War and the Weird. Forbes Phillips
of their belief. It is refreshing to find a writer like Mr. W. S. Lilley in the Nineteenth Century professing his absolute belief in ghosts. To man, and it would appear to man alone on this plane, it is given to explore the unknown and to establish the communion of soul with soul.
After all it is a question of evidence. If a man say "I won't believe in anything super-natural whatever the evidence may be," it is best to leave him to his folly. If he will accept the evidence that would pass muster in a court of law, then you have a common ground, you can weigh evidence. To me the evidence for spiritual appearances is overwhelming looking at it from the strictly legal angle of vision.
In years gone by the scientific genius began with the assertion that everything must have had a beginning, and to assert that there was a spiritual Being with no beginning was nonsense. To the dim indistinct crowd such appeared to be clever reasoning. But our very consciousness insists that there is something which had no beginning, and Reason adds, "else there could be nothing now." For example, Space could not have had a beginning, that Duration could not, that Truth could not, that somehow, somewhere these Three Eternals must have been co-eternal, incomprehensible. And in this Trinity "none is afore or after the other," which recalls the Athanasian Creed.
I cannot prove that Truth had no beginning, yet my consciousness tells me at no period was it laid down as something new, that the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line. No mathematician has ever proved that there is no boundary to space, but something within me tells me that there can be no such boundary. Even Reason tells me that an impassable boundary would only serve to indicate the unlimited extension beyond.
In all ages we have the mystic. Now the mystic is common to all religions. He is the man who has felt the touch of spiritual beings, the call of Heavenly things, and we have to explain him. In seeking to do this we shall realize some of the truth of the things soldiers see which we have called "The Weird in War."
V
ANGELS
The evidence for the existence and the appearance of angels does not rest on the testimony merely of men who fought at Mons. But even that evidence which is accepted by the talented author of The Bowmen requires some explaining away and he admits that there is a difficulty in ignoring it. But there is the accumulating evidence of the ages. When we have explained away the soldiers' delusions, we have to confront those of the world's wisest sons—giants in thought. We have to confront the fact that all great religions have the theory of angels.
After all, every good thought may be the whisper of an angel, every beautiful prospect may be but the glint of the wing, every ray of light and heat but the waving of the robes of those higher spiritual intelligences which rush hither and thither on God's service, whose faces see God in Heaven. Such a belief is just as sound, and far more philosophical than any of the guesses I have read so far, given us as "explanation" of such phenomena.
I am in hearty agreement with much that Mr. Arthur Machen writes in his book The Bowmen. It is a book everyone should read. That splendid story of failure and triumph, the Retreat from Mons, prompted him to write a story on an Angelic Host coming to the aid of the British force. He wrote it after the manner of the journalist who is an eye-witness of the event. Many people still believe what they read in the newspapers; and many people believed his story. But he is altogether wrong when he imagines that he is the author of the belief in Angelic visions. I was in France hearing stories of angelic intervention long before Mr. Machen wrote his delightful yarn. A frog might as well imagine that his croak is responsible for the whole world of music, as to postulate that his story gave rise to the theory of Angels. Men had visions of such long before the first stone of our venerable shrine at Westminster was laid, before the Romans built their first mud huts in the valley of the Tiber, before the Pyramids raised their terrific greatness to the heavens. So Mr. Machen need not concern himself on that score.
The Anglican Church has failed dismally to keep before people the teaching of the Church in regard to Angels and Angelic intervention in the affairs of men. There I am in entire agreement with Mr. Machen. Soldiers tell their stories of angels and a few bishops cackle; but not one of them dares to speak of the fuller belief of the Church in angels and the soul-inspiring mystery of the Communion of Saints, the inter-relationship between those on the earth-plane and those who have passed to the higher life. The hardworking priest in the slums fearlessly proclaims this one sacrament of life with the Divine Life, his belief in angels and their help, in saints and their prayers, and because he believes he is able to work under conditions which make life for a cultured man almost intolerable. But he works, thankful to be left alone by his bishop: for war has declared a close time for ritualistic curates. But the soldier whose patriotism he has nurtured writes home to him telling frankly his experiences, his dreams, his visions. I have seen many of these letters. The writers are not liars nor are they hysterical subjects, but fine specimens of healthy manhood. Here and there a dissenting divine has raised his voice to declare there may be something in these stories of angels, but the dissenting pulpit is under the despotism of the pew and cry of "Rome" is enough. "Honest doubt" is always sure of a sympathetic audience, "honest belief" is greeted with the cry of superstition or the cuckoo cry of "Popery."
A soldier sees something super-natural. Some one says I know a hundred or a thousand soldiers who did not see it. A man may witness a murder. His evidence is accepted in the law courts. They do not call the hundred thousand people who did not see it in proof that no murder was perpetrated. Few people know the fundamental principles of evidence. More people misuse it.
VI
FELLOWSHIP WITH THE UNSEEN
Religion is man's fellowship with the Unseen, and it would seem that bishops and various crank divines are determined that such a belief shall be discouraged. Man's nature has upon it the Hall Marks of Heaven. Woven into man's anatomical texture we find faculties that transcend this world, that are for ever intent upon the waves that beat upon us from another shore. He sees the coastline of another world to which he commits his dead. We call such people Mystics, Catholics, Seers, etc. They are the people who have had touch with the Unseen. After all, the people with actual personal experience of spiritual power, who shape their lives by their experience are the real assets of belief.
Man may or may not be sprung from the beast, he may or may not have been raised from slime. Man's spirit did not arise in slime, that at all events came from a race of flame. Dust will not account for everything.
The Church in its greatest office of all, the Communion Service, claims to worship in union with "Angels and Archangels and with all the Company of Heaven." Having proclaimed this tremendous fact the Church, for the most part leaves it, and bishops view any further annunciation of the fact with suspicion and sometimes with threats.
On one solemn day in the year the Church invokes S. Michael and all Angels. S. Michael's Mass as it is still called. The old teaching of the Church bids us lift our eyes to behold those more intimate intelligences which stand nearer the Great and Central Mystery. When a soldier stumbles by chance upon one of those higher beings he is regarded as the victim of hallucination, of superstition or drink or all of them. A chaplain with dull German Protestantism obscuring his view of spiritual things treats him as some unclean thing. Dissent in England for years has been synonymous with pro-Germanism. It has been at war with the historic creed of Christendom. It was better for their aims that angels should not exist.
Before