.<rrxTr>"«i% 
 
 DEC 3 1917 
 
 BS 2417 .W2 P4 1917 
 Pell, Edward Leigh, 1861- 
 What did Jesus really teach 
 about war? 
 
WHAT DID JESUS 
 
 REALLY 
 TEACH ABOUT WAR? 
 
fFORKs sr 
 Edward Leigh Pell 
 
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WHAT DID JESUS 
 
 REALLY 
 TEACH ABOUT WAR? 
 
 DEC ;■; mi 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD LEIGH PELL 
 
 Author of 
 *'Our Troublesome Religious Questions," etc. 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 191 7, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York : 138 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh : 100 Princes Street 
 
PREFACE 
 
 WE shall not win this war until it 
 gets on our conscience. We 
 may end it, but that is another 
 matter. It was on our conscience once 
 — the violation of Belgium put it there — 
 but somehow it slipped off — how or why 
 we need not now inquire. And it has 
 never gotten back. 
 
 I was saying as much to a friend of 
 mine the other day when he interrupted 
 me. "Yes," he said warmly, "but it is get- 
 ting back. I was at that great mass-meet- 
 ing Sunday and I never saw such " 
 
 I knew the rest. It was indeed a won- 
 derful meeting. There was a great talk 
 and a great collection and a tremendous 
 burst of enthusiasm that lifted us straight 
 up to the third heaven. But when it was 
 over people went away saying, "Yes, 
 we've got to do it. We must whip them 
 over there or we shall have to whip them 
 over here." 
 
 B 
 
6 Preface 
 
 Undoubtedly the war has gotten on 
 America's sensibilities, but it is not on her 
 conscience. Only here and there does one 
 meet a man who is doing his "bit" with a 
 sense of exaltation, as one who has heard 
 in that awful cry for help the voice of his 
 own kin; as one who has had a vision of 
 Christ's tender compassion for the op- 
 pressed or of Christ's blasting indignation 
 against the oppressor. 
 
 It does not take much to win some 
 wars. A war for territory may be won by 
 a foolish illusion that will send a people 
 forward under the compulsion of what 
 they believe to be an economic necessity. 
 But a war for the right can only be won 
 by an awakening of conscience that will 
 send a people forward under the compul- 
 sion of a high moral obligation. 
 
 America has many needs, but I can con- 
 ceive of nothing more urgent in the pres- 
 ent crisis than a vision of the face of Him 
 in whose presence no conscience has ever 
 been able to sleep. 
 
 E. L. P. 
 
 Richmond, Va. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CBAPTBB PAOB 
 
 I. His Words in the Light of His 
 
 Soul 9 
 
 n. The Letter that Killeth .... 21 
 in. The Spirit that Giveth Life. . 33 
 IV. The Spirit Back of Our Deeds 49 
 V. The Thing that Counts with 
 
 God 58 
 
 VI. Bringing the Question Closer 
 
 Home 68 
 
 Vn. What Was Christ's Idea of In- 
 dividual Responsibility?. ... 79 
 
 VIII. Can a Christian be a " Slack- 
 er "? 94 
 
 IX. What Was Christ's Idea of the 
 
 Value of Human Life? 105 
 
 X. What was Christ's Idea of 
 
 Peace? 116 
 
 XL What Would Jesus Say Today? 126 
 XII. What Should Be the Chris- 
 tian's Attitude Toward 
 War? 136 
 
 7 
 
8 Contents 
 
 XIII. How Far Should a Christian 
 
 Go? 146 
 
 XIV. The Immediate Business before 
 
 Us 155 
 
 XV. How Can We Hasten the Day 
 
 OF Lasting Peace.'^ 167 
 
HIS WORDS IN THE LIGHT OF 
 HIS SOUL 
 
 FOR mental fatigue I try a walk in 
 the woods ; but for mental tangles 
 I like a walk down the street. 
 The street is better than the woods, for 
 you cannot go many blocks without meet- 
 ing Life; and in the matter of untangling 
 things, Life, I have found, is as gifted as 
 a deft-fingered woman. 
 
 The other day as I wandered through 
 an obscure part of the town I came upon 
 a game little rascal perched upon the 
 stomach of a big, fat, blubbering coward. 
 The youngster remained upon his soft seat 
 until the situation ceased to be interesting 
 and then sprang to his feet. The big boy 
 slowly picked himself up, brushed his 
 clothes and started off without a word. 
 The little rascal gazed after the retreating 
 
10 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 figure a moment, then sprang after it, 
 seized it by the collar, threw it backward 
 to the ground and sat upon it again. 
 Three times while I stood near, that pa- 
 thetic figure picked itself up, brushed its 
 clothes and started off; and three times 
 the little fellow sprang after it, seized it 
 by the collar, threw it backward to the 
 ground and sat upon it. When I left — 
 
 Do I mean to saj^ that I left those boys 
 to themselves? 
 
 I do. I left without a word. I wanted 
 to do something but I could think of noth- 
 ing. I can think of nothing now. What 
 could I have done? The little fellow did 
 not need my help and what the big 
 one needed only Heaven could bestow. 
 Besides, I was sick. I was sick at the 
 stomach. 
 
 It occurred to me afterwards that my 
 stomach may have done that big, fat, blub- 
 bering boy an injustice. How did I know 
 that he was not too fat to fight? I have 
 seen boys that were too fat to fight. 
 
 Also nations. 
 
 But my stomach revolted all the same. 
 
 Afterwards I asked myself what Jesus 
 
In the Light of His Soul 11 
 
 would have done. It was a puzzling 
 question and I soon began to look for an 
 easier one. I asked myself how Jesus 
 would have felt. That was easier — much 
 easier. I could ansAver that. I was as 
 sure as I had ever been sure of anything 
 that I knew exactly how he would have 
 felt. 
 
 And then I became sure of something 
 else. I had been thinking of this war 
 question and now I was thinking of it 
 again, and I noticed that I was looking at 
 it from another angle. And one problem at 
 least had disappeared. . . . 
 
 So far as we know, Jesus never discussed 
 the war question. I do not mean that he 
 has left us no light upon it. He has left 
 us a great deal of light upon it. But he 
 did not discuss it. When you come to 
 think of it there was no reason why he 
 should discuss it. He could do better: 
 he could settle it. And he did settle it. 
 
 Not merely nor mainly by what he said, 
 but by what he was. 
 
 The Man that was behind his words set- 
 tled it. . . . 
 
12 WhatDid Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 It is amazing what a mess we have made 
 of some of the Master's teachings. Not 
 long ago I was startled by the shouting 
 headlines of an evening paper proclaim- 
 ing that Lloyd- George had announced 
 that peace was in sight. There was a bliss- 
 ful time when I could easily take all head- 
 lines at their face value; but the age of 
 innocence is long since passed, and I had 
 little difficulty in restraining my feelings 
 until I could get beyond the reporter's 
 general version of what was said down to 
 the premier's own exact words. From the 
 headlines I had a right to expect that 
 Lloyd-George had made an announcement 
 either that victory was at hand or that the 
 war powers had come to an understand- 
 ing; but when I got into the body of the 
 article I found that he had made no an- 
 nouncement at all. He was talking to a 
 company of Americans and he was in a 
 great blaze of enthusiasm. Now that 
 America had come to the help of the 
 allies, victory, he declared, was sure; and 
 in a fervid climax he shouted, "I can see 
 peace coming!" That was all. 
 
 The enterprising newspaper man who 
 
In the Light of His Soul 13 
 
 interpreted this very innocent and uncal- 
 culating prophetic vision of peace as an 
 official announcement that the war was 
 about to end, did no greater violence to 
 the words of Lloj^d- George than our 
 American pacifists have been doing to the 
 words of Jesus ever since the great war 
 began. In such times as these when rea- 
 son is always wabbling upon its throne, 
 one does not have to be an expert casuist 
 to make things mean what one wants them 
 to mean. If there is no chance to pack 
 the jury one only needs to stir up enough 
 feeling to becloud the issue. That will do 
 quite as well. 
 
 If a committee composed of men who 
 wish to misjudge me should be appointed 
 to find out just how I stand on certain 
 moral questions, I should know in advance 
 just what they were going to do. I should 
 know that they were going to examine my 
 words, not to find out the truth, but to 
 find support for the verdict which they 
 had already adopted. And I should know 
 the method they would pursue. They 
 would take such words of mine as they 
 chose out of their setting, arrange them 
 
14 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 to suit their purpose and insist upon 
 interpreting them hterally. And they 
 would confine themseh'^es to my words: 
 they would not so much as take a look at 
 me. They would not ask a word about 
 my reputation, much less my character; 
 they would not want to know anything 
 about my life; they would not care a fig 
 about my thoughts, motives or the inmost 
 desires of my soul. They would only ask 
 what I said, and then they would isolate 
 my words and hold me to their literal 
 meaning, utterly regardless of the circum- 
 stances under which they were uttered or 
 of the spirit that was evidently behind 
 them. If they wanted to show, for in- 
 stance, that I believed in the enslavement 
 of women they would bring forward cer- 
 tain foolish remarks concerning militant 
 suffragists which I had made on sundry 
 occasions, perhaps with humorous intent. 
 If they wanted to show that I believed in 
 lynching they would recall the fact that 
 I once declared that Villa ought to be shot. 
 If they wanted to condemn me as an un- 
 feeling brute they would bring out the 
 number of times I had refused to give 
 
In the Light of His Soul 15 
 
 pennies to street beggars M'ho smoke 
 cigars. In the end they would make me 
 out a very bad man. 
 
 If I should be dissatisfied with their 
 verdict, as I undoubtedly would be, and 
 should ask for another hearing, and my 
 case should be referred to a committee of 
 partial friends, I should know what meth- 
 ods they would adopt also. They would 
 adopt the very same methods that were 
 used by my enemies, except that they 
 would interpret all my objectionable ut- 
 terances figuratively instead of literally. 
 They would show, for instance, that my 
 foolish remarks against the feminist move- 
 ment were really very cleverly constructed 
 compliments (metaphorical of course) of 
 a most rare, delicate and chivalrous type. 
 
 Frankly, I would just as soon fall into 
 the hands of my enemies as into the hands 
 of my partial friends. My enemies would 
 make me out a knave, but my partial 
 friends would make me out a fool. And 
 that would be quite as bad. There is only 
 one way in which a man can find out how 
 I really stand on any question: he must 
 take my words on that question in con- 
 
16 What Did Jesus Teach About War? • 
 
 nection with their surroundings and he 
 must take them in connection with me. 
 He must not only know my utterances 
 but he must know the spirit that uttered 
 them. No man can rightly interpret my 
 words regardless of my spirit, and I have 
 no right to attempt to interpret another 
 man's words regardless of his spirit. 
 
 All this ought to go without saying ; yet 
 for a thousand years and more when the 
 friends of Jesus have undertaken to find 
 out how he stood on a given question they 
 have usually forgotten the obhgations 
 both of partial friends and of impartial 
 truthseekers and insisted upon examining 
 his words by methods which no one but an 
 enemy would be expected to employ. 
 
 There is no light like the light of the 
 human eye, but if you wanted light you 
 would not go to an eye hospital and bring 
 home a pocketful of eyes that have been 
 plucked from their sockets. There are a 
 few sayings of Jesus which are as com- 
 plete in themselves as the stars that shine 
 by their own light ; but most of his sayings 
 are like eyes: the moment you take them 
 out of their sockets the light is gone. 
 
In the Light of His Soul 17 
 
 Yet for a thousand years and more we 
 Christians have been trying to get at the 
 mind of our ISIaster by pulHng his words 
 out of their sockets and examining them 
 under the microscope as isolated units. 
 
 We might have been better employed 
 in trying to solve the problem of the uni- 
 verse by throwing a hatful of A B C 
 blocks into the air and spelHng out the 
 results as they fell to the floor. 
 
 To know how Jesus stands on this war 
 question we must go beyond his words. 
 We are not to pass by them, but we must 
 go beyond them. We must go beyond 
 them to their surroundings, and then we 
 must go straight through them to the soul 
 that is behind them. We must go straight 
 through them to the Master himself. 
 
 If Christ should come among us today 
 and we should look into his face I am sure 
 we should have no difficulty in deciding 
 where he stood. We would no longer ex- 
 amine his words as isolated units: we 
 would listen to them as they came one 
 after another from his hps. We would 
 listen to them as they came up out of his 
 soul. 
 
18 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 We should not need to ask him how he 
 felt about that big, fat, blubbering coward 
 lying in the street. We should not be 
 puzzled to know what he would do if he 
 should come upon a beastly fellow in the 
 act of beating the life out of his neighbor's 
 child; if he should meet a group of fat, 
 smug hypocrites dragging after them a 
 weeping woman who had been taken in 
 sin ; if he should overhear a brutal Iscariot 
 sneer at a loving Mary for anointing her 
 Master's feet; if he should drop in at a 
 church where men were making a pretense 
 of worshipping God for gain ; if he should 
 happen in at a king's court, or a sweat- 
 shop, or a broker's office, or a military 
 camp where a tyrant was literally or fig- 
 uratively grinding his heel into the face of 
 a prostrate fellow man. 
 
 We should know what he would do. 
 And we should know it not because we 
 had just looked into what he said on one 
 occasion about turning the other cheek, 
 but because we were looking into his face. 
 
 Take the words of Jesus which seem to 
 bear on this war question out of their set- 
 ting — take them apart from the general 
 
In the Light of His Soul 19 
 
 tenor of his teaching, apart from his mind 
 and heart and hfe, apart from himself, 
 and they have no more light in them than 
 eyeballs torn out of their sockets or elec- 
 tric-light bulbs disconnected from the 
 wires. It is only when we make connec- 
 tion between the Man and his words that 
 the light comes. And in that light — the 
 light that comes from the Man himself — 
 there is no longer any doubt. The Man 
 himself — the Man who came to rescue hu- 
 man beings from the low habitations of 
 brutes and lead them to the heights of 
 manhood in the kingdom of God ; the Man 
 who knew that if human beings did not 
 achieve manhood after the divine pattern 
 according to their divine destiny the world 
 would go to the scrapheap and the king- 
 dom of God would be without inhabitants ; 
 the Man who looked upon human beings 
 not only with infinite pity for their weak- 
 ness and cowardice, but with infinite long- 
 ing to lift them out of their weakness and 
 cowardice to his own heroic height; the 
 Man whose indignation against the op- 
 pressor was onlj^ surpassed by his compas- 
 sion for the oppressed; the Man who 
 
20 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 steadfastly refused to lift a finger for his 
 selfish interests, yet never hesitated to 
 throw himself into the breach for others — 
 that Man has settled this war question 
 forever. 
 
II 
 
 THE LETTER THAT KILLETH 
 
 IN his walks abroad Jesus was always 
 followed by a crowd. It was a ter- 
 ribly hungry crowd. Now and then 
 he would turn and speak to them and his 
 words would be as the handful of corn 
 which the farmer throws out now and then 
 to toll his pigs along. They would fol- 
 low him all day if he would only give them 
 a word now and then. Sometimes his 
 sayings would melt their hearts; some- 
 times they would pierce them; sometimes 
 they would confuse them ; but they would 
 take everything he gave them and follow 
 on for more. 
 
 One day he suddenly turned about and 
 with a severity which must have startled 
 them said: 
 
 "If a man cometh unto me and hateth 
 not his own father, and mother, and wife, 
 and children, and brethren, and sisters, 
 
 21 
 
22 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 yea, and his own life also, he cannot be 
 my disciple." 
 
 It was a horrible speech. At least so 
 it would have sounded in our ears. If a 
 teacher of a new religion should utter such 
 a sentiment before an American audience 
 today he would be hissed off the platform. 
 If the people who listened to Jesus that 
 day had listened with our ears they would 
 have done worse. They would have fairly 
 howled with rage. They would have 
 cast dust into the air. They would have 
 thrown stones at him. They would have 
 cursed him as a blasphemer; for in their 
 minds reverence for parents was insep- 
 arable from reverence for God. 
 
 But they were Orientals and they lis- 
 tened with Oriental ears. And because 
 they listened with Orientals ears nothing 
 happened. As the last word fell from his 
 lips he turned and went on his way, and 
 the multitude followed on quietly as be- 
 fore. 
 
 No doubt his severity had startled them, 
 but they were not worried. They were 
 not worried because they knew how to 
 take him. They had heard him before. 
 
The Letter that Killeth 2S 
 
 They had looked into his face before. 
 Time and again they had caught a ghmpse 
 of his soul; and when you once get a 
 glimpse of a man's soul you will interpret 
 his words by what you see in his soul and 
 not take them as they appear on their faces. 
 And in their Teacher's soul they had never 
 seen anything but love. They knew that 
 he loved everybody and they knew that if 
 there was anytliing in the world that he 
 hated it was hate. He would not even 
 let them hate their enemies. He even 
 demanded that they should love their en- 
 emies. It was impossible to conceive that 
 he would have them hate their own fathers 
 and mothers. Whatever he might mean, 
 he could not mean that. 
 
