We are not always thankful for our blessings; often, indeed, we do not recognise them as such. They come to us disguised in the fashion of curses, or so we are apt to consider them till we know better. Many of us are absurdly proud of the number of our friends; with equal absurdity we deplore our evil destiny if we have but one enemy. Yet if all the truth were known, we should find that we have more reason to thank God for our foes than for our friends!
In the actual storm and stress of life’s battle our “friends,” so-called, are of little use to us; they are more prone to be a drag on the wheel. They are, generally speaking, kind, conventional folk, who, when a soul is girding on its armour for action, will give “advice,” such as “Oh, I wouldn’t run any risks, if I were you!” or “Do be careful not to offend any one!” or “You’ll get yourself disliked!” as if risk, offence, dislike, and trouble were not full of stimulus, inspiring the fighting spirit which alone can beat down difficulties and carry us on from triumph to triumph till the great victory over ourselves be assured! But enemies! Praise God for them! They are the useful and necessary Force which hurls itself against all progress, all power and originality of thought or action—the murderous obstacle laid across the line in an attempt to wreck the express train—the great contrary wind that seeks to drive the sailing boat against the rocks—the “thing in the way” that must be thrust aside and trampled underfoot. What worker or warrior would willingly forego “each rebuff that makes earth’s smoothness rough”? The man or woman without an enemy must be of all persons the most insignificant; one who does nothing and is nothing; of whom no one is envious, and who can never have said a brave, original thing, or a word of upright, downright truth in any circumstances.
You never know how high you are climbing till you feel some one behind you trying to pull you down. Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid by ignorance and malice to a man or woman of genius and virtue, is the verdict passed on the Divine Master in Galilee, that he (or she) “hath a devil”!
At the present time more than at any other period of history we of the British Empire should bless God for our enemies! What they have done and what they are doing for us, albeit unconsciously and unwillingly, can hardly be accurately estimated—not while they are still attacking us. We must wait some years before we can measure up the advantages they are bestowing upon us—advantages which we might not in a century have obtained for ourselves.
We were too satisfied with our apparent “friends”; we were, and still are, much too sure of them! We were comfortable, contented, lazy. We had everything we wanted and more. We spent money freely, and being eminently good-natured and trustful, we allowed every one to come in at our open doors and partake of our hospitality. Out of our full bags of gold we poured rivers of charity in every direction; we helped everybody that asked for help; and we allowed all sorts of folk to exploit us and make money out of us. We could not believe that the “friends” we entertained and whose hands we had filled with good gifts could ever turn upon us. We seemed to have no foes; and we trusted these “friends” of ours implicitly. Too casual and easy-going to heed the teachings of philosophy we forgot that it takes a far nobler nature to receive benefits than to bestow them.
Mean minds resent generosity while taking advantage of it, and nothing goads and envenoms some dispositions so much as the near consciousness of a superior force and ungrudging hand. This was, and is, the trouble with the Kaiser and his particular following—we will not say Germany, for German without the Hohenzollern autocracy would be a very different and far greater Germany than it has been since the days of Goethe and Schiller.
The Emperor William, as an eminently theatrical monarch, loving grease-paint and the limelight, and obsessed by various crazes, such as hate for his English mother and intensified hate for his mother’s country, filled even with a morbid revulsion against the English blood in his own veins, cannot abide the thought of the greatness and far-reaching protective influence of the British Imperial Power. To bend, break, and destroy THAT has been his dream from boyhood—a dream never to be fulfilled! His visits to our shores were the visits of a seeming “friend,” and we treated him as an honest people treat an honest man. He took our kindness for stupidity, our trust for ignorance, our faith for credulity, and his complete misconception of the British character has led him into a trap which he set for us, but by which he himself is snared—the usual Nature-law enacted surely and remorselessly on every treacherous soul.
What would be said or thought of a man invited to the house of a kindly hostess and permitted to enjoy the full freedom of the place, its hospitality, its food, its comfort and shelter, who, on having used it as a convenience and gained personal pleasure and advantage therein, even to the making of money, suddenly turned roughly upon his entertainer, abused her manners, her voice, her speech, her friends, her servants and mode of living, and having got all he wanted out of her personally insulted her? Probably not one man in ten thousand would conduct himself so vilely, but if that one man did so forgo all manliness, there would be not a few of his own sex ready and more than willing to put him in his place at the point of the boot.
Yet such has been the “honorable code of chivalry” of the Emperor William—the “Kultur” which boasts of treachery to his own kindred, of injury to his mother’s native land, of wantonly murderous attacks on innocent civilians who are not in any way concerned with the diseased obsessions of his brain—a “Kultur” which is more than anything else the “cult of stupidity”—the stupidity of a blinded bull charging into everything with unreasoning fury. But for us the bull-onslaught is a saving grace, for through the blindness of the beast we see!
Yes, we see, and see clearly! We have discovered our foe behind the disguise of our “friend,” and instead of opening our doors to him we shut them. Instead of holding out the hand of welcome and confidence we put up the curtain of our artillery fire!—and the valour of Britain, wrongfully supposed to be asleep or dead, is up in all its pristine might and mettle, full-armed with a strength and magnificent courage unmatched in all our history.
This is what our enemies have done for us: they have brought us to realise the truth Ourselves! Had it not been for their “stab-i’-the-back” we might still have played away our time, and with it our commerce. Our enemies have roused our grip and grit; they have taught us that we can turn out as many fighting men and munitions in twelve months as they could do in forty years. Even we, accustomed for a century to a peace unbroken save by small foreign skirmishes, are now with our Allies winning the greatest war of the world.
Assaulted in new and brutal ways from the air, from the underseas, as well as on land, Imperial Britain holds her own, for which she may thank, not her friends, but her foes. True it is that, as Christ taught, “A man’s foes shall be they of his own household,” and this saying is markedly fulfilled in the Kaiser’s hatred of his mother’s country and people. But whether of one’s own household or not, nothing is so salutary, so rousing, so inspiring and vivifying to the mind as the consciousness of enemies, the knowledge that some one envies you, grudges you success, and would be glad to hear of your failure in some great effort. It rouses all your latent forces and makes you stronger, bolder, more irresistible than ever you were before.
A fair woman never looks fairer than when she is being “picked to pieces” by a yellow-skinned scandal-monger, and to any individual possessing gifts above the ordinary the spite and malice of the envious and jealous are as light on the path and music in the air, invigorating the heart, bracing the energies, and emphasising the fact that any one so envied is worth envying, any one so hated is worth hating, because so far above the reach of either envy or hatred!
So let us praise God for our enemies! They are adding to our triumphs and renewing our glories. When we chant the “Te Deum” let us mentally include an extra strophe which shall say, “We bless Thee, O Lord, for our foes, that Thou dost suffer them to teach us the sure way to victory! We thank Thee for their broken faith, their cruelties, and their falsehoods, as from these we renew our own resolve to keep our promised word to all nations, and even in the bitterness of battle to be honest and humane!
“From their unjust cause we draw fresh justice: from their defeats we derive our conquest. Without them we might have forgotten what we were and what we are! We thank and praise Thee, O God, that through these our enemies we have found our best friends—Ourselves!”