, under the unnatural
conditions of wartime.

We believe that the hearty cooperation of the medical and moral
agencies and of the military and voluntary forces which have to do with
the men, can greatly reduce both immorality and disease. We feel sure,
moreover, that the solid backing of public opinion in America will
support every effort to surround our camps with a zone of safety and to
keep the men clean and strong in the multiplied dangers of a foreign
land, as well as in the military camps of our own country. It is
reassuring to know that our military authorities abroad have taken a
strong stand and that in no army in Europe are drunkenness and the
contraction of venereal disease more instantly court-martialled or more
severely punished.

CHAPTER VII

RELIGION AT THE FRONT

The war, like a great searchlight thrown across our individual and
national lives, has revealed men and nations to themselves. It has shown
us the nation's manhood suddenly stripped of the conventionalities, the
restraints, and the outward respectability of civil life, subjected to
the trial and testing of a prodigious strain. It has shown us the real
stuff of which men are made. It is like the X-ray photographs now
constantly used in all the military hospitals, and placed in the windows
of the operating rooms, to guide the surgeon in discovering the hidden
pieces of shrapnel or shattered bones which must be removed in order to
save the patient.

The war has been a great revelation of things both good and bad. In the
light of this terrible conflict, we may well ask what it shows us of the
present virtues and vices of the men, and of our past failure or success
in dealing with them, and to what future course of action it should
summon us? In other words, what lessons has the war to teach us? Large
numbers of young clergymen and laymen of the churches of England and
Scotland have gone to the war zone with the men as chaplains, Y M C A
workers, or in the army itself, and have learned to know men as they
never knew them before. We would covet this opportunity for every young
minister or Christian worker in America. Mr. Moody once stated that the
Civil War was his university. It was there he learned to understand the
human heart and to know and win men.

During the summer of 1917 a questionnaire was sent out to representative
religious workers throughout the armies in France and Great Britain by a
committee under the chairman