Facing the vast common need in war time with four thousand wounded patients, whom no one chaplain could visit, the whole story is obviously pathetic and sad.  The writer also recalls visiting a Y M C A hut of another nationality, where the secretary was so obviously “out for his own show,” and had become so engrossed in the counter of his dry canteen and his work as a money-changer, that he had forgotten all the higher interests of the men, and the high purpose for which he was there.  He had become a mere secularized machine, a kind of automatic cash register, mistaking in his work the means for the end.  He was just as much “out for his own show” as the three mentioned above, and it was an infinitely smaller “show.”

Here we have four instances of men, each conscientious, well meaning, and earnest; each zealous for his own work and his own organization; yet each earning the pity or contempt of the great body of men outside the churches today who are out of sympathy with sectarian zeal.  The saddest religious spectacle the writer ever witnessed was in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where five chapels divide that sacred spot where our Lord is supposed to have been crucified, occupied by five bodies, each claiming to be the church.  The blood of their fellow Christians has been shed by the followers of these churches on this very spot, and it is a humiliating sight to see them kept apart even to this day by the Turkish bayonet alone.  How many of us are working for “our own show,” rather than for the Kingdom of God?

The war work of the Y M C A in America, in England, in France, and elsewhere has been made possible only by churchmen sacrificing their individual interests and losing themselves in service for the Kingdom.  The Association represents the churches at work on behalf of the suffering men in the war zone.  If it should claim the credit for itself as though it were a wholly independent organization, rather than the united work of the churches which have sunk their own differences to make possible this common work, this would be only a manifestation of the same spirit and more inexcusable.  But such a claim it could never truly make.  As a matter of fact, this united work has proved how truly Christians of various bodies can get together on a great practical issue.  If, as at present, all can unite in a great lay organization, what may not the churches themselves do in the future?

Should we not in this war repent, in bitterness and deep humiliation, for our unhappy divisions and each resolve that he will work for nothing less than the whole Kingdom of God, and that no member of that Kingdom, even one of these least, shall be excluded from the love and fellowship which make us one in Him?  One of the chaplains in France who has himself been in the ranks says:  “I feel that in the past churches have been more anxious to get men into the Kingdom of the Church than into the Kingdom of God,