VI

A PLEA FOR THE INNOCENTS

My “spiritual home” is not Berlin, nor even Rome, but Jerusalem.  In heart and mind I am there to-day, and have been there ever since the eternally memorable day on which our army entered it.  What I am writing will see the light on the Feast of the Holy Innocents;[*] and my thoughts have been running on a prophetic verse which unites the place and the festival in a picturesque accord: 

“Thus saith the Lord, I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem:... and the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.”

The most brilliant Israelite of our times, Lord Beaconsfield, said of a brilliant Englishman, Dean Stanley, that his leading feature was his “picturesque sensibility,” and that sensibility was never more happily expressed than when he instituted the service for children in Westminster Abbey on Innocents’ Day—­“Childermas Day,” as our forefathers called it, in the age when holidays were also holy days, and the Mass was the centre of social as well as of spiritual life.  On this touching feast a vast congregation of boys and girls assembles in that Abbey Church which has been rightly called “the most lovable thing in Christendom”; and, as it moves in “solemn troops and sweet societies” through aisles grey with the memories of a thousand years, it seems a living prophecy of a brighter age already at the door.

[Footnote *:  December 28, 1917.]

It seems—­rather, it seemed.  Who can pierce the “hues of earthquake and eclipse” which darken the aspect of the present world?  Who can foresee, or even reasonably conjecture, the fate which is in store for the children who to-day are singing their carols in the church of the Confessor?  Will it be their lot to be “playing in the streets” of a spiritual Jerusalem—­the Holy City of a regenerated humanity? or are they destined to grow up in a reign of blood and iron which spurns the “Vision of Peace” as the most contemptible of dreams?

In some form or another these questions must force themselves on the mind of anyone who contemplates the boys and girls of to-day, and tries to forecast what may befall them in the next four or five years.

It is a gruesome thought that the children of to-day are growing up in an atmosphere of war.  Bloodshed, slaughter, peril and privation, bereavement and sorrow and anxiety—­all the evils from which happy childhood is most sedulously guarded have become the natural elements in which they live and move and have their being.  For the moment the cloud rests lightly on them, for not “all that is at enmity with joy” can depress the Divine merriment of healthy childhood; but the cloud will become darker and heavier with each succeeding year of war; and every boy and girl is growing up into a fuller realization of miseries which four years ago would have been unimaginable.