down by law. Dissent has never
hesitated to use compulsion when it lay ready to hand to enforce
materialism. So belief in angels well nigh ceased to exist. To-day the
revival comes from actual experience rather than from church teaching.
The antagonism to such belief amounts to unreasonable heights of folly.
Luther has so long occupied the place of Christ that dissent has
forgotten what Christ taught us in regard to angels. We ignore the fact
that He claimed to have seen angels, and to have had their help and
ministration. When politics mix with religion, spirituality dies, there
is no vision, for there is little belief and less sincerity. No wonder
the soldier's vision of angels strikes them as something altogether
beyond the pale of belief.

It is time that our "spiritual fathers" and other stepfathers began to
give us a lead in spiritual things. We are burdened with bishops who
play to the gallery and the cheaper press, who would rather take a
confirmation service in a coal-pit than in a consecrated shrine of
prayer, for the simple reason that "Confirmation in a Coal-pit" gets a
flaming advertisement in every paper. Their vision is set on notoriety:
the spiritual vision recedes. How can they have sympathy with those who
pierce the boundary line that separates this world from a higher plane?

Men who have spent their lives on office seeking can never be seers or
priests. Parsons who beat the political drum may rise to power
political, never to the power spiritual. The vision glorious is to those
who face duty, self-sacrifice, and see in them the Divine Call, who
believe in the sacrifice of the Gospel rather than its comfort. The
charlatan must not dominate the Christian in our spiritual pastors, if
it do, then such are not qualified to minister in spiritual things.

VII

THE WHITE COMRADE

The story that angels fought on the side of the Allies in the battle of
Mons must rest upon evidence, coupled with experience. If we begin by
assuming that there can be no intelligences in the universe unless they
are clothed in the regulated fashion, then no amount of evidence will
suffice. It is a worm's-eye view that regards man as the last word in
mind.

Meanwhile France is pursuing the evidence for another story exclusively
of French origin and vouched for by men to whom the belief in spiritual
beings is repugnant, viz., the apparition of "Le Camarade Blanc," of
whom at Nancy, in the Argonne, at Soissons and Ypre