 And that was not all. They not only 
 knew what he did not mean but they knew 
 what he did mean. Being Orientals they 
 were accustomed to speeches of that sort. 
 They talked that way themselves. They 
 had to talk that way. Everybody in the 
 East talks that way today. Everybody 
 talks in pictures, especially pictures of 
 violent and startling contrasts. It is the 
 only way you can make yourself under- 
 
24 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 stood. If I wanted to impress an Amer- 
 ican with the height of the mountains near 
 my home I would give the exact figures; 
 but if I were talking to a Syrian I would 
 give him no figures at all: I would only 
 give him a figure of speech. I would 
 point to his little mountains and I would 
 say: "Ah! you should see my mountains. 
 Those little hills yonder are mere holes in 
 the ground." And he would understand. 
 If I should say that my mountains rise 
 ten thousand feet above the level of the 
 sea it would mean nothing to him at all. 
 
 And so when Jesus told the crowd that 
 day that if a man hated not his father and 
 mother he could not be his disciple, they 
 knew what he was trying to do. They 
 knew that he was simply trying to impress 
 upon them an important teaching by 
 means of a picture of violent and startling 
 contrasts. And the moment they looked 
 upon the picture they saw what it meant. 
 They saw a man so bent upon following 
 his teacher that he was even willing to re- 
 nounce his own father and mother. It 
 did not suggest hate; it only suggested 
 devotion — wonderful devotion. And so 
 
The Letter that Killeth 25 
 
 they knew that what the Master was 
 thinking about was not how they should 
 feel toward their fathers and mothers, but 
 how they should feel toward him. He 
 was not thinking of hate at all; he was 
 thinking of love. And they knew that 
 what he meant was not that they must 
 hate others, but that they must love him 
 and that they must love him supremely. 
 "Unless you put me before all things; un- 
 less I am everything to you, you cannot 
 be my disciple." 
 
 And they did not worry. They no 
 more worried over it than an Oriental 
 bridegroom would worry over his bride's 
 threat to kill herself if he did not hate all 
 the women in the world except herself. 
 
 Nor do we worry over it today. Literal 
 as we Americans are, we never have any 
 difficulty over this saying except in our 
 childhood. In childhood it horrifies us, 
 but as soon as we are old enough to fall 
 in love we begin to take it as a matter of 
 course. We know that it is something 
 about love and we still have sense enough 
 to except the language of love from lit- 
 eral interpretation. We talk business as 
 
26 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 Occidentals, but we still talk love as 
 Orientals. And when one speaks of love 
 with what men call Oriental extravagance 
 we understand. We know that our literal 
 speech was made for such ideas as black 
 is black and two plus two equals four, and 
 that love can no more be expressed in lit- 
 eral terms than heaven can be pictured in 
 red and gold. When a man says that two 
 plus two equals four we know that he is 
 speaking in the language of science, which 
 is Occidental, not Oriental, and we inter- 
 pret his words accordingly. When he 
 speaks of love we know that he is using 
 the language of love, which is Oriental 
 and not Occidental, and we interpret his 
 words accordingly. We no more think of 
 putting a literal interpretation upon a 
 bride's threat to kill herself if her husband 
 ever looks at another woman than we 
 would place a figurative interpretation 
 upon the notice from the bank that our 
 account is overdrawn, and must be made 
 good before three o'clock. For a like rea- 
 son we no more think of placing a literal 
 interpretation upon Christ's startling say- 
 ing about hating father and mother than 
 
The Letter that Killeth 27 
 
 we would think of placing a figurative in- 
 terpretation upon his flat declaration that 
 he must suffer many things and be killed 
 and be raised again the third day. 
 
 With this hard saying before us it is as 
 plain as the sun that we can no more get 
 at the mind of Jesus by interpreting his 
 words apart from himself than we can get 
 at the mind of anybody else by interpret- 
 ing his words apart from himself. We 
 never think of cutting a friend's words 
 loose from his mind, his spirit, his life, and 
 interpreting them by themselves. My 
 words are as much a part of myself as the 
 hairs of my head, and I feel that I have 
 a right to demand that such hairs as I have 
 shall be judged by the way they look on 
 my head and not by the way they would 
 look in the clutch of a baby's fist. If I 
 am told that my friend Wilkins in a 
 speech the other night gave utterance to 
 a very heartless sentiment, I do not take 
 his reported saying into a laboratory and 
 analyze it by itself. The fact is I don't 
 try to analyze it at all. I simply put it 
 in Wilkins's lips (mentally of course) and 
 take a good look at Wilkins. I look at 
 
28 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 the corners of his mouth to see if he is jok- 
 ing. Then I look at liis eyes. Then I 
 look through his eyes down into his soul. 
 If I cannot get a good view of his soul I 
 think a little while about what I know of 
 his life and character. I remember that 
 there never was a man with a bigger heart 
 than Wilkins. And then I decide that 
 whatever Wilkins may have meant, cer- 
 tainly he did not mean what his words say 
 when taken by themselves. And I refuse 
 to take them by themselves. It is impos- 
 sible for me to take my friend's words lit- 
 erally if his literal words give the lie to all 
 that I know of his life and character. 
 
 I do not even treat a stranger's words 
 that way. If a man sitting near me on 
 the car gives utterance to a rather violent 
 sentiment I do not immediately conclude 
 that he is an anarchist. I must at least 
 glance at the corners of his mouth to see 
 if he is joking. 
 
 As a rule it is only when we are out of 
 humor and want to misjudge people, or 
 want to have our way to prove our point, 
 that we insist upon taking their words ac- 
 cording to the letter and not according to 
 
The Letter that Killeth 29 
 
 the spirit. Indeed I can think of but one 
 exception. That exception, strange to 
 say, is where the words we want to inter- 
 pret happen to be the words of Jesus. 
 Aside from that horrible saying about hat- 
 ing father and mother and two or three 
 other hard sayings, we usually feel that we 
 must take his words literally whether we 
 are in a bad humor or not. . . . 
 
 With this horrible saying before our 
 eyes we know perfectly well that it is the 
 letter that killeth and the spirit that giveth 
 life; yet the moment we turn from it we 
 forget and fall back into our old habit of 
 saying that when Jesus commanded us to 
 turn the other cheek he must have meant 
 exactly what he said or nothing. We can 
 read that if a man hate not his father or 
 mother he cannot be "my disciple" and still 
 know that we are his disciples, though we 
 love our fathers and mothers dearly; but 
 when we come to the passage about turn- 
 ing the other cheek, both cheeks turn pale 
 and we close the Bible with a sigh and 
 spend the rest of the day wondering 
 whether it is worth while to try to be a 
 
30 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 Christian at all, especially in war times. 
 We simply cannot turn the other cheek 
 and we do not see how we can be Chris- 
 tians until we do. And we do not see 
 how we can be Christians if we don't. 
 W^e know that if we do there wull no longer 
 be any manhood in us, and we know 
 that Jesus came to transform human be- 
 ings into men; and certainly we cannot 
 be men if we have no manhood. And 
 there we are ! 
 
 It is pathetic. . . . 
 
 When the pacifist lecturer told his in- 
 telligent Christian audience that Christ's 
 command to turn the other cheek meant 
 exactly what it said or it meant nothing, 
 half the intelligent Christians in the audi- 
 ence dropped their heads for shame. If 
 they had had a Christian badge on their 
 breasts I fancy they would have unpinned 
 it and slipped it into their pockets. No- 
 body thought of that hard saying about 
 hating father and mother. Nobody 
 thought of asking why the lecturer in- 
 sisted that they should take it literally. 
 Nobody ventured to suggest that if it was 
 
The Letter that Killeth 31 
 
 taken in anj^ other way he would have no 
 way to prove his point. Nobody thought 
 of asking whether the saying taken liter- 
 ally would harmonize with the general 
 tenor of Christ's teaching, his spirit, his 
 life. Nobody thought to ask where Jesus 
 would find men for his kingdom if his 
 own followers should renounce their man- 
 hood for a yellow streak. Nobody ever 
 thought to ask whether Jesus himself ever 
 turned the other cheek. 
 
 One wonders why. 
 
 What is the meaning of this depressing, 
 helpless feeling that comes over us every 
 time we are told that we must take the 
 words of Jesus literally? One wonders 
 how often we have asked this question and 
 then hurried on as if we were afraid some- 
 body would answer it. For my part I 
 should really like to know. I should like 
 to know why so many good people feel 
 like culprits whenever they read that part 
 of the Sermon on the Mount that seems to 
 tell us that we should not resist evil but 
 should turn the other cheek. I should 
 like to know why we find it so hard to rid 
 ourselves of this horrible suspicion that we 
 
32 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 are neither brave nor honest or we would 
 obey the commands of Jesus hterally. It 
 cannot be because he has told us to take 
 his words literally. He has told us no 
 such thing. Can it be because it has been 
 so often and so solemnly affirmed in our 
 hearing that the man who refuses to take 
 the words of Jesus literally is a coward? 
 Has it gotten on our nerves? 
 
Ill 
 
 THE SPIRIT THAT GIVETH 
 LIFE 
 
 OUR modern civilization has given 
 us some strange ideals. For a 
 hundred years and more the 
 world's ideal Christian has been a dear, 
 saintly old lady with a pale face and thin, 
 blue-veined hands who spends most of her 
 time sitting in an easy-chair with her Bible 
 in her lap trying to think of kind things 
 to say about the devil, and occasionally 
 protesting in a gentle voice and with 
 graceful diction against the cruel custom 
 of killing flies. We never question that 
 ideal because it is a man's picture of his 
 mother in her old age; and a man's picture 
 of his mother in her old age is not open to 
 question. 
 
 I do not know whether we got our mod- 
 ern picture of Christ from this ideal or not 
 — I rather think we did; but the two pic- 
 tures are wonderfully alike. For a hun- 
 
 33 
 
34 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 dred years and more milHons of people 
 have been thinking of Jesus as a dear, 
 saintly, harmless soul, of quiet mien and 
 gentle speech, who likes to think up kind 
 things to say about the devil and who 
 never protests against anything except the 
 cruel custom of killing flies. 
 
 This is the Christ of our Sunday after- 
 noon dreams. 
 
 The Christ of history was the bravest 
 fighter the world has ever known. 
 
 I do not say that he was not gentle and 
 kind and tender-hearted. I have seen 
 some gentle and kind and tender-hearted 
 women who were tremendous fighters. 
 And Jesus, though the gentlest and kind- 
 est and most tender-hearted of men, was 
 a tremendous fighter. 
 
 I do not like to think of him as a war- 
 rior, but he began his life-work by declar- 
 ing war against the literalists, and he 
 fought them until his back was against the 
 cross. 
 
 There are glimpses of this war all the 
 way through the gospel story. We know 
 how it came about. He had come to res- 
 cue men from the depths of sin and to lift 
 
The Spirit that Giveth Life 35 
 
 them up into the kingdom of God where 
 they might achieve their divine destiny as 
 sons of God. He had found his own peo- 
 ple in double bondage. They were bound 
 not only by sin but by tyrants. We usu- 
 ally think of them as being in bondage to 
 Rome; but the yoke which Rome had put 
 upon them was a trifle compared with that 
 which had been bound upon them by their 
 own teachers. Rome had subjugated the 
 country as a whole, but the rabbis had 
 subjugated the people — man by man. 
 Long before Jesus came the rabbis had 
 lost their spiritual vision and become litcr- 
 ahsts. When a religious teacher loses his 
 spiritual vision he usually becomes a lit- 
 eralist. There is nothing else he can be- 
 come except an apostate. And being an 
 apostate is not so pleasant as remaining 
 in the faith, so long as one is allowed to 
 teach according to the letter and not ac- 
 cording to the spirit. And the rabbis had 
 followed the lines of easiest resistance. 
 Having lost their spiritual vision, and be- 
 ing no longer able to look beneath the 
 letter of the law to its spirit, they had con- 
 tented themselves with looking on the out- 
 
36 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 ward appearance, and they had revised 
 their teaching accordingly. 
 
 When a religious teacher has nothing 
 left but the letter of the law he usually 
 develops an extraordinary zeal for it, and 
 this invariably makes him a tyrant. And 
 the rabbis, with certain notable and noble 
 exceptions, had become tyrants. The 
 rabbi of our own day treats his people as 
 brothers; but if we can give any credence 
 to history the average rabbi of Christ's 
 day treated his people as oxen. And the 
 people of Christ's day, being too weak 
 after centuries of fiery trial to choose their 
 own paths, quietly submitted their necks 
 to the yoke that was held out to them and 
 consumed in silence such fodder as their 
 masters chose to set before them. 
 
 Let us not discuss the fodder. That 
 subject is too pathetic. All we need to 
 remember is that for centuries the rabbis 
 had been piling up their literal interpre- 
 tations around the law until the law itself 
 was now almost entirely hidden from view, 
 and that this great mass of hteral inter- 
 pretations was to the law as chaff to 
 wheat. This is not the whole truth, but 
 
The Spirit that Giveth Life 37 
 
 it is not necessary to remember more. 
 The whole truth is worse: the mass was 
 not only as chaff; it was chaff and the 
 chaff was full of poisonous weeds. 
 
 Feed a people on the mere letter of 
 God's law and you will soon reduce them 
 to spiritual starvation: and when they 
 have been well starved you can put a 
 chain about their necks and lead them 
 whither you will. That was what the rab- 
 bis had done and when Jesus came they 
 were leading the people about, as I have 
 said, like dumb oxen. 
 
 And they were leading them in utter 
 darkness. They had put out the lamp 
 which heaven had let down to them. They 
 had made the truth of God a lie. They 
 had deprived the law of its soul. They 
 had deprived righteousness of its mean- 
 ing; black had become white, and religion 
 had been turned into a shrewd device, de- 
 signed to enable power-loving rabbis to 
 hold a man by the ear with one hand while 
 playing tricks with his conscience with the 
 other. 
 
 It was plain to Jesus that he could 
 never reach the chains of sin which bound 
 
38 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 his people's hearts until he had broken the 
 chains of tyranny which bound their 
 minds, and the moment he succeeded in 
 winning the ear of the people he set to work 
 to rescue them from, their tyrants. And 
 then the war began. It was a bloodless 
 fight until just before the end, but it was 
 one of the fiercest fights the world has ever 
 seen. We like to think of those wonder- 
 ful years as beautiful years in which the 
 Prince of Peace went softly about in the 
 holy calm of vespers, cooling fevered 
 brows, healing broken hearts and blessing 
 little children. But the ministry of Jesus 
 was not like that. It was rather like the 
 fiery trial of a man whose house is beset 
 by a pack of wolves, and who is trying to 
 feed his hungry children and save them 
 from the hungrj- beasts at the same time. 
 How strange that we should have put 
 aside all those wonderful pictures of 
 Christ the Hero throwing himself into the 
 breach for his oppressed people and have 
 chosen to remember him only as he looked 
 in the midst of his. tender ministrations 
 of mercy to the needy ! How strange that 
 we should have forgotten those terrible 
 
The Spirit that Giveth Life 39 
 
 moments of single-handed conflict with 
 that hungry pack of wolves, the tyrannical 
 Pharisees, who through all his ministry 
 were either hanging upon the outskirts of 
 the crowd or howling at his heels ! . . . 
 
 All through that terrible struggle to 
 rescue his people from the grip of the rab- 
 bis the Master concentrated his fire upon 
 literalism and the externalism and hyi)oc- 
 risy which invariably attend it. I do not 
 recall a single conflict with the Pharisees 
 in the presence of his people in which he 
 did not try to disarm his antagonists, 
 either by showing the people how literal- 
 ism made the truth of God a lie or by 
 pointing out to them its deadly fruits — 
 externalism and hypocrisy — as shown in 
 the lives of the Pharisees themselves. In 
 a hundred ways he tried to show them how 
 the rabbis, by conforming themselves to 
 the letter of the law, not only took the 
 force out of many of the Father's com- 
 mands, but often put into his law com- 
 mands which he never thought of giving 
 and Vi'hich were utterly abhorrent to his 
 spirit. "It is utterly wrong!" we can 
 
40 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 hear him saying. "It is not the letter that 
 counts but the spirit. God looks not on 
 the outward appearance but upon the 
 heart. If you look only upon the out- 
 ward appearance of the law you will look 
 only upon the outward appearance of your 
 lives and you will become like your teach- 
 ers. And then — 
 
 "W"oe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, 
 hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited 
 sepulchres, which outwardly appear beau- 
 tiful, but inwardly are full of dead men's 
 bones, and of all uncleanness." . . . 
 
 And now we come to one of the most 
 amazing facts in the history of human 
 folly. After all his terrific battles against 
 the letter that killeth and in behalf of the 
 spirit that giveth life, the bravest and most 
 persistent antagonist of literalism the 
 world ever saw is still quoted by his own 
 people in this year of grace and light as 
 — a hteralist! 
 
 And most of the quotations are from 
 his Sermon on the Mount, the most power- 
 ful protest against literalism ever uttered. 
 
