When Spring Comes
Plea For the Country To Choose Christ, Not Caesar, In Following the High Road to Peace
[Part of a sermon preached by BoyntonMerrill '15 in his Second Church in Newton April 14, 1940, is reprinted below. Itdeals with the present war and the choicewhich the American Christian citizen mustmake. In the form below about one-halfthe sermon, compared to the original, ispublished. Mr. Merrill will be one of thespeakers at the Alumni Luncheon in Hanover June 15, this being his Twenty-FifthReunion.-ED.]
I HAVE HARDLY MENTIONED the War in this pulpit since last October. Not once, however, have we failed in prayer to lift the tragic sadness of these days and our own bewildered and hesitant hearts up to the forgiving and, I do believe, sorrowing heart of God. I mention the war today because I feel strongly that the Christian Church and her ministers cannot be utterly silent when grief and wickedness stride the world. Now—if ever—those who believe in the God of spring, who believe in a God of love and life, who work and pray for the coming of Christ's kingdom-now, if ever, they must reaffirm their faith and belief and hope.
I do not blame you for not wanting to hear about the war Sunday after Sunday. You hear and read about it every other day of the week. You are quite right when you say to me, "Religion and the Church should deal with deeper and nobler and more timeless things than these recurrent and sordid struggles." Your words betray that you know that the simple truth is that these struggles after the waterways and buried minerals, after the wheat-fields and markets of the world are sordid and have been recurrent. Your words betray, too, that you know that there are nobler and more precious things than these.
If we would only see clearly and keep saying to ourselves that these material prizes really are the things for which these wars are fought! If we only would control those emotions which make us prefer to shut our eyes to this simple truth! If we would only dare to steel our minds against the propagandist's sly prostitution of the world's great words, its great ideals and its noblest dreams; prostitutions which make us take evil instead of good, and substitute a temporal gain for those far-off nobilities toward which the race looks and marches! If we would only be genuinely realistic, confessing that the ideal is more real to us and more deserving of our sacrifice than imperial wealth and political shibboleths! If we would let the weight of our private and public witness fall on the side of the things that we know are "deeper, nobler and more timeless," rather than sacrifice these splendors to these stupid and wicked wars, which are not, at first and fundamentally, crusades to defeat evil at all, but are, rather, struggles to keep or to get power and place, struggles between the imperialisms which are and the imperialisms which seek to be.
I cannot be your conscience. No man on earth has any warrant to sit in moral condemnation on any other man's honest judgment. I venture to speak only as your minister and as one confronted, exactly as are you, with a fearful and tragic choice, with a tangled skein of right and wrong. I am only trying, for whatever of help it may be to you, to tell you where my judgment falls in this matter today and what I believe is the will of God for me.
"Before every man there openeth A High Way and a Low; And every man decideth The way his soul shall go."
Yes, we all must choose, and condemnation waits for us, I believe, not if we mistakenly choose the Low Way. Condemnation waits for us only if we are too cowardly to choose any way at all, or selfishly and deliberately refuse to choose the High Way.
REAL ISSUE IS COURAGE TO ABSTAIN The real issue, I do believe, is not whether we are to fling our nation and our sons into another one of Europe's age-old wars; a war which, whatever its outcome and whoever wins it, is certain to be but the new sowing of more dragons' teeth, the new sowing of more hatreds, the new sowing of more deep despairs and of more deeply rooted vows of revenge. The real issue is whether this nation (and that means you and me and all of us) is farsighted, and realistic, and brave, and Christian enough to endure the taunts and slurs of those who will call us cowards if we decline to wade into another orgy of mutual slaying. The issue is this: dare we throw our great weight against this ancient, brutal and ghastly method of resolving the differences between nations and throw that same weight toward discovering and implementing some method which will rest down upon the use of intelligence rather than of force, of good-will rather than of armed might? Greater than any and all of the material dangers inherent in the present struggle is the spiritual danger that this nation will not dare to refuse to wallow in this slough of hate and blood, that it will not dare to lead out from the low levels of death and bitterness toward the high levels of life and of reason.
LEARN FROM PAST MISTAKES We flung away once (be it said to our great shame) from a wonderful chance to help do this thing. We did not dare, we were not far-sighted, or brave or unselfish enough in 1920-21 to help the newly born League of Nations to come to strength and maturity. We sired it and then we left it alone, among cruel and vengeful men, to die. And now, partly because of us, hundreds of thousands of young men must die again. We sent our boys to die in 1917-19 and then, when they had died, the very men who sent them refused to take any real risks that their deaths might, perhaps, have not been in vain. We here in Massachusetts must not forget, too, that it was a man from Massachusetts who did much to lead the country to leave the League to die. Of course no man could know then whether it would live or no. But we know now that it has all but died because, having won by many deaths a military victory, there was neither the vision nor the courage to go on to win those moral, mutual victories far greater than any armies will ever win! In the last war the United States' dead numbered 126,000; total casualties were 350,000; the monetary cost was over $40,000,000,000. So far as one can see, twenty years later, these billions were spent and these thousands died and these other thousands are looking out today from hospital windows—in vain. Our choice, twenty-three years ago, was not the choice of the High Way. Many of us who went thought it was the High Way, but we know better now. We were mistaken and betrayed. It must not happen again.
The true High Way lies out, I do believe, in quite another direction. It lies in the direction of deliberately saying that we revolt against and will have no similar share in another bloody wrangle. We do this, not because we are afraid of the physical costs, but because we see that the real answer is not to be found out that way at all. That method has been tried, at fearful cost, for thousands of years and the longer it is tried and the more thoroughly it is tried, the more inhuman and ghastly and fruitless it becomes. The answer lies out in the direction of saying that we are quite ready to spend billions again if need be and to contribute the minds and lives of our best and wisest, but not their needlessly broken bodies. We are eager to do this thing not that we may bring certain nations of the world to their knees while other nations stand over them with economic whips and punishing swords, but to bring all nations (our own included) to a sound mind and to a method of settling differences, which assumes that we are grown men, not cruel, stupid boys; that we are above the beasts of the field, not beneath them.
If we are really seeking to enthrone the ideals which brought America into being, if we are really seeking to be Christian, if we are honestly concerned with bringing nearer the Kingdom of Christ, if we are trying to be the followers of him who came that men might have life and not death, if we are truly concerned with the suffering and grief of the countries and people we love abroad, if it is Christ's High Roadrather than Europe's Low Road that we would walk ourselves and help other men to walk,—what better time to choose that way of life than in these days when the God of spring and of life is giving farflung and deeply moving proof on every hand that he is a God whose heart is set and whose power is sufficient to make a drab, dark world once more athrill with song and beauty?
"When spring comes." We look out into man's world and we see these sad nations and men. Some of them are, so it seems, very wicked; some of them are bitterly vengeful; some of them are coldly set on making or keeping a prodigious portion of the wealth of the world for themselves; some of them are tragically and innocently caught in traps they did not set. We see them locked in this fearful struggle of death. We see our own nation nervously arming for this or future wars. We look out into God's world and we see something very different: we see. a calm, unfailing power working quite silently and gently, a power which makes for life and song, for flowering shrubs, for bursting buds, for singing; birds, for blue skies and warm rains, for green fields and laughing children.
I dream—l pray that my country may, under the great argument of spring, choose to serve the God of Life who makes beauty "boil over" and drenches the earth with it, rather than to serve the God of War who makes men's hearts boil over with bitterness and drenches the earth with death. The old, old issue is up again! It is God or Mammon; Christ or Caesar; the High Way or the Low. No nation under heaven was ever more perfectly situated to take the great step forward and to lead toward days when wisdom and love, rather than selfishness and hate, shall tip the scales of human conduct.
One very brief story. On Wednesday of this week I turned my radio dial quite by chance and only for an idle moment while I waited for lunch. A radio commentator of whom I never heard was speaking from Washington. This is about what he said:
"I was coming down Sixteenth Street this morning and I saw a great many white posters, printed with purple ink, tied to the lamp posts. They made me think of similar posters I saw tied to lamp posts in Europe a few months ago. The messages on the posters there and here were,, however very different. Over there the posters read, "This way to the Air Raid Shelters." Over here, in our Capital, this morning the posters read "This way to the cherry blossoms."
"Before every man there openeth A High Way and a Low; And every man decideth The way his soul shall go." "Teach me Thy way, O Lord!"
