Alone of nations, Prussia seems still to understand something of the art of governing, and of fighting enemies to said art. Germany from of old, has been the peaceablest, most pious, and in the end most valiant and terriblest of nations. Germany ought to be the President of Europe, and will again, it seems, be tried with that office for another five centuries or so.... This is herfirstlesson poor France is getting. It is probable she will require many such.This is blasphemy indeed at the present time. Charles Kingsley was no less emphatic in his admiration of Germany. Writing on the Franco-Prussian War to Professor Max Müller, he said:Accept my loving congratulations, my dear Max, to you and your people. The day which dear Bunsen used to pray, with tears in his eyes, might not come till the German people were ready, has come, and the German people are ready. Verily God is just and rules too; whatever the Press may think to the contrary. My only fear is lest the Germans should think of Paris, which cannot concern them, and turntheir eyes away from that which does concern them, the retaking of Alsace (which is their own), and leaving the Frenchman no foot of the Rhine-bank. To make the Rhine a word not to be mentioned by the French henceforth ought to be the one object of wise Germans, and that alone.... I am full of delight and hope for Germany.And to Sir Charles Bunbury:I confess to you that were I a German I should feel it my duty to my country to send my last son, my last shilling, and after all my own self, to the war, to get that done which must be done, done so that it will never need doing again. I trust that I should be able to put vengeance out of my heart, to forget all that Germany has suffered for two hundred years past from that vain, greedy, restless nation, all even which she suffered, women as well as men, in the late French war.The attraction of Germany is not only paramount in literature, in Walter Scott and Mill and Matthew Arnold; the superiority of German blood and constitution was an article of faith of the Victorians. The sins of Prussia were forgiven with amazing alacrity. The base attacks on Austria and Denmark evoked no moral indignation. German influence on English life was not only welcomed; historians went so far as to proclaim the identity ofEngland and Germany. Thus Freeman, in a lecture in 1872, stated that “what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element among others, but that it is the very life and essence of our national being....” Houston Chamberlain, in his reverent unravelling of the greatness of the Germanic peoples, is merely carrying on the tradition of the Victorian age. In the application of theories he is a disciple of Gobineau, a Frenchman, who after a profound study of the inequality of the human race became convinced of the superiority and high destiny of Germany. Gobineau and Chamberlain have told the Germans that they are mighty and unconquerable, and the Germans have listened with undisguised pleasure.Gobineau may be set aside as a professor of a fixed idea. There are other Frenchmen who have paid glowing tribute to Germany. Taine excelled in praise of her intellectual vigour and productivity. Victor Hugo expressed his love and admiration for her people, and confessed to an almost filial feeling for the noble and holy fatherland of thinkers. If he had not been French he would have liked to have been German. Ernest Renan studied Germany, and found her like a temple—sopure, so moral, so touching in her beauty. This reminds us of the many who during the present war, though ostensibly enemies of Germany, spend half their time in proclaiming her perfection and the necessity for immediate imitation of all her ways. Madame de Staël and Michelet expressed high regard for German character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities of attraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with which Lafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery which Sven Hedin heaps on the Germans. (It is quite futile to seek for an explanation of Hedin's conduct in his Jewish-Prussian descent. He would lackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions. Strindberg, alas! is dead, but his exposure of Hedin has been strangely justified.)Heine is an example of the curious and insistent fascination with which the mind may be drawn to one nationality whilst it is repelled by another. His judgment on England is painful in the extreme:“It is eight years since I went to London,” he writes in the Memoirs, “to make the acquaintance of the language and the people. Thedevil take the people and their language! They take a dozen words of one syllable into their mouth, chew them, gnaw them, spit them out again, and they call that talking. Fortunately they are by nature rather silent, and although they look at us with gaping mouths, yet they spare us long conversations.”Can anything be more sweeping? Can anything be more untrue? “Fortunately they are by nature rather silent”—imagine the reversed verdict had Heine attended a general election campaign! The unattractiveness of England is softened by the women. “If I can leave England alive, it will not be the fault of the women; they do their best.” This is praise indeed, when placed side by side with his dismissal of the women of Hamburg. They are plump, we are told, “but the little god Cupid is to blame, who often sets the sharpest of love's darts to his bow, but from naughtiness or clumsiness shoots too low, and hits the women of Hamburg not in the heart but in the stomach.”France was as delightful as England was doleful:“My poor sensitive soul,” he cries, “that often recoiled in shyness from German coarseness,opened out to the flattering sounds of French urbanity. God gave us our tongues so that we might say pleasant things to our fellow-men.... Sorrows are strangely softened. In the air of Paris wounds are healed quicker than anywhere else; there is something so noble, so gentle, so sweet in the air as in the people themselves.”I suppose the only analogy to such superlative contentment is provided by the phenomenon known as falling in love. Happily we do not all choose the same object of affection. England has a curious way of inspiring either great and lasting love or irritation and positive dislike. There seems to be little or no indifference. I believe love predominates.From exiled kings to humble refugees, from peripatetic philosophers to indolent aborigines, the testimony of her charm can be gathered. I speak as a victim. I love England with a fervour born of admiration (without admiration no one ever falls in love). I love her ways and her mind, I love her chilly dampness and her hot, glowing fires (attempts to analyse and classify love are always silly). In her thinkers and workers, in her schemes and efforts for social improvement, in herfreedom of thought and speech I found my mentalmilieu.To me England is inexpressibly dear, not because a whole conspiracy of influences—educational, conventional, patriotic—were at work persuading me that she is worthy of affection. I myself discovered her lovableness. Your Chauvinist is always a mere repeater. He is but a member of the Bandar-Log, shouting greatness of which he knows nothing. True love does not need the trumpets of Jingoism. I have no room for lies about England: the truth is sufficient for me. Though I love England, I have affection to spare for other countries. I feel at home in France, in Sweden, in America, in Switzerland. Your Chauvinist will excuse the former affections on account of “blood.” Swedish-French by ties of ancestry, such a sense of familiarity is natural when set against my preternatural love of England.Chauvinism flourishes exceedingly on the soil of national conceit. That conceit is prodigious and universal. The Germans are past-masters in the art of self-glorification, and their pan-German literature is certainly not only bold but ingenious in this respect.Is any one great outside Germany? Very well, let us trace his German origin. It may be remote, it may be hidden by centuries of illusory nationality, but it must be there. France has her apostles of superiority. Their style is more flexible, their pretensions less clumsy, but they neglect no opportunity of seducing us into a belief that France, and France only, is mistress of the human mind. Russia has her fervid declaimers of holy excellence and the superior quality of the Slav character. It does not matter whether the country is great or small, whether it be Montenegro or Cambodia, it always contains souls who feel constrained to give the world a demonstration of their overflowing superiority. Pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, pan-Magyarism, pan-Anglosaxism, pan-Americanism grow out of such conceit, systematized by professors and sanctified by bishops.The conceit of nationality often fosters great deeds, and generally finds expression that is more aggressive than intelligent. It takes hold of the most unlikely subjects. It is a potent destroyer of balanced judgment, and will pitilessly make the most solemn men ridiculous. The outbursts of Emerson whenunder its influence are truly amazing. “If a temperate wise man should look over our American society,” he said in a lecture, “I think the first danger which would excite his alarm would be the European influences on this country.... See the secondariness and aping of foreign and English life that runs through this country, in building, in dress, in eating, in books.”This rejection savours of the contempt with which some young men turn their backs on the fathers who fashioned them. “Let the passion for America,” he cried, “cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for—exalted manhood.” He gives a picture of the finished man, the gentleman who will be born in America. He defines the superiority of such a man to the Englishman:Freer swing his arms; farther pierce his eyes, more forward and forthright his whole build and rig than the Englishman's, who, we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone.It is difficult to surmise the exact meaning of being imprisoned in one's backbone. The possession of plenty of backbone is generally held to be a decided advantage. Emersonmay have had special and transcendental prejudices against strongly fashioned vertebræ.The freaks of nationalism are as remarkable as the freaks of internationalism. There is a constant interplay between the two, and the ascendancy of the one or the other often seems strangely capricious. Nationalism is weak where it should be strong, and rigid where common sense would make it fluid. The painful position of most royal families in time of war is an example of the readiness with which nations submit to foreign rulership and influence. Thrones, one would think, should represent the purely national spirit in its more intimate and sacred aspect. Yet the abundance of crowned rulers, past and present, attached by solemn selection or marriage, who are not by blood and tradition of the people, shows the fallacy of this supposition. Napoleon was an Italian who learnt French with some difficulty, and who was at first hostile to the French and somewhat contemptuous of their ways. Maréchal Bernadotte—French to his finger-tips—became King of Sweden. Pierre Loti, interviewing the charming and beloved Queen of the Belgians during the present war, remembers that the martyred lady before himis a Bavarian princess. The delicate and painful subject is mentioned. “It is at an end,” says the Queen; “betweenthemand me has fallen a curtain of iron which will never again be lifted.”Prominent statesmen, who, one would also think, should be bone of the bone of the nations for which they speak, have often been of alien birth or of mixed racial composition. Bismarck was of Slav origin; Beaconsfield was a Jew. The most picturesque example of such irregularities of the national consciousness is perhaps the presence of General Smuts in the War Cabinet. Once the alert and brave enemy in arms against this country, he is now its trusted guide, philosopher, and friend.Writers whom posterity classes as typical representatives of the national genius have often been of mixed racial strain, as were Tennyson, Browning, Ibsen, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Longfellow, and Whitman. The “bastards” of internationalism, so offensive to some nationalist fire-eaters, are not produced by the simple and natural processes by which races are mixed. They are self-created, their minds are set on gathering the varied fruit of all the nations. Genealogically they may beas uninteresting as the snail in the cabbage-patch, spiritually they are provocative and arresting. Romain Rolland and George Brandes challenge and outrage the champions of nationalism by the very texture of their minds. Joseph Conrad, a Pole, stands side by side with Thomas Hardy in his mastership of contemporary English fiction. Conrad in his consummate interpretation of sea-life is, if anything, more English than Hardy.The future of internationalism is possibly fraught with greater wonders than has been the past. The path will certainly not be laid out with the smoothness which some enthusiasts imagine. The idea and the hope are old as the hills. Cicero proclaimed a universal society of the human race. Seneca declared the world to be his country. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius declared themselves citizens of the world. St. Paul explained that there is neither Jew nor Greek. John Wesley looked upon the world as his parish. “The world is my country, mankind are my brothers,” said Thomas Paine. “The whole world being only one city,” said Goldsmith, “I do not care in which of the streets I happen to reside.”Such complete impartiality is a little toodetached for the make-up of present humanity. It may suit an etherialized and mobile race of the future. We are dependent on conditions of space and surroundings, we are the creatures of association and love. The master-problem in internationalism is the elimination of the forces of prejudice and ignorance that foster hostility, and the preservation of the precious characteristics which are the riches of the Soul of the World.RELIGION IN TRANSITIONThe general destructiveness of war is patent to everybody. The destruction of life, of property, of trade, strikes the most superficial observer as inevitable consequences of a state of war. At the outbreak of hostilities most of us foresaw that the uprooting would not stop short at the sacrifices of livelihood and occupation which were demanded by military necessities. We expected a sweeping revision of our habits, our prejudices, our conventions. We have got infinitely more than we expected. Not only have we made acquaintance with the State—the State as a relentless master of human fate and service; not only have we learnt that individualism—philosophic or commercial—is borne like a bubble on the waters of national tribulation and counts for nothing in the mass of collective effort demanded from us. Industry, commerce, art, learning, science, energy, enthusiasm, every gift and power within the range of human capacity, isrequisitioned for the efficient pursuit of war. Liberty of action, of speech, ancient rights which were won by centuries of struggle, are taken away because we are more useful and less troublesome without them. We are made parts of the machinery of State, and we have to be drilled and welded into the proper shape.The changes imposed on us from without are thorough and have been surprisingly many, but the changes taking place within our own souls are deeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation of the sociological tenets of the past. You will fail, for you will feel that this is a new world with burning problems and compelling facts which cannot be covered by the old systems. Take down the old books of religious comfort—Thomas à Kempis, or Bunyan, or St. Augustine, and you feel their remoteness from the newagonies of soul. But it is not only the old books of piety which fail to satisfy the hunger of to-day; the mass of devotional writings, especially produced to meet the needs of the war, are painfully inadequate. Rightly or wrongly, there is a sense of the inadequacy of the thought of the past to meet the need of the present. It invades every recess of the mind, it interposes itself in science as well as in religion; it leaves us no peace.There can be no doubt about it: we are blighted by the great destructiveness. All attempts to keep the war from our thoughts are destined to fail. Without being struck in an air-raid or torpedoed on the high seas, there is a sufficiency of destructive force in the daily events and in our accommodation to live on for them or in spite of them.Hence the universal demand for reconstruction. It is a blessed word: we cling to it, we live by it. So many buildings have tumbled about our ears, so many foundations were nothing but running sand; a whole galaxy of truths turned out to be lies. Now we must prepare that which is solid and indestructible. Perhaps some great and wise spirit brooding over our world, learned with the experience ofæons, of human attempts and mistakes, smiles at the deadly earnestness of the intention to reconstruct. I do not care. We have reached a pass when all life and all hope are centred in this faith: the faith that we can make anew and good and beautiful the distorted web of human existence.The war has not taught us what civilization is. But it has taught us what it is not. We know now that it is not mechanical ingenuity or clever inventions or commercialism carried to its utmost perfection. Civilization is not railways or telephones or vast cities or material prosperity. A satisfactory definition of civilization is well-nigh impossible. The past has born a bewildering number of different types, and it is a matter of personal taste where we place the line of demarcation between barbarism and culture. Our Christian civilization is passing through catastrophic changes, and it is again a matter of opinion whether it is in its death-throes or in the pangs of a new birth. But we feel vaguely, yet insistently, that civilization is a state of the soul; it is the gentle life towards which we aspire. It is based on the gradual substitution of moral and spiritual forces forsimple brute force. What is the exact relation of religion to civilization? The answer has been as variable as the purpose of the questioners. To some religion is civilization, to others it is merely a temporary weakness of the human mind, to which it will always be prone from fear of the unknown and the wish to live for ever. Comparative studies of the great religions of the world, their past and present forms, do not support the view that civilization is identical with religion. Religions have on many occasions ranged themselves on the side of brute force to the suppression of gentleness and sympathetic tolerance. It is really all a question of the meaning which we attach to the word “religion.” Do we mean the Church, set forms of worship and ceremonial, or do we mean the human craving for spiritual truth with the consequent strife to reach certainty, and, in certainty, peace of soul? There is a gulf between the two conceptions of religion.Religion is questioned as never heretofore. The great destructiveness is passing over the old beliefs. In the clamour for reconstruction we must clearly distinguish between the wider religious life and mere denominationalism.The vast host of rationalists are busy proclaimingthe downfall of religion. The war serves them as material for demonstration. The failure of Christianity to avert bloodshed, and the horrors under which Christendom is now submerged, are naturally used as a proof that the ethic of Christianity is lamentably feeble. The difference between theoretical Christianity and the social practices which the Church condones is held to be damning evidence of hypocrisy and falsehood. The quarrels between sects and divisions, the petty subjects which rouse the ire of the orthodox mind, the persistent quibbling over insignificant details of faith and service, have strained rationalistic patience to the breaking-point. The Church has been found fiddling whilst Rome burns.Our little rationalists are right, perfectly right, when they point to the shortcomings of the Churches. But they confuse the form with the substance, the frailties of human nature with the irrepressible desire to find God. They have their small idols and their conventional forms of worship, which, if put to the great social test, would prove as ineffective in building the City of Light as the churchgoing of the past. Their prime deity is Science. We are on the point of developing intelligence, they tell us;we at last see through the silly theories about God and the Universe, which deluded the childish and the ignorant of past ages. Assisted by the sound of guns and the sight of general misery, we must at last realize that there is no God to interfere in the troubles of man, and that Churches and creeds are hopeless failures. Science, we are assured, will take the place of religion.I am a patient and sympathetic student of the propagandist literature of rationalism. I have the greatest admiration for the moral and social idealism which is advocated. I agree that the atheological moral idea is superior to the mere performance of religious ceremonial. But I cannot admire the reasoning or the intelligence of those who use a smattering of science as evidence of the decay of religion. There is something almost comical in the solemnity with which they contrast the commonplaces of scientific observation with the vast mysteries of religion, to the detriment of the latter. “These marvellous researches of the human eye,” writes Sir Harry Johnston in a collection of articles entitledA Generation of Religious Progress, presumably intended to portray our rationalistic progress, “so far,though they have sounded the depths of the Universe, have found no God.” He is speaking of astronomical investigation, and he has just emphasized the reliability of our five senses.One wonders whether he is simply echoing the well-known phrase of Laplace, or whether he seriously believes that the non-existence of God is proved by the inability of the human eye to see Him! Nothing could be more unscientific—one hates using that hackneyed expression, but there is no other—than this confidence in the reliability of the senses. It reminds one of the young man who said he could not believe in God because he had not seen Him. He could only believe in things which he could see. “Do you believe you have a brain?” some one asked. The young man did. “And have you seen it?” was the next question.I shall be told that though the young man could not—fortunately—see his own brain, others might by opening his skull, and that no dissection of brains or examination of stars has ever shown us God. This is exactly the point where our easygoing rationalist misses the mark. Brains and stars do show God to those whohave developed the faculties wherewith to perceive Him.The senses are, after all, very fallible and very variable. A little opium, a little alcohol, a blow on the head, or some great emotion will modify their judgment to an incredible degree. Sir Harry Johnston may not be very representative as an exponent of scientific conclusions about the existence of God, but he is interesting and typical of much of the rough-and-ready opposition to formulated religion. I quote the upshot of his admiration for the feats of the human eye:Religion, as the conception of a heavenly being, or heavenly beings, hovering about the earth and concerning themselves greatly with the affairs of man, has been abolished for all thoughtful and educated people by the discoveries of science. Perhaps, however, I should not say “abolished” as being too final; I should prefer to say that such theories have been put entirely in the background as unimportant Compared with the awful problems which affect the welfare and progress of humanity on this planet.The honesty of the conviction is not marred by the fact that it is entirely