 Aside from their appeal to our greed 
 
The Spirit that Giveth Life 41 
 
 for material comfort the most powerful 
 weapons used by the pacifists to reduce 
 this nation to the bondage of selfishness 
 are two kindred sayings cut out of this 
 wonderful sermon against literalism and 
 used as isolated and literal statements to 
 show how vehemently Jesus opposed war. 
 These sayings are : 
 
 "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy 
 right cheek, turn to him the other also." 
 And— 
 
 "Resist not evil." 
 
 These two sayings, which somehow flash 
 like swords above the heads of the audi- 
 ence in every pacifistic onslaught even when 
 they do not issue from the lips of the lec- 
 turer himself, have undoubtedly wrought 
 greater slaughter, especially among the 
 elect, than all their other weapons com- 
 bined. Yet if we would only deprive 
 them of their literal interpretation and 
 put them back into their places long 
 enough to take a look at their surround- 
 ings, we should quickly see that if they 
 were taken in their true sense they would 
 be of no more use as weapons in the hands 
 of a pacifist than a couple of roses. 
 
42 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 What was Jesus talking about? 
 
 If somebody should tell me of a very 
 unreasonable remark which my friend 
 Jones made the other day in his presence, 
 that would be the first thing I should want 
 to know. I should want to know what 
 Jones was talking about. If that did not 
 settle the matter I should want to know 
 what mood he was in. Or if it should oc- 
 cur to me that Jones was especially apt 
 at metaphors and frequently indulged in 
 them I might ask whether he was talking 
 in a plain, literal way or indulging, as he 
 so often did, in figures of speech. I think 
 too much of Jones to take him literally 
 when I know that such an utterance taken 
 literally would condemn him as a very un- 
 reasonable man. I have known Jones a 
 long time and I know he is not an unrea- 
 sonable man. 
 
 Suppose it had been my fortune to 
 spend a year with Jesus in Galilee. And 
 suppose some time after that wonderful 
 experience a friend should come to me and 
 say : "I heard the Master utter a very hard 
 saying the other day. He told us that if 
 a man should strike you on one cheek you 
 
The Spirit that Giveth Life 43 
 
 ought to turn the other." What would 
 I say? 
 
 If I were a literalist I should say: 
 
 "Are you sure those were his very 
 words? Very well: then I am going to 
 do exactly as he commanded. The next 
 time a man strikes me on one cheek I am 
 going to turn the other." 
 
 But not being a literalist I should not 
 decide the matter so quickly. It would 
 not be sufficient for me to know that those 
 were his very w^ords. Those words taken 
 in their literal sense don't sound like him. 
 I know that if a man should smite me on 
 one cheek and I should turn the other it 
 would only add fuel to the fire. And the 
 Master, I am sure, does not want us to 
 add fuel to such a fire. Besides I know 
 that if I should turn the other cheek I 
 would turn my back upon my manhood, 
 and I know that that could not please him. 
 Why, he came to lift us to the highest 
 manhood, and I can think of nothing that 
 would stir his indignation so much as the 
 sight of a man laying aside his manhood 
 and leaving only a yellow streak. 
 
 And so I should have to go further. I 
 
44 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 should have to know what he was talking 
 about and I should have to know the spirit 
 in which those words were uttered. And 
 so I should say to my friend: 
 
 "Indeed! But he could not have meant 
 it hterally, for the Master always prac- 
 ticed what he preached; and you know he 
 never turned the other cheek. Suppose 
 we apply his own law of interpretation." 
 
 And I should insist upon knowing what 
 the Master was talking about. 
 
 Suppose we should insist upon it today. 
 What would we learn? 
 
 We would learn that Jesus was talking 
 about that horrible law of retaliation. 
 That law was not so horrible at the time 
 it was made, but the hate that blinds men 
 had gradually turned it into an instru- 
 ment of vengeance, and Jesus hated venge- 
 ance. He hated the revengeful spirit. 
 Retaliation was a horribly brutal thing 
 that must be ruled out of the hearts of 
 men, whatever the cost. He had come 
 into a world of brothers — the Father made 
 men to be brothers — and he had found 
 those brothers demanding an eye for an 
 tye and a tooth for a tooth. It was hor- 
 
The Spirit that GIveth Life 45 
 
 rible. It made his spirit boil every time 
 he thought of it. It was impossible for 
 him to speak of it without indignation. 
 "What?" I can hear him saying, 
 "What? An eye for an eye? And you 
 the children of the Father? You want an 
 eye for an ej^^e? You want to retaliate 
 like the heathen? What are you thinking 
 about? You want to strike back just for 
 revenge? Perish the thought! Why, 
 you are destroying yourself when you 
 strike back for revenge. Better endure 
 any insult rather than strike back for re- 
 venge. Better let your enemy spit on 
 you. Better turn the other cheek. Any- 
 thing is better than revenge." 
 
 And that was all. Not a word was said 
 about whether there might be circum- 
 stances under which a man or a nation 
 might strike back or not. All that he said 
 was that a man has no right to strike back 
 for revenge. Unquestionably the saying 
 applies against all wars for revenge and 
 all indulgence in the spirit of retaliation in 
 war, but it cannot be quoted against war 
 in general. It has nothing whatever to do 
 with the question of war in general. 
 
46 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 But did not Jesus say, "Resist not 
 evil"? And isn't that sweeping enough? 
 Doesn't that include all sorts of wars ? 
 
 One is tempted to reply that if it in- 
 cludes all sorts of wars we have no right 
 to make an exception in favor of the fierce 
 war which our pacifist friends have been 
 waging with all the forces at their com- 
 mand during the last three years ; but that 
 would be beside the point. Taken apart 
 from its surroundings and taken literally 
 this solemn command of Jesus imquestion- 
 ably teaches nonresistance. Taken liter- 
 ally it means that it is the duty of Chris- 
 tians to sit down and fold their hands and 
 submit without protest of any sort to 
 every evil thing that may come upon them, 
 including burglars, impostors, grafters, 
 impecunious friends seeking another loan, 
 saloon-keepers soliciting our votes and 
 (incidentally) our boys, merciless auto- 
 mobilists, tainted meats, weeds in the corn, 
 mosquitoes, pirates, pestilence and war. 
 Taken literally it means that if we want 
 to be true followers of Jesus we must stop 
 trying to follow in his steps (for we can- 
 not follow him without his own heroic 
 
The Spirit that Giveth Life 47 
 
 spirit) and sneak off to some secluded 
 spot where there is no fighting to do and 
 where piously inclined souls can spend 
 their days in such harmless and comfort- 
 ing diversions as singing Psalms and play- 
 ing peekaboo with the children. Taken 
 literally it means that the ideal hero of the 
 kingdom of heaven is not the Man of Gal- 
 ilee, but that big, fat, blubbering non-re- 
 sister whom I found that day lying in the 
 street with a little game rascal perched 
 upon his stomach. Taken literally it 
 means that we should not try to be like 
 the JNIaster, for he was the greatest re- 
 sister of evil the world has ever seen. He 
 came into the world to rescue men from 
 their worst enemies and he fought to the 
 last. The fact that he did not use phys- 
 ical force (I shall discuss that matter 
 further on) does not alter the fact that 
 he fought. He was just as ivulj a fighter 
 as Moses, Joshua, David, Washington, 
 Lee or the fighting parsons of the gold- 
 fever days of the far West. And he used 
 force. 
 
 But it is evident that we cannot take 
 that saying by itself. We must ask what 
 
48 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 Jesus was talking about. And when we 
 have looked into the matter we shall find 
 that he was talking about the very same 
 thing he was discussing when he com- 
 manded us to turn the other cheek. He 
 was talking about that abominable spirit 
 of retaliation, and he was saying that a 
 man has no right to do anything — not 
 even to resist evil — in a spirit of revenge. 
 A follower of Jesus has many privi- 
 leges, but he must be ready to die rather 
 than retaliate, just as he must be ready to 
 die rather than steal. 
 
IV 
 
 THE SPIRIT BACK OF OUR 
 DEEDS 
 
 I HAVE called it the INIaster's own 
 law of interpretation; but it did not 
 originate with him: as a matter of 
 fact it is as old as the hills. Ages before 
 Jesus came the world had become con- 
 scious of the existence of a law of inter- 
 pretation that was wholly unlike its own. 
 Everybody who had any spiritual vision 
 at all could see that there was a vast dif- 
 ference between man's way of looking at 
 things and God's. "Man looketh on the 
 outward appearance, but Jehovah looketh 
 on the heart." That had always been 
 God's way. He had never judged things 
 by the way they looked on the surface : he 
 had always gone straight down to the 
 heart of things. And everybody could 
 see that God's way was right. But it is 
 
 49 
 
50 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 pleasanter to the flesh to look at the out- 
 side than to make one's way down to the 
 heart of things, and it is human to go on 
 doing the pleasanter thing. Apparently 
 it was not until Jesus came and made men 
 see the peril and folly of judging accord- 
 ing to the letter that the world began to 
 wake up to the necessity of adopting 
 God's plan. 
 
 Perhaps no teacher ever had so clear a 
 vision of this necessity as Jesus. At any 
 rate he urged it upon men with an em- 
 phasis which no teacher had ever used be- 
 fore. And he was as persistent as he was 
 emphatic. He was not always talking 
 about it but he was always using it. He 
 not only applied it to the law of God: he 
 applied it to his own words as well. When 
 an ill-humored crowd insisted upon plac- 
 ing a literal interpretation upon a remark 
 which he had made about giving them his 
 flesh to eat, he gave them to understand 
 that they must interpret his words not ac- 
 cording to the letter, but according to the 
 spirit. "It is the spirit that giveth life: 
 the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that 
 I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are 
 
The Spirit Back of Our Deeds 51 
 
 life." And he not only applied it to his 
 words: he applied it to his conduct. If 
 his followers chosie to judge him by his 
 overt acts, as the Pharisees did, they would 
 no doubt make him out a very bad man, as 
 the Pharisees did. He would be no bet- 
 ter in their sight than the publicans and 
 sinners with whom he ate. 
 
 And he went still further. He applied 
 it to all human conduct. Men cannot be 
 safely judged by their overt acts. The 
 moral value of conduct does not lie in the 
 overt act, but in the spirit which prompts 
 it. It is not what a man does, but the mo- 
 tive behind the deed, that counts. A man 
 may obey the letter of the law as rigidly as 
 the Pharisees and be as rotten as the Phar- 
 isees. A man may be as fair as a sepul- 
 chre in his outward conduct and as foul as 
 a sepulchre in his heart. You cannot 
 judge a man by what he does with his 
 hands without first taking a good look at 
 his heart. A Christian has no more right 
 to judge men's deeds by the way they look 
 on the surface regardless of the spirit that 
 prompts them than he has to judge the 
 words of Christ by the way they look on 
 
52 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 the surface regardless of the spirit that is 
 beneath them. 
 
 We cannot even judge men's wars, hor- 
 rible as they are, by the way they look on 
 the surface. If we must condemn them 
 because they are horrible, then we must 
 condemn some things which Jesus appar- 
 ently approves and which we cannot well 
 get along without. 
 
 Childbirth, for instance. 
 
 And surgical operations. 
 
 Some wars, indeed, we remember as 
 childbirths. The American Revolution, 
 for instance. And a few we remember as 
 surgical operations. 
 
 I do not mean to say that according to 
 the teaching of Jesus war is nothing more 
 than a horror. Often it is a crime. In 
 most cases, perhaps, it has been a crime on 
 one side or the other. But I do mean to 
 say that according to this particular teach- 
 ing of Jesus we have no right to condemn 
 war by its outward appearance. We 
 have no more right to condemn a war be- 
 cause it is horrible than we have to con- 
 demn a surgical operation because it is 
 horrible. 
 
The Spirit Back of Our Deeds 53 
 
 If I should spend ten minutes in an 
 operating room and go away without a 
 thought of what was in the minds and 
 hearts of the surgeons whom I saw at 
 work, I fancy I should go direct to the 
 police station. And I should go boiling 
 over with righteous rage. I should re- 
 port that I had discovered an unspeakably 
 horrible place inhabited by fiends who 
 spend their time cutting men and women 
 to pieces for the sheer hellish joy of it. 
 If I could not stir up the police I should 
 hurry over to the newspaper offices, and 
 if I could not stir up the reporters I should 
 go out on the streets and harangue the 
 people. And I should not be satisfied un- 
 til I had raised a mob that would not leave 
 one stone of that hospital upon another. 
 Fortunately for the public peace, as well 
 as for my own comfort, I never go to a 
 hospital without having my heart suffi- 
 ciently stirred to enable me to look be- 
 neath the surface down to the heart of 
 things, and when I come away, instead of 
 rushing off to the police station, I usually 
 go softly to my home devoutly thanking 
 God for the wonderful compassion of the 
 
54 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 Good Physician which found its way into 
 the hearts of men and moved them to 
 build hospitals. 
 
 If I had stood in a Belgian fortress dur- 
 ing that unspeakable eruption of savagery 
 three years ago and my mind and heart, 
 for some strange reason, had failed to 
 divine what was in the minds and hearts 
 of the soldiers at the guns, I would have 
 come away boiling with a rage against 
 war that would never have died out so long 
 as I had blood enough left to boil. Seeing 
 only grim, death-dealing fighters and 
 belching guns and exploding shells and 
 vomiting volcanoes filling the air with a 
 horrible chaos of hot and bleeding human 
 flesh, I would have sworn in my frenzy 
 that I had spent an eternity in hell and 
 that every Belgian I saw was a demon. 
 But if I had stood in the midst of that hor- 
 ror with my spiritual eyes open and had 
 looked straight through it all down to the 
 heart of things, down to the spirit that is 
 back of things, I should have come away 
 feeling that I had — 
 
 Well, I should not have felt that I had 
 been in hell. 'Not should I have felt like 
 
The Spirit Back of Our Deeds 55 
 
 calling those grim, death-dealing fighters 
 demons. 
 
 A spiritual age judges things by the 
 spirit that is back of them, and this habit 
 increases its spiritual vision and its spirit- 
 ual wealth. A materialistic age keeps its 
 eyes fixed upon externals and as a conse- 
 quence steadily loses in spiritual vision 
 and wealth. The ancient habit of looking 
 upon the outward appearance, which we 
 have fallen into anew in the last genera- 
 tion, is destroying our spiritual wealth in 
 ways we never dreamed of. We have lost 
 the spiritual vision that can look beyond 
 the freezing cold of winter, beyond the 
 merciless March winds that stir the trees to 
 their roots, beyond the boiling hot days of 
 summer all the way to the golden autmiin 
 harvests. Therefore we cry out against the 
 cold and the wind and the heat. We have 
 lost the the vision to see beyond the hor- 
 rors of the dissecting room to the rosy 
 cheek of health. Therefore we cry out 
 against the dissecting room. We have lost 
 the vision to see beyond the parental rod 
 to the strong, noble man who never for- 
 gets to thank God for the thrashings his 
 
56 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 father gave him when he was a boy. 
 Therefore we cry out against the parental 
 rod. We can only see as far as the rod: 
 we cannot even see through the father's 
 eyes down into his breaking heart. We 
 can only see enough to assure us that a 
 big, cowardly bully is jumping on a poor 
 little, defenseless boy. And because we 
 cannot see farther, because we have not 
 even the spiritual vision to see that the 
 father who is whipping his boy is cruci- 
 fying himself for his boy's sake, we break 
 our rods and throw them away and leave 
 our boys to go to the dogs and incidentally 
 to break our hearts and throw them away. 
 A father looks up from his work to see 
 his child playing on the track just as the 
 fast express comes thundering round the 
 bend. He reaches the little fellow just 
 ahead of the locomotive and, springing 
 across the track, thrusts him on before 
 him. The child is thro^vn against the curb 
 and his arm is broken; and a passing 
 stranger, with the spiritual vision of a 
 mummy, proceeds to honor the father's 
 heroic deed by denouncing him to the 
 gathering crowd as an unfeeling brute. 
 
The Spirit Back of Our Deeds 57 
 
 An age with such a vision may see 
 through some things, but it cannot be ex- 
 pected to see through the smoke of battle 
 to such ethereal visions beyond as the tri- 
 umph of right, the overthrow of tyranny, 
 the rescue of the oppressed, the recogni- 
 tion of the inviolabihty of small nations, 
 the safety of democracy, the restoration 
 of Belgium, or a victory for the principles 
 of Christ that will secure to every man the 
 right of manhood and a fair chance to 
 achieve his divine destiny in the kingdom 
 of God. 
 
y 
 
 THE THING THAT COUNTS 
 WITH GOD 
 
 DOWN in a little Carolina town 
 many years ago they were try- 
 ing a man for murder. At the 
 outset the judge had reminded the jury 
 of the law which required them to keep 
 together until they announced their ver- 
 dict, and then, after the custom of the 
 time, proceeded to lay it upon their con- 
 sciences. Whatever happened — no mat- 
 ter if the heavens fell — they must keep to- 
 gether. If one of them should go to the 
 bad place the rest were in duty bound to 
 follow. They must keep together. The 
 trial proceeded quietly until suddenly the 
 fire bell rang out. It had been a long time 
 since the oldest inhabitant had heard a fire 
 alarm and the excitement became so in- 
 tense that a juryman who was sitting by 
 a window lost his head and — so the story 
 goes — ^jumped to the ground two stories 
 
 68 
 
The Thing that Counts with God 59 
 
 below. Instantly the next man sprang 
 after him and the next and the next, mitil 
 eleven men had solemnly followed him at 
 the risk of their lives in unquestioning 
 obedience to the letter of the law. 
 
