Page:The War and the Churches.djvu/96

78 was a moral agency. They detected cases in which adverse fortune had sobered and softened a man: the finger of Providence. In France there was a very considerable return to the Catholic Church, and recovery of its power, after the disastrous war of 1870. In the south of Italy there is always much less sexual freedom for a time after an earthquake has buried a few tens of thousands under the ruins of their houses. I would undertake to fill a quarto volume with instances of good things which arose out of or followed upon evil experiences. We saw that the present war is being examined in the same respect. There are "great spiritual opportunities": hundreds of thousands of young men are being compelled (by the authorities) to go to church who had not been for years; the different denominations are fraternising as they never did before; the churches are rather fuller than they had been of late: charity is awakened on a prodigious scale; zeal for an ideal (the violated peace of Belgium) is dragging men even from our slums to the colours. Here again one could at least fill a moderate treatise with the things achieved; and beyond them all is the unuttered vision of the crowded churches at the triumphant close of the war, perhaps that long-coveted religious revival.

There is no doubt whatever that this theory of the war will be assiduously pressed when nature has drawn her green mantle once more over the blackened area of the war and our hearts are lifted up by thought of victory. It is already being urged, and I would add a little to the comments I have already passed on it.

The clergy would do well to realise that, whatever virtue this theory may have in soothing the minds and dissolving the doubts of their followers, to an outsider