The Discipline of War Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent — A Closer Reading

Discipline as a Chosen Fast

The opening address, “The Discipline of the Will,” takes its text from Isaiah 58:6: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen?” Potter argues that the war itself constitutes a fast imposed by God, making personal Lenten abstinence almost redundant. He writes that “our amusements are already to a large” curtailed—the sentence breaks off in the excerpt, but the direction is clear. The war, in his view, is a collective discipline that preempts individual choice.

This framing is striking: rather than urging readers to give up luxuries, Potter insists that circumstances have already done the work. The address thus redefines Lenten observance as acquiescence to national suffering rather than voluntary sacrifice. The catalog subject “World War, 1914-1918 – Sermons” accurately reflects the content, but the excerpt reveals a narrower focus: the war is not merely a topic but the very mechanism of spiritual training.

Suffering as Spiritual Education

Potter illustrates his thesis with biographical examples. He cites Charles Kingsley’s “agonies of doubt” as the source of his counselling power, and Archbishop Temple’s childhood poverty—field labour, poor clothes, insufficient food—as forging his “rough, rugged” character. Temple, Potter notes, studied by passage light because he could not afford lamp oil. These figures are offered as proof that hardship produces moral and spiritual strength.

The argument extends to “bed-ridden invalids” who develop “intense, fervent, yet restful piety.” Potter claims that suffering, especially in middle life, “lays the foundations of conversion.” He then applies the logic to the war: it has “linked together the Empire,” allayed political strife, and “braced up the moral fibre of countless lives.” The reasoning is circular—suffering is justified by its supposed effects—but the examples ground it in specific, named individuals rather than abstraction.

Christ in the Suffering Church

The later excerpt shifts to the Incarnation as “the greatest act of sympathy.” Potter glosses the Latin compassion and Greek sympathy as “feeling with,” and connects Christ’s suffering to the Church as his spiritual body. He invokes Matthew 25:40—“inasmuch as ye have ministered to one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me”—to argue that Christ is present in suffering believers.

He then draws a distinction: the same Christ who “suffering in His martyr Stephen was yet standing at the Father’s right hand to succour him.” The paradox is meant to console, but the excerpt breaks off before the conclusion. What remains is a theology of suffering that locates divine presence within wartime pain, a theme that aligns with the catalog’s secondary subjects of religion-theology and philosophy-ethics, though the excerpts offer no systematic ethical argument—only pastoral exhortation.

Readers should note that the excerpts represent only the first address and part of a later one; the full book includes nine addresses plus a daily Lenten appendix. Potter’s voice is homiletic, not analytic, and his evidence is anecdotal rather than scriptural exegesis. The work is best approached as a period piece of wartime pastoral theology, revealing how one Anglican canon reconciled national catastrophe with traditional Lenten discipline.

Reading that canon’s sermon about war’s stern schooling, I felt how oddly comforting it was to be told our suffering had a purpose. It reminded me, strangely, of holding Lawrence and the Arabs — Reading Companion years ago. That fellow also chose his trials, yet both books share such a quiet, determined hardness—a belief in being shaped by the desert’s solitude, one way or another.