From ‘A Mobilisation of the Church’, The Spectator, 8 January 1916: Suppose the Church were mobilised so that the majority of the younger clergy and all the ordinands were set free for service in the Army, the situation at the end of the war might be very different from that which we have been anticipating. There is no life more intimate than that of the barrack-room. There is no life where the essential characters of men are so fully revealed as the life of the trench. Those of the combatant clergy who returned from the war would know all that was worth knowing of the characters of ordinary men…With such men as clergy a new era might dawn for the Church in this land, and the Kingdom of Heaven be brought very nigh.
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