 Not all Pharisees have the courage of 
 their convictions, but they all have the 
 same convictions. If those Carolina jury- 
 men had lived in Christ's day I fancy the 
 rabbis would have crowned them (meta- 
 phorically, of course) with laurel wreaths 
 and exalted them to the very highest seats 
 at Abraham's table which they had not al- 
 ready reserved for themselves. A Phar- 
 isee is a religious man who has lost his 
 spiritual vision and who, being oblivious 
 of the spirit that is in things and behind 
 things, is unconscious of any material dif- 
 ference between the ten commandments 
 and the multiplication table. 
 
 When Christ came he found the Phar- 
 isees dealing with men's deeds as a mod- 
 ern accountant deals with figures. Twice 
 two means what it says on the surface, and 
 Thou shalt not kill meant what it said 
 on the surface. All law was purely arbi- 
 trary. Things were right or wrong 
 
60 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 simply because God had commanded or 
 forbidden them, or because the rabbis of 
 the past had commanded or forbidden 
 them, which to their minds was practically 
 the same thing. And as arbitrariness al- 
 ways begets arbitrariness the business of 
 arbitrarily dividing deeds between the 
 "Do" and "Don't" column went merrily 
 on through the centuries without break. 
 People wanted to know whether it was 
 right or wrong to carry a needle around 
 on the Sabbath, and when the Pharisees 
 decided to put it down in the "Don't" 
 column it became wrong. Whether a man 
 carried a needle to show his contempt for 
 the law against burden-bearing on the 
 Sabbath or only took it over to a neigh- 
 bor's to sew up a little fellow who had 
 been gored by an ox was not material; 
 having been put down in the "Don't" 
 column it was wrong and that was the end 
 of it. 
 
 The Pharisees, like the poor, we have 
 always with us. A generation ago they 
 were spending their time arbitrarily desig- 
 nating certain amusements as right and 
 certain amusements as wrong. We re- 
 
The Thing that Counts with God 61 
 
 member them as gentlemen of honor and 
 intelhgence who were open to conviction 
 provided it was undersood that the devil's 
 favorite habitation is a woman's feet and 
 that there is no material difference be- 
 tween the girl who dances in private with 
 her brother and the girl who dances in 
 public with a rake. For several years past 
 they have been busy laying down arbi- 
 trary laws on the subject of fighting. We 
 may fight to protect our individual prop- 
 erty from a burglar, but we may not fight 
 to protect the collective property of the 
 American people from a pirate. We may 
 put an end to a murderer by the slow pro- 
 cess of life imprisonment, but not by the 
 instantaneous process of electrocution. 
 As individuals we may protect our lives 
 with a gun, but as a people we must be 
 content to protect our lives with a protest. 
 We may fight our enemies with our 
 tongues, but not with our fists. We may 
 use moral force but not physical force. 
 And so on. 
 
 If the Pharisees of Christ's day were 
 right, then unquestionably the Pharisees 
 of our own day are right. And unques- 
 
62 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 tionably it is our duty to follow them. 
 Unquestionably we should decide all these 
 questions about fighting according to the 
 way things look on the surface and to our 
 own eyes, regardless of the condition of 
 our vision and regardless of the spirit that 
 is in things or back of them. If all fight- 
 ing — individual or collective, physical, in- 
 tellectual or moral — looks ugly to our eyes 
 and makes us feel bad inside, we must set 
 down all fighting as wrong and then sit 
 down and let the mosquitoes eat us up, 
 while fiends insult our wives and grind 
 their heels in our children's faces. If all 
 our manly instincts revolt at the spectacle 
 of a bloody fist fight, but jump for joy at 
 a war of words, then we should condemn 
 bloody fist fighting and magnify the noble 
 art of stabbing your neighbor in the back 
 with a poisoned tongue. 
 
 But, on the other hand, if the Pharisees 
 of Christ's day were wrong it would seem 
 to follow that the Pharisees of our day are 
 wrong. If we must judge a fight not by 
 the way it looks on the surface, but by the 
 spirit that prompts it, it would seem, at 
 least to the ordinary mind, that we have 
 
The Thing that Counts with God 63 
 
 no more right to arbitrarily put this or 
 that kind of fight in the "Do" or "Don't" 
 column than we have a right to arbitrarily 
 decide that two plus two equals five. 
 
 And deep down in our hearts we know 
 that the Pharisees are wrong. If we are 
 fighting we know perfectly well whether 
 we are right or wrong, and we know it 
 not by what is going on on the surface but 
 by what is going on in our hearts. We 
 know that the thing that counts with God 
 is not what our fists are doing, but what 
 our hearts are doing. If I were fighting 
 to deliver a poor fellow from the hands 
 of a cruel oppressor I would have a sense 
 of exaltation as strong and pure as that 
 which comes at the moment of supreme 
 sacrifice; but if I should suddenly dis- 
 cover that I was not really concerned 
 about the poor fellow at all, but had 
 jumped on the oppressor because he was 
 my enemy and I wanted to get even with 
 him, my spirit would fall into the bottom- 
 less pit of degradation and shame. 
 
 It is not fighting that counts against 
 \is; it is the hating that is back of most 
 of our fighting. To say that all fighting 
 
64 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 is wrong because it is impossible to fight 
 without hate is not only puerile, but it 
 gives the lie to every noble character that 
 has ever lived. History does not record, 
 so far as I can recall, a single noble life 
 that was not filled with fighting. I am 
 sorry for the man who says he cannot 
 fight without hate, just as I am sorry for 
 the man who cannot punish a child until 
 he gets "mad." Any brute can whip his 
 child when he is mad: it takes a real man 
 to whip his child when he is not beside 
 himself. And it takes a real man to fight 
 when there is not a trace of hate in his 
 heart. A real man cannot fight without 
 fire, but he can fight without hate. He 
 must burn with wrath — wrath against 
 wrong — but that is a different matter; a 
 very different matter. . . . 
 
 The fact that many noble men have 
 gone through life without the use of phys- 
 ical force proves nothing. They did not 
 get through without fighting. And fight- 
 ing, whether by physical, intellectual or 
 moral force, is fighting. If Christ's law of 
 interpretation is right the distinction 
 
The Thing that Counts with God 65 
 
 'to 
 
 which the pacifist makes between physical 
 force and other kinds of force is purely- 
 arbitrary. We have been treated to an 
 immense amount of drivel on this point 
 in recent years. Men who plunged into 
 this fight against war with tongues as 
 sharp as swords, and who have been slash- 
 ing right and left with unseemly ferocity 
 ever since, tell us that physical force is 
 an unspeakably low and vile thing. Per- 
 haps. I have known men — zealous apos- 
 tles in what they honestly believed to be a 
 noble cause — to use their physical tongues 
 in ways that were unspeakably low and 
 vile. But if fighting is to be judged, not 
 by looking on the outward appearance, 
 but by looking on the heart, the character 
 of the force used is merely incidental. 
 It makes no difference whether I fight a 
 man or his principles or his nation with 
 physical force or intellectual force or 
 moral force: the right or wrong of it is 
 determined not by the form of the force 
 used, but by the spirit that is behind it. 
 I might remark in passing that it is a little 
 difficult to reconcile this recent talk ab-^u^ 
 the savagery and vileness of physical 
 
66 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 force with the evident sincerity with which 
 the average American used to thank God 
 for the sound thrashings his good Chris- 
 tian father gave him when he was a boy, 
 and but for which he might not have been 
 worth the rope it would take to hang him. 
 For my own part I cannot find it in my 
 heart to sneer at the only force available 
 to the average man who is called to over- 
 come brutality in an emergency. I can- 
 not despise the power that God has given 
 us to rescue women and children from the 
 assaults of human fiends. 
 
 Physical force is an inferior force, but 
 not in itself a vile force. It is the force 
 in common use among vile men (who 
 have nothing else to use), and it is often, 
 very often, used in vile ways ; but it is not 
 a vile force. The fact that Jesus never 
 used it proves nothing except that he 
 never needed it. The fact that men who 
 have reached the full stature of moral 
 manhood rarely use it proves nothing ex- 
 cept that they rarely need it. Jesus had 
 no use for it for the simple reason that 
 he had higher forces. He had great in- 
 tellectual force, which in many cases was 
 
The Thing that Counts with God 67 
 
 fully adequate for his needs; and he had 
 a spiritual force with which he held back 
 the human Avolves that were ever at liis 
 heels, — a force which could sweep the 
 temple of its horde of greedy hypocrites 
 with a word and hurl a howling mob back- 
 ward to the ground with a glance. 
 
 If it is hard to conceive of Jesus using 
 physical force, it is not because physical 
 force is vile, but because we can hardly 
 conceive of circumstances in which his 
 higher powers would not have been avail- 
 able. Let a man of great moral stature 
 speak to a bully who is choking a small 
 boy to death, and ten to one the bully will 
 scramble to his feet and sneak away like 
 a humiliated cur. The average man does 
 not find the problem so simple. Ten to 
 one he will be compelled to jump on the 
 bully and beat him into his senses. That 
 does not mean that it is wrong to beat bul- 
 lies into their senses. But it does mean 
 that the average man has fallen pitifully 
 short of his divine calling, 
 
VI 
 
 BRINGING THE QUESTION 
 CLOSER HOME 
 
 IF a man shoots at his neighbor with 
 murderous intent and misses him, 
 he is just as much a murderer as the 
 man who shoots at his neighbor with mur- 
 derous intent and kills him. That is the 
 teaching of Jesus, and it is the teaching of 
 conscience and common sense. For ob- 
 vious reasons society cannot undertake to 
 punish the man who misses as a murderer 
 and it therefore makes a distinction; but 
 this distinction is purely arbitrary. To say 
 that a man is not guilty unless he suc- 
 ceeds in killing his neighbor is to make his 
 innocence or guilt depend upon the ac- 
 curacy of his aim or the condition of his 
 cartridge. Jesus made it depend upon 
 the condition of his heart. 
 
 If the Master is right — -if it is true that 
 the moral value of our conduct is to be 
 found, not in our overt acts, but in the 
 
 68 
 
The Question Closer Home 69 
 
 spirit which prompts them — then it is 
 high time we were tearing up our ar- 
 bitrary hsts of deeds that are right and 
 deeds that are wrong and going back to 
 conscience and common sense, both of 
 which find their fullest expression in the 
 words of Jesus. 
 
 In the light of this teaching of Jesus we 
 shall find that there are no deeds which 
 we can put down as good under all cir- 
 cumstances and very few which we can 
 put down as evil under all circumstar'^es. 
 Even the best of deeds — even praying, 
 even giving to the poor — may be evil. No 
 teacher ever placed more emphasis upon 
 prayer than Jesus. He was always urg- 
 ing men to pray. He himself spent whole 
 nights in prayer. Yet his spirit revolted 
 at the sight of the praying of the hypocrit- 
 ical Pharisees in the streets. There are a 
 few deeds which we can put down as evil 
 without looldng beneath the surface, be- 
 cause we know that they can only proceed 
 from an evil spirit ; but most deeds cannot 
 be intelligently labeled until we have 
 plumbed them to the very bottom. We 
 must know whence they spring. 
 
70 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 And in this light we can see how absurd 
 it is to insist that it is right to use in- 
 tellectual force or moral force, but wrong 
 to use physical force. That again makes 
 the right or \vrong of our deeds depend 
 upon Avhat we may have in our hands 
 rather than upon what we may have in 
 our hearts. I grant that it is quite un- 
 refined to strike a man with your fist, but 
 it is hardly as cruel as most of the gentle 
 substitutes which our pacifist friends have 
 he*^n so freely using upon unoffending 
 American audiences in the last three 
 years. Personally I should esteem it a 
 favor to be knocked down by half a dozen 
 fists if I might thereby escape being run 
 through by a brilliant antagonist who has 
 had exceptional training in the use of a 
 stiletto tongue. 
 
 So with those subtle distinctions which 
 not a few brilliant academics have been 
 making between fighting in self-defense 
 or for the rescue of one's cliild from a 
 kidnapper, on the one hand, and fighting 
 for one's country or for the deliverance of 
 an oppressed people from the hands of 
 their oppressors on the other. No doubt 
 
The Question Closer Home 71 
 
 if we will shut our eyes to the spirit which 
 prompts our deeds these distinctions may- 
 be recognized with little trouble, but if 
 we will look at them in the light of the 
 teaching of Jesus we shall see that there 
 is no essential difference between them. 
 In the light of this teacliing, that it all 
 depends upon the spirit that is behind the 
 deed, we do not need to be told that there 
 are times when it is ignoble to fight, 
 whether the weapons in our hands are 
 moral, intellectual or physical, and that 
 there are times v»'hen it is a high and noble 
 privilege to fight and to fight with the best 
 weapons we can command, whether they 
 are moral forces, arguments, withering 
 denunciations, fists, or even guns. Sitting 
 in my quiet study far away from the 
 hearts of men who are struggling in bat- 
 tle "somewhere in France," it might be 
 possible for me to read the story of their 
 latest drive without seeing in it anything 
 more than a horrible carnival of crime. 
 But if as I turned from the storj^ I should 
 be startled by a cry for help, and should 
 rush to the door just in time to see a 
 mother spring like a tigress at the throat 
 
72 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 of a big brute who was making off ^vith 
 her child, I would be conscious of an over- 
 whelmingly sublime and noble spectacle. 
 My spiritual vision may not reach as far 
 as "somewhere in France," and I may miss 
 the spirit of the noble fellows there at 
 the front ; but so long as it can reach as far 
 as my next-door neighbor I shall not de- 
 spair. It might be worse. I might rage 
 against the heroism of France until the 
 sight of a mother next door fighting like 
 a tigress to rescue her child would mean 
 nothing more to me than a very disagree- 
 able and wholly uncalled-for exhibition of 
 unrefinement. 
 
 Putting these two pictures side by side 
 and viewing them simply as isolated spec- 
 tacles I can see little difference between 
 them. The sight of men in battle is hardly 
 more horrible in itself than the sight of a 
 mother springing upon a brute like a ti- 
 gress. Yet the very thought of a mother 
 fighting savagely for her offspring gives 
 us a sense of exaltation as if we had been 
 seeing heavenly visions. Everybody can 
 feel the thrill of it. Everybody will say 
 that it is a high and holy thing. Yet we 
 
The Question Closer Home 73 
 
 all have friends who never think upon that 
 awful spectacle in France with any feeling 
 other than annoyance. Why this differ- 
 ence? Who that has ever caught a glimpse 
 of a man as he sprang, under the impulse 
 of unselfish devotion, to the defense of 
 his country or the rescue of an oppressed 
 people, does not know that the spectacle 
 of the mother fighting like a tigress for 
 her child is repeated in spirit "somewhere 
 in France" a thousand times a day! 
 
 Still we are asked to believe that the 
 Master thinks of this whole horrible busi- 
 ness in Europe as refined men and women 
 think of a fight between two brutal boxers 
 in the back room of a slum saloon. 
 
 I do not mean to exalt war. Heaven 
 forbid! I do not mean to say that as it 
 is usually conducted it is not often a carni- 
 val of crime. It is often a carnival of 
 crime. I do not mean to say that it is 
 practicable for a war to go on without an 
 enormous amount of wrongdoing. Peace 
 does not go on without an enormous 
 amount of wrongdoing. All that I am 
 trying to say is that under the teaching 
 of Jesus we have no more right to put 
 
74 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 down war as a sin in itself regardless of the 
 spirit that prompts men to engage in it 
 than we have to put down all lighting — 
 individual or collective, moral, intellectual 
 or physical — as a sin, regardless of the 
 spirit that prompts men to engage in it. 
 If we make war in general a sin in itself 
 then the use of any kind of force against 
 our fellow men under any circumstances 
 is wrong, and we are forced to take our 
 place by the side of the world's most 
 pathetic joke, the pious Brahmin who is 
 afraid to crush a mosquito lest he should 
 incidentally murder his own grandfather. 
 Let us bring the question closer home. 
 "Somewhere in France" is so far away. 
 Let us think of Jones. My friend Jones 
 — let us say — lives just half a mile out of 
 town at the back of a thick pine forest. 
 There is a mill a mile farther on that is 
 infested with lawless characters. Jones 
 is called away suddenly in the morning 
 and as the afternoon wears away it is 
 noticed at the mill that he has not passed 
 on his way back. Night comes on and 
 suddenly the news flashes over my neigh- 
 borhood that a gang from the mill is on 
 
The Question Closer Home 75 
 
 the way to Jones's house. There are three 
 pretty children asleep at Jones's house 
 and a pretty young wife waiting and wish- 
 ing for Jones. 1 have just gotten the 
 news over the 'phone. The gang has 
 stopped in the woods a quarter of a mile 
 away — evidently waiting for the moon to 
 go down. 
 
