesick; it is so like our way of doing it. That is, all except the hecklers. They are so quick and keen of retort. Also, the English can beat us at mud-slinging. It is humiliating to admit it, but it is so. We are amateurs in abusing the government; but we are young yet, and longer practice will no doubt, give us greater skill. How like our elections is the hubbub and hysteria of it all. Mr. Asquith told me how he made a speech on worldaffairs, and one of his audience said: ‘What we want to know is, are we going to get a pier for our boats! ’ Always the local grievance clouds the larger issue. How familiar it is, as if a man went out, and encountered in the street what he thought for the moment was himself. Men, otherwise sane, seem to lose their senses in a political campaign. Statesmen talk drivel, promising what no mortal can perform, challenging the scorn of man and the judgment of heaven. O Democracy!

(As soon as it was known that the President was to attend the Peace Conference in person, the Tory papers in London began subtly and skillfully to paint a caricature of him in the public mind. He was described as a kind of Hamlet, living aloof in the cloisters of the White House; a visionary companioned by abstractions; a thinkingmachine so cold that one could skate all round him, having ‘as good a heart as can be made out of brains,’ — ‘not a man at all, but a bundle of formulæ,’ — and, finally, by the Morning Post, as ‘a political Moody and Sankey’ coming to convert Europe to his gospel of ‘internationalism,’ which it described as a ‘disease.’ Such was the reactionary attitude toward the man who made the only constructive suggestion seeking to prevent the ‘ collective suicide ’ of war. But only a small part of the British press was guilty of such a violation of good form and good feeling. The Times — by virtue, no doubt, of its position, not only as a journal, but as an institution — secured from the President a memorable interview, in which he was shown to be actually and attractively human; and, further, that he had no intention of demanding the sinking of the British Fleet.

The President arrived in London the day after Christmas, and the greeting accorded him by the English people was astonishingly hearty and enthusiastic. Their curiosity to see the man whose words had rung in their ears, expressing what so many hoped but so few were able to say, joined with their desire to pay homage to the first President of our Republic who had set foot on English soil. His visit was taken to be a gesture of goodwill, and I have never seen anything like the way in which he captured the English people. He swept them off their feet. For a brief time his marvelous personality, his ‘magic of the necessary word,’ his tact, his charm, seemed to change the climate of the island. No man in our history could have represented us more brilliantly. In Buckingham Palace as the guest of the King, in the old Guildhall as a guest of the City, at the luncheon in the Mansion House, his words were not a mere formal, diplomatic response, but real in their unaffected simplicity, and as appropriate as they were eloquent. On the Sabbath, instead of going with the King to worship at St. Paul’s, he went to the little Nonconformist Chapel at Carlisle, where his mother had been a girl, and his grandfather the minister. His brief talk in the old pulpit was a gem, and it touched the people deeply. At the Mansion House luncheon we heard the news of the election returns — the result having been delayed in order to get the report of the soldier vote.)

December 28. — So the President has come and gone, and the Prime Minister has learned what was in his Christmas stocking. It is a blank check, and he may now fill il in with such stakes as he can win at the Peace Table. He divined aright the bitter mood and temper of the hour. It is a Tory victory by a trick, the Liberal Party having been asphyxiated, if not destroyed; and it remains to be seen whether it can be resuscitated. Mr. Asquith was defeated; Mr. Bottomley was elected! In America that would be equal to the defeat of Elihu Root and the election of Hearst, and would be deemed a disaster. So the Prime Minister gets what he wanted — a Parliament tied, hamstrung, without moral mandate, three quarters of its members having accepted the coupon; and of the remainder, the largest party consists of seventy Sinn Feiners who are either in prison or pledged not to sit in the House. It is a Parliament in which there will be no effective opposition, the Labor Party being insignificant and badly led. The Prime Minister gets what he wants, but at the sacrifice of the noblest tradition in British history. Labor is sullen, bitter, angry. I predict a rapid development of the dogma of Direct Action; and, if it is so, the Prime Minister will have no one to blame but himself. Such is the effect of a trick election, the tragedy of which grows as its meaning is revealed.

