I
can't allow all that nonsense about love. My job is to teach them to
hate. You must either cooperate with me or go."
The chaplain refused to change his faith or his teaching, and the
general thought better of his intervention.
For all chaplains it was difficult. Simple souls were bewildered by
the conflict between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of war.
Many of them--officers as well as men--were blasphemous in their scorn
of "parson stuff," some of them frightfully ironical.
A friend of mine watched two chaplains passing by. One of them was a
tall man with a crown and star on his shoulder-strap.
"I wonder," said my friend, with false simplicity, "whether Jesus
Christ would have been a lieutenant--colonel?"
On the other hand, many men found help in religion, and sought its
comfort with a spiritual craving. They did not argue about Christian
ethics and modern warfare. Close to death in the midst of tragedy,
conscious in a strange way of their own spiritual being and of a
spirituality present among masses of men above the muck of war, the
stench of corruption, and fear of bodily extinction, they groped out
toward God.
Pages:
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941