The Great Discovery

-the incredible thing that has happened in our parish. When we had least tho

from the offices in town, plunged through the tunnel, and hastened to our gardens. We lifted up our eyes to the hills, and our secu

hose who had six whole days in the week to devote to their own pleasure began to dev

the suddenness of a lightning f

s can never express this sudden meeting of ma

ts and spires it came-boom, boom-under the stars. It was war. That far-away echo might not itself be the grim struggle of death,

al-that word was born for us anew. We heard it on the lips of mothers clinging to the hands of their sons, who were summoned away to join their regiments, and as white lips said "Good-bye" to those whose blood was to water the fair fields of France, we suddenly realised what it meant. The word, meaningless yesterday, to-day expressed the greatest wish that the lips of man can

inite universe, and it was when the dusk sank into the deep night that the word ros

ing shard, and in the number of our Dreadnoughts. Then all these things seemed to fail us. A nightmare seemed to fall on us-a nightmare which lifted not night or day.

et? The ghastly deeds of shame-were they to come to our doors! We looked at our children, and they could not understand the light in our eyes. These

seemed to be dying of attrition. And the old church where the quarriers and farm servants assembled and worshipped in an atmosphere that on a warm day became so thick that one could cut it wit

graves of the generations. With wistful faces they turned towards it. While the bell rang they stood in groups among the graves. And if you listened

nd there just as if they had been there every Sunday when the beadle, with head erect, ushers the minister to the pulpit and snips him in. (Though the church is new, th

mere superstition. Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the universe in their grasp. To ask that one of these laws should be altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to

mer morning, they often heard the whirr of my friend's mowing machine as he mowed his lawn. It was th

use of camp-followers. The tune of the opening Psalm was Kilmarnock, and my friend sang it in a way which showed that his mother had tr

a weapon in the hand of the devil. But the prayer went on-for the sailors keeping their watches in the darkness of the night that God might watch over them, that through their unfaltering courage our shores might be inviolate; for the soldiers now facin

aying to and fro, while the shrapnel burst and the aeroplanes whirred in the smoke of the cannon.

at home, of fathers and mothers to whom their sons would never return, of women in empty houses with their husbands laid in nameless graves, of little children who would never learn to say "

t instinct is mightier far than that logic which is, after all is said, only the last refuge of the feeble-minded. There came like the sudden lifting of a curtain the vision of a whole nation-nay, of races gird

language, with a felicitous phrase now and then lighting up his sentences, that prayer was not a mere relic of fanatical superstition but a mighty power. He discussed with a wealth of learning whether God ha

reat a thing is freedom." Prayer was not mere spiritual gymnastics. A God immured in cold laws, barred for ever from the play of love or tenderness, would be the one being in the universe most to be pitied. The Cre

her crying for victory over each other. But the difficulty was of appearance only. For the only prevailing prayer was prayer in the name of Christ. "Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name that will I do." To ask in His

e been done with the name of God on men's lips; of atrocities such as the unspeakable Turk never perpetrated; of war waged not upon to-day but upon the centuries of faith that reared great cathedrals now in flames; of women and children laid upon the reeking altars of human passion; and al

her never got

tens to the Word. But all the traditions of the parish were snapped in a second. In the side gallery sat the General, sitting as he a

, little by little, as the sermon went on, he turned round. At last he was facing the pulpit. His gleaming eyes were fixed on the preacher. His son was dead. And

ied-and then there rose a cheer-muffled, but still a cheer. In the pulpit the words died on the preacher's lips. He seemed a

the only sign he gave of his long absence from church. The sermon was never finished. The preacher in a low voice said

Is

and tha

at th

ur cause

*

cer

devoure

*

essed

us safe

th not

a liv

their

oody c

*

ds soared in exultant triumph, wailed like the cry of the shingle swept by the surf; the sighing of the wind over the heather was in it, and the hissing of the stor

ress now sang it. We, too, would pull down strongholds and turn to flight the armies of the alien. In all ages the cause of freedom triumphed, and that cause was ours. We had entered on conflict with clean hands and, God helping us, we would wage it with clean hands. The cl

The ticket-collector is a philosopher, and he comes to church, because he loves the old psalm tunes. But when one of our parishi

ing in it," flashes the man from Keswick. "If ye wad only reid philosophee," says the ticket-collector, "ye would ken better." But to-day my friend and the ticket-collector

neral has no dealings. But they talked like brothers. For the shoemaker has a son fighting at the front, and his heart is sore troubled within him. And the General's son is dead. And as I came up the brae I saw

nd God, and, finding Him, we have found each other. The man who in his madnes