(The reference to Mr. Bottomley implies no ill-will to him personally, though I hate the things for which he stands. When it was announced that I had accepted the invitation to the City Temple, I received a long cablegram from Mr. Bottomley, suggesting that I write for his paper, John Bull, and telling of his admiration for Dr. Parker. Unfortunately, as I did not choose to be introduced to England through such a medium, I could not accept his invitation. Often — especially after my protest against the increase of brewery supplies — he wrote cruel things about me. It did not matter; I should have been much more unhappy if he had written in my praise. He is the captain of the most dangerous and disintegrating elements in Britain, the mob as distinct from democracy, — the crowded public-house, the cheap music-hall, and the nether side of the sporting world. With facile and copious emotions, he champions the cause of the poor, with ready tears for ruined girls — preferably if the story of their ruin will smack a little smuttily in his paper. Since the Armistice, his office has been the poison-factory and centre of antiAmerican propaganda, and in playing upon the fears and hates and prejudices of people, he is a master. Alas, we are only too familiar with his type on this side of the sea.)

January 4, 1919. — Joined a group to-day noon, to discuss the problem of Christian union, by which they seemed to mean Church union — a very different thing. But it was only talk. Men are not ready for it, and the time is not ripe. Nor can it be hastened, as my friend the Bishop of Manchester thought when he proposed some spectacular dramatization of the Will to Fellowship during the war. Still less will it come by erasing all historical loyalties in one indistinguishable blue of ambiguity. If it is artificial, it will be superficial. It must come spiritually and spontaneously, else it will be a union, not of the Church, but of the churchyard. Dicker and deal suggest a horse-trade. No, our fathers parted in passion; in passion we must come together. It must be a union, not of compromise, but of comprehension. If all the churches were made one to-day, what difference would it make?

Little, if any. Something deeper and more drastic is needed. As the Elizabethan Renaissance was moralized by the advent of Puritanism, and the reaction from the French Revolution was followed by the Evangelical Revival, so, by a like rhythm, the new age into which we are entering will he quickened, in some unpredictable way, by a renewal of religion. Then, perhaps, on a tide of new life, we may be drawn together in some form of union. In this country no union is possible with a State Church, unless the Free Churches are willing to turn the faces of their leaders to the wall. So far from being a national church, the Anglican communion is only a tiny sect on one end of the island. Its claim to a monopoly of apostolicity is not amenable to the law of gravitation — since it rests upon nothing, no one can knock away its foundations. Just now we are importuned to accept, the ‘historic episcopacy’ for the sake of regularity, as if regularity were more important than reality. Even the Free Churches have failed to federate, and one is not sorry to have it so, remembering the lines of an old Wiltshire love-song which I heard the other day:—

January 12. — Alas! affairs on the lovely but unhappy island of Ireland seem to go from bad to worse, adding another irritation to a shell-shocked world. From a distance the Irish issue is simple enough, but near at hand it is a sad tangle, complicated by immemorial racial and religious rancors, and, what is sadder still, by a seemingly hopeless incompatibility of temperament between the peoples of these two islands. They do not, and apparently cannot, understand each other. It looks like the old problem of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. Besides, the friction is not only between Ireland and England, but between two Irelands — different in race, religion, and economic organization. If Ireland could be divided, as Lincoln divided Virginia, the riddle would be solved. But no Irishman will agree.

