Tke Gospel in War Time MOTES OF AM ADDRESS RECENTLY DELIVERED A T THE BIBLE INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES BS Dr. W. H. Grifttk-Tkomas Toronto, Ontario, Canada
The eyes of people today are upon the future. Everywhere men are dis cussing the problem of reconstruction. We are told that nothing will be the same after the war, however a friend of mine in Toronto says three things will be the same—men, women and children. But there are two things that are always the same; the Gospel and human nature. The chief thing now is not the relig ion of the soldier but the religion of those who are responsible for the sol dier— the religion given to men before they go to battle. I was reading the other day a little book of Seventeen essays of Chaplains entitled “The Church in the Furnace.” I think it would more properly be called “the chaplain in the furnace.” How strange that so many have gone to minister to the soldier apparently knowing so lit tle about men! The Gospel message does not need any reconstruction. It only needs restating, with special emphasis on the points that stand out now as never before as true and imminent in war time. I wish to mention some of these truths which call for emphasis in the present day. First: The FACT OF SIN. War has shown that human life is not right. Sir Oliver Lodge before the war said that nobody now is bothering about their sins. In the light of the last three and a half years, sin has been seen as never before, and it is making the work of the preacher very much different. In a recent book, “The Jus tification of God,” the author says “this
is a much wickeder world than we had imagined.” The church has failed in its emphasis upon the doctrine of SIN. We need as never before to preach sin and repentance, and to show people sin as an awful reality. What we need is sermons, not essays. An essay is some thing delivered BEFORE people, but a sermon is something delivered TO peo ple. The church is for the purpose of making people muse, which means to think. It is not to AMUSE, which means to keep people from thinking. Second: The reality of righteous ness. It would seem to some, in view of the awful German atrocities and sin ful outrages, that everything of truth and righteousness had become over whelmed. Nevertheless it is still true that RIGHT is the foundation of the world. As Kipling has said, “The ten commandments will not budge.” The Germans anticipated a short war. Things have not turned out at all as they had expected. It has been a long record of plans miscarried. To the German everything is calculated by machinery, but they forget human nature. As one has said, “They have anticipated everything but that which has actually happened.” An invisible ally has fought all along the line, push ing them back. From the standpoint of military reasoning there was no reason why the Germans did not get to Paris in 1914. The hand of God was against them. A farmer wrote a letter to a news paper editor stating that he had done all his planting, plowing, harrowing and harvesting on a Sunday and that
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