 What shall we do? My neighbor at the 
 'phone did not discuss the matter. He 
 simply said, "Come on, we are going." 
 He did not say what they were going for 
 or whether they were going to carry any- 
 thing or not. And I did not ask him. 
 I simply 
 
 But what would you do? We are 
 Christians in our neighborhood — every 
 one of us. Fairly decent Christians too. 
 Not one of us ever hurt a man in his life. 
 Most of us would not even enjoy killing 
 a fly. And as fairly decent Christians we 
 have our names at stake. And a Christian 
 ought not to be out at night looking for 
 trouble. After all, what is it to us? The 
 world would be better off if everybody 
 would mind his own business. But there 
 is Jones's pretty wife and there are the 
 
76 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 babies. And before midnight those brutes 
 from the mill will break down the door 
 and poor Jones's pretty wife 
 
 But here is my gun. How strange! 
 I didn't know I had it. I must have 
 picked it up a moment ago. Heavens! 
 What am I going to do with this gun? 
 I — why, I am a Christian. 1 had better 
 put it up in the corner and go to bed. The 
 God who cares for the ravens when they 
 cry will surely keep an eye on Jones's 
 pretty wife and babies. 
 
 But this strange feeling in my heart! 
 Perhaps this means that God already has 
 his eye on the situation and that he is 
 calling me. Perhaps I had better go. 
 
 But the gun ! "What would Jesus think 
 if he saw me hurrying down the street 
 with a gun! Here we are declaring war 
 against that gang and actually going 
 after them. And we are all Christians. Is 
 it right to declare war except in self- 
 defense? That gang has never done any 
 of us any harm. What had we better do? 
 We might leave our guns and go and 
 meet those fellows and announce our 
 strict neutrality. Or we might take them 
 
The Question Closer Home 77 
 
 along so that we shall be prepared to en- 
 force our neutrality when we have de- 
 clared it. 
 
 But there is Jones's pretty wife again. 
 I imagine I can see her face pressed 
 against the window pane looking for 
 Jones. And I can see those three pretty 
 babies asleep in bed. Oh, this fighting 
 question! What should a Christian do? 
 Here, surely, is no chance to turn the 
 other cheek. 
 
 We are almost in sight of Jones's house. 
 Nobody said anything about bringing 
 guns, but every man has a gun. Nobody 
 has asked what we should do. Wilkins, 
 who takes the lead, has divided up the 
 men and told them which were to ap- 
 proach the house from the front and which 
 from the rear and so on. And the rest of 
 us are not saying a word. Here we are — 
 Christians all of us — followers of the 
 Prince of Peace — and somehow we have 
 blundered into this war and now we are 
 actually marching into battle. Heaven 
 help us! This is awful! Who said that 
 war is hell? And we are Christians. 
 Hadn't we better go back? 
 
78 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 Listen! Heavens! They are already 
 there. They are breaking down the door. 
 Lord, help us! Wasn't that Jones's wife 
 crying for help? Quick! To the right 
 there! Take that -path, yonder! For the 
 love of God — quick! Fire! 
 
 Heavens ! The brute has caught her in 
 his arms. Shoot through that window! 
 Quick ! For the love of God — quick ! 
 
 It is all over. There is blood on the 
 bed. There is blood on our hands. There 
 is blood everywhere. There are three 
 men lying dead on the floor. Horror of 
 horrors ! And we are Christians ! 
 
 Yes, we are Christians! And we have 
 done our duty. We have laid pretty 
 Jones's wife upon her bed, for she has 
 fainted, and all ten of us are trying to 
 hold those three children in our arms at 
 one time. And there is not a trace of hate 
 or vengeance in our hearts. "Praise the 
 Lord," says Wilkins, who is a Methodist. 
 "I feel like singing the doxology," whis- 
 pers Watson devoutly. "Thank the 
 Lord, we didn't get here too lale!" ex- 
 claims Smithwick. "Amen!" say we all. 
 
VII 
 
 WHAT WAS CHRIST'S IDEA 
 OF INDIVIDUAL RESPONSI- 
 BILITY? 
 
 THE professional pacifist who ar- 
 rives on the scene half an hour 
 after the fight is over will see 
 nothing but the horror of it all, and natur- 
 ally will reason accordingly. Knowing 
 nothing of what has passed in our hearts 
 he will call us murderers. He will call us 
 beasts. We flatter ourselves that we are 
 Christians: he will affirm with fervency 
 that we have not been civilized, much less 
 Christianized. He will declaim eloquently 
 upon the sacredness of human life — hav- 
 ing in mind, of course, the lives of the 
 dead men on the floor and not the lives 
 of Jones's pretty wife and babies. He 
 will talk bitterly of those inexplicable 
 modern lapses of humanity into savagery. 
 He will remind us that we have not only 
 committed a horrible crime but have done 
 
 79 
 
80 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 worse: we have committed an unspeak- 
 ably foohsh blunder. "Why don't men 
 listen to reason?" he will ask. We shall 
 suggest that if we had been listening to 
 reason we might not have heard Jones's 
 pretty wife's cry; and he will reply that 
 it is all nonsense; that it was none of our 
 business anyway; that if we had been lis- 
 tening to reason we would have seen the 
 utter folly of ten men of average economic 
 value to the community risking their lives 
 for one non-productive woman and three 
 helpless children Avho are eating their 
 heads off. Suppose those poor unfortu- 
 nates had killed the last one of us and left 
 our wives and half a hundred children to 
 starve to death! He will lift his eyes to- 
 ward heaven and wonder when humanity 
 will ever learn to listen to reason. He 
 will remind us that we have not only 
 sinned against society: we have sinned 
 against reason. If we protest and remind 
 him of our obligation to humanity he will 
 laugh a hard, cold, professorial laugh 
 and suggest that we are pretty fellows to 
 be talking about obligation to humanity. 
 WHiat about our obligation to those poor 
 
Christ's Idea of Responsibility 81 
 
 fellows lying there on the floor? What 
 about our obligation to tkeii' wives and 
 children? There was no obligation upon 
 us to bring us here. That was a matter 
 for the law. We should have stayed at 
 home and attended to our own business. 
 Such matters are in the hands of the law, 
 and if the law doesn't attend to its duty 
 that is not our lookout. He will ask us 
 what the law is for anyway, and he will 
 remind us that when we put the law in 
 operation to protect Mrs. Jones and her 
 children we did our part. Mind you, he 
 doesn't say Jones's pretty wife and babies : 
 he doesn't loiow our neighbor Jones's 
 pretty wife and babies. "Didn't you vote 
 last November?" he will ask. "And 
 didn't you pay your taxes? Didn't you 
 provide officers of the law and put the 
 law in motion? Then you did your part. 
 Why did you butt in here w^here you had 
 no business? Oh, this meddlesome gen- 
 eration! Wlien will we learn to mind 
 our own business and let other people's 
 alone?" . . . 
 
 Ever since the days of Cain the human 
 
82 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 race has been trying to escape individual 
 responsibility. It is human to meddle 
 with other people's business, and it is just 
 as human to deny all responsibility for 
 other people's business. Every genera- 
 tion pries into its neighbor's affairs until 
 it is asked to lend a hand and then turns 
 round and asks with a sneer, "Am I my 
 brother's keeper?" 
 
 It is amazing how much inventive genius 
 men in all ages have shown in their ef- 
 forts to escape responsibility for their 
 neighbors. The ancients sought escape 
 through religion. Perhaps more religions 
 have been invented for this purpose than 
 for any other purpose in the world. 
 Nearly all heathen religions seem to be 
 at bottom the result of an effort to quiet, 
 or buy off, or neutralize, or in some way 
 get rid of the natural sense of obligation 
 toward one's fellows which now and then 
 seems to bob up even in the darkest 
 corners of humanity. Our gifted friends 
 in the East, the Japanese, succeeded in 
 inventing a religion which enabled them 
 to escape practically all individual obli- 
 gation except their obligation to the em- 
 
Christ's Idea of Responsibility 83 
 
 peror and his country. This is the one 
 serious obstacle in the way of Japan's 
 advancement outside of material lines. 
 It has yet to develop a sense of individual 
 obligation, without which no nation can 
 reach a really high and lasting civilization. 
 In ancient times the sense of individual 
 obligation had little chance outside of the 
 Hebrew nation. The pagans threw their 
 wet-blanket religions over it and usually 
 succeeded in hushing its feeble cry. Only 
 among the Jews was any real effort made 
 to nurture and develop it. Every heaven- 
 sent Hebrew prophet laid the burden of 
 responsibility squarely upon the shoul- 
 ders of individual men. Every Hebrew 
 proi)het was a standing protest against 
 the "slacker." When Jesus came he came 
 with an individual message to individuals. 
 Others might talk of national responsi- 
 bility, but Jesus talked to Peter not about 
 national responsibility, but about Peter's 
 responsibihty. And when he was through 
 Peter understood that he was responsible 
 not only for himself but, as far as his 
 ability lay, for everybody he could help. 
 Men were the children of the same Father 
 
84 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 and brothers one of another, and every 
 man had to bear the obligation both of 
 sonship and brotherhood. No man could 
 be a "slacker." Every man vras a brother 
 to every other man. Every man was un- 
 der obligations to be a neighbor to every 
 man he could help. Not the parable of 
 the Good Samaritan alone, but the whole 
 teaching and life of Jesus emphasized this 
 duty. Nothing that Jesus ever did or 
 said leaves a loophole of escape. Men 
 have been making loopholes of their own 
 ever since his day and have been escaping 
 through them, but they have never gotten 
 rid of their obligations thereby. They 
 are like escaped criminals : they can never 
 walk abroad as freemen until they have 
 gone back and served their sentence. 
 
 Nowadays men seldom try to escape in- 
 dividual obligation through religion. We 
 have an easier loophole. We have the 
 soulless corporation. The idea of a cor- 
 poration is not new, and corporations in 
 the past often acted in conscienceless 
 ways: but it was left for the modern man 
 to conceive the idea of a corporation with- 
 out a soul and to apply it to other organi- 
 
Clirist's Idea of Responsibility 85 
 
 zations besides those formally recognized 
 as corporations. In every sphere of life 
 today men are seeking to escape individ- 
 ual responsibility by organizing and run- 
 ning their organizations as corporations, 
 on the assumption that corporations are 
 not handicapped by a conscience. 
 
 We are running all sorts of organiza- 
 tions on this basis — industrial, political, 
 social and even religious. The governing 
 board of a charity institution, composed of 
 benevolent men of unblemished character 
 and the highest business integrity, will 
 drive a bargain for supplies such as any 
 man of character would scorn to stoop 
 to in his own private business. Even 
 church boards have been known to fall 
 under the illusion that when men are 
 working as a board for a good cause and 
 not for self the end justifies the means. 
 In every sphere today one meets with the 
 feeling that the moment men organize 
 for united action individual responsibility 
 ends. . . . 
 
 What does Jesus say about corpora- 
 tions? Nothing. Jesus does not recog- 
 
86 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 nize a corporation: he only knows the 
 individuals that compose it. And he has 
 told us how we should behave as individ- 
 uals. What does he say about the duties 
 of nations? Nothing. Jesus does not 
 recognize a nation — that is, as we usually 
 think of a nation nowadays. So far as his 
 teachings go, a nation is nothing more nor 
 less than a brotherhood of individuals liv- 
 ing close enough together to have interests 
 in common. There is no reason why he 
 should tell America how it should behave : 
 he has told Americans how to behave and 
 he is holding Americans responsible, not 
 America. When we came together to 
 make ourselves a nation we did not lay 
 aside our individuality, and so long as we 
 hold on to our individuality our individual 
 obligations will hold on to us. 
 
 God has not made one moral law for 
 individuals and another moral law for 
 corporations, boards, legislatures, nations. 
 If we are acting individually as Christians 
 it is not our privilege to act collectively as 
 heathen. What God requires of us as 
 individuals he requires of us in every 
 capacity. What he requires of us in our 
 
Christ's Idea of Responsibility 87 
 
 own homes he requires of us in the direct- 
 ors' meeting, in the city council, in the 
 church board, in the legislature, at the 
 polls and in the trenches. Wherever I 
 go I must take my conscience and my in- 
 dividual responsibility. They are as much 
 a part of me as my head. 
 
 In the light of the teachings of Jesus 
 America is simply a body of Americans. 
 The thing wliich many good people nowa- 
 days call the American nation does not 
 exist outside of the imagination. It is 
 only a fictional scapegoat — a clumsy 
 mental device invented for the relief of 
 the consciences of delinquent Americans. 
 And Jesus nowhere recognizes fictional 
 scapegoats. The only American nation 
 actually existing is a union of American 
 people, all of whom without exception are 
 individually responsible for its acts to the 
 extent of their ability and opportunity; 
 and there is no way for us to cut loose 
 from our responsibility as Americans 
 except by cutting loose from America. 
 Some people imagine that they have suc- 
 ceeded in shifting their responsibility upon 
 the nation; but they have only shifted it 
 
88 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 from one shoulder to the other. They are 
 still carrying the whole load. 
 
 It is easy to say that if I am a member 
 of the great American body I am nothing 
 more than a mere microscopic gland, and 
 that therefore I cannot be expected to 
 have anything to do with this war question 
 one way or another. One hardly looks 
 for a microscopic gland to step in and 
 decide whether a nation should cast itself 
 in the breach to save the world from 
 tyranny or not. But that is only an illu- 
 sion. A microscopic gland may be a 
 very small thing, but I should not like 
 for many microscopic glands in my body 
 to go on that sort of strike. 
 
 Aside from the literalism and external- 
 ism of the rabbis there was nothing which 
 Jesus protested against more earnestly 
 than this heathenish idea that one man 
 is too small to count. One sheep was 
 not too small to count. One penny was not 
 too small to count. In the eyes of the 
 Father even a sparrow was not too small 
 to count. Why should a man be too small 
 to count? In the eyes of the Father 
 even a piece of a man — even the sem- 
 
Christ's Idea of Responsibility 89 
 
 blance of a man — was of more value than 
 many sparrows. There was not a man in 
 the world whom the Father did not 
 count. There was not a man upon whom 
 he had not set his heart. There was not a 
 man for whom he had not given his Son. 
 There was not a man to whom he had 
 not given a place in his purpose for the 
 world. There was not a man to whom he 
 had not given a task in his plans to uplift 
 mankind. In the eyes of the Father the 
 most important thing in the world was a 
 man. Therefore a man was not at liberty 
 to put himself out of commission. He 
 could not isolate himself. He could not 
 live unto himself. He could not be a 
 shirker. He could not say that it was 
 none of his business. He could not refuse 
 to be his brother's keeper. He could not 
 refuse to have a voice or a hand in the 
 affairs of men. He was not an insect; 
 he was a man — a responsible being shar- 
 ing the tasks of the Eternal. . . . 
 
 For nearly two thousand years it was 
 the custom of Christians to magnify the 
 individual in accordance with the teach- 
 
90 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 ings of Jesus. Then something happened. 
 Science came and put its finger upon 
 Things. Science did such wonderful 
 things with Things that the world could 
 think of nothing else. It was no longer 
 interested in men; its heart went out to 
 Things. It dreamed of the divine des- 
 tiny of Things. And every day the mar- 
 ket value of the individual went steadily 
 down. Today in some markets the only 
 man who is quoted at all is the machine 
 man or the expert who has been developed 
 on one side at the expense of all other 
 sides. There is a demand for men in the 
 lump — for scientifically organized socie- 
 ties that can do things as machinery — but 
 the individual is at a hopeless discount. 
 
 It is impossible for the market value of 
 the individual to go down without drag- 
 ging down the sense of individual obliga- 
 tion with it, and in the last generation we 
 have seen individual obhgation almost 
 forced out of the world's market. People 
 no longer talk about the dignity of the in- 
 dividual and they don't wish to hear any 
 more, if you please, of this stale drivel 
 about individual obligations. Here in 
 
Christ's Idea of Responsibility 91 
 
 America, or at least in a large part of 
 America, we seem to have turned Romans 
 overnight, for we refuse to think of any- 
 thing but our cohorts. We are as am- 
 bitious — or at least we think we are — to 
 lose our individuality in our organizations 
 as the Hindoo is to lose his individuality 
 in Nirvana. Parting company with the 
 Master and his old-fashioned ideas of the 
 dignity and divine destiny of man, we 
 have gone forward to magnify boards, cor- 
 porations, unions, fraternities, associa- 
 tions, parties, nations. In this year of 
 grace the American nation, which under 
 God owes its origin and its all to the 
 highest type of manhood the world has 
 known since the days of Paul, is devoutly 
 thanking God for the heroes of its past 
 and at the same time magnifying soulless 
 machines as the only hope of its future. 
 
 In the light of science this looks like 
 progress, but in the light of the teachings 
 of Jesus it is only a reversion to paganism. 
 
