THIS is the question that is being asked by millions. Parents ask it whose sons are at the Front. Wives ask it whose husbands have left them for the War. The cry comes from a mighty nation in the throes and shadow of death. How long? The greatest voice in the realm has told us that the “end is not in sight.” Statesmen warn us that we must be prepared to face great sacrifices, and that all the manhood of the nation will be required to give us victory. We must have munitions, and we [must have men, they say. Dear friends, we must have God.
The nation is not seeking God, and as long as “business as usual, pleasure as usual,” is the motto of a nation, there will be no permanent success. Are the leaders of the nation seeking God? Do we ever hear His name mentioned in Parliament or in Proclamations? We know from the Word of God, we know from history, that no nation ever prospered that failed to acknowledge Him. And yet God has been dealing gently with this nation, although His mighty hand has been laid upon it. God is warning Great Britain now. He is standing at the door and knocking. If the nation does not open its doors and let Him in, it will never be well with it.
God allowed the enemy to bombard our shores; God allowed his submarines and mines to sink our men-of-war; God allowed his Zeppelins to pour down death and destruction from the skies. Over and over again the nation has been on the eve of a mighty victory, when by some mischance it was snatched away. The casualty lists are getting longer and longer, and the world is mourning its best and bravest. All these things are the voices of God, that the nation has not yet heard, that the nation does not seem inclined to hear. Pleasure and sin are rampant in our midst. Like hounds in leash, men and women are scarcely held back from all the excesses of sin. The spirit of the nation seems to say, “While our men are dying for us abroad, we will laugh and enjoy ourselves at home. We will crowd the theaters and the picture palaces, and eat and drink and enjoy ourselves, even if the groans of the wounded and the dying rend the air around us.”
A young officer fresh from the battle-front said to me, “People take things much more seriously in France than they do in England.” An atheist, in Hyde Park, was shouting out to the people around him, “There is no God! I can prove there is no God.” There were two wounded soldiers from the trenches listening to him, and one said loudly, “We can believe there is no God in London; but we know there is a God in the trenches.” While men are dying for their country abroad, this is how the nation is living at home.
We want a Jonah to go through the land to bring the nation to its knees. We want some prophet-voice from God to rebuke, to chasten, to exhort. The nation will be scourged for its sins — most of all for the sin of forgetting God, and for blaspheming against Christ, the Son of God, and for denying His power to save.
In the days of the Armada the nation prayed, and God sent a mighty wind that swept the Armada away from our shores and destroyed it. The breath of God did more that day than all the might of England could have done.
And today God could send a storm that would wreck every Zeppelin; and God could give a power to the nation’s arms that would lead to instant victory. Directly Britain prays and repents God will give victory. He says: “I will be inquired of.” The Christians in our midst must be the forlorn hope of Christendom. They must throng the courts of heaven and cry aloud to God for the nation’s sins. They must pray to God that the blindness may be taken away that refuses to see God in all that is happening, and to acknowledge Him in the confession of a nation’s sins. Unless God is exalted we shall be debased. Our beloved King holds the hearts of all his people in his keeping; under God, he holds the national destinies of all the peoples over whom he rules in his keeping also. “By Me kings rule.” So if the King would read the people, they would follow him in the acknowledgment of God, by prayer and the confession of the nation’s sins. Then a people face to face with God could say, “Our eyes are upon Thee” — “the battle is not ours but God’s.”
But if we fill the theaters instead of our haunts of prayer; if we run after pleasure instead of seeking after God, then God will leave us, and the devil will have his way with us. One week-day given up to penitence and prayer; one hour of silence before the majesty of heaven; one mighty cry from a nation’s heart to God; the sackcloth of penitence upon us from the highest to the lowest; the royalty of Britain laid before the King of kings; the warriors of England prostrate before the omnipotence of God; the statesmen of Britain seeking to know the mind and will of God — let this be done, and the sun of victory will shine out in its effulgence over all our world, and the cannons’ roar will be drowned by the mighty diapason of a nation’s paean of worship,
“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,
Praise Him all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
H.W.