The English people, as I talk with them about Ireland, are as much bewildered by it as anybody else. They do feel hurt at the attitude of South Ireland during the war, and I confess I cannot chide them for it. Ireland was exempted from conscription, from rationing, from nearly all the hardships of a war which, had it been lost, would have meant the enslavement of Ireland, as well as the rest of the world. A distinguished journalist told me that his own Yorkshire relatives were forced into Irish regiments by politicians, to make it appear that Ireland was fighting. The Irish seaboard, except in Ulster, was hostile seaboard. It required seventy-five thousand men to keep order in Ireland, and that, too, at a time when every man was needed at the front. Ulster, in the meantime, did magnificently in the war, and it would be a base treachery to coerce it to leave the United Kingdom. Ulster may be dour and relentless, but it has rights which must be respected. Yet, if England does not find a way out of the Irish muddle, she may imperil the peace of the world. So the matter stands, like the Mark Twain story in which he got the hero and heroine into so intricate a tangle that he gave it up, and ended by offering a prize to anyone who could get them out of it.

January 14. — To-day a distinguished London minister told me a story about the President, for which he vouches. He had it from the late Sylvester Horne, — Member of Parliament and minister of Whitefield’s Chapel, — who had known the President for years before he was elevated to his high office. Horne happened to be in America — where he was always a welcome guest — before the war, shortly after the President was inaugurated, and he called at the White House to pay his respects. In the course of the talk, ho expressed satisfaction that the relations between England and America would be in safe hands while the President was in office. The President said nothing, and Horne wondered at it. Finally he forced the issue, putting it as a question point-blank. The President said, addressing him in the familiar language of religious fellowship: ‘Brother Horne, one of the greatest calamities that has befallen mankind will come during my term of office. It will come from Germany. Go home and settle the Irish question, and there will be no doubt as to where America will stand.’

How strange, how tragic, if, having kept America out of the war for more than two years, — since nearly all Irishmen are in the party of the President, — Ireland should also keep America out of the peace, and defeat, or at least indefinitely postpone, the organization of an effective league of nations! Yet such may be the price we must pay for the wrongs of olden time, by virtue of the law whereby the sins of the fathers are visited upon generation after generation. Naturally the English people do not understand our urgent interest in the problem of Ireland, not knowing how it meddles in our affairs, poisoning the springs of good-will, and thwarting the coöperation between English-speaking peoples upon which so much depends.

January 16. — At the London Poetry Society — which has made me one of its vice-presidents — one meets many interesting artists, as well as those who are trying to sing the Everlasting Song in these discordant days — Masefield, Noyes, Newbolt, Yeats, Mackereth, to name but a few, with an occasional glimpse of Hardy. Nor do I forget May Doney, a little daughter of St. Francis, walking The Way of Wonder. A reading of poetry by Sir Forbes Robertson is always an event, as much for his golden voice as for his interpretative insight. The plea of Mackereth, some time ago, for poetry as a spiritual teacher and social healer, was memorable, appealing to the Spirit of Song to bring back to hearts grown bitter and dark the warmth and guidance of vision. The first time I heard of Mackereth was from a British officer as we stood ankledeep in soppy mud in a Flanders trench. If only we could have a League of Poets there would be hope of a gentler, better world, and they surely could not make a worse mess of it than the ‘practical’ men have made. If the image in the minds of the poets of to-day is a prophecy of to-morrow, we may yet hope for a world where pity and joy walk the old, worn human road, and ‘Beauty passes with the sun on her wings.’

January 19. —The Peace Conference opened with imposing ceremony at Versailles yesterday, and now we shall see what we shall see. An idealist, a materialist, and an opportunist are to put the world to rights. Just why a pessimist was not included is hard to know, but no doubt there will be pessimists a-plenty before the job is done. Clemenceau is a man of action, Lloyd George a man of transaction, and what kind of a man the President is, in negotiations of this nature, remains to be revealed. The atmosphere is unfavorable to calm deliberation and just appraisement. The reshaping of the world outof-hand, to the quieting of all causes of discord, is humanly impossible. Together Britain and America would be irresistible if they were agreed, and if they were ready for a brave, large gesture of world-service — but they are not ready. America had only enough of the war to make it mad and not enough to subdue it; Britain had enough to make it bitter. As a penalty of having no axe to grind, America will have to bear the odium of insisting upon sound principles and telling unpalatable truths, and so may not come off well. We shall see whether there is any honor among nations, whether the terms of the Armistice will be made a ‘scrap of paper,’ and whether there is to be a league of peace or a new balance of power — a new imperialism for the old. Meanwhile, all ears will be glued to the keyhole, straining to hear even a whisper of ‘open covenants, openly arrived at.’

