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Writer's pictureLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Dec 50 min read

Excerpted Inspirations #156


[Stephen Birley, taking his turn as sentry, tries to reconcile his pacifism with his desire to defend what he loves against the ravages of World War II.] Certainly the top of Beacon Hill was no place for a pacifist, for in watching for invasion from sky or sea he was materially assisting England’s war effort. But consistency for a pacifist was impossible, for there was no way, short of suicide, of avoiding participation in totalitarian war. Nothing to be done except decide just how to participate in it. So far, in the conflict that was raging between his independent mind and his fighting traditions, he had advanced to the position that he would fight for his country with any weapon that came to hand except the sword, but that he would rather be killed than kill his brother. It wasn’t consistent, but then neither was the other point of view, a war to end war and all that rot. To his agonized mind it seemed that consistency was impossible for any living creature; there was nothing for each man to do but weigh conflicting creeds in the scales of his own free mind, strike his own balance between them, and stick to it. What was important was the freedom of the mind, and the sticking to it. But how hard it was to strike that balance! Oh God, how hard! All his life, for as long as he could remember, there had been in him this conflict between his independent mind and his proud love of tradition, and it had bred in him this morbid fear of criticism that had poisoned his whole life. For it was always the things he loved most of all, his home and family and their history, that stood in judgment upon the conclusions to which his intellect led him, and his sensitiveness shrank from their judgment as from a whiplash. This loneliness of being censured, this being driven out into the wilderness, was the one thing that he feared. As he paced up and down, keeping his watch upon earth and sea and air, his mind turned and turned upon itself tormentingly. He wondered if there could be any fight more bitter than this of the individual against the common mind. During these last weeks the weight of the common mind, bent to the task of defending all it held holy from annihilation, had been against him like the whole force of an incoming tide against a lonely outgoing swimmer. While those who had yielded felt it like a great benevolent power lifting them upon wings, he felt it as a cruel thing choking the life out of him with its salt bitterness. There was nothing he longed for more desperately than permission to turn round and go with the tide. … Oh God, to turn round and go with the tide! But he couldn’t. Without that striking of the balance and keeping to it that some men called keeping the faith, and others called integrity, one was just an animal. Men had died, and died gladly, not so much for the truth of their faith, which might be proved false by the years, as for the right to think and test and seek and find, and hold what they had found, that made them men. If man had not got that right, then there was no hope for him, he would never fight his way back to the ultimate truth that he had lost. But the last few hideous months had shaken Stephen badly, driven him to fight his battle all over again, for they had revealed that this was no ordinary struggle of rival imperialisms but a fight to save the very things that had been won by man’s integrity. It was not this time only a bit of territory that was threatened but the free mind of Greece, the Roman faith to the plighted word, the tolerance of Christ and the honor of medieval chivalry. It was religion and art and thought that might go under. How could one not take arms against a threat so ghastly? he had asked himself again and again through the long days and longer nights of these last tortured months, only to swing back and back to his conviction that victory achieved at the cost of mangled children and shrieking women and men shaking in agony was not victory for righteousness but simply a sin as deadly as the sin attacked. There were no real victories except the victories of the spirit, such a victory as that of Greece over Rome when the mind of the conqueror was in turn conquered by the culture of his slave, or as that of Socrates drinking the hemlock and Christ upon the cross. These were the victories that outlasted the centuries; all the others turned to dust and ashes. In the last war men had fought as they were fighting now, to build a new heaven and a new earth, but when they took their victory and sowed it as seed upon the earth it came up again in the likeness of another war. Elizabeth Goudge, The Castle on the Hill (1941), pp. 124-126

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