He told them first, his voice firm with conviction, that God had not
populated this world with saints, but with ordinary human men; and that
they need not fear that, simply because they might not have been
churchgoers or lived what the world calls religious lives, therefore God
would desert them in the danger and trials and perhaps the death to
which they went. "If I thought that God wished any man to be tortured
eternally," he said, "to be tortured for all time and not to have any
hope of heaven, then I would go down to Hell cheerfully with a smile on
my lips rather than worship such a being. I don't know whether a man may
put it beyond the power of God to help him. But I know this, that
whether you are bad or good, or religious or not religious, God is with
you all the time trying to help you.

"And what have we to fear now?" he went on, raising his eyes for a
moment from the puckered, interested brown foreheads below him and
looking out over the shimmering distant silver of the horizon, as if
away over there, over the edge of the world, he could read what the next
few months had in store for them. "We know what we have come for, and we
know that it is right. We have all read of the things which have
happened in Belgium and in France. We know that the Germans invaded a
peaceful country and brought these horrors into it, we know how they
tore up treaties like so much paper; how they sank the _Lusitania_ and
showered their bombs on harmless women and children in London and in the
villages of England. We came of our own free wills--we came to say that
this sort of thing shall not happen in the world so long as we are in
it. We know that we are doing right, and I tell you that on this mission
on which we have come, so long as every man plays the game and plays it
cleanly, he need not fear about his religion--for what else is his
religion than that? Play the game and God will be with you--never fear.