People say, “What are you going to do with the huts after the war?” We want to pick them up, and bring them back to this country and put one down in every parish in the land, so that when the boys do come back they will still have the Y.M.C.A. hut to go into, so that they can still keep up the spirit of unity.

Woe be to the man who goes into the hut and tries to preach sectarianism.  The Y.M.C.A. is creating a spirit of unity amongst the boys, and that is going on all the time.  I want the limitations to vanish at home.  I want the ecclesiastical barriers to go.  When you get to Heaven the Lord will have to give Gabriel a job to introduce many Christians to one another.  You should see your boys, how they mix up.  They come in—­the Roman Catholics, the Church of England, and the Nonconformists and Plymouth Brethren and Salvation Army, and all sorts—­you don’t know who’s who.  We are not quarrelling over religions at the front—­we are fighting and dying for the folks who are doing that at home.

Let’s stop our religious nonsense.  Religion’s too big to be confined within our four little walls.  If our Church rules are so rigid that they won’t let us come together, then our Church rules are wrong.  God never made rules which divide men—­all God’s laws unite.  Christ died that we might be one, and it is time we got together.  Your boys are bigger than your Churches.  You and I have got to rise to the opportunity.  God help us to do it!

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Somebody asks, “Why does the Y.M.C.A. always want more new huts?  Why not move the old ones?” What will the boys do who take the places of those who have gone forward?  When the line goes forward, it does not come back—­not in these days; it abides—­and the boys who come up as a support, they take the huts the other boys leave.

The Y.M.C.A. stands for everything to your boys.  It is their club, their church, their recreation-room.  It is their canteen—­dry canteen, you may be sure—­it is their reading-room, it is their smoking-room, and why should not the Church of Jesus Christ provide places of recreation for its own people?  Why should it leave the public-house and the theatre to do it all?  We have lost lots of people because we have been so slow—­we have lost them, you and I, but we are learning sense in these days, and the Y.M.C.A. has come to the help of the Churches, to be the communication-trench between the Churches and the people.

It is doing magnificent work.

As I write these lines I think of one dear boy, a young sergeant, a Public-School boy.  I had watched him grow up.  I knew his home, and as he leaned against me he said, “Gipsy, I’m homesick; I want my mother,” and then, with a sob, he said, “Tell me more about Jesus.”

I was able to talk to him about his mother because I had lost mine, and just because I love Jesus I was able to talk to him about the blessed Jesus Who comes into a man’s heart when he is sad, lonely, and homesick, and helps him.