mistaken. “God is infinitely more remote now (in 1916) from the thoughts of the educated few than he was prior to 1859,” writes Sir Harry. This statementis not true. Speculation about God, the meaning of life, the social import of Christianity, was never more rife amongst educated people. Here I must check myself: what does “educated” mean? To be able to read and write, and say “Hear, hear” at public meetings? To have a pretty idea of the positions of Huxley and Haeckel by which to confound the poor old Bible? If by education we mean the exposition of some special branch of the physical sciences, the statement may be true. If we mean men and women with a general knowledge of life and letters, with a social consciousness and humanitarian sympathies, it is ridiculously wide of the truth. There is everywhere a hunger for a satisfying explanation of life. There are restlessness and impatience with dogma and creed, there is a growing indifference to the old sectarian exclusiveness, but there is above all a new interest in God. We need not go to Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Wells for testimony to this interest. They reflect the religious renaissance which is the essence of the reconstruction for which men crave. The symptoms are accessible to the observation of all. Neither priestly intolerance nor rationalistic prejudice can suppress them.InThe Bankruptcy of Religion, Mr. Joseph McCabe develops the case against religion with the skill of a trained controversialist. Like the converted sinner in the ranks of the Salvation Army, Mr. McCabe carries special weight to the lines of rationalists and ethicists. For he was once a priest and lived in a monastery, and he left the priesthood and the monastery convinced of the worthlessness of both. He is, therefore,persona gratissimaat the High Court of Reason. “The era of religious influence closes in bankruptcy,” he informs us. He has no patience with attempts at religious reconstruction; he asks us to shake ourselves free of the vanishing dream of heaven and to leave the barren tracts of religion. He exhorts us to abandon the “last illusions of the childhood of the race”:Linger no longer in the “reconstruction” of fables which once beguiled the Arabs of the desert and the Syrian slaves of Corinth, but set your hearts and minds to the making of a new earth! Sweep these ancient legends out of your schools and colleges, your army and navy, your code of law, your legislative houses, and substitute for them a spirit of progress, efficiency, boldness, and candour!Fine words, brave words, honest words, but hollow within. Mr. McCabe is no psychologist.The fables and legends of old times may be abandoned, the desire for the realities round which fable and legend grow remains and cannot be extirpated by a rationalistic operation. Supernaturalism—in the widest sense—is ineradicable. Religion will not be suspended by the discovery that it is possible to formulate excellent theories of social equity without the assistance of priests. The hunger of the human heart for knowledge of God persists though all the old religious systems may prove illusions.Our little rationalists imagine that they are hitting the foundations of religion when they successfully assail the crumbling walls of dogmas. Religious life escapes their fire. Faith and hope rise above disillusionment. Love knows instinctively that it is not made of dust. Through the darkness and the wilderness it calls to God, and lo! God responds with light and guidance which outlast earthquakes and massacres. Reject every creed that has been offered as an explanation of the mysteries of life, forsake all the humiliating, joy-killing penances for sin, and God will reveal Himself in the beauty of Nature. He will speak through the impulses of creative art, through music and poetry and painting. He willattract our thought through philosophy and our emotion through the impetus to improve the social order. And science—the greater science, which rejects dogmatism and lies of self-sufficiency as it rejects the crudities of the Creed—takes us by circuitous paths to new temples for the worship of God.The tenet that science and religion are incompatible and antagonistic, so dear to the hearts of the scientists in the middle of the nineteenth century, and still repeated with mechanical certainty in every secularist mission-hall, is likely to undergo a complete revision in the near future. The antagonism between dogmatic religion and materialistic science will never be removed. But the signs are apparent everywhere that religion is shedding its adherence to outer forms and entering into the freedom of the living spirit, whilst science is turning to problems which used to lie within the domain of unexplored religion. Religion will become scientific and science will become religious. The principles laid down by Darwin and Huxley have lost their power of stifling religious aspiration; the startling pronouncements in defiant materialism of Büchner and Haeckel now startle none but the ignorant. Theanxiety to exclude scientific facts disappears with the realization that all truth, all knowledge, all reason, are subservient to the search for God. The struggle between the wish to believe and the temptation to think caused real distress of mind to many thinkers of the nineteenth century. The choice seemed to lie between atheism and blind submission to authority. “Let us humbly take anything the Bible says without trying to understand it, and not torment ourselves with arguments,” said Charles Kingsley. “One word of Scripture is more than a hundred words of man's explaining.” The modern mind does not dread the meeting of science and religion. It does not labour to reconcile them. It is conscious of their ultimate identity and their present insufficiency. Hence a new tolerance which is mistaken for indifference by the zealots on both sides. Hence the absence of actuality in the fierce denunciations of Bradlaugh and Holyoake and Ingersoll. They did valiant battle against religious formalism of the past; they were champions of reason and science at a time when religionists fought to exclude both.It is not science which is undermining the future of institutional religion. There is a newenemy, more subtle and more powerful. It is the growing consciousness of an intolerable inconsistency between religious theory and practice. The war thus becomes a stumbling-block to faithfulness to conventional Christianity, and the glee of the rationalist is pardonable. I again quote Mr. McCabe:What did the clergy do to prevent the conflict? In which country did they denounce the preparations for the conflict, or the incentives of the conflict? What have they done since it began to confine the conflict within civilized limits? Have they had, or used, a particle of moral influence throughout the whole bloody business? And, if not, is it not time we found other guardians and promoters of high conduct?Apart from the fact that the Pope and some lesser religious leaders have denounced and deplored the conflict, and that a comprehensive answer to Mr. McCabe's question would somewhat modify the implied moral impotence of the clergy, we might ask the same questions of the leaders of secularist morality. What have they done to prevent the conflict? Why have their intellectual giants failed to impress upon mankind the folly of war? They have had freedom of speech and action, they havewielded incisive criticism and strength of invective. They have had many decades in which to put into practice the theory of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But the problem of the persistence of war has somehow escaped atheists and rationalists, just as it has eluded theologians and revivalists.We may admit that the clergy are more blameworthy than the orators of rationalism. If the teachings of Jesus Christ are to be applied to the art of war, then the art of war is doomed to extinction. If the Church be an international society, based on mutual love and peace, then the perpetration of war on members of the Church is clearly wrong. If the ideals of the Christian life be charity, gentleness, forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the fault lies not in the teaching itself but in the feebleness of the Church, then the Churchmust clearly be counted a failure. If the cause of the discrepancy is to be found merely in the slowness and obstinacy of the human soul in following the path of righteousness, the practical realization of the Christian ideal will be but a question of time and effort.The attitude of Christianity towards war may at best be described as a chapter of inconsistencies. “Can it be lawful to handle the sword,” asked Tertullian, “when the Lord Himself has declared that he who uses the sword shall perish by it?” By disarming Peter, he stated, the Lord “disarmed every soldier from that time forward.” To Origen, Christians were children of peace who, for the sake of Jesus, shunned the temptations of war, and whose only weapon was prayer. The difficulty of reconciling the profession of Christianity with the practice of war constantly exercised the minds of the early Christians. St. Basil advocated a compromise in the form of temporary exclusion from the sacrament after military service. St. Augustine came to the conclusion that the qualities of a good Christian and a good warrior were not incompatible. Gradually the dilemma ceased to trouble the minds of Christians as the needs of the State and citizenship of thisworld were recognized. After some centuries the Church not only approved of war, but herself became one of the most powerful instigators to military conquest. The Crusades and the ceaseless wars of religious intolerance became “holy” as the spiritual objection to bloodshed receded before the triumphant demands of primitive passions.Now, as heretofore, we have episcopal reminders of the blessings of war. “May it not be,” wrote the Bishop of London soon after the outbreak of the war in 1914, “that this cup of hardship which we drink together will turn out to be the very draught which we need? Has there not crept a softness over the nation, a passion for amusement, a love of luxury among the rich, and of mere physical comfort among the middle class?”He leaves the questions unanswered, and incidentally omits to dwell on the shortcomings of the poor in the direction of softness and luxury. He continues:Not such was the nation which made the Empire, which crushed the Armada, which braved hardships of old, and drove English hearts of oak seaward round the world. We believe the old spirit is here just the same, but it needed a purifying, cleansingdraught to bring it back to its old strength and purity again, and for that second reason the cup which our Father has given us, shall we not drink it?Much has been said in justification of this view of war from the biological point of view. Prussian militarists are experts in the exposition of similar theories. But from the Christian point of view the complacency with which the world-tragedy is put down as a “purifying, cleansing draught” is somewhat disconcerting. Dean Inge, writing in theQuestin the autumn of 1914, shows himself to be a disciple of the same school:We see the fruits of secularism or materialism in social disintegration, in the voluntary sterility and timorous acquisitiveness of the prosperous, and in the recklessness and bitterness of the lower strata. A godless civilization is a disease of which nations die by inches. I hope that this visitation has come just in time to save us. Experience is a good school, but its fees are terribly high!Were we, then, really so bad that “this visitation” was needed to save us from voluntary sterility (by imposing compulsory?) and the other delinquencies enumerated by the Dean? The nature of the punishment hardly fits the crime. Moreover, such a conception of war asa wholesome corrective is practically indistinguishable from the panegyrics of the extreme militarists whom we are out utterly to destroy. “God will see to it,” wrote Treitschke, “that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race.” “War,” wrote