 I can lose my identity in a crowd, but 
 I cannot lose my individuality or my in- 
 dividual obligation. And it makes no dif- 
 ference whether the crowd is organized 
 
92 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 and incorporated or only a lawless mob. I 
 am as responsible for my acts in a cor- 
 poration or a nation as I am for my acts 
 in a lawless mob. If a thing is wrong for 
 me as an individual it is wrong for me as 
 a citizen of my country. If it is wrong 
 for me as a citizen of my country it is 
 wrong for my country, and it is my duty 
 to the extent of my ability and opportu- 
 nity to see that my country does not do 
 that which would be wrong for its individ- 
 ual citizens to do. If it is wrong for me to 
 make war against my neighbor for selfish 
 reasons, it is wrong for my country to 
 make war against its neighbor for selfish 
 reasons. If it is wrong for me to demand 
 an eye for an eye, it is wrong for my 
 country to demand an eye for an eye. If 
 getting into a difficulty with my neighbor 
 does not give me a right to retaliate, the 
 fact that my country is at war with its 
 neighbor does not give my country a right 
 to retaliate. If it is right for me to use 
 force if necessary to deliver the oppressed 
 from the oppressor it is right for my coun- 
 try. If it is wrong for me to use more 
 force in such instances than necessary it is 
 
Christ's Idea of Responsibility 93 
 
 wrong for my country. America has no 
 more right to stand indifferently by while 
 a tyrannical government grinds its heel in 
 the face of a prostrate nation than I have 
 to stand indifferently by while a tyrannical 
 neighbor living on my right grinds his 
 heel in the face of my helpless neighbor 
 living on my left. America has no more 
 right to shut its ears against a cry for 
 help than I have. America has no more 
 right to show the white feather than I 
 have. America must be just as human, 
 just as compassionate, just as unselfish, 
 just as true to God and humanity, just 
 as quick to succor the oppressed, just as 
 true to every high moral obligation as in 
 my best moments I have tried to be and as 
 in all moments I know I ought to be. 
 
VIII 
 
 CAN A CHRISTIAN BE A 
 "SLACKER"? 
 
 THE kingdom of Christ is a king- 
 dom of peace, but you cannot 
 establish a kingdom without 
 war. And the army of Christ is still on 
 the fighting line. The moment we en- 
 list in his service we find ourselves face 
 to face with forces of evil wliich call for all 
 the fighting spirit we have and more. And 
 what we lack he will supply. There are 
 teachings of Jesus which cannot get into 
 the blood without turning the veriest 
 "slacker" into a hero. If a man is a 
 Christian he is bound to fight. It is in 
 his blood. He cannot retreat. He can- 
 not surrender. He cannot hide his head 
 in the sand. He must fight. 
 
 Christianity means war. It doesn't 
 necessarily mean this or that kind of a 
 war, but it means war. We cannot follow 
 
 94 
 
Can a Christian be a "Slacker"? 95 
 
 Christ and not fight. We must fight in- 
 dividually and we must fight as a people. 
 We must fight with our spirits — heaven 
 only knows how we have to fight with 
 our spirits ! We must fight with our intel- 
 lects. And so long as savagery remains 
 in the world — so long as there are human 
 beings who are not susceptible to moral 
 appeal — it may be necessary once in a 
 long while to fight with our bodies. We 
 may cut war out of our hymns and our 
 rituals and our school histories and our 
 ethical culture societies, but we cannot 
 cut it out of the Christian life. A Chris- 
 tian is no "slacker." A Christian is every 
 inch a fighter. 
 
 How often a dear, white-faced, saintly 
 soul, who never killed a fly, has confessed 
 to you that her life, which always seemed 
 as serene as a June sunset, was one long 
 fierce battle for Christ in the secret places 
 of her home — a battle in which her gentle 
 lips and even her blue-veined hands often 
 had to come to the help of her heroic 
 spirit ! 
 
 What are the teachings of Jesus that 
 force Christians to fight? 
 
»6 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 He has put them all together for us in 
 one word. That word is love. Not sel- 
 fish passion, but love. Not a narrow, ex- 
 clusive love, but an all-embracing love. 
 Not love for some men, but love for all 
 men. Not love for men alone, but love for 
 God and men. Not any sort of love for 
 God and men, but filial love for God and 
 brotherly love for men. 
 
 There is nothing that makes a man 
 fight like love. If a man reaches the 
 point where he can love God as his Father 
 and his fellow men as his brothers he will 
 have enough love to make him fight as 
 long as he lives. We have been told that 
 if we really love God and our fellow men 
 we will not fight, or at any rate we will 
 not use physical force. That is like saying 
 that if I really love my wife and children 
 I will run when they are in danger. If 
 I love my wife and children I am bound to 
 fight for them and I am bound to fight as 
 hard as I can and with the best weapons 
 at my command, regardless of whether 
 they are physical or not. The thing that 
 keeps some men from fighting for their 
 wives and children with the best weapons 
 
Can a Christian be a "Slacker"? 97 
 
 at their command is not love. When a 
 man tells you that he will not fight for his 
 country because he is a planetary patriot 
 and loves all countries, you know that the 
 barrier in the way is not love. It is noth- 
 ing but a yellow streak. 
 
 Planetary patriotism may be defined 
 as a modern device used as a covering for 
 yellow streaks. It is not yet perfected 
 and unless greatly stretched usually leaves 
 both ends of the streak exposed. 
 
 If I love God as my Father — the 
 Father whom Jesus has shown us — I will 
 obey him and I will want to see his will 
 done on earth as it is done in heaven. 
 I will fall in ^vith his purposes and plans. 
 And naturally I will come out squarely 
 against all the forces that are mobilized 
 against him. I will do everything I can 
 in behalf of his will and I will oppose 
 with all my might every force that is 
 seeking to defeat his will. 
 
 Here, for instance, is his plan for 
 rescuing human beings from the low level 
 of sheer animahsm and putting his spirit 
 into them and helping them to achieve 
 their divine destiny as men — sons of God. 
 
98 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 Jesus has told us about this plan. He 
 has shown how his heart is set upon it. 
 Here are millions of human beings with 
 wonderful possibilities — beings made in 
 the image of God and designed to walk 
 with him as liis sons. At present they are 
 grazing with cattle. And they are slaves 
 — like cattle tied to a stake. God has a 
 plan to set them free and help them up 
 to the high plateaus of the land of the 
 spirit where they may become men indeed 
 — where they may reach the stature of 
 mankind not in body merely, or mind 
 merely, but in spirit. As a Christian it is 
 my business to fall in with tliis plan. 
 Millions of peojDle today have no chance. 
 They are bound down by sin, by igno- 
 rance, by their fellow men. The bond of 
 sin God alone can break, but he is look- 
 ing to us to break the rest. If human 
 beings are to be saved — if they are to rise 
 to manhood and achieve the end of their 
 being — they must have freedom and light. 
 Their shackles must be broken off so that 
 they can go and they must have light 
 that they may see which way to go. They 
 must have life also, but that is God's mat- 
 
Can a Christian be a "Slacker"? 99 
 
 ter. Our business is to give them free- 
 dom and hght. So long as there is a man 
 in the world who has no chance it is our 
 business to fight for him and to keep on 
 fighting until the chance is given him. 
 We may not have to use physical force. 
 If we will make the best of our own chance 
 and rise to the heights of spiritual man- 
 hood we shall have a superior force which 
 in most cases will do the work better than 
 physical force. But whether we have to 
 use ph} sical force or not we have got to 
 see that every bound human being is set 
 free and given a chance. 
 
 And certainly if we love our fellow men 
 as brothers — and we shall love them as 
 brothers the moment we come to love God 
 as our Father — we are going to fight ^vith 
 all our might, regardless of whether we 
 have to use physical force or not. We are 
 going to help along everything that makes 
 for mankind and we are going to fight 
 everything that tends to destroy manhood. 
 We will fight pacifism not only because it 
 is contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but 
 because its whole tendency is to make a 
 yellow streak where you want a man. We 
 
100 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 will fight "Safety first," not merely be- 
 cause it is the password of pacifism and 
 the slogan of selfishness, but because its 
 whole tendency is to save a man's skin 
 and let the man go to the devil. If men 
 are teaching half truths that are honey- 
 combing the nation's manhood we are go- 
 ing to fight them, whether they teach them 
 in the name of religion or only in the 
 name of business. If a nation reaches the 
 point where it is in danger of being over- 
 whelmed by materialistic appeals and 
 where it must either respond to a higher 
 appeal and go to war or else lose what 
 manhood it has, we are going to stand for 
 war, though we may hate war a thousand 
 times worse than a father hates to punish 
 his disobedient child, and though we may 
 be unable to sleep of nights for the 
 thought of its horrors. 
 
 Heaven knows there is little enough 
 manhood in the world. And the Father's 
 heart is set upon making men. He gave 
 his Son as a pattern to make them by and 
 to give his life that human beings might 
 not perish but might achieve their divine 
 destiny as men. And surely if the Son 
 
Can a Ckristian be a "Slacker"? 101 
 
 is burning with indignation to-day — as 
 some good people think — it is not at the 
 sight of men shooting one another in 
 Europe, horrible as that may be, but at the 
 sight of men here in America who in their 
 amazing zeal for the gospel of selfishness 
 have exalted the yellow streak as a golden 
 image and are hysterically calling upon 
 the nation's manhood to fall down be- 
 fore it. . . . 
 
 Much of our hazy and foolish thinking 
 about this war question may be traced to 
 the common failure to realize that the love 
 which Jesus requires really means some- 
 thing in particular. It is so easy to think 
 of it as a very charming but highly sub- 
 limated sentiment of no earthly use — 
 something which the master intended we 
 should carry in our hearts for safekeep- 
 ing, as a woman carries a precious but 
 quite unuseful locket in her bosom. 
 
 This would be a natural mistake if 
 Jesus had only talked about love and told 
 us that all he wanted us to do was just to 
 love. But Jesus has never asked us just 
 to love. He always asks us to love some- 
 
102 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 thing in particular and in a particular 
 way. He asks us to love God as a son 
 loves or ought to love liis father. He asks 
 us to love men as a man loves or ought to 
 love his brother. In other words what he 
 requires of the world is a real love, which 
 acts in the very same way in the world's 
 life as real love in the family acts as 
 family love. This truth is not only con- 
 spicuous in his sayings but is even more 
 conspicuous in his life. Look through 
 the gospel story, and wherever you come 
 upon him you will see him either in the 
 character of a son whose heart is wrapped 
 up in his Father and his Father's interests 
 or as a loving brother ready to throw him- 
 self into the breach for his brother's 
 sake. Now he is helping forward his 
 Father's plans; now he is exalting his 
 Father's will; now he is fighting his 
 Father's enemies — the Pharisees — almost 
 as fiercely as I would fight a brute who 
 has his fingers at the throat of my child; 
 now he is throwing himself into the breach 
 for a brother; now he is breaking the 
 chains of some poor fellow who is bound 
 hand and foot by disease or sin ; now he is 
 
Can a Christian be a "Slacker"? 103 
 
 standing up for the oppressed against the 
 oppressor. How often he stands up for 
 the oppressed against the oppressor! He 
 even takes the part of a wretched adul- 
 teress against the oppression of a lot of 
 church dignitaries. He is a brother to us 
 all, and it is inconceivable that he should 
 stand silently by while tyrants grind their 
 heels in our faces. . . . 
 
 No; Jesus did not use physical force. 
 But that does not mean that he regarded 
 physical force as a brutal thing; it only 
 means that he regarded it as an inferior 
 thing. Would I choose to pounce upon 
 a mob of desecrators in the temple with 
 my fists if I could hold a little, harmless 
 whip of small cords aloft as a symbol of 
 authority to catch their eye and then 
 speak a word that would sweep the entire 
 mob headlong before me? 
 
 No; Jesus did not use phj^sical force. 
 But it may be worth while to remember 
 that he used such force as he needed. If 
 he were here to-day I do not imagine that 
 he would meet an oppressor who was so 
 brutalized that no spiritual weapon could 
 
104 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 find its way beneath his skin, but if he 
 should meet such a monster I am sure he 
 would not throw up his hands. If the 
 monster had his fingers at a little child's 
 throat and he could give him no word or 
 look that would overwhelm him and force 
 him to loosen his grip, I do not imagine 
 that he — he who said, "Suffer little chil- 
 dren to come unto me" — would go on his 
 way and leave the child to be choked to 
 death. 
 
IX 
 
 WHAT WAS CHRIST'S IDEA OF 
 THE VALUE OF HUMAN 
 LIFE? 
 
 YOU cannot stand in the operating 
 room at a hospital and think 
 sanely on the problem of human 
 suffering while your son is on the operat- 
 ing table. The horror of it all crazes you. 
 So it is with this war question. The 
 pacifist lecturer takes his place before 
 the footlights and with a few wonderful 
 strokes pictures for us this horror of a 
 great darkness in Europe, and when our 
 hearts are breaking and our brains have 
 turned to a scrapheap asks how any 
 human being can vote for war. Of course 
 we cannot vote for war. How can we 
 vote for a wild and ravenous beast that 
 sucks the blood of men and devours the 
 hearts of women and little children? 
 One of the things that runs us mad is 
 
 105 
 
106 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 the horrible loss of hfe. This has always 
 been a terrifying thing, but it is more ter- 
 rifying to-day than it ever was before. 
 The scientist will tell us that this is prob- 
 ably because human life is so much more 
 valuable to-day than it ever was before, 
 but to our ordinary untrained minds it 
 seems more reasonable to suppose that it 
 is because this generation has set a higher 
 price on human life than was ever set be- 
 fore. The price of human life has been 
 steadily going up for a hundred years. It 
 began to rise at the ushering in of the Age 
 of Comfort and it rose steadily until the 
 discovery of ether, when it took a tremen- 
 dous jump; and it has been jumping ever 
 since. Since that day we have done more 
 to preserve our precious lives and make 
 them comfortable than was done in all 
 the generations that preceded it, and to- 
 day it is by far the highest stock in the 
 Avorld's market. In ancient times it was 
 a common saying that all that a man hath 
 will he give for his life ; but to us moderns 
 that figure is too modest : we are sure that 
 he will give all that he can borrow, beg 
 or steal. 
 
The Value of Human Life 107 
 
 And the price is still soaring. 
 
 It would seem time to ask whether this 
 human life stock of ours is not badly- 
 watered. Certainly we are charging 
 manj^ times more for it than our fathers 
 did in the sixties and we are not accus- 
 tomed to speak lightly of the offerings 
 of those stressful times. 
 
 I asked an intelligent woman why our 
 young men were not offering themselves 
 for their country, and she answered sim- 
 
 "^lothers don't want to lose their sons." 
 I remembered that the women of my 
 town in '61 led their sons to the door and, 
 holding back their tears, kissed them and 
 told them to go. And I fancied that the 
 life of a son was rather precious even in 
 those primitive days. 
 
 I asked a j'oung guardsman on duty at 
 an electric plant if he would like to go to 
 the front. I knew that young militiamen 
 used to hate that kind of service and were 
 always hoping to be sent to the front. He 
 shook his head and said he would rather 
 stay where he was for the next six years. 
 I asked him about his comrades and he as- 
 
108 What Did Jesus Teax^h About War? 
 
 sured me they were all alike. Nobody 
 wanted to go. 
 
 It was but a straw, but there are vast 
 fields filled with such straws. And straws 
 still have a way of showing which way the 
 wind is blowing. 
 
 Unless history is a lie there never was a 
 time when men counted their lives so dear 
 unto themselves as they do to-day. It was 
 not that the young guardsman loved his 
 country less: it only meant that he loved 
 his life more. 
 
 There is a crumb of comfort in the re- 
 flection that we are still heroes in our 
 childhood. A little fellow told me yester- 
 day that he dreamed the other night that 
 he was trying to make his way with his 
 baby sister between the British and Ger- 
 man trenches in a battle, when he saw a 
 cannon ball coming straight toward her. 
 
 "What did you do?" I asked. He 
 laughed. "Oh," he said, a little sheep- 
 ishly, "I jumped in front of her, and it 
 knocked me down; but I got up and got 
 her out all riffht." . . . 
 
 '»' 
 
 Indifference to human life has always 
 
The Value of Human Life 109 
 
 been the curse of the non-Christian 
 world. Even the modern Japanese will 
 risk his life to rescue a fifty-cent picture 
 of his emperor from a burning building. 
 Civilization never got anywhere except 
 on the surface until the price of human life 
 began to rise. But in the last hundred 
 years the pendulum — if I may change the 
 figure — has swung to the other extreme. 
 Here in America we moderns have put the 
 price of life as far above its actual value 
 as the heathen ever put it below. Time 
 and again in the last two or three years I 
 have seen it raised above everything else 
 in the world. I have known women to 
 plead for higher wages for shop girls so 
 that they would not have to sell their vir- 
 tue in order to live. "Somewhere in 
 America" an audience of women fren- 
 ziedly applauded a girl who declared that 
 she would justify any girl in selling her 
 virtue to provide bread for her family. 
 I have seen the price of life shamelessly 
 raised above honor, above right, above 
 justice, above sacrifice, above patriotism, 
 above every high and holy obligation. We 
 have used "Safety first" to smother out 
 
110 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 a high moral impulse, and the next mo- 
 ment piously cursed our enemies for put- 
 ting military necessity before the obliga- 
 tions of humanity. Ever since the dis- 
 covery of ether we have been running 
 from pain and heat and cold and wind 
 and rain, and inventing headache reme- 
 dies, and making easy-chairs easier, and 
 turning our homes into padded kiddy- 
 coops; and the pampering and coddling 
 business has gone on until we have come 
 to feel that this precious little spark in us 
 that we call life is of more importance to 
 the world than God himself. . . . 
 
