What of the Night?

Chaplains have been writing home from the fighting fronts about an unusual burst of religious interest, Among soldiers & sailors. Fighting men suddenly snatched from death have written books describing how they prayed in peril and how their prayers were heard.* To some people these spiritual stirrings look like the beginning of a religious revival. Others have been reminded of the little boy who would say his prayers only at night, explaining that "any bright boy can look out for himself in the daytime, but at night he needs some help."

Last week the Christian Century, commenting on this wartime phenomenon of heightened personal religion, was inclined to be neither skeptical nor starry-eyed about it.

Said the undenominational Chicago weekly: ". . . there is more sincerity in a cry to God out of the depths from one who has felt all the billows of disaster go over him . . . than in the routine pieties of many who habitually employ the standard forms of petition but have no actual sense of need. So there should be no cynical discounting of the reality of the religious experience of those men in foxholes, where 'there are no atheists,' or those castaways on rubber rafts who 'thought they heard the angels sing,' or those navigators of shell-swept skies who declare that 'God is my co-pilot.' When the consciousness of need is great, the appeal for help has the deepest ring. . . .

"But the trouble with such belated discoveries of God in desperate emergencies is that they discover so little. . . . One fears not so much that there will be atheists in the foxholes as that some of the men who come out of the foxholes after seeing their comrades die in them will find no way to keep the faith that they found in the face of desperate danger. . . . We shall not say that those who have looked death in the eye and suddenly become aware of the reality of God will lose the vision when the danger passes. . . . But if religion is to have its full value as a 'last resort' in times of peril or affliction, it must have deep rootage, broad leafage and ample fruitage in the normal circumstances of life. . . ."

* Examples: Eddie Rickenbacker (Seven Came Through); and his Pacific raft companions, James C. Whittaker (We Thought We Heard the Angels Sing) and Johnny Bartek (Life Out There).

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