strong, but it was in the reeking tube and in the smoking shard, and in the number of our Dreadnoughts. Then all these things seemed to fail us. A nightmare seemed to fall on us—a nightmare which lifted not night or day. Our soldiers were driven back, back, back. They fought by day and marched by night, and we heard in the night watches the beating of their wearied feet, blood stained.

Was there to be no end to that tramp, tramp of men yielding before death? Was the Empire reared by the heroism of generations to crumble under our feet? The ghastly deeds of shame—were they to come to our doors! We looked at our children, and they could not understand the light in our eyes. These deeds of hell—they might occur even now under the shadow of our hills. It was then that the word began to blaze in the heavens. And the word was—God.

We had built a new church in our parish, that those who built pleasant houses on the slopes, fleeing from the restless city that lay below, might have room to worship. But the desire to worship seemed to be dying of attrition. And the old church where the quarriers and farm servants assembled and worshipped in an atmosphere that on a warm day became so thick that one could cut it with a knife—that old church would have been quite big enough to hold all who came, for the instinct to pray seemed to be dying. And many, because the new church was now too big, regretted the old.

Then, suddenly, the new church was filled to the door. Men and women discovered the road leading down to the hollow where the church stands amid the graves of the generations. With wistful faces they turned towards it. While the bell rang they stood in groups among the graves. And if you listened there was but one word—war, war, war. Over and over again just that one word. Until the bell was silent, and they turned into the now crowded church.

As I sat there and cast a glance around me, I felt a sudden amazement. Those who never before had come down the steep brae when the bell was ringing were sitting here and there just as if they had been there every Sunday when the beadle, with head erect, ushers the minister to the pulpit and snips him in. (Though the church is new, the minister is yet snipped in by the beadle—a lonely prisoner there on his perch, and it is an uncanny sound to hear the click of that snip shutting in the solitary man.)

In the pew in front of me sat a burly man with a head like a dome. He never came to church. When I met him he would stand for an hour in the lane among the hawthorns explaining his views. Prayer was mere superstition. Cosmic laws unchanging and unchangeable held the universe in their grasp. To ask that one of these laws should be altered for a moment that a boon might be conferred on us was to ask that the universe might be shattered. Prayer was immoral, the asking for what could not be granted, and what we knew could not be granted. If he went to church it would be hypocrisy on his part.

And thus it came that when the farm servants came up the Gallows road on their way to church on a summer morning, they often heard the whirr of my friend's mowing machine as he mowed his lawn. It was the way he took of letting the parish know that culture could have no dealings with effete superstitions.

And yet there he sat in front of me with a hymn-book which he picked up from the shelf at the door, where such books are piled for the use of camp-followers. The tune of the opening Psalm was Kilmarnock, and my friend sang it in a way which showed that his mother had trained him well. Then I forgot him, but after a while something like a stifled sob in front of me brought him again to my consciousness.

The minister began to pray for the King's forces "on the sea, on the land, and in the air." My mind was playing round the words "in the air," for they were an intrusion into the familiar order—an innovation! Every invention of man seemed doomed to become a weapon in the hand of the devil. But the prayer went on—for the sailors keeping their watches in the darkness of the night that God might watch over them, that through their unfaltering courage our shores might be inviolate; for the soldiers now facing the enemy, grappling with death, that God might succour them, covering their heads in the day of battle. "Break Thou down the fierce power of our enemies," cried the minister suddenly, "that with full hearts we may praise Thee, the God of our fathers."

A great hush fell on the crowded church. The shut eyes saw the red battlefields, with the lines swaying to and fro, while the shrapnel burst and the aeroplanes whirred in the smoke of the cannon. The cries of men suddenly smitten smote on the inner ear. It was then that the great thing happened.

All of a sudden the voice broke, recovered, and broke again, and the minister was swept away from the well-ordered, beautiful words he had prepared. He began to speak of the stricken hearts at home, of fathers and mothers to whom their sons would never return, of women in empty houses with their husbands laid in nameless graves, of little children who would never learn to say "Father" ... It was then that my friend stifled a sob. There was Something after all, Someone greater than cosmic forces, greater than law—with an eye to pity and an arm to save. There was God.

And my friend's son was with the famous regiment that was swaying to and fro, grappling with destiny. He was helpless—and there was only God to appeal to. There comes an hour in life when the heart realises that instinct is mightier far than that logic which is, after all is said, only the last refuge of the feeble-minded. There came like the sudden lifting of a curtain the vision of a whole nation—nay, of races girdling the whole earth—to whom the same high experience has come. Everywhere the sanctuaries filled, the eyes turned upward, for instinct is mightier than reason. The smoke of battle has revealed the face of God.

With us in the parish churches of Scotland the great thing is the sermon. But to-day it is different; the great thing now is prayer. And the minister preached about prayer. He set forth in clear and ordered language, with a felicitous phrase now and then lighting up his sentences, that prayer was not a mere relic of fanatical superstition but a mighty power. He discussed with a wealth of learning whether God had shut Himself in behind a prison-house of cosmic laws that made it impossible for Him to answer prayer. He reasoned the worshippers cold. But there in that hour reason was bound to give way before intuition.

"If I am free," cried the preacher, "to rush to the help of my child when he crieth in terror; and if, when the creatures of His hand cry to God He is bound and cannot help or soothe, then He is poorer than I, so great a thing is freedom." Prayer was not mere spiritual gymnastics. A God immured in cold laws, barred for ever from the play of love or tenderness, would be the one being in the universe most to be pitied. The Creator did not sit deaf and dumb on the Throne of indifference answering nothing, doing nothing. History was the proof that Righteousness was throned at the core of the universe, for at the last right ever prevailed.

Then the measured tones went on to speak of the difficulty of believing in the efficacy of prayer when Christians faced Christians in mortal conflict, and they both cried for victory—both the children of the One Father crying for victory over each other. But the difficulty was of appearance only. For the only prevailing prayer was prayer in the name of Christ. "Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name that will I do." To ask in His name was to ask in His spirit—the spirit of humility, self-sacrifice, and love—the spirit of self-surrender to the will supreme. The question was which of the prayers for victory was prayer in the name of Christ....

This was clear, convincing, but cold. Only at rare intervals does the minister of our parish give way to passion. Suddenly there