January 30. — On my way back from Scotland I broke my journey at Leicester, to preach in the church of Robert Hall — the Pork-Pie Church, as they call it, because of its circular shape. In the evening I lectured on Lincoln. Leicester, I remembered, had been the home of William Carey, and I went to see his little Harvey Lane Church, where he dreamed his great dream and struggled with drunken deacons. Just across the narrow street is the red-brick cottage where he lived, teaching a few pupils and working at his cobbler’s bench to eke out a living. It is now a Missionary Museum, preserved as nearly as possible in its original form and furniture, its ceiling so low that I could hardly stand erect. There, in his little back-shop, — with its bench and tools, like those Carey used, — a great man worked. Pegging away, he nevertheless kept a map of the world on the opposite wall of his shop, dreaming the while of world-conquest for Christ. There, too, he thought out that mighty sermon which took its text from Isaiah 54: 2, 3, and had two points: Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.

No other sermon of that period — 1792— had only two points, and none ever had a finer challenge to the faith of Christian men. We need the vision of Carey in this broken world to-day, that so, however humble our lot, we may learn to think in world-terms — in terms, that is, of one humanity and one Christianity. I felt myself standing at the fountain-head of that river of God which will yet make this war-ridden earth blossom as a rose.

April 8. — The City Temple mailbag entails an enormous amount of labor, bringing almost a hundred letters a week; but it is endlessly interesting. There are letters of all kinds — a series from Manchester proving that the world is hollow and that we live on the inside — and from everywhere: China, India, France, America, and all over Britain. If an American says a naughty thing about Britain, a copy of it is sent to me, underlined. If it is the other way round, I am not allowed to forget it. There are letters from ministers whose faith has been shaken, and from others who want to go to America; pitiful letters from shell-shocked boys in hospitals; letters from bereaved parents and widowed girls — heroic, appealing, heart-breaking, like that from an old woman in the north of England whose life of sorrow was crowned by the loss of her two grandsons in the war. In closing she said: ‘Me youth is gone, me hope is dead, me heart is heavy; but I neglect no duty.’ To which I could only reply that, though God had taken everything else, in leaving her a love of righteousness He had left her the best gift He had.

As nearly all the City Temple sermons and prayers are published, both hearers and readers write to agree or disagree, or, more often, to relate difficulties of faith or duty. The mail-bag is thus an index to the varying moods of the time in respect to matters of faith, and I learn more from it than I am able to teach others. Every time a sermon has to do with Christ, it is sure to be followed by a shower of letters, asking that the subject be carried further. In spite of the agitations of the world, — perhaps because of them, — What think ye of Christ? remains the most absorbing and fascinating of all questions.

Somehow, in spite of my practice for the last ten years, I have always had a shrinking feeling about writing and printing prayers. Yet, when I receive letters telling how perplexed and weary folk are helped by them, I relent. Public prayer, of course, is different from private devotion; it is individual, indeed, but representative and symbolic, too. One speaks for many, some of whom are dumb of soul, and if one can help others to pray, it is worth while. Yesterday, in the Authors’ Club, a man took me aside and told me this story. He was an officer invalided out of the service, having been wounded and smitten with fever in the Mesopotamian campaign. He took from his pocket a tiny book, — it looked like a notebook, — saying that it contained the bread, the meat, the milk, all that had kept his soul alive on the long marches and the weary waits in the hospitals. I thought it was, perhaps, a copy of the New Testament, or the Imitation of Christ; but, on opening it, I found ten of my little prayers cut from the paper and pasted in the book. Such things help me to go on, even against a shrinking I cannot define.