General von Bernhardi, “is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow which excludes every advancement of the race, and, therefore, all real civilization.” “A perpetual peace,” said Field-Marshal von Moltke, “is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is one of the elements of order in the world established by God. The noblest virtues of men are developed therein. Without war the world would degenerate and disappear in a morass of materialism.” Many perplexed souls have turned to the Church for guidance during this time of destruction and sorrow, and the directions given have often increased the perplexity. The Bishop of Carlisle expressed the opinion that if we were really Christians the war would not have happened. Archdeacon Wilberforce and Father Bernard Vaughan stated that killing Germans was doing serviceto God. Many who have suffered at the hands of the Germans will be inclined to agree, but the trouble from the point of view of the Christian ethic is not removed by such a simple solution. We cannot but suspect that German prelates have been found who have seen in the killing of women and children by air-raids on London a service to the German God. Dr. Forsyth, inThe Christian Ethic of War, tells us that “war is not essentially killing, and killing is here no murder. And no recusancy to bear arms can here justify itself on the plea that Christianity forbids all bloodshed or even violence.” He reminds us that Christ used a scourge of small cords, and that he called the Pharisees “you vipers,” and Herod “you fox.” “If the Christian man live in society,” he tells us, “it is quite impossible for him to live upon thepreceptsof the Sermon on the Mount. But also it is not possible at a half-developed stage to live in actual relations of life and duty on itsprincipleexcept as anideal.” The Roman form of internationalism he regards “as not only useless to humanity (which the present attitude of the Pope to the war shows) but as mischievous to it.”It is strange that whilst the war has causeda number of ordained representatives of the Christian Church to declare that practical Christianity is an impossibility and the Sermon on the Mount a beautiful but ineffective ideal, it has brought agnostics and heathen to a conviction that socialized Christianity is the sovereign remedy for the national and international disease. They have reached the conclusion that the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is the revolutionary leaven for which the world is waiting. In his preface onThe Prospects of Christianity, Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that he is “as sceptical and scientific and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere.” This assurance is intended to help us to regain breath after the preceding pronouncement:I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will if He had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.This is one of the outstanding mental phenomena of the war: sceptics and thinkers havebegun to examine Christianity as a practical way of social salvation. There is a tendency to re-examine the gospel, not with intent to lay stress on historical weakness or points of similarity with other religions, but with the poignant interest which men lost in the desert display towards possible sources of water. It may appear as a coldly intellectual interest in some who are wont to deal with the tragedies of life as mildly amusing scenes in a drama of endless fatuity. But the coldness is a little assumed. There are others who do not attempt to disguise that their whole emotional life is stirred to passionate protest and inquiry, who, though Christians by profession and duly appointed ministers of God, call for a recommendation of Christianity and the establishment of a social order based on the principles of life laid down by Jesus Christ. InThe Outlook for Religion, Dr. W. E. Orchard condemns the way of war as the complete antithesis of the way of the Cross. “How can people be so blind?” he cries. “Has all the ethical awakening of the past century been of so little depth that this bloody slaughter, this hellish torture, this treacherous game of war can still secure ethical approval?”Perhaps the great majority of the clergy deserve the indictment of rationalists. Mr. McCabe can prove his case by citing the exceptions. After all, the accusation is neither new nor original. Voltaire set the tune. “Miserable physicians of souls,” he exclaimed, “you declaim for five quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no word on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces.”Voltaire's powers of satire were roused by the spectacle of the different factions of Christians praying to the same God to bless their arms. The element of comicality in this aspect of war is greatly outweighed by that of pathos. Those who earnestly pray to God to lead them to victory must at any rate be firmly convinced that their cause is one of which God can approve. No believer would dare to invoke the blessing of God upon a cause which his conscience tells him is a mean and sordid enterprise. Voltaire's quarrel was really with the faith in war as a means of determining the intentions of the Divine Will. Success in war has been held, and is held, by Christians to be a sign of the favour of the Almighty. Bacon expounded this view to the satisfaction of coming generations when he referred to wars as “the highest trials ofright” when princes and States “shall put themselves on the justice of God for the deciding of their controversies, by such success as it shall please Him to give on either side.” The Germans have nauseated the world by their incessant proclamations that they are the favoured and chosen of God. The good old German God has vied with Jehovah of the Israelites in stimulating and sustaining the will to war.Those atheists to whom all war is an abomination and entirely irreconcilable with the highest human attributes have found complete unanimity in their repudiation of the idea of a presiding God of Battles in the dissenting objections to war expressed by Quakers, Christadelphians, Plymouth Brethren, and other sects of Christianity. There can be no doubt that the faith in war, and in the Divine guidance of war, is receding. The new conception of God, for which humanity is struggling, will be one entirely different from the jealous and cruel Master of Bloodshed to whom man has paid homage in the dark ages of the past. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realization of its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose which unitesChristians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has been born which will prove stronger than all the passion for war which has overwhelmed us in the past. President Wilson seeks a peace identical with the freedom of life in which every people will be left free to determine its own polity and its own way of development, “unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.” Statesmen see the ultimate hope for a free humanity in a change of heart. Mr. Asquith outlines the slow and gradual process by which a real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will, will be substituted for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances, and a precarious equipoise. Mr. Lloyd George insists that there must be “no next time.” Viscount Grey warns us that if the world cannot organize against war, if war must go on,“then nations can protect themselves henceforth only by using whatever destructive agencies they can invent, till the resources and inventions of science end by destroying the humanity they were meant to serve.” Leagues of nations are proposed, organization for peace on a scale commensurate with the past organization for war is recognized as the principal task of international co-operation.This new revolt against war is inseparable from the religious revival of the time. The word “revival” conjures up memories of less strenuous times, when men were concerned with smaller problems, and uninspired by the bitter experience of the present—Spurgeon thundering in his Tabernacle, Salvation Army meetings, small gatherings in wayside villages, at which howling sinners were converted and revivalists counted their game by the dozen. The present revival is something for which the past provides no analogy. It is not concerned so much with individual salvation as with the salvation of the race and the world. The petty sins and shortcomings which brought men to the confessional and to the stool of repentance lose importance when compared with the awful omissions which we now recognize as the cause of the calamitieswhich have befallen us. It is not only the existence of war that is rousing the conscience. War is seen to be but a symptom, a horrible outbreak of malignant forces, which we have nurtured and harboured in times of peace. These forces permeate the very structure of society. A new and fierce light beats on our slums, our industrialism, on the old divisions of class and quality, on the standards of comfort and success. Poverty, sickness, and child mortality—the whole hideous war of Mammon through which millions of our fellow-creatures are condemned to the perpetual service of Want—can no longer conveniently be left outside the operations of our religious consciousness.One thing is certain: we can no longer be satisfied with a religion which pays lip-service to God, and offers propitiating incense to His wrath, whilst it ignores the misery and the suffering of those who have no reason to offer thanksgiving. Religious profession and religious action will have to be unified. The sense of social responsibility is slowly but surely taking the place of the anxiety to assure one's own salvation. Some churches are empty, dead; they have no message for the people, no vision wherewith to inspire the young.They might with advantage close, and their clergy be employed upon some useful national service. Ritual and incantations are doubtless useful aids to religious worship and the necessary quietude of mind, but they are losing their hold over souls to whom religious life has become a matter of social service. These are of the order spoken of by Ernest Crosby:
Alone of nations, Prussia seems still to understand something of the art of governing, and of fighting enemies to said art. Germany from of old, has been the peaceablest, most pious, and in the end most valiant and terriblest of nations. Germany ought to be the President of Europe, and will again, it seems, be tried with that office for another five centuries or so.... This is herfirstlesson poor France is getting. It is probable she will require many such.
Alone of nations, Prussia seems still to understand something of the art of governing, and of fighting enemies to said art. Germany from of old, has been the peaceablest, most pious, and in the end most valiant and terriblest of nations. Germany ought to be the President of Europe, and will again, it seems, be tried with that office for another five centuries or so.... This is herfirstlesson poor France is getting. It is probable she will require many such.
This is blasphemy indeed at the present time. Charles Kingsley was no less emphatic in his admiration of Germany. Writing on the Franco-Prussian War to Professor Max Müller, he said:
Accept my loving congratulations, my dear Max, to you and your people. The day which dear Bunsen used to pray, with tears in his eyes, might not come till the German people were ready, has come, and the German people are ready. Verily God is just and rules too; whatever the Press may think to the contrary. My only fear is lest the Germans should think of Paris, which cannot concern them, and turntheir eyes away from that which does concern them, the retaking of Alsace (which is their own), and leaving the Frenchman no foot of the Rhine-bank. To make the Rhine a word not to be mentioned by the French henceforth ought to be the one object of wise Germans, and that alone.... I am full of delight and hope for Germany.
