VOLUNTEERS IN A CONSCRIPT ARMY

Baccalaureate Sermon by the Reverend Ambrose Vernon, D.D., Pastor of theHarvard Church at Brookline

EDITOR'S NOTE. Of the sermons which America's entrance into the war has produced none has been more notable than the Baccalaureate which Doctor Vernon preached to the Dartmouth seniors on June 17 of this year. That it may reach a wider alumni audience than that which a diminished Commencement season could privilege, it is here printed in full.

Text: John 10: 18. No one taketh my life from, me but I lay it down of myself.

The war is destroying many things: those it leaves us it makes new. It has quite transformed, for example, our estimate of the sacrifice of Christ, and in so doing has given us a new appraisal of the worth of this text. Formerly, as we read it, we were filled with wonder at its spirit of audacity and self-sacrifice. Now we are inclined to envy the joy to which it witnesses.

There are multitudes all about us who, like Christ, are making the ultimate sacrifice for a great cause. "The Son of man is come not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many;" in the days of peace we used to feel that those words isolated the Son of man from us ; now we know that there are thousands of such sons of men. With St. Francis, thousands of hands are stretched forth to heaven, and thousands of voices cry "Welcome, Sister Death." With John Brown, a multitude of our fellow-men declare, "It is a great comfort to feel assured that I am permitted to die for a cause, — not merely to pay the debt of nature as all must;" we understand what he meant by saying, "I am worth unconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose." The young men of this College two weeks ago inscribed their names among their compatriots in the Book of Life and Death. And some weeks before that many of you offered yourselves willingly for the inevitable. Our youth no longer fall short of Christ because they shrink from the ultimate sacrifice. They seem separated from Him now by a barrier they had scarcely detected before. He laid down His life of Himself; no one took it from Him: they lay down their lives at the command of their government. He was the supreme volunteer; they are members of a conscripted army. To lay down our life for the truth when we are free to preserve our life by denying the truth is one thing, but to be conscripted to lay down our lives for the cause of our country, whether we will or no, seems quite another. Fortunately you men of Dartmouth, in your burning zeal for your country, anticipated conscription. As volunteers you have written a new and glorious chapter in the history of this College, one of the great citadels of American democracy. Our colleges have taken their places by the side of the Russian universities as mothers of liberty. Because of your great sacrifices they occupy already a different place in the esteem of the country. But, notwithstanding, the army in which you volunteers will serve is a conscripted army. Indeed, after the fifth of June, we all of us are citizens of a conscripted nation. Yet, my friends, in the words of our text, how essential to the sacrifice of Christ was the freedom of Christ! And so I purpose to ask you to consider with me this morning: How to be a Volunteer in a Conscript Nation.

In the first place, we at once qualify as volunteers when we discern in the cause for which America has enlisted a purpose holy enough to demand the assent of our souls. Fundamentally, I take it, we believe in representative democratic government. We believe that our chosen representatives have a right to demand from us the sacrifice of our fortunes and lives for its preservation. It is we, therefore, who, through the voice of our own delegates, have conscripted ourselves. But the foundation of democratic government is the impregnable conviction of the sanctity of every individual man. There is no earthly authority that can conscript the heart. It would be my duty to be shot by my government rather than for it, if its decision flouted the sacred convictions of my soul. And just because of that essential and inalienable independence of the soul, it insists that if I fight at all it must be as a volunteer. No act of Congress can usurp its rights. The soul is the only home of freedom and holiness. It alone weighs motives before action and after it. It alone makes common decision personal with a cheer. It alone pierces through flesh and blood with the power and glory of love. It alone lays claim to immortality when all that seems has suffered shock. It alone conceives unseen value - and bestows it upon the objects of its reverence. Because of it, woods and colleges and independence halls, the fields of Gettysburg and Waterloo, the bluffs of Vicksburg and the banks of the River Marne are dear. By it princes reign and are dethroned and by it, first kings and then peoples, decree justice. Out from its holy hiding-place has come forth the light and truth which have led to the formation and dissolution of nations, to the enactment and repeal of law, to the setting up of families and churches and schools. All of the most ancient and dominating institutions of men are its creation; it gave and it can take away. They perish but it remaineth, yea all of them wax old like a garment, but it endureth and its years have no end. If this huge war be a blind crawling of insects which sting each other here in the night with no duty or holiness about it, then no soul before me has a right to be belittled and befouled by it. But if it be a part of the unending struggle of the human soul for its redemption then we deliberately lay our lives down in it; no one takes them from us; "we embrace the purpose of God and the doom assigned."