April 16. — The hearings of the British Coal Commission, in the King’s Robing-Room, some of which I have attended, look and sound like a social judgment-day. Never, I dare say, has England seen such pitiless publicity on the lives of the workers, the fabulous profits of the owners, — running up as high as 147 per cent, — and the ‘rigging’ of the public. It is like a searchlight suddenly turned on. No wonder the country stands aghast. Nothing could surpass the patience, the courage, the relentless politeness of Robert Smillie, who conducts the case for the miners. He has had all England on dress-parade — lords, dukes, and nobles

— while he examined them as to the titles to their holdings. They were swift and often witty in their replies, but it means much that they had to come when summoned by a miner. They were bored and surly, but they humbly obeyed. Truly, we are in a new England; and though their lordships may have a brief success in the King’s RobingRoom, they are in fact already defeated

— and they know it. They win a skirmish, but they lose a battle.

May 10. — What the Free Catholicism may turn out to be remains to be disclosed; so far, it is more clever and critical than constructive. W. E. Orchard is its Bernard Shaw, and W. G. Peck its Chesterton. At first, it was thought to be only a protest against the ungracious barrenness of Nonconformist worship, in behalf of rhythm, color, and symbolism. But it is more than that. It seeks to unite personal religious experience with its corporate and symbolical expression, thus blending two things too often held apart. As between Anglicans and Nonconformists, it discovers the higher unity of things which do not differ, seeking the largeness of Christ in whose radiance there is room for every type of experience and expression. It lays emphasis on fellowship, since no one can find the truth for another, and no one can find it alone. Also, by reinterpreting and extending the sacramental principle, and at the same time disinfecting it of magic, the Free Catholicism may give new impetus to all creative social endeavor. For years it has been observed that many ultra-high Churchmen — for example, Bishop Gore, who is one of the noblest characters in modern Christianity — have been leaders in the social interpretation of Christianity. Perhaps, at last, we shall learn that it was not the Church, but Humanity, with which Jesus identified Himself when He said: ‘This is my body broken for you.’ The great thing about Christianity is that no one can tell what it will do next.

June 2. — Have been down in Wales for a day or two, lecturing on Lincoln, and also feeling the pulse of the public sentiment. I found it beating quick and hot. Indeed, not only in Wales, but all over the north of England, there is white-hot indignation — all due to that, wretched election last autumn. One hears revolutionary talk on all sides, and only a spark is needed to make an explosion. When I see the hovels in which the miners live, — squalid huts, more like pig-pens than human homes, — I do not wonder at the unrest of the people, but at their infinite patience. Physical and moral decay are inevitable, and the spiritual life is like a fourth dimension. I asked a Labor leader what it is that is holding things together, and he replied: ‘All that holds now is the fact that these men went to Sunday School in the churches and chapels of Wales years ago; nothing else restrains them.’ Thus a religious sense of the common good, of communal obligation, holds, when all ot her ties give way. But the churches and chapels are empty today, and in the new generation what will avert the ‘emancipated, atheistic, international democracy,’ so long predicted? Religion must do something more than restrain and conserve: it must create and construct. If ever we find the secret of creative social evolution, it will be in a deeper insight into the nature and meaning of religion as a social reality, as well as a private mysticism. This at least is plain: the individual and the social gospel belong together, and neither will long survive the shipwreck of the other. Never, this side of heaven, do I expect to hear such singing as I heard in Wales!

June 16. — Henry James said that three marks distinguish London — her size, her parks, and her ‘magnificent mystification.’ To know the mystification one needs to spend a night — cool, moonless, and windy — on top of St. Paul’s Cathedral. After climbing as many steps as there are days in the year and a journey through devious diagonals, we emerge by a tiny door leading to the Golden Gallery, three hundred feet above the sleeping city. Sounds as they ascend are isolated and identifiable, even when softened by distance or teased by the wind. Fleet Street, westward, is a ravine of yellow glamour. Cheapside looks like a fissure in the side of a volcano, where blackness swallows up everything else. The bridges play at criss-cross with lampreflections in the river. The clock-tower of Westminster, like a moon and a half, shines dimly, and the railway signals at Cannon Street Station look like stars of the under-world — crimson, emerald, amber. By half-past three a sky, mottled with heavy clouds, begins to sift them into planes and fills the breaks with the sort of light that is ‘rather darkness visible.’ Slowly the pall over the city, half mist and half smoke, — the same ‘presumptuous smoake’ of Evelyn’s day, — begins to drift sullenly with the wind, like a gas-attack. An hour ago the lamplights made everything seem ghostly; now the ghostliness is theirs. Presently, out of a sea of slate, Wren’s steeples rise like gaunt spectres, with an air compounded of amazement and composure. The last thing to take shape is the Cathedral itself; first the gilt Cross shines palely, then the Lantern grows to unearthly whiteness, but the Dome still broods in darkness. As we watch, the campaniles and the statues below turn from alabaster to ivory. Squadrons of clouds float in an atmosphere that is turning from gray to pearl, and from pearl to gold, like the rosy amorini in a Venetian altar-piece. The river is astir with barges, and early trams sprinkle grains of humanity about the thoroughfares. Camden Town crawls back under its pall of industrial smoke. At last the city, in all its infinitude of detail, is revealed, and the mystification of the night gives way to the day with ‘sovran eve.’ A flashing glimpse of the Cathedral from within, in the glow of the eastern windows, makes one wonder why we do not offer our worship, as they do in the East, at dawn.

July 25. — With appalling clarity we are beginning to see how little we gained by the war, and how much we lost. Instead of a world worthy of the generosity and idealism of the dead, we have moral collapse, revolutionary influenza, industrial chaos, and an orgy of extravagance. In politics, in business, in social life, things are done which would have excited horror and disgust in 1914. One recalls the lines of Chesterton written after the landslide election of 1906: —

Nothing is more terrible than the moral let-down all about us, unless it is the ease and haste with which a wild and forgetful world has proved false to the vows it swore in its hour of terror. Yesterday a London magistrate said that half the crime in the kingdom is bigamy. Reticences and modesties seem to have been thrown overboard to an accompaniment of the jazz dance, which has become a symbol of the mood of the hour. Often it has been said that man is the modest sex, but I never believed it until now. Young girls between fifteen and twenty-two are unmanageable, and imitate the manners of courtesans. Working for good wages, they are independent of their parents, demanding latchkeys, to come and go at all hours; and at the slightest restraint they leave home. In broad daylight the public parks are scenes of such unspeakable vulgarity that one is grateful for the protection of garden walls. Who can estimate the injury done by this loosening of the moral bonds, this letting down of the bars to the brute? Those who speak of war as a purifier of morals are masters of a Satanic satire!

September 12. — These are days when anything may happen. Having lived for five years in an atmosphere of violence, men are irritable, and riots break out on the slightest pretext. Many fear that the history of a century ago, when Peterloo followed Waterloo, may repeat itself. Nobody is satisfied with the result of the Peace Conference — sorriest of sequels to a victory won by solidarity and sacrifice. Some think the treaty too hard, some too soft, and all wonder how it can be enforced without sowing the seeds of other wars. The Covenant of the League is criticized as keenly here as in America, but with nothing like the poisonous partisan and personal venom displayed at home. It is felt, that, if the nations hold together, tire Covenant can be amended and the treaty revised and made workable as need requires; but if they pull apart, the case is hopeless.

What is happening in America is hard to make out, except that, under cover of a poison-gas attack on the President, all the elements that opposed the war — including the whole hyphenated contingent — have formed a coalition of hatreds to destroy him. At the Peace Conference he was the victim of a vendetta by men of his own country who, for partisan purposes, tried to stab their own President in the back at the very moment when he was negotiating a treaty of peace in a foreign land! Not unnaturally the attitude of the Senate is interpreted on this side as a repudiation of the war by America. ‘You came late and go early; having helped to put out the fire, you leave us to clean up the mess,’ my English friends say. No wonder they feel bitter, and this feeling is fanned by the anti-American fanatics, whose organized propaganda — something new in England — has been so active since the Armistice. No doubt it is provoked in part by the stupid antiBritish propaganda in America, with other elements added, the while sinister forces are busy in behalf of estrangement between two peoples who should be, not only friends, but fellow workers for the common good.