Accept my loving congratulations, my dear Max, to you and your people. The day which dear Bunsen used to pray, with tears in his eyes, might not come till the German people were ready, has come, and the German people are ready. Verily God is just and rules too; whatever the Press may think to the contrary. My only fear is lest the Germans should think of Paris, which cannot concern them, and turntheir eyes away from that which does concern them, the retaking of Alsace (which is their own), and leaving the Frenchman no foot of the Rhine-bank. To make the Rhine a word not to be mentioned by the French henceforth ought to be the one object of wise Germans, and that alone.... I am full of delight and hope for Germany.
And to Sir Charles Bunbury:
I confess to you that were I a German I should feel it my duty to my country to send my last son, my last shilling, and after all my own self, to the war, to get that done which must be done, done so that it will never need doing again. I trust that I should be able to put vengeance out of my heart, to forget all that Germany has suffered for two hundred years past from that vain, greedy, restless nation, all even which she suffered, women as well as men, in the late French war.
I confess to you that were I a German I should feel it my duty to my country to send my last son, my last shilling, and after all my own self, to the war, to get that done which must be done, done so that it will never need doing again. I trust that I should be able to put vengeance out of my heart, to forget all that Germany has suffered for two hundred years past from that vain, greedy, restless nation, all even which she suffered, women as well as men, in the late French war.
The attraction of Germany is not only paramount in literature, in Walter Scott and Mill and Matthew Arnold; the superiority of German blood and constitution was an article of faith of the Victorians. The sins of Prussia were forgiven with amazing alacrity. The base attacks on Austria and Denmark evoked no moral indignation. German influence on English life was not only welcomed; historians went so far as to proclaim the identity ofEngland and Germany. Thus Freeman, in a lecture in 1872, stated that “what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element among others, but that it is the very life and essence of our national being....” Houston Chamberlain, in his reverent unravelling of the greatness of the Germanic peoples, is merely carrying on the tradition of the Victorian age. In the application of theories he is a disciple of Gobineau, a Frenchman, who after a profound study of the inequality of the human race became convinced of the superiority and high destiny of Germany. Gobineau and Chamberlain have told the Germans that they are mighty and unconquerable, and the Germans have listened with undisguised pleasure.
Gobineau may be set aside as a professor of a fixed idea. There are other Frenchmen who have paid glowing tribute to Germany. Taine excelled in praise of her intellectual vigour and productivity. Victor Hugo expressed his love and admiration for her people, and confessed to an almost filial feeling for the noble and holy fatherland of thinkers. If he had not been French he would have liked to have been German. Ernest Renan studied Germany, and found her like a temple—sopure, so moral, so touching in her beauty. This reminds us of the many who during the present war, though ostensibly enemies of Germany, spend half their time in proclaiming her perfection and the necessity for immediate imitation of all her ways. Madame de Staël and Michelet expressed high regard for German character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities of attraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with which Lafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery which Sven Hedin heaps on the Germans. (It is quite futile to seek for an explanation of Hedin's conduct in his Jewish-Prussian descent. He would lackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions. Strindberg, alas! is dead, but his exposure of Hedin has been strangely justified.)
Heine is an example of the curious and insistent fascination with which the mind may be drawn to one nationality whilst it is repelled by another. His judgment on England is painful in the extreme:
“It is eight years since I went to London,” he writes in the Memoirs, “to make the acquaintance of the language and the people. Thedevil take the people and their language! They take a dozen words of one syllable into their mouth, chew them, gnaw them, spit them out again, and they call that talking. Fortunately they are by nature rather silent, and although they look at us with gaping mouths, yet they spare us long conversations.”
Can anything be more sweeping? Can anything be more untrue? “Fortunately they are by nature rather silent”—imagine the reversed verdict had Heine attended a general election campaign! The unattractiveness of England is softened by the women. “If I can leave England alive, it will not be the fault of the women; they do their best.” This is praise indeed, when placed side by side with his dismissal of the women of Hamburg. They are plump, we are told, “but the little god Cupid is to blame, who often sets the sharpest of love's darts to his bow, but from naughtiness or clumsiness shoots too low, and hits the women of Hamburg not in the heart but in the stomach.”
France was as delightful as England was doleful:
“My poor sensitive soul,” he cries, “that often recoiled in shyness from German coarseness,opened out to the flattering sounds of French urbanity. God gave us our tongues so that we might say pleasant things to our fellow-men.... Sorrows are strangely softened. In the air of Paris wounds are healed quicker than anywhere else; there is something so noble, so gentle, so sweet in the air as in the people themselves.”
I suppose the only analogy to such superlative contentment is provided by the phenomenon known as falling in love. Happily we do not all choose the same object of affection. England has a curious way of inspiring either great and lasting love or irritation and positive dislike. There seems to be little or no indifference. I believe love predominates.
From exiled kings to humble refugees, from peripatetic philosophers to indolent aborigines, the testimony of her charm can be gathered. I speak as a victim. I love England with a fervour born of admiration (without admiration no one ever falls in love). I love her ways and her mind, I love her chilly dampness and her hot, glowing fires (attempts to analyse and classify love are always silly). In her thinkers and workers, in her schemes and efforts for social improvement, in herfreedom of thought and speech I found my mentalmilieu.
To me England is inexpressibly dear, not because a whole conspiracy of influences—educational, conventional, patriotic—were at work persuading me that she is worthy of affection. I myself discovered her lovableness. Your Chauvinist is always a mere repeater. He is but a member of the Bandar-Log, shouting greatness of which he knows nothing. True love does not need the trumpets of Jingoism. I have no room for lies about England: the truth is sufficient for me. Though I love England, I have affection to spare for other countries. I feel at home in France, in Sweden, in America, in Switzerland. Your Chauvinist will excuse the former affections on account of “blood.” Swedish-French by ties of ancestry, such a sense of familiarity is natural when set against my preternatural love of England.
Chauvinism flourishes exceedingly on the soil of national conceit. That conceit is prodigious and universal. The Germans are past-masters in the art of self-glorification, and their pan-German literature is certainly not only bold but ingenious in this respect.Is any one great outside Germany? Very well, let us trace his German origin. It may be remote, it may be hidden by centuries of illusory nationality, but it must be there. France has her apostles of superiority. Their style is more flexible, their pretensions less clumsy, but they neglect no opportunity of seducing us into a belief that France, and France only, is mistress of the human mind. Russia has her fervid declaimers of holy excellence and the superior quality of the Slav character. It does not matter whether the country is great or small, whether it be Montenegro or Cambodia, it always contains souls who feel constrained to give the world a demonstration of their overflowing superiority. Pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, pan-Magyarism, pan-Anglosaxism, pan-Americanism grow out of such conceit, systematized by professors and sanctified by bishops.
The conceit of nationality often fosters great deeds, and generally finds expression that is more aggressive than intelligent. It takes hold of the most unlikely subjects. It is a potent destroyer of balanced judgment, and will pitilessly make the most solemn men ridiculous. The outbursts of Emerson whenunder its influence are truly amazing. “If a temperate wise man should look over our American society,” he said in a lecture, “I think the first danger which would excite his alarm would be the European influences on this country.... See the secondariness and aping of foreign and English life that runs through this country, in building, in dress, in eating, in books.”
This rejection savours of the contempt with which some young men turn their backs on the fathers who fashioned them. “Let the passion for America,” he cried, “cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for—exalted manhood.” He gives a picture of the finished man, the gentleman who will be born in America. He defines the superiority of such a man to the Englishman:
Freer swing his arms; farther pierce his eyes, more forward and forthright his whole build and rig than the Englishman's, who, we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone.
Freer swing his arms; farther pierce his eyes, more forward and forthright his whole build and rig than the Englishman's, who, we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone.
It is difficult to surmise the exact meaning of being imprisoned in one's backbone. The possession of plenty of backbone is generally held to be a decided advantage. Emersonmay have had special and transcendental prejudices against strongly fashioned vertebræ.
The freaks of nationalism are as remarkable as the freaks of internationalism. There is a constant interplay between the two, and the ascendancy of the one or the other often seems strangely capricious. Nationalism is weak where it should be strong, and rigid where common sense would make it fluid. The painful position of most royal families in time of war is an example of the readiness with which nations submit to foreign rulership and influence. Thrones, one would think, should represent the purely national spirit in its more intimate and sacred aspect. Yet the abundance of crowned rulers, past and present, attached by solemn selection or marriage, who are not by blood and tradition of the people, shows the fallacy of this supposition. Napoleon was an Italian who learnt French with some difficulty, and who was at first hostile to the French and somewhat contemptuous of their ways. Maréchal Bernadotte—French to his finger-tips—became King of Sweden. Pierre Loti, interviewing the charming and beloved Queen of the Belgians during the present war, remembers that the martyred lady before himis a Bavarian princess. The delicate and painful subject is mentioned. “It is at an end,” says the Queen; “betweenthemand me has fallen a curtain of iron which will never again be lifted.”
Prominent statesmen, who, one would also think, should be bone of the bone of the nations for which they speak, have often been of alien birth or of mixed racial composition. Bismarck was of Slav origin; Beaconsfield was a Jew. The most picturesque example of such irregularities of the national consciousness is perhaps the presence of General Smuts in the War Cabinet. Once the alert and brave enemy in arms against this country, he is now its trusted guide, philosopher, and friend.
Writers whom posterity classes as typical representatives of the national genius have often been of mixed racial strain, as were Tennyson, Browning, Ibsen, Kant, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Longfellow, and Whitman. The “bastards” of internationalism, so offensive to some nationalist fire-eaters, are not produced by the simple and natural processes by which races are mixed. They are self-created, their minds are set on gathering the varied fruit of all the nations. Genealogically they may beas uninteresting as the snail in the cabbage-patch, spiritually they are provocative and arresting. Romain Rolland and George Brandes challenge and outrage the champions of nationalism by the very texture of their minds. Joseph Conrad, a Pole, stands side by side with Thomas Hardy in his mastership of contemporary English fiction. Conrad in his consummate interpretation of sea-life is, if anything, more English than Hardy.
The future of internationalism is possibly fraught with greater wonders than has been the past. The path will certainly not be laid out with the smoothness which some enthusiasts imagine. The idea and the hope are old as the hills. Cicero proclaimed a universal society of the human race. Seneca declared the world to be his country. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius declared themselves citizens of the world. St. Paul explained that there is neither Jew nor Greek. John Wesley looked upon the world as his parish. “The world is my country, mankind are my brothers,” said Thomas Paine. “The whole world being only one city,” said Goldsmith, “I do not care in which of the streets I happen to reside.”
Such complete impartiality is a little toodetached for the make-up of present humanity. It may suit an etherialized and mobile race of the future. We are dependent on conditions of space and surroundings, we are the creatures of association and love. The master-problem in internationalism is the elimination of the forces of prejudice and ignorance that foster hostility, and the preservation of the precious characteristics which are the riches of the Soul of the World.
The general destructiveness of war is patent to everybody. The destruction of life, of property, of trade, strikes the most superficial observer as inevitable consequences of a state of war. At the outbreak of hostilities most of us foresaw that the uprooting would not stop short at the sacrifices of livelihood and occupation which were demanded by military necessities. We expected a sweeping revision of our habits, our prejudices, our conventions. We have got infinitely more than we expected. Not only have we made acquaintance with the State—the State as a relentless master of human fate and service; not only have we learnt that individualism—philosophic or commercial—is borne like a bubble on the waters of national tribulation and counts for nothing in the mass of collective effort demanded from us. Industry, commerce, art, learning, science, energy, enthusiasm, every gift and power within the range of human capacity, isrequisitioned for the efficient pursuit of war. Liberty of action, of speech, ancient rights which were won by centuries of struggle, are taken away because we are more useful and less troublesome without them. We are made parts of the machinery of State, and we have to be drilled and welded into the proper shape.
The changes imposed on us from without are thorough and have been surprisingly many, but the changes taking place within our own souls are deeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation of the sociological tenets of the past. You will fail, for you will feel that this is a new world with burning problems and compelling facts which cannot be covered by the old systems. Take down the old books of religious comfort—Thomas à Kempis, or Bunyan, or St. Augustine, and you feel their remoteness from the newagonies of soul. But it is not only the old books of piety which fail to satisfy the hunger of to-day; the mass of devotional writings, especially produced to meet the needs of the war, are painfully inadequate. Rightly or wrongly, there is a sense of the inadequacy of the thought of the past to meet the need of the present. It invades every recess of the mind, it interposes itself in science as well as in religion; it leaves us no peace.
There can be no doubt about it: we are blighted by the great destructiveness. All attempts to keep the war from our thoughts are destined to fail. Without being struck in an air-raid or torpedoed on the high seas, there is a sufficiency of destructive force in the daily events and in our accommodation to live on for them or in spite of them.
Hence the universal demand for reconstruction. It is a blessed word: we cling to it, we live by it. So many buildings have tumbled about our ears, so many foundations were nothing but running sand; a whole galaxy of truths turned out to be lies. Now we must prepare that which is solid and indestructible. Perhaps some great and wise spirit brooding over our world, learned with the experience ofæons, of human attempts and mistakes, smiles at the deadly earnestness of the intention to reconstruct. I do not care. We have reached a pass when all life and all hope are centred in this faith: the faith that we can make anew and good and beautiful the distorted web of human existence.
The war has not taught us what civilization is. But it has taught us what it is not. We know now that it is not mechanical ingenuity or clever inventions or commercialism carried to its utmost perfection. Civilization is not railways or telephones or vast cities or material prosperity. A satisfactory definition of civilization is well-nigh impossible. The past has born a bewildering number of different types, and it is a matter of personal taste where we place the line of demarcation between barbarism and culture. Our Christian civilization is passing through catastrophic changes, and it is again a matter of opinion whether it is in its death-throes or in the pangs of a new birth. But we feel vaguely, yet insistently, that civilization is a state of the soul; it is the gentle life towards which we aspire. It is based on the gradual substitution of moral and spiritual forces forsimple brute force. What is the exact relation of religion to civilization? The answer has been as variable as the purpose of the questioners. To some religion is civilization, to others it is merely a temporary weakness of the human mind, to which it will always be prone from fear of the unknown and the wish to live for ever. Comparative studies of the great religions of the world, their past and present forms, do not support the view that civilization is identical with religion. Religions have on many occasions ranged themselves on the side of brute force to the suppression of gentleness and sympathetic tolerance. It is really all a question of the meaning which we attach to the word “religion.” Do we mean the Church, set forms of worship and ceremonial, or do we mean the human craving for spiritual truth with the consequent strife to reach certainty, and, in certainty, peace of soul? There is a gulf between the two conceptions of religion.
Religion is questioned as never heretofore. The great destructiveness is passing over the old beliefs. In the clamour for reconstruction we must clearly distinguish between the wider religious life and mere denominationalism.
The vast host of rationalists are busy proclaimingthe downfall of religion. The war serves them as material for demonstration. The failure of Christianity to avert bloodshed, and the horrors under which Christendom is now submerged, are naturally used as a proof that the ethic of Christianity is lamentably feeble. The difference between theoretical Christianity and the social practices which the Church condones is held to be damning evidence of hypocrisy and falsehood. The quarrels between sects and divisions, the petty subjects which rouse the ire of the orthodox mind, the persistent quibbling over insignificant details of faith and service, have strained rationalistic patience to the breaking-point. The Church has been found fiddling whilst Rome burns.
Our little rationalists are right, perfectly right, when they point to the shortcomings of the Churches. But they confuse the form with the substance, the frailties of human nature with the irrepressible desire to find God. They have their small idols and their conventional forms of worship, which, if put to the great social test, would prove as ineffective in building the City of Light as the churchgoing of the past. Their prime deity is Science. We are on the point of developing intelligence, they tell us;we at last see through the silly theories about God and the Universe, which deluded the childish and the ignorant of past ages. Assisted by the sound of guns and the sight of general misery, we must at last realize that there is no God to interfere in the troubles of man, and that Churches and creeds are hopeless failures. Science, we are assured, will take the place of religion.
I am a patient and sympathetic student of the propagandist literature of rationalism. I have the greatest admiration for the moral and social idealism which is advocated. I agree that the atheological moral idea is superior to the mere performance of religious ceremonial. But I cannot admire the reasoning or the intelligence of those who use a smattering of science as evidence of the decay of religion. There is something almost comical in the solemnity with which they contrast the commonplaces of scientific observation with the vast mysteries of religion, to the detriment of the latter. “These marvellous researches of the human eye,” writes Sir Harry Johnston in a collection of articles entitledA Generation of Religious Progress, presumably intended to portray our rationalistic progress, “so far,though they have sounded the depths of the Universe, have found no God.” He is speaking of astronomical investigation, and he has just emphasized the reliability of our five senses.
One wonders whether he is simply echoing the well-known phrase of Laplace, or whether he seriously believes that the non-existence of God is proved by the inability of the human eye to see Him! Nothing could be more unscientific—one hates using that hackneyed expression, but there is no other—than this confidence in the reliability of the senses. It reminds one of the young man who said he could not believe in God because he had not seen Him. He could only believe in things which he could see. “Do you believe you have a brain?” some one asked. The young man did. “And have you seen it?” was the next question.
I shall be told that though the young man could not—fortunately—see his own brain, others might by opening his skull, and that no dissection of brains or examination of stars has ever shown us God. This is exactly the point where our easygoing rationalist misses the mark. Brains and stars do show God to those whohave developed the faculties wherewith to perceive Him.
The senses are, after all, very fallible and very variable. A little opium, a little alcohol, a blow on the head, or some great emotion will modify their judgment to an incredible degree. Sir Harry Johnston may not be very representative as an exponent of scientific conclusions about the existence of God, but he is interesting and typical of much of the rough-and-ready opposition to formulated religion. I quote the upshot of his admiration for the feats of the human eye:
Religion, as the conception of a heavenly being, or heavenly beings, hovering about the earth and concerning themselves greatly with the affairs of man, has been abolished for all thoughtful and educated people by the discoveries of science. Perhaps, however, I should not say “abolished” as being too final; I should prefer to say that such theories have been put entirely in the background as unimportant Compared with the awful problems which affect the welfare and progress of humanity on this planet.
Religion, as the conception of a heavenly being, or heavenly beings, hovering about the earth and concerning themselves greatly with the affairs of man, has been abolished for all thoughtful and educated people by the discoveries of science. Perhaps, however, I should not say “abolished” as being too final; I should prefer to say that such theories have been put entirely in the background as unimportant Compared with the awful problems which affect the welfare and progress of humanity on this planet.
The honesty of the conviction is not marred by the fact that it is entirely mistaken. “God is infinitely more remote now (in 1916) from the thoughts of the educated few than he was prior to 1859,” writes Sir Harry. This statementis not true. Speculation about God, the meaning of life, the social import of Christianity, was never more rife amongst educated people. Here I must check myself: what does “educated” mean? To be able to read and write, and say “Hear, hear” at public meetings? To have a pretty idea of the positions of Huxley and Haeckel by which to confound the poor old Bible? If by education we mean the exposition of some special branch of the physical sciences, the statement may be true. If we mean men and women with a general knowledge of life and letters, with a social consciousness and humanitarian sympathies, it is ridiculously wide of the truth. There is everywhere a hunger for a satisfying explanation of life. There are restlessness and impatience with dogma and creed, there is a growing indifference to the old sectarian exclusiveness, but there is above all a new interest in God. We need not go to Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Wells for testimony to this interest. They reflect the religious renaissance which is the essence of the reconstruction for which men crave. The symptoms are accessible to the observation of all. Neither priestly intolerance nor rationalistic prejudice can suppress them.
InThe Bankruptcy of Religion, Mr. Joseph McCabe develops the case against religion with the skill of a trained controversialist. Like the converted sinner in the ranks of the Salvation Army, Mr. McCabe carries special weight to the lines of rationalists and ethicists. For he was once a priest and lived in a monastery, and he left the priesthood and the monastery convinced of the worthlessness of both. He is, therefore,persona gratissimaat the High Court of Reason. “The era of religious influence closes in bankruptcy,” he informs us. He has no patience with attempts at religious reconstruction; he asks us to shake ourselves free of the vanishing dream of heaven and to leave the barren tracts of religion. He exhorts us to abandon the “last illusions of the childhood of the race”:
Linger no longer in the “reconstruction” of fables which once beguiled the Arabs of the desert and the Syrian slaves of Corinth, but set your hearts and minds to the making of a new earth! Sweep these ancient legends out of your schools and colleges, your army and navy, your code of law, your legislative houses, and substitute for them a spirit of progress, efficiency, boldness, and candour!
Linger no longer in the “reconstruction” of fables which once beguiled the Arabs of the desert and the Syrian slaves of Corinth, but set your hearts and minds to the making of a new earth! Sweep these ancient legends out of your schools and colleges, your army and navy, your code of law, your legislative houses, and substitute for them a spirit of progress, efficiency, boldness, and candour!
Fine words, brave words, honest words, but hollow within. Mr. McCabe is no psychologist.The fables and legends of old times may be abandoned, the desire for the realities round which fable and legend grow remains and cannot be extirpated by a rationalistic operation. Supernaturalism—in the widest sense—is ineradicable. Religion will not be suspended by the discovery that it is possible to formulate excellent theories of social equity without the assistance of priests. The hunger of the human heart for knowledge of God persists though all the old religious systems may prove illusions.
Our little rationalists imagine that they are hitting the foundations of religion when they successfully assail the crumbling walls of dogmas. Religious life escapes their fire. Faith and hope rise above disillusionment. Love knows instinctively that it is not made of dust. Through the darkness and the wilderness it calls to God, and lo! God responds with light and guidance which outlast earthquakes and massacres. Reject every creed that has been offered as an explanation of the mysteries of life, forsake all the humiliating, joy-killing penances for sin, and God will reveal Himself in the beauty of Nature. He will speak through the impulses of creative art, through music and poetry and painting. He willattract our thought through philosophy and our emotion through the impetus to improve the social order. And science—the greater science, which rejects dogmatism and lies of self-sufficiency as it rejects the crudities of the Creed—takes us by circuitous paths to new temples for the worship of God.
The tenet that science and religion are incompatible and antagonistic, so dear to the hearts of the scientists in the middle of the nineteenth century, and still repeated with mechanical certainty in every secularist mission-hall, is likely to undergo a complete revision in the near future. The antagonism between dogmatic religion and materialistic science will never be removed. But the signs are apparent everywhere that religion is shedding its adherence to outer forms and entering into the freedom of the living spirit, whilst science is turning to problems which used to lie within the domain of unexplored religion. Religion will become scientific and science will become religious. The principles laid down by Darwin and Huxley have lost their power of stifling religious aspiration; the startling pronouncements in defiant materialism of Büchner and Haeckel now startle none but the ignorant. Theanxiety to exclude scientific facts disappears with the realization that all truth, all knowledge, all reason, are subservient to the search for God. The struggle between the wish to believe and the temptation to think caused real distress of mind to many thinkers of the nineteenth century. The choice seemed to lie between atheism and blind submission to authority. “Let us humbly take anything the Bible says without trying to understand it, and not torment ourselves with arguments,” said Charles Kingsley. “One word of Scripture is more than a hundred words of man's explaining.” The modern mind does not dread the meeting of science and religion. It does not labour to reconcile them. It is conscious of their ultimate identity and their present insufficiency. Hence a new tolerance which is mistaken for indifference by the zealots on both sides. Hence the absence of actuality in the fierce denunciations of Bradlaugh and Holyoake and Ingersoll. They did valiant battle against religious formalism of the past; they were champions of reason and science at a time when religionists fought to exclude both.
It is not science which is undermining the future of institutional religion. There is a newenemy, more subtle and more powerful. It is the growing consciousness of an intolerable inconsistency between religious theory and practice. The war thus becomes a stumbling-block to faithfulness to conventional Christianity, and the glee of the rationalist is pardonable. I again quote Mr. McCabe:
What did the clergy do to prevent the conflict? In which country did they denounce the preparations for the conflict, or the incentives of the conflict? What have they done since it began to confine the conflict within civilized limits? Have they had, or used, a particle of moral influence throughout the whole bloody business? And, if not, is it not time we found other guardians and promoters of high conduct?
What did the clergy do to prevent the conflict? In which country did they denounce the preparations for the conflict, or the incentives of the conflict? What have they done since it began to confine the conflict within civilized limits? Have they had, or used, a particle of moral influence throughout the whole bloody business? And, if not, is it not time we found other guardians and promoters of high conduct?
Apart from the fact that the Pope and some lesser religious leaders have denounced and deplored the conflict, and that a comprehensive answer to Mr. McCabe's question would somewhat modify the implied moral impotence of the clergy, we might ask the same questions of the leaders of secularist morality. What have they done to prevent the conflict? Why have their intellectual giants failed to impress upon mankind the folly of war? They have had freedom of speech and action, they havewielded incisive criticism and strength of invective. They have had many decades in which to put into practice the theory of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But the problem of the persistence of war has somehow escaped atheists and rationalists, just as it has eluded theologians and revivalists.
We may admit that the clergy are more blameworthy than the orators of rationalism. If the teachings of Jesus Christ are to be applied to the art of war, then the art of war is doomed to extinction. If the Church be an international society, based on mutual love and peace, then the perpetration of war on members of the Church is clearly wrong. If the ideals of the Christian life be charity, gentleness, forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the fault lies not in the teaching itself but in the feebleness of the Church, then the Churchmust clearly be counted a failure. If the cause of the discrepancy is to be found merely in the slowness and obstinacy of the human soul in following the path of righteousness, the practical realization of the Christian ideal will be but a question of time and effort.
The attitude of Christianity towards war may at best be described as a chapter of inconsistencies. “Can it be lawful to handle the sword,” asked Tertullian, “when the Lord Himself has declared that he who uses the sword shall perish by it?” By disarming Peter, he stated, the Lord “disarmed every soldier from that time forward.” To Origen, Christians were children of peace who, for the sake of Jesus, shunned the temptations of war, and whose only weapon was prayer. The difficulty of reconciling the profession of Christianity with the practice of war constantly exercised the minds of the early Christians. St. Basil advocated a compromise in the form of temporary exclusion from the sacrament after military service. St. Augustine came to the conclusion that the qualities of a good Christian and a good warrior were not incompatible. Gradually the dilemma ceased to trouble the minds of Christians as the needs of the State and citizenship of thisworld were recognized. After some centuries the Church not only approved of war, but herself became one of the most powerful instigators to military conquest. The Crusades and the ceaseless wars of religious intolerance became “holy” as the spiritual objection to bloodshed receded before the triumphant demands of primitive passions.
Now, as heretofore, we have episcopal reminders of the blessings of war. “May it not be,” wrote the Bishop of London soon after the outbreak of the war in 1914, “that this cup of hardship which we drink together will turn out to be the very draught which we need? Has there not crept a softness over the nation, a passion for amusement, a love of luxury among the rich, and of mere physical comfort among the middle class?”
He leaves the questions unanswered, and incidentally omits to dwell on the shortcomings of the poor in the direction of softness and luxury. He continues:
Not such was the nation which made the Empire, which crushed the Armada, which braved hardships of old, and drove English hearts of oak seaward round the world. We believe the old spirit is here just the same, but it needed a purifying, cleansingdraught to bring it back to its old strength and purity again, and for that second reason the cup which our Father has given us, shall we not drink it?
Not such was the nation which made the Empire, which crushed the Armada, which braved hardships of old, and drove English hearts of oak seaward round the world. We believe the old spirit is here just the same, but it needed a purifying, cleansingdraught to bring it back to its old strength and purity again, and for that second reason the cup which our Father has given us, shall we not drink it?
Much has been said in justification of this view of war from the biological point of view. Prussian militarists are experts in the exposition of similar theories. But from the Christian point of view the complacency with which the world-tragedy is put down as a “purifying, cleansing draught” is somewhat disconcerting. Dean Inge, writing in theQuestin the autumn of 1914, shows himself to be a disciple of the same school:
We see the fruits of secularism or materialism in social disintegration, in the voluntary sterility and timorous acquisitiveness of the prosperous, and in the recklessness and bitterness of the lower strata. A godless civilization is a disease of which nations die by inches. I hope that this visitation has come just in time to save us. Experience is a good school, but its fees are terribly high!
We see the fruits of secularism or materialism in social disintegration, in the voluntary sterility and timorous acquisitiveness of the prosperous, and in the recklessness and bitterness of the lower strata. A godless civilization is a disease of which nations die by inches. I hope that this visitation has come just in time to save us. Experience is a good school, but its fees are terribly high!
Were we, then, really so bad that “this visitation” was needed to save us from voluntary sterility (by imposing compulsory?) and the other delinquencies enumerated by the Dean? The nature of the punishment hardly fits the crime. Moreover, such a conception of war asa wholesome corrective is practically indistinguishable from the panegyrics of the extreme militarists whom we are out utterly to destroy. “God will see to it,” wrote Treitschke, “that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race.” “War,” wrote General von Bernhardi, “is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow which excludes every advancement of the race, and, therefore, all real civilization.” “A perpetual peace,” said Field-Marshal von Moltke, “is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is one of the elements of order in the world established by God. The noblest virtues of men are developed therein. Without war the world would degenerate and disappear in a morass of materialism.” Many perplexed souls have turned to the Church for guidance during this time of destruction and sorrow, and the directions given have often increased the perplexity. The Bishop of Carlisle expressed the opinion that if we were really Christians the war would not have happened. Archdeacon Wilberforce and Father Bernard Vaughan stated that killing Germans was doing serviceto God. Many who have suffered at the hands of the Germans will be inclined to agree, but the trouble from the point of view of the Christian ethic is not removed by such a simple solution. We cannot but suspect that German prelates have been found who have seen in the killing of women and children by air-raids on London a service to the German God. Dr. Forsyth, inThe Christian Ethic of War, tells us that “war is not essentially killing, and killing is here no murder. And no recusancy to bear arms can here justify itself on the plea that Christianity forbids all bloodshed or even violence.” He reminds us that Christ used a scourge of small cords, and that he called the Pharisees “you vipers,” and Herod “you fox.” “If the Christian man live in society,” he tells us, “it is quite impossible for him to live upon thepreceptsof the Sermon on the Mount. But also it is not possible at a half-developed stage to live in actual relations of life and duty on itsprincipleexcept as anideal.” The Roman form of internationalism he regards “as not only useless to humanity (which the present attitude of the Pope to the war shows) but as mischievous to it.”
It is strange that whilst the war has causeda number of ordained representatives of the Christian Church to declare that practical Christianity is an impossibility and the Sermon on the Mount a beautiful but ineffective ideal, it has brought agnostics and heathen to a conviction that socialized Christianity is the sovereign remedy for the national and international disease. They have reached the conclusion that the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is the revolutionary leaven for which the world is waiting. In his preface onThe Prospects of Christianity, Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that he is “as sceptical and scientific and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere.” This assurance is intended to help us to regain breath after the preceding pronouncement:
I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will if He had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.
I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way which would have been found by Christ's will if He had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman.
This is one of the outstanding mental phenomena of the war: sceptics and thinkers havebegun to examine Christianity as a practical way of social salvation. There is a tendency to re-examine the gospel, not with intent to lay stress on historical weakness or points of similarity with other religions, but with the poignant interest which men lost in the desert display towards possible sources of water. It may appear as a coldly intellectual interest in some who are wont to deal with the tragedies of life as mildly amusing scenes in a drama of endless fatuity. But the coldness is a little assumed. There are others who do not attempt to disguise that their whole emotional life is stirred to passionate protest and inquiry, who, though Christians by profession and duly appointed ministers of God, call for a recommendation of Christianity and the establishment of a social order based on the principles of life laid down by Jesus Christ. InThe Outlook for Religion, Dr. W. E. Orchard condemns the way of war as the complete antithesis of the way of the Cross. “How can people be so blind?” he cries. “Has all the ethical awakening of the past century been of so little depth that this bloody slaughter, this hellish torture, this treacherous game of war can still secure ethical approval?”
Perhaps the great majority of the clergy deserve the indictment of rationalists. Mr. McCabe can prove his case by citing the exceptions. After all, the accusation is neither new nor original. Voltaire set the tune. “Miserable physicians of souls,” he exclaimed, “you declaim for five quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no word on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces.”
Voltaire's powers of satire were roused by the spectacle of the different factions of Christians praying to the same God to bless their arms. The element of comicality in this aspect of war is greatly outweighed by that of pathos. Those who earnestly pray to God to lead them to victory must at any rate be firmly convinced that their cause is one of which God can approve. No believer would dare to invoke the blessing of God upon a cause which his conscience tells him is a mean and sordid enterprise. Voltaire's quarrel was really with the faith in war as a means of determining the intentions of the Divine Will. Success in war has been held, and is held, by Christians to be a sign of the favour of the Almighty. Bacon expounded this view to the satisfaction of coming generations when he referred to wars as “the highest trials ofright” when princes and States “shall put themselves on the justice of God for the deciding of their controversies, by such success as it shall please Him to give on either side.” The Germans have nauseated the world by their incessant proclamations that they are the favoured and chosen of God. The good old German God has vied with Jehovah of the Israelites in stimulating and sustaining the will to war.
Those atheists to whom all war is an abomination and entirely irreconcilable with the highest human attributes have found complete unanimity in their repudiation of the idea of a presiding God of Battles in the dissenting objections to war expressed by Quakers, Christadelphians, Plymouth Brethren, and other sects of Christianity. There can be no doubt that the faith in war, and in the Divine guidance of war, is receding. The new conception of God, for which humanity is struggling, will be one entirely different from the jealous and cruel Master of Bloodshed to whom man has paid homage in the dark ages of the past. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realization of its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose which unitesChristians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has been born which will prove stronger than all the passion for war which has overwhelmed us in the past. President Wilson seeks a peace identical with the freedom of life in which every people will be left free to determine its own polity and its own way of development, “unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.” Statesmen see the ultimate hope for a free humanity in a change of heart. Mr. Asquith outlines the slow and gradual process by which a real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will, will be substituted for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances, and a precarious equipoise. Mr. Lloyd George insists that there must be “no next time.” Viscount Grey warns us that if the world cannot organize against war, if war must go on,“then nations can protect themselves henceforth only by using whatever destructive agencies they can invent, till the resources and inventions of science end by destroying the humanity they were meant to serve.” Leagues of nations are proposed, organization for peace on a scale commensurate with the past organization for war is recognized as the principal task of international co-operation.
This new revolt against war is inseparable from the religious revival of the time. The word “revival” conjures up memories of less strenuous times, when men were concerned with smaller problems, and uninspired by the bitter experience of the present—Spurgeon thundering in his Tabernacle, Salvation Army meetings, small gatherings in wayside villages, at which howling sinners were converted and revivalists counted their game by the dozen. The present revival is something for which the past provides no analogy. It is not concerned so much with individual salvation as with the salvation of the race and the world. The petty sins and shortcomings which brought men to the confessional and to the stool of repentance lose importance when compared with the awful omissions which we now recognize as the cause of the calamitieswhich have befallen us. It is not only the existence of war that is rousing the conscience. War is seen to be but a symptom, a horrible outbreak of malignant forces, which we have nurtured and harboured in times of peace. These forces permeate the very structure of society. A new and fierce light beats on our slums, our industrialism, on the old divisions of class and quality, on the standards of comfort and success. Poverty, sickness, and child mortality—the whole hideous war of Mammon through which millions of our fellow-creatures are condemned to the perpetual service of Want—can no longer conveniently be left outside the operations of our religious consciousness.
One thing is certain: we can no longer be satisfied with a religion which pays lip-service to God, and offers propitiating incense to His wrath, whilst it ignores the misery and the suffering of those who have no reason to offer thanksgiving. Religious profession and religious action will have to be unified. The sense of social responsibility is slowly but surely taking the place of the anxiety to assure one's own salvation. Some churches are empty, dead; they have no message for the people, no vision wherewith to inspire the young.They might with advantage close, and their clergy be employed upon some useful national service. Ritual and incantations are doubtless useful aids to religious worship and the necessary quietude of mind, but they are losing their hold over souls to whom religious life has become a matter of social service. These are of the order spoken of by Ernest Crosby: