188 RT. REV. BISHOP J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D., ON THE INFLUENCE 



alien peoples, who were sometimes their friends, sometimes 

 their enemies, but always and everywhere representatives of a 

 civilization alien from their own, cr of sheer idolatry and 

 barbarism. AVhen these soldiers come home at the end of the 

 war, they will come with the knowledge that Christianity is 

 not, and, still more, that their own form of Christianity is not, 

 the one religion in the world ; that it cannot be taken for 

 granted as the absolute, unique revelation of God ; but that it 

 must prove its claim to the allegiance of mankind by the 

 intrinsic superiority of the doctrines which it inculcates, and of 

 the virtues which it creates and fosters in its votaries. In a 

 word, the truth of Christianity has at all times been challenged ; 

 but it has never, perhaps, been so widel} r or so gravely 

 challenged as it will be in many minds, owing to the 

 experiences, voluntarily or involuntarily, gained in the present 

 war. 



But apart from the effect of contact with foreign life, both 

 secular and spiritual, the men who come back after the war will 

 have passed through deep, crucial times. They will have been 

 emancipated from the bonds of routine at home ; they will have 

 spent weeks and months, even years, in the open air ; they will 

 have undergone privation and suffering ; they will have 

 realized how social inequalities vanish in the trenches and on 

 the battlefield ; for it may not seldom have happened that the 

 employer, as a private soldier, has obeyed the orders of a man 

 who, until the war broke out, was serving him in his works and 

 drawing weekly wages from him. These men will have been 

 face to face with death ; they will have seen their comrades 

 wounded, crippled, slaughtered on every side ; they will have 

 asked themselves, with an intensity unknown before, What is 

 the meaning or value of ' life ? Is death the end of life, and, if 

 not, what lies beyond the river, dark and narrow, which is 

 called death ? 



It is certain that the men, who have so lived and so fought, 

 will never contentedly acquiesce in the old conditions of life. 

 For good or for evil, they will have broken with the limitations 

 of shop or office or factory. It is probable that many of them, 

 when the war is over, will seek the large, free area of the 

 colonies. They will hope and claim to do more, and to be 

 more, than they were of old ; to pursue more various careers, 

 and to enjoy more generous opportunities. Nor is there any 

 sphere in which the bracing influence of the war will tell more 

 vividly than in religion. Not a few men, it may be, will have 

 gained a new sense of religion at the Front. It may be an all- 