But if the war be indeed a struggle of the soul, we must discover in this battle a holier purpose than the humiliation of Germany or the triumph of America. Souls do not lay themselves down either to aggrandize or to punish nations; they require more sacred issues. They fight not to obtain power to sink the Kronprinsessin or the Deutschland as the Lusitania and Sussex were sunk, but to make all future sinkings of that sort unthinkable. They fight not to devastate western Germany as Germany has devastated eastern France but to make such devastation impossible. They fight not to surround Germany with a chain of victorious armies but to bring about such conditions that all nations shall be safer without armies than with them. They fight in short not to humiliate a national enemy but to liberate humanity. But when we discover such motives as these, there rises in our hearts a power that no man ever sees or ever controls. It sweeps away all his ordinary paralysis of effort and lands him safe as a volunteer in a conscript nation.

And then we discover that there is no real opposition between conscription and the volunteer spirit. There is no way to volunteer in human life, except in a conscripted army. We are all of us conscripted into life; no one of us was asked his permission to be born; we have not chosen the color of our eyes or the constitution of our bodies; we none of us chose our country or our parents, nor for the matter of that, our ideals, our social customs, nor even those tides of the spirit that set so mysteriously and inevitably toward religious faith. That we are warmed by the sun and rejoice in the manifold color of earth and sky, that the sense of duty which limits our freedom at the same time exalts our soul, that faith, hope and love are essential to full human development, that the greatest of them is love, that "in the darkest spot of earth some love is found," that the days of our years are threescore years and" ten or even by reason of strength fourscore but that we soon are cut off and fly away, that "if death were seen at first as death, love had not been," - these are conditions with which we had nothing to do, and into the midst of which we are flung by God. But we volunteer in this conscripted world when we become convinced that the fundamental purpose of this universe is a noble one. Through the contemplation of Jesus Christ, through the strange joy of doing our duty when it involves a cross, through the transforming experience of human love, we discover the richness and goodness and power of the will of God. Then we enlist our will in His and devote our entire lives to the furtherance of that purpose and that love by which we were conscripted from the beginning. We turn from servants into sons when we discover and affirm the purpose of the Father, but we were not consulted about the purpose itself. So we escape from the bondage of conscripts into the freedom of volunteers in this war, when our souls assent to the great purpose of our nation, to uphold the priority of the rights of peace over thoSe of war on sea and land, to make the world safe for democracy, to establish a concert of free peoples which shall at last make the world itself free. This is the fundamental qualification of the volunteer.

Then a man qualifies as a volunteer in a conscript nation by the maintenance of a cheerful spirit in the midst of hardship, for the spirit is not subject to conscription. One of my friends who has recently seen service on the Mexican border writes that soldiers are proverbial grumblers. But grumbling is a characteristic of a hireling, whose own the cause for which he fights is not. When a man is fond of saying that he enlisted to fight, not to be eaten by vermin, to be wet through day and night, to guard and repair trenches and to be only half-fed, you may be sure that he is no genuine volunteer. A hireling is where he want to be and is doing what he doesn't want to do. A volunteer, on the other hand, wants to be where his cause sends him and doing what his cause demands from him. Now, in a very high sense it is true that no Christian wishes to be anywhere in a battle-line or making preparations for the destruction of his fellow-men. But he would not be where he is if he were not convinced that his ideal is something higher either than his own life or that of his enemy. And if his ideal is sublime enough to demand and to dignify his life, it is also compelling and to demand and. dignify any hardship. As a matter of fact, war is far more prolific of monotonous hardship than it is of exciting combat. "It takes the grace of God," writes a minister turned waiter in a Y. M. C. A. hut, "to wipe 300 mugs a day and keep cheerful." And it takes the high spirit of a volunteer to stand ankle-deep in mud, looking out over the side of a dangerous but inactive trench or to watch the machinery of a ship at anchor for twelve hours on a stretch and be free from grumbling. And when orders seem blind and rations are spoiled and the men on either side of you are giving vent to longings after a life free from insects and full of human kindliness, it seems well-nigh impossible to keep the will engaged in the work at hand. But that is where the spirit of the volunteer turns the scale. He regards vermin and monotony and bad food as much his enemy as the opposing army. He has enlisted to meet any foe with a contagious cheer; the harder it is to down, the more must he be filled with the enthusiasm of his purpose. His soul draws most heavily upon the precious reserves of a holy cause when the difficulties compel the draft. The volunteer desires to prove to himself and to his comrades that there are no enemies which his spirit, set aflame by his sublime purpose, cannot slay. Donald Hankey's "Beloved Captain" was more inspiring to his men than the justice of their cause, because he went among them with the contagious smile of a whole-souled volunteer. And the regiment which is richest in volunteers will prove the main reliance of our conscript army.

