ism of its worldliness_. The men have an unuttered belief in
God, and they reverence Jesus Christ as the friend and brother and
comrade of man, as the embodiment of the highest ideal they can conceive.
But they feel that somehow the churches do not adequately represent
Christ, that they have become merely the adjunct of the State to second
its schemes and aims. Many feel that the Church has lowered its colors
in the present war, that in some countries it has been little more than a
recruiting station for enlistment and that its message cannot be
reconciled with the Sermon on the Mount.

One sergeant thus states his convictions: "Perhaps it would be well if we
out here could get up a committee of inquiry on 'Civilians and Religion'
and arrive at some decision as to what is the matter with you at home.
Are we to return home where the spiritual fires have been kept burning
brightly, or to the blackened ashes of those great ideals of the early
days of August, 1914, which have burned themselves out? Are we to return
to a country in which, in spite of all the community of suffering and
sorrow, the Christian churches have still their differences simmering
instead of being regiments in one common Army?"

Another soldier writes: "What could not the churches do for the world if
they could only connect the symbols Christ gave us with the knowledge
that is within the hearts of men? There must be more known about
suffering and sacrifice now in the hearts of men than at any past time.
I thought once, on the Somme, that the two races facing each other in
such agony were as the two thieves on their crosses reviling each other,
and that somewhere between us, if we could but see Him, was Christ on His
Cross."

4. The men are _bewildered and repelled by the Church's divisions_.
There is a widespread feeling among them that there is something wrong
here, that instead of representing Christ or losing themselves in the
wide interests of His Kingdom, instead of concern for the winning of the
world and humanity as a whole, the aims of many of the churches are
petty, narrow, exclusive, and sectarian. There is a feeling among the
men that far too many Christians are working for themselves or for their
own particular branch of the Church, or are, as one of them puts it, "out
for their own show."

In the last hospital we visited, the young American Episcopal chaplain
working with one of our own units asked the writer to accompany him one