(An unhappy example of this feeling, which marred the closing weeks of my ministry, was an alleged ‘interview’ which appeared in the Daily News, purporting to come from me. It made me use words remote from my thought, in a spirit foreign to my nature; and the result was an impression so alien to my spirit, and so untrue to the facts, as to be grotesque. Such words as these were put into my mouth: ‘I have come reluctantly to the opinion that an American minister cannot really succeed in England. There is something in the English character or point of view — I cannot define it — that seems to prevent complete agreement and sympathy between the two. There exists a body of opinion amongst the middle men in the ministry and the churches that objects to the permanent settlement of American preachers in this country.’ All of which was manufactured so far as I was concerned, however true it may be to English opinion. When the man who did it was asked for his reason, he said that he wished ‘to keep American ministers from coming to England.’ Of course, it will take more than that to keep us from going to England, — though I dare say it will be many a day before an American accepts an English pastorate, — but the incident illustrates the state of mind almost a year after the Armistice. Unfortunately that feeling still exists, and it makes an exchange of pulpits difficult for Americans who have any national self-respect.

However, by patience and mutual regard this irritation may be overcome in the morning of a fairer, clearer day.)

October 9. — Sir Oliver Lodge lectured in the City Temple to-night. The Temple was full, with many standing in the aisles. His subject was ‘The Structure of the Atom,’ and he spoke for more than an hour, holding his audience in breathless interest Even the children present heard and understood, as if it had been a fairy-story. Indeed, it was more fascinating than a fairystory — his illustrations were so simple, so vivid. As a work of art, the lecture was a rare feat. If only the men of the pulpit could deal with the great themes of faith — surely not more abstract than the structure of the atom — with the same simplicity and lucidity, how different it would be! Tall, well-formed, his dome-like head reminding one of the pictures of Tennyson, the lecturer was good to look at, good to hear; and the total impression of his lecture was an overwhelming sense of the reality of the Unseen. He made only one reference to psychical studies, and that was to warn people to go slow, not to leap beyond the facts, and, above all, — since spiritualism is not spirituality, — not to make such matters a religion. This advice came with the greater weight from the man who more than all others, perhaps, has lifted such investigations to the dignity of a new science.

October 12. — Mr. Asquith, Lord Robert Cecil, Mr. Clynes, and Premier Venizelos of Greece, all on the same platform, speaking in behalf of the League of Nations! Such was the bill of fare at the Mansion House, to which was added — for me — a spicy little chat with Mrs. Asquith, most baffling of women. She is lightning and fragrance all mixed up with a smile, and the lightning never strikes twice in the same place. Mr. Asquith read his address — as he has been wont to do since he first became Prime Minister — in a style as lucid as sunlight and as colorless: a deliberate and weighty address, more like a judicial opinion than an oration, yet with an occasional flash of hidden fire. Clynes also read his address, which was a handicap, for he is a very effective speaker when he lets himself go. Lord Robert — tall, stooped, with centuries of British culture written in his face — was never more eloquent in his wisdom and earnestness; and one heard in his grave and simple words the finer mind of England. If only he were more militant, as he would be but for too keen a sense of humor. He has the spiritual quality which one misses so much in the statesmanship of our day — I shall never be happy until he is Prime Minister! Venizelos was winning, graceful, impressive; and in a brief talk that I had with him afterward, he spoke with warm appreciation of the nobility and high-mindedness of the President. He has the brightest eyes I have seen since William James went away. Without the moral greatness of Masaryk, or the Christian vision of Smuts, he is one of the most interesting personalities of our time and one of its ablest men.

