As a typical college freshman, much of what the professors taught in class missed me, I'm afraid. But something history professor Mae Parrish said at Georgia's Berry College in the winter of 1958-59 caught my attention and has stayed with me all these years. My assessment is that this outstanding teacher was not a believer in the conventional sense, but one day she gave the class her endorsement of the college chaplain.
"Preachers are notorious," she said, "for getting their history wrong. But I've never caught Dr. Gresham in a single error. He gets it right every time."
I thought of that the other day when I heard a well-known pastor deliver a sermon at a denominational event in which he completely mangled a quote from Winston Churchill.
"I'm a great admirer of Churchill," he began, but you'd never have known it by what he did. Making a point about faithfulness to duty, he told of something Churchill said at a time during the Second World War when Britain's coal miners threatened to strike, a disastrous move that could cripple England's war effort, weaken the economy, and leave millions of Britons in the cold. Churchill met with the miners and delivered one of his impassioned speeches that drove them out of the meeting and back into the pits to dig the coal.
According to the speaker, Churchill told the coal miners — and I'm going from memory here — "One of these days, we will all stand before the Lord Jesus Christ at the final judgment. He will turn to the fighter pilots and ask, 'What did you do?' and they will say, 'We gave our all in the defense of liberty.' He will say to the soldiers, 'What did you do?' and they will answer, 'We faced the enemy and risked everything for our nation.'
The speaker went on in that vein for a bit. Then, quoting Churchill, he said, "Then the coal miners will come before the King of Kings, and He will ask, 'What did you do?' and they will say, 'We cut the coal.'"
The minister went on with his sermon, but I was stuck. Something about his version of that story was not right. I have a shelf of Churchill books at home, some by him and most about him, and, while I was familiar with that story, I was fairly certain Churchill had not spoken of anyone standing before the Lord Jesus at judgment. As soon as I returned home from the meeting, I looked up the incident in a book of Churchill's speeches.
The date was October 31, 1942. Winston Churchill was addressing a conference of coal-mine operators and miners in Westminster's Central Hall. It was a short speech and can be read in five minutes. As Churchill speeches go, this one was rather routine, no brilliant oratorical flourishes, nothing really memorable until the final paragraph.
"We shall not fail, and then some day, when children ask, 'What did you do to win this inheritance for us, and to make our name so respected among men?' one will say: 'I was a fighter pilot'; another will say: 'I was in the Submarine Service'; another: 'I marched with the Eighth Army'; a fourth will say: 'None of you could have lived without the convoys and the Merchant Seamen'; and you in your turn will say, with equal pride and with equal right: 'We cut the coal.’” At least the preacher got the last line correct.