Once more a man qualifies as a volunteer in a conscript nation by freeing himself from personal ambition. The services which a volunteer renders are solely to his cause; he is not volunteering in order to make a career but in order to make a sacrifice. He is guilty of blasphemy if he seeks that the cause should advance him rather than that he should advance the cause. To fight in an army to obtain a captaincy or a medal is like marrying a woman for her wealth or her beauty.

That man is worthiest of command who gives himself with an undivided spirit to carrying out the commands that are given him. General Grant affords a notable illustration of this quality of the volunteer spirit in a professional soldier. "Every one has his superstitions he writes, too modest to imply a criticism Of those who acted from different principles, "one of mine is that in positions of great responsibility every one should do his duty to the best of his ability when assigned by competent authority, without the use of influence to change his position. I had no idea myself of ever having any large command, nor did I suppose that I was equal to one; but I said I would give anything if I were commanding a brigade of cavalry in the army of the Potomac and believed that I could do some good. Captain Hillyer suggested that I make application to be transferred there to command the cavalry. I then told him I would cut off my right arm first." So completely had the glory of the cause overshadowed Grant's own service to it in his mind that Senator Carpenter could say of him, when he was in the Presidency: "I was trying last night to recall a single instance if in conversation in regard to the late war I had heard General Grant allude to himself, and I could not. I have heard him speak in the most glowing terms of his comrades in arms. I have heard him speak of the exploits of Sherman. I have heard him allude to what was done by Logan, McPherson, and many other officers of the Union army. I never heard him say, speaking of a battle, 'at such a juncture I thought I would do so and so,' or, 'I ordered a battalion this way or that,' or, 'I turned the scale by such a maneuver.' I never heard him allude to himself in connection with the war. I believe you might go to the White House and live with him and converse about the war day after day. and you never would know from anything he said that he was in the war at all." This utter losing of self in the splendor of the cause, so that a man puts away not only all thought of death but all thought of fame is, I think, the rarest and loveliest sign that he has qualified as a thorough volunteer in a conscript army. "Things merely personal to himself of all earth's things will least affect himself."

And so, men of the class of 1917, I beseech you in this conscript nation of America, in this conscript life of humanity, to prove sturdy volunteers.

That means to enlist for life in the only cause in which you can enlist yourselves — namely in the holiest cause you know. You may fight singly, you may fight in regiments fired by the glory of a common purpose. The latter is far easier than the former; but heroism is not dependent upon the numbers who march by your side, it depends upon the devotion and the steadfastness with which you consecrate yourselves to the highest that you see. You will not always be steadfast; you will need to be purified repeatedly by the forgiveness of God. But that forgiveness must set you again in your place in the ranks of the Volunteers of the Highest. "For this cause have you been born and for this cause have you come into the world that you might bear witness to the truth."

Endure hardships without flinching — your own hardships. Never desire the talents or the conditions of other men. Keep your souls free from the maudlin devastation of self-pity. Keep yourself to your own task without quarter. Heroism consists not in conspicuous but in faithful fighting-. Its characteristic, as Emerson says, is persistency. The highest victory that any of you will ever win is to transfigure your circumstances by an ideal that they have polished but not chipped.

Scorn ambition. No matter what the world says, scorn ambition. Refuse to make your fellow-men rungs in a ladder of personal fame. Christ was among men "as one that serveth." Let not your capacities, your plans, your friendships, center about desires which isolate and underscore yourself. "He that would save his life shall lose it." Let all you do and think and say be centered about that divine purpose which, by some mysterious but infallible providence, vouchsafes to all who cherish it an inner Guest whose Presence outlaws ambition and fills you with a joy that passes all understanding. Keep your soul so overflowing with the delight of that inner comradeship and with a sense of its majesty that bondage both to yourself and to the world will be impossible. Let no man, no government, no iron of necessity take your life from you: lay it down of yourself. - lay it down on the only altar worthy of receiving it, the altar of its God.