October 20. — The President is stricken at a time when he is most needed! It is appalling! Without him reaction will run riot. Though wounded in a terrifying manner, he still holds the front-line trench of the moral idealism of the world! Whatever his faults at home, — His errors of judgment or his limitations of temperament, — in his world-vision he saw straight; and he made the only proposal looking toward a common mind organized in the service of the common good. Nothing can rob him of that honor. If our people at home had only known the sinister agencies with which he had to contend, — how all the militarists of Europe were mobilized against him at Paris, — they would see that his achievement, while falling below his ideal, as all mortal achievements do, was nothing short of stupendous. Those who know the scene from this side have an honorable pride in the President; and though his fight should cost him his life, when the story is finally told he will stand alongside another who went ‘the way of dominion in pitiful, highhearted fashion’ to his martyrdom. He falls where a brave man should fall, at the front, as much a casualty of the war as any soldier who fell in Flanders or the Argonne.

November 11. — Sunday evening, the 9th, was my last service as the Minister of the City Temple, and the sermon had for its text Revelation 3: 14 — ‘These things saith the Amen.’ It was an effort to interpret that old, familiar, haunting word, — the Amen of God to the aspiration of man, and the Amen of man to the way and will of God, — seeking to make vivid that vision which sees through the shadows, and affirms, not that all is well, nor yet that all is ill, but that all shall be well when ‘God hath made the pile complete.’ Its message was that, when humanity sees what has been the Eternal Purpose from the beginning, and the ‘far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves,’ the last word of history will be a grand Amen — a shout of praise, the final note of the great worldsong. To-day, at noon, all over the Empire, everything paused for two minutes, in memory of the dead. The City Temple was open and many people gathered for that moment of silent, high remembrance; and that hushed moment was my farewell to the great white pulpit, and to a ministry wrought in the name of Jesus in behalf of goodwill — speaking with stammering voice those truths which will still be eloquent when all the noises of to-day have followed the feet that made them, into Silence.

November 12. — To-night the National Council of the Brotherhood Movement, which gave me so warm a welcome in 1916, tendered me a parting dinner — an hour which I can neither describe nor forget. Dr. Clifford — a veteran soldier in the wars of God — presided, and his presence was a benediction. Looking back over my three years and a half in London, I can truly say that, though I did not want to come, and would not have come at all but for the war, I do not regret that I did come — save for the scenes of horror and suffering, which I pray God to be able to forget. Nor do I regret leaving, though my ministry has been a triumph from the beginning, in spite of many errors of my own added to the terrible conditions under which it was wrought. As long as I live I shall carry in my heart the faces of my dear friends in England, and especially the love and loyalty of the people of the City Temple— the memory of their kindness is like sacramental wine in the Cup of Everlasting Things. Perhaps, on the other side of the sea, because I now know the spirit and point of view of both peoples, I may be able to help forward the great friendship.

November 14. — Hung in my memory are many pictures of the beauty-spots of this Blessed Island: glens in the Highlands of Scotland; the ‘banks and braes o’ bonny Doon ’; stately old cathedrals, — strong, piteous, eloquent, — sheltering the holy things of life; the towers and domes of Oxford; Stoke Poges on a still summer day; the roses of Westcliff; the downs of Wiltshire, where Walton went a-fishing and Herbert preached the gospel — and practised it, too; Rottingdean-on-the-Sea; scenes of the Shakespeare country — the church, the theatre, the winding Avon; the old Quaker Meeting-house in Buckinghamshire, where Penn and Pennington sleep; the mountains of North Wales; great, gray London, in all its myriad moods: London in the fog, the mist, the rain; London by moonlight; the old, rambling city whose charm gathers and grows, weaving a spell which one can neither define nor escape; London from Primrose Hill on a clear, frosty day; London from the dome of St. Paul’s; London from the Savoy in October, seen through a lattice of falling leaves, while a soft haze hangs over the River of Years. It is said that, if one lives in London five years, he will never be quite happy anywhere else — and I am leaving it just in time!