 Undoubtedly Jesus set high value upon 
 human life. All life, he taught, was 
 precious in the eyes of God. Not a spar- 
 row falleth to the ground without our 
 Father. The preservation of our hves is 
 so important to him that we need suffer 
 no anxiety about them: vre only need to 
 do our best and leave the rest to him. The 
 Ufe is more than meat and the body than 
 raiment. He was concerned not only 
 about life but about health: he wanted 
 
The Value of Human Life 111 
 
 men to be fully alive that they might al- 
 ways live at their best. 
 
 But the value which Jesus set upon life 
 was spiritual, not material. He looked 
 at the present life as a high and sacred 
 opportunitj^ It was the chance which 
 the Father gave to every human being to 
 achieve the divine destiny of manhood; 
 to find his way into the kingdom of God 
 and live forever; to share in God's pur- 
 pose for mankind, and to help his fellow 
 men to achieve their divine destiny also. 
 
 I can find no evidence that he valued 
 human life in any other way. A man's 
 life was valuable just in proportion to 
 the use he was making of it or was going 
 to make of it. If he was not doing any- 
 thing with it at all its value was only 
 prospective. If he w^as not going to do 
 anything with it at all it was worth no 
 more than a barren figtree. A cumberer 
 of the ground is only worth its weight in 
 firewood minus the cost of cutting it 
 down and cutting it up. 
 
 But in the eyes of Jesus no life was 
 anything like as precious as the world has 
 come to regard men's lives in our day. 
 
112 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 A man might easily value liis hfe too 
 highly. The man who thinks that his 
 Hfe is so valuable that he must give up 
 everything else to save it will find at the 
 end that he must give up everything: he 
 has nothing left — not even life itself. "He 
 that findeth his life shall lose it." If I 
 try to save my life at the cost of right, 
 justice, virtue, truth, manhood, the friend- 
 ship of God, I shall pay more for it than 
 it is worth and even then I shall fail to get 
 it. A few years of physical existence that 
 will come to me out of the bargain will 
 not be life. 
 
 Highly as Jesus valued life in this 
 world as an opportunity, he did not value 
 it at all when placed in the scales over 
 against any of the things which make for 
 life eternal. When it comes to deciding 
 between these things and life a true man 
 must choose to die. At such a time a 
 man must lose his life if he would save it. 
 
 In other words Jesus looked at life just 
 as every man who has reached the full 
 stature of spiritual manhood looks at it 
 today. In the eyes of every human being 
 who has achieved spiritual manhood the 
 
The Value of Human Life 113 
 
 value of life is relative. If you hold up 
 such a man on the road and demand his 
 money or his life he may give you his 
 monej^; but if you demand his life or his 
 honor, his life or his manhood, his life or 
 his allegiance to Christ or to truth or to 
 his sacred vows or to humanity or to his 
 country, he will hand over his life. And 
 he will do it not as a suicide or a coward, 
 but as one to whom God has given his 
 own vision and who can therefore see 
 things in their true proportion. 
 
 It is plain, then, that when a Christian 
 is held up and compelled to decide be- 
 tween his life and his allegiance to Christ 
 or to humanity or to his country, he must 
 decide not in the darkness of the crazing 
 horrors of war, but in the light that comes 
 from the face of Christ. So long as Jesus 
 could go forward in his work and pre- 
 serve his life without surrendering or 
 compromising his honor, his manhood, his 
 teachings, his allegiance to the Father, he 
 went on with liis work and he took care of 
 his life. Time and again he saved himself 
 from the mob. But when the time came 
 that he had to choose between these 
 
114 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 things and his hfe, when his enemies 
 reached the point where they could say- 
 that he must either surrender or die, he 
 set his face as a flint and went calmly 
 forward to his death. 
 
 It was in the same spirit that his serv- 
 ant Paul went forward, whether to life or 
 to death. 
 
 "Behold I go bound in the spirit unto 
 Jerusalem, not knowing the things that 
 shall befall me there. . . . But I hold not 
 my life of any account as dear unto my- 
 self, so that I may accomplish my course." 
 
 The value of life, I have said, is rela- 
 tive. There are times when it is better 
 to die than to live. There are times when 
 life is not worth fighting for. There are 
 other times when life is worth so much 
 that we might give our own lives for it. 
 If my child falls into the river my valua- 
 tion of his life instantly goes up, and my 
 valuation of my own life instantly goes 
 down. If I stand on the river bank and 
 watch my own child drown my own life 
 will not be worth a fig. 
 
 Pacifism run out to its logical end will 
 bid me stay on the river bank. I am a 
 
The Value of Human Life 115 
 
 poor swimmer and my life is more pre- 
 cious than the child's. Reason will bid 
 me stay also. How foolish to throw my 
 life away and leave my other children 
 starve ! But if there is a spark of the life 
 of the spirit in my heart — if there is a 
 trace of the image of God there — I am 
 going to plunge in. 
 
 The argument for the sacredness of 
 human life undoubtedly condemns every 
 unnecessary death in war, but so long as 
 men are called to risk their lives for things 
 that are more precious than life it is not 
 a condemnation of war in itself. Nor is 
 it a warning for Christians never to have 
 any part in any war under any circum- 
 stances. It only warns them not to plunge 
 into war in a spirit that is not in harmony 
 with the Lord of Life. The thing that 
 makes one blush for shame at the thought 
 of the part that Christians have had in 
 war is not that they have fought, but that 
 they have usually fought like heathen. 
 
X 
 
 WHAT WAS CHRIST'S IDEA 
 OF PEACE? 
 
 WHAT is this white dove our 
 hearts are longing for? Is it a 
 heaven-born, hving thing ever 
 flying above our heads, but ever ready to 
 settle down upon such as seek it with up- 
 right hearts, or is it an expensive but quite 
 uninspiring piece of taxidermy that can 
 be bought by anybody who has the cash 
 to pay for it? 
 
 I wish this generation could be per- 
 suaded to sit down with its Bible and do 
 a bit of clear, honest thinking on this 
 point. I am sure we shall never get the 
 tangle out of our war question until we 
 have gotten it out of this peace question. 
 
 Here are these wonderful visions of the 
 old Hebrew prophets. Here is a picture 
 of a peace that flows like a river. Is that 
 the kind of peace we are looking for? 
 
 There is a peace that flows like a river, 
 
 116 
 
Christ's Idea of Peace 117 
 
 and there is a peace that stands still like 
 a stagnant millpond and smells to heaven. 
 
 Here is a vision of a glorious day com- 
 ing when "they shall sit every man under 
 his vine and under his figtree, and none 
 shall make them afraid." Certainly this 
 looks very much like the peace many of us 
 are looking for today. It is enough to 
 make the mouth of Big Business water to 
 think of a glad day coming when every 
 man will sit at his own office desk and 
 work out his own schemes and none — not 
 even the war gods of Europe, nor the 
 money gods of Wall Street, nor the dema- 
 gogues of Congress, nor the autocrats of 
 labor, nor those pesky, omnipresent blood- 
 hounds of the city editor, nor the gum- 
 shoes of the Department of Justice — shall 
 make him afraid. But is this the vision 
 that Micah saw? What was it that 
 Micah saw? 
 
 "But in the latter days it shall come to 
 pass, that the mountain of Jehovah's 
 house shall be established on the top of 
 the mountains, and it shall be exalted 
 above the hills; and peoples shall flow 
 unto it. And many nations shall go and 
 
118 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 say, Come ye, and let us go up to the 
 mountain of Jehovah, and to the house of 
 the God of Jacob; and he will teach of 
 his ways, and we will walk in his paths 
 . . . and he will judge between many 
 peoples." * 
 
 Is that the peace America is longing 
 for today? Is that the peace the profes- 
 sional pacifist is holding out to us — the 
 peace that comes to those who sit at His 
 feet and walk in his ways and look to him 
 as their judge? Is Ajnerica ready to sit 
 at his feet, or is it only looking for a 
 chance to sit securely under its own vine 
 and figtree? 
 
 Here is another thrilling vision — a 
 vision of a time coming when "the wolf 
 shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard 
 shall lie down Avith the kid; and the calf 
 and the young lion and the fatling to- 
 gether: and a little child shall lead them." 
 Is this the peace we are looking for? No 
 doubt we should all like to see the time 
 come in America when, as I have said 
 elsewhere,! the poor man could safely 
 
 *Micah 4: 1-3. 
 
 t Our Troublesome Religious Questions, p. 178 {Retell). 
 
Christ's Idea of Peace 119 
 
 dwell with the money-lender and the little 
 manufacturer could lie down with the big 
 trust, and the innocent human calves 
 could trust themselves in the hands of 
 their representatives in Congress. But 
 what must happen to bring in that happy 
 day? Look at the picture again. Did 
 you notice that the lion was eating straw 
 Hke the ox? Would a lion eat straw like 
 an ox unless he had undergone a change 
 of heart? And is that the kind of peace 
 we want — a peace that will come not 
 from a change of our international laws 
 but from a change of heart? 
 
 But let us come to the teachings of 
 Jesus. Here is Jesus magnifying peace. 
 "Blessed are the peacemakers." Here is 
 Jesus sjDcaking peace — to the winds, to 
 the troubled sea, to the troubled hearts of 
 men. Here is Jesus promising peace. 
 "My peace give I unto you." Is this 
 the peace we are longing for? Is it be- 
 cause we are hungr}'' for the peace which 
 Jesus gives that we are fighting war, or 
 is it only because we are hungry for that 
 outward quiet, that freedom from inter- 
 ruption and disturbance that enables us 
 
120 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 to pursue our own selfish material ends 
 in security and with physical and mental 
 comfort? 
 
 We might as well be honest with our- 
 selves. The world is hating war today, 
 not because it is craving for the peace 
 that Jesus promised for its eternal wel- 
 fare, but because it is craving the peace 
 it has promised itself for its own present 
 material comfort. All the pious drivel 
 of the professional pacifist cannot hide 
 this fact. We may talk as fervently as 
 we please of the love we should have for 
 our fellow men, but so long as millions of 
 our fellow men are under the heel of the 
 oppressor and have no chance to achieve 
 their divine destiny, the love we should 
 have for them will lead to war rather than 
 peace. Not to hate, not to revenge, 
 not to greed, not to crime, not to 
 unnecessary violence, but to war — to 
 the earnest use of such force, whether 
 moral, intellectual or physical as may 
 be necessary to break the grip of the 
 oppressor, to hold back savagery, to lift 
 the oppressed to their feet and give them 
 a chance. The thing that holds back a 
 
Christ's Idea of Peace 121 
 
 people from war when matters have come 
 to such a pass that it cannot keep back 
 without losing its manhood and ignoring 
 every high moral obligation, is not love of 
 peace, nor love for the God of peace, nor 
 love for one's fellow men, but love of self. 
 We may plead for peace in the name of 
 Jesus and humanity until we have per- 
 suaded ourselves that it is because of our 
 love for Jesus and humanity that we want 
 it, but the fact remains that the peace 
 wliich the American people as a people 
 have had their hearts set upon for the last 
 three years is a peace that Jesus would 
 despise and a peace that would work hu- 
 manity's ruin. 
 
 The only peace that heaven ever of- 
 fered to men either through Judaism or 
 Christianity, either through Isaiah or 
 Christ, is the peace that flows from 
 righteousness: not the harmony that 
 comes from falling in with things as they 
 are for the sake of quiet, but the harmony 
 that comes from falling in with the will 
 of God. Such a peace comes to every 
 man who is rescued from the depths of 
 animalism, where self rules, and lifted to 
 
122 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 the high plateaus of the kingdom of God, 
 where men can keep step in perfect har- 
 mony with God as their Father, and 
 where they can walk in j)erfect harmony 
 shoulder to shoulder with one and another 
 as brothers. That alone secures the peace 
 of God which passeth understanding. 
 The thing that has been so loudly mag- 
 nified in America of late as peace — the 
 thing we get by surrender or compromise, 
 by sacrificing our manhood, by consenting 
 to the rule of tyrants, by hiding our eyes 
 to the chains which bind our fellow men, 
 by ignoring right and justice and truth 
 and all our highest obligations to God and 
 humanity — that thing is not peace at all. 
 It is a monstrous abortion born of our 
 own selfish hearts; a worthless imitation; 
 at best a cowardly armistice which only 
 serves as a breathing spell between wars. 
 It was that wretched make-believe which 
 Jesus had in mind when he declared that 
 the Son of man came not to send peace, 
 but a sword. . . . 
 
 Let me see if I can put what I have 
 been trying to say in a picture. 
 
Christ's Idea of Peace 123 
 
 Jesus comes to our troubled hearts as 
 he came to his disciples that dark stormy 
 night walking u^jon the water — the thing, 
 by the way, which they were most afraid 
 of. When we receive him into our ship 
 the winds immediately cease and a great 
 calm fills our hearts. But the next mo- 
 ment we become conscious of a situation 
 that must have attention. The horror of 
 the storm is gone and we have ceased to 
 tremble and a sweet, holy calm broods 
 over all; but 
 
 Well, if things were not right in my 
 home and the Master should come to 
 spend awhile with me, something would 
 happen — something besides the passing of 
 storms, I am sure. I know that if a 
 storm was raging in my heart at the time 
 it would instantly pass. All the horror of 
 it would i^ass and in its place would come 
 an ineffable peace. But that would not 
 be all. The next moment as I stood look- 
 ing into his face I would think of some- 
 thing, and I would have to ask him to take 
 a seat and excuse me for a little while. 
 And I would hurry out and proceed to 
 set the house to rights. I would hide or 
 
-i 
 
 124 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 burn everything I did not want him to 
 see. If anything was going on in any 
 part of the house which I knew to be con- 
 trary to his will I would stop it. If I 
 could not stop it with my tongue or my 
 moral force I would stop it with a hickory 
 switch. Nothing should be allowed in my 
 home that I would be ashamed for him to 
 see. If I had a tyrant for a son and he 
 had jumped on his younger brother and 
 bound him hand and foot with a rope and 
 thrown him into the cellar, that matter 
 would have to be righted even if I had to 
 wear out a dozen hickory switches. If I 
 had a gambling brother who was at his 
 game with a friend in his room upstairs 
 he would have to put up his game or leave 
 the house. If anybody from garret to 
 cellar was oppressing anybody else he 
 would have to stop, whatever it might cost 
 me to stop him. By the time I got 
 through I think I would understand what 
 the Master meant when he said that he 
 came not to send peace but a sword. 
 
 Setting things to rights to harmonize 
 with Jesus means war. 
 
 The Master did indeed come to send 
 
Christ's Idea of Peace 125 
 
 peace, but not the kind of peace that 
 comes from acquiescence in the existing 
 status when the existing status happens to 
 be wrong. When he stepped aboard the 
 little storm-bound ship that dark night 
 the storm ceased in the hearts of his disci- 
 ples as well as in the sea. Everything that 
 came from the Master that night — the 
 glance of his eye, the sound of his voice — 
 was saying "Peace"! But if as he came 
 aboard he had glanced around and found 
 Judas Iscariot about to club John over 
 the head, I fancy he would not have been 
 content to sit down and acquiesce in the 
 existing status without a word. And when 
 he spoke I fancy he would not have said, 
 "Anything for the sake of peace." 
 
XI 
 
 WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY 
 TODAY? 
 
 IN the light of the teachings of Jesus 
 it is plain that we must judge a 
 war not by the evils which attend it 
 but by the purpose and spirit which run 
 through it. This, of course, is a difficult 
 task. Often — usually, perhaps — it is an 
 impossible task. It is easy under this rule 
 to pass upon war in the abstract. We can 
 say that when men go to war under the 
 compulsion of a high moral appeal or a 
 high moral necessity, remembering their 
 obligations to God as their Father and to 
 all men as their brothers, they are blame- 
 less; and that when they go under the 
 promptings of selfishness, greed, hate, am- 
 bition, pride, or any other ignoble impulse, 
 the blood of their brothers is upon them. 
 And it is quite possible to conceive of cir- 
 
 126 
 
What Would Jesus Say Today? 127 
 
 cumstances in which we might pass upon 
 war in the concrete. No one who has any 
 spiritual vision at all would have any diffi- 
 culty in passing upon my little fictional 
 war for the rescue of Jones's pretty wife 
 and habies. In that case there were only 
 a few of us and all were of one mind and 
 one heart. But such a war is not possible 
 on a large scale. Nowhere in the world 
 can you get together a million men in 
 whose hearts selfishness has given way 
 to a high and holy purpose. In most 
 wars there is such a mixture of motives 
 that it is almost imj^ossible for the wisest 
 of men to come to any sort of a verdict. 
 A nation sometimes begins a war with 
 high motives and ends it with low motives, 
 and in such a case there is usually a vast 
 maze of varying motives lying between 
 which no mind can untangle. Even a 
 slight turn in my little fictional war might 
 have made it an intricate puzzle. Sup- 
 pose while we were charging the gang at 
 Jones's house I had discovered that the 
 leader was the brute who knocked me 
 down one night in the road and robbed me, 
 and suppose in that instant a savage de- 
 
128 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 sire for revenge had surged up in my 
 bosom and I had shot him down under 
 that brutal impulse instead of under the 
 divine compulsion of a high moral neces- 
 sity. And suppose my neighbor Smith 
 had discovered an enemy also and had fol- 
 lowed my example. Would we have re- 
 membered it as a high and holy war, or 
 would we have tried to forget it as a 
 carnival of crime ? Or would we have had 
 to content ourselves with a Scotch verdict? 
 
 Good people are asking what Jesus 
 would do if he were among us today. 
 One thing I am sure he would not do. 
 He would not indulge in wholesale com- 
 mendation on the one hand or wholesale 
 denunciation on the other. No doubt his 
 mind could untangle the vast maze of mo- 
 tives that run through it all, but he would 
 see too many good motives to say that it 
 was altogether bad and certainly he would 
 see too many bad motives to say that it 
 was altogether good. I am not sure that 
 he would undertake to pass upon the war 
 as a whole at all. 
 
 But I am sure he would not remain 
 silent. We might conceive of him as be- 
 
What Would Jesus Say Today? 129 
 
 ing so overcome by grief and indignation 
 for a time that he could not speak, but 
 he would not remain silent. He would not 
 decline to be quoted. 
 
 Knowing him as we do, I am sure his 
 first impulse would be an impulse of pity. 
 His heart would go out with infinite com- 
 passion for all who need it. And that 
 would probably cover us all. But it would 
 be a sane compassion. He would not give 
 most of his pity to those who were in the 
 wrong simply because they happened to 
 be harder pressed than their enemies. 
 There is nothing morbid in the compas- 
 sion of Jesus. He would find much to 
 weep over on both sides, but I cannot con- 
 ceive that his sympathy would find ex- 
 pression in baskets of flowers for the op- 
 pressor, or that he would keep back a part 
 of the pity he had intended for Belgium 
 because the Belgians in their hour of trial 
 failed to show a proper regard for the 
 comfort of their invaders. 
 
 And I am sure that as he gazed through 
 his tears there would presently come up 
 from the depth of his soul a mighty burst 
 of indignation. I can hear him now say- 
 
130 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 ing to his followers: "How long shall I 
 be with you: how long shall I suffer you?" 
 Nearly two thousand years have passed 
 since he charged his people with the busi- 
 ness of rescuing human beings from the 
 depths of animalism and lifting them to 
 the heights of manhood in the kingdom of 
 God; and we have hardly made a begin- 
 ning. Only here and there have we risen 
 to our duty and broken off the chains of 
 savagery, ignorance and tyranny with 
 which our neighbors were bound and 
 given them a chance to stand on their feet. 
 Nearly two thousand years have passed 
 since he charged us with the business of 
 extending his kingdom throughout the 
 world, and although today v/e have num- 
 bers and strength sufficient to accomplish 
 almost anything for him that human 
 power can accomplish, we still lack the 
 courage to use our power to advance his 
 will in any high place under the sun. 
 Worldly churches have used their power 
 to advance their own interests, but that 
 is another matter. Never in all these 
 years have Christ's people united to de- 
 mand of the powers that be that nations 
 
What Would Jesus Say Today? 131 
 
 shall be run in accordance with his moral 
 demands. Never have the Christian 
 forces of the world mobilized to deliver 
 the oppressed, to drive tyranny out of 
 power, to demand of the governments of 
 the earth that every being made in the 
 image of God shall have a chance to 
 achieve his divine destiny. 
 
 I am also sure that his indignation 
 would be as a blasting wind upon the 
 spirits of all men who have waged this 
 war for selfish motives and especially upon 
 those who have shed blood for such mo- 
 tives in the name of God or under pre- 
 tense of being divinely led. He would 
 rebuke these men as terribly as he rebuked 
 the hypocrites of old. And he would not 
 stop with them. He would turn to the 
 men who have fought with hate in their 
 hearts, who have struck back not for the 
 right but for revenge, who have used 
 measures of retaliation for vengeance' 
 sake; and his flaming eyes would sweep 
 them out of his following as desecrators 
 of his Father's house. 
 
 What would he say to the men in the 
 trenches? For those who are there under 
 
132 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 the compulsion of motives which no man 
 would blush to own at his feet, certainly 
 he would have no word that was not heart- 
 ening or uplifting. In the light of his 
 teaching it would not seem strange if he 
 should counsel some men to go home, but 
 they would be men who had denied their 
 manhood, their country and their God by 
 taking up arms from ignoble motives. In 
 other words they would be men who had 
 not gone to war at all, but had only gone 
 into the business of human butchery for 
 gain. 
 
 As he went hither and thither reliev- 
 ing the suffering and cheering the true- 
 hearted there would no doubt fall from 
 his lips many words of commendation, 
 but they would not be for good marks- 
 manship or mere physical bravery: they 
 would be for those who kept their gaze 
 upon the star of sacrifice and upon their 
 high calling as children of the Father and 
 brothers of men, and for those who while 
 trembling in body never failed to stand 
 steady and true in spirit. Also he would 
 soothe the spirit of the dying Jew as well 
 as the djring Christian ; and if one pointed 
 
What Would Jesus Say Today? 1S3 
 
 out to him that the Jewish rabbi who 
 snatched a crucifix from an Irish soldier 
 and held it up before the eyes of a dying 
 Catholic he would say — I am sure that he 
 would say — "He that is not against us is 
 for us." 
 
 And I am sure of one thing more. I 
 am sure his spirit would burn with indig- 
 nation at the sight of men — whether kings, 
 generals or common soldiers — coolly lay- 
 ing aside moral obligation as a mere scrap 
 of paper on the ground of military neces- 
 sity. . . . 
 
 What would he say to America? 
 
 Nothing. He does not know America. 
 At least he does not know the convenient 
 fiction which so many of us call by that 
 name and which warms us with a patriotic 
 glow only when we imagine that we have 
 shifted our obligations upon its shoulders. 
 But he would have somewhat to say to us 
 Americans. 
 
 Perhaps he would say, for one thing, 
 "These ye ought to have done, and not to 
 have left the other undone." 
 
 I do not think he would be severe upon 
 
134 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 us for not going to our task until the 
 eleventh hour, for he once told a very 
 encouraging story for people who for one 
 reason or another do not go to their task 
 until that hour. But I think he would 
 give us a word of warning. He would 
 remind us that we have an opportunity 
 to show whether we are his true followers 
 or only his distant admirers. He would 
 tell us that if we are going to the front 
 under the compulsion of a high moral ap- 
 peal or a high moral necessity his blessing 
 will go with us, but that we had better 
 take care to keep our hearts sacred to this 
 high motive to the end. He would tell us 
 that if we have high moral obligations to 
 keep us at home, still we are brethren and 
 each of us must do his "bit." We can not 
 refuse to help the cause of humanity in 
 France because we are kept at home any 
 more than we can refuse to help extend 
 Christ's kingdom in China because we are 
 kept at home. And perhaps he would go 
 further. Perhaps he would tell us that 
 while it is ignoble for a man to forsake the 
 loved ones who are dependent upon him 
 and go to the front without compulsion, 
 
What Would Jesus Say Today? 135 
 
 under pretense of patriotism, it is equally 
 ignoble for him to stay at home for the 
 sake of greed under any pretense what- 
 soever. 
 
XII 
 
 WHAT SHOULD BE THE 
 
 CHRISTIAN'S ATTITUDE 
 
 TOWARD WAR? 
 
 I AM glad that the world has at last 
 come to hate war. Not that I think 
 it means as much as we are just now 
 taking it to mean. Certainly it does not 
 mean that we have come to love peace. I 
 can see no sign that the world is getting 
 very hungry for real peace. It wants 
 freedom from disturbance, but that does 
 not necessarily mean more than it wants 
 to get rid of things that rack men's nerves 
 and destroy their comfort and imperil 
 their lives and interfere with their busi- 
 ness. It is weary of noise, but I do not 
 think it is hungry for the quiet of the 
 fields in the cool of the evening. It is 
 sick and tired of interruptions, but it is 
 not longing for an opportunity to sit by 
 the twilight fire alone. 
 
 136 
 
The Christian Attitude Toward War 137 
 
 Still it means something. Hating war 
 does not insure peace, but it may bring 
 about conditions in which it will be easier 
 to awaken in men's hearts a yearning for 
 real peace and a real willingness to fall 
 in with the mind of the Prince of Peace. 
 I know there are good people who imag- 
 ine that this rising hatred of war is itself 
 proof that we have already fallen in with 
 that mind ; but Jesus was not a mere hater 
 of war. A coward would excel him as a 
 hater of war. In the light of his teachings 
 I cannot conceive of him as standing be- 
 fore an Ajnerican audience today and 
 affirming that war is such a horrible thing 
 that we must immediately banish it from 
 the world regardless of conditions or con- 
 sequences. Jesus was never blind to con- 
 ditions. Nor did he have anything in his 
 spirit in common with the academic hero 
 of our day whose favorite exhibition of 
 courage is a fine recklessness of conse- 
 quences where other people are concerned. 
 You could not get him to think of himself, 
 but where other people were concerned he 
 bad to think. And he thought of conse- 
 quences. I am sure he would not ask me 
 
138 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 to go through a forest where hons abound 
 without taking my gun. Nor would he 
 ask me to sho^v my love for a lawless 
 neighbor by intrusting my money to his 
 keeping or by confiding to him that I had 
 decided to give away my pistol and sleep 
 with my windows open. Jesus would pre- 
 fer that I defer my trip among lions with- 
 out a gun until that happy day when a 
 little child shall lead them, and he would 
 not have me relax my precaution against 
 my lawless neighbor until he had under- 
 gone a like change of heart. 
 
 But would not Jesus say that war is a 
 horrible thing? Undoubtedly. But let us 
 look into his face. Often I see him going 
 about in the character of the Good Physi- 
 cian. How would a good and wise plwsi- 
 cian probably think of war? I can easily 
 imagine that if Jesus should come among 
 us today he ^vould talk about war as a 
 good and wise physician would talk about 
 a horrible last-resort operation that is per- 
 formed in rare cases at a hospital. War 
 at best, he would say, is too terrible to 
 think of except in rare cases and then 
 only as a last resort ; and if we are driven 
 
The Christian Attitude Toward War 139 
 
 to it we must go to our task in the same 
 spirit that prompts a conscientious Chris- 
 tian surgeon to undertake a terrible 
 operation as a last resort. . . . 
 
 I cannot see how one can stand in the 
 light of the teachings of Jesus and insist 
 that no sort of war is ever necessary under 
 any circumstances. So long as it is our 
 duty to cooperate with Christ in rescuing 
 human beings from the slavery of sin, 
 ignorance and tyranny, so long must we 
 be at war with sin, ignorance and tyranny ; 
 and so long as this war goes on we shall 
 be in danger of being driven to the use 
 of physical force. Among these enemies 
 are some whom we can occasionally over- 
 whelm by intellectual force; others by 
 spiritual force; but there are others who 
 are so savage that nothing but a material 
 weapon can get beneath their skin; and 
 so long as such enemies of God and hu- 
 manity remain in the world all the power 
 in the world cannot insure its permanent 
 freedom from physical war. 
 
 On the other hand it is just as true that 
 war is only necessary in very rare cases. 
 
140 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 If I have a violent next-door neighbor it 
 is possible that the time may come when 
 it will be necessary for the protection of 
 my loved ones or my other neighbors to 
 give him a sound thrashing. But how 
 many good and wise men ever found it 
 necessary to give their next-door neighbor 
 a sound thrashing? 
 
 If I were living as Jesus lived I would 
 have such moral force that I could dis- 
 arm any troublesome neighbor who was 
 not altogether savage without the use 
 of an ounce of physical force. And it is 
 not often that a man has a savage for 
 a next-door neighbor. Moreover, if I 
 were wise as well as good it is quite pos- 
 sible that I could so conduct myself that 
 even if I should have a savage for a neigh- 
 bor it might not be necessary to give him 
 a sound thrashing once in a lifetime. 
 
 So, if we Americans had been doing 
 our duty as Christians for the last hundred 
 years, if we had devoted half as much time 
 to our moral and spiritual development 
 as we have devoted to our material devel- 
 opment, if we had developed half as much 
 moral power as material power, it is quite 
 
The Christian Attitude Toward War 141 
 
 probable that we would have enough 
 moral power today to force good behavior 
 upon any troublesome nation that was not 
 altogether savage without firing a gun or 
 even calling for volunteers. Moreover if 
 we were wise as well as good it is quite 
 possible that we could so conduct our- 
 selves that even if we should have a sav- 
 age nation for a neighbor it might not be 
 necessary to give it a sound thrashing 
 once in its lifetime. 
 
 But all this only reduces the chances of 
 war to a minimum. It does not get rid of 
 the minimum. And it is not the part of 
 wisdom to ignore what we cannot get rid 
 of. We have got to take this minimum 
 into account. We have got to take these 
 rare cases into account. Now and then, 
 so long as savagery remains in the world, 
 all our moral force and all our wisdom 
 may prove insufficient, and we may have 
 to go to war as a last resort. 
 
 The important thing to remember just 
 here is that while we may be blameless if 
 we are driven into war we are not blame- 
 less if we drift into it. We have no n;!or'} 
 right to allow this nation to drift into war 
 
142 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 than a physician has to allow his patient 
 to drift into an operating hospital. The 
 physician who neglects his patient until 
 an operation becomes necessary is a crim- 
 inal, and where a people neglect condi- 
 tions until a war thereby becomes neces- 
 sary they are criminals. War is so ter- 
 rible a thing that no people can stand idly 
 by and see their nation drift into it and be 
 blameless. 
 
 This is, or ought to be, a very sore sub- 
 ject for modern Christians. In ancient 
 and medieval times nations plunged into 
 war. Nowadays they usually drift into 
 it. In primitive times our ancestors no 
 doubt got a lot of fun out of squabbhng 
 with their neighbors. But since the Good 
 Samaritan has been passing our way all 
 that is changed. We really feel nowadays 
 that a quarrel between neighbors is a ter- 
 rible thing. Yet quarrels between neigh- 
 bors have not ceased. We still have them, 
 mainly because when we lost the incentive 
 to fight our neighbors we fell into the 
 habit of drifting. It is the absence of a 
 strong incentive that makes men and na- 
 tions drift. 
 
The Christian Attitude Toward War 143 
 
 Of course we don't want to go back to 
 the old incentive either as individuals or as 
 nations. That no doubt would stop our 
 perilous drifting, but it would take us back 
 to our old ways. What we need is an 
 incentive that will stop our drifting and 
 take us forward to better ways. . . . 
 
 Apparently the first incentive to war 
 was the sheer fun of fighting. It is hard 
 to reahze that this incentive lasted until 
 the beginning of our modern civilization. 
 But it passed at last. One still knows a 
 few people who dearly love a "scrap," 
 but no nation now goes to w^ar for the 
 sheer fun of it. 
 
 The next incentive is hate. That has 
 not yet passed, but it is passing. The 
 modern man is not averse to hating his 
 neighbor, but he is of a practical turn and 
 he calculates that he can no longer afford 
 to pay the price. Usually it takes some- 
 thing more than hate alone to plunge a 
 modern nation into war. 
 
 After hate came greed — greed for gain 
 or glory or both. This undoubtedly is the 
 dominant incentive of our own time, 
 and thus far it shows little sign of passing. 
 
144 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 Naturally it would be expected to outlive 
 hate, but just now it is being pressed by 
 another incentive — love. I am not sure 
 that any nation has ever waged war for 
 love alone — not even for love of country; 
 but unquestionably it has been playing an 
 ever-increasing part in modern wars. The 
 present war may be the most terrible war 
 the world ever saw ; but it is not the worst. 
 It is far from being the worst. Even 
 its horrifying savagery is not to be com- 
 pared with the savagery of ancient war- 
 fare. We talk of the rivers of blood that 
 are flowing through Europe : we lose sight 
 of the far deeper and broader rivers of 
 compassion that are flowing round the 
 world. If there is more hate, there is more 
 love. If there is more greed, there is more 
 liberalitj^ If there is more selfishness, 
 there is more sacrifice. It is not because 
 our wars have been so bloody that we feel 
 like hiding our faces for shame: it is be- 
 cause they have been so horribly selfish. 
 We cannot forget that while we have 
 always been quick to spring to our guns 
 at the first sign of mobilization on the 
 border, we have never found it diflicult 
 
The Christian Attitude Toward War 145 
 
 to sit still and smoke our cigarettes in 
 peace while tyrants were grinding whole 
 peoples to pulp beneath their heels. We 
 cannot forget that while we Christians 
 have jumped at every chance to fight for 
 our own freedom, we have had several 
 chances to wage righteous wars for the 
 oppressed Jew and missed them all. We 
 cannot forget that while Armenia was 
 bleeding we only laid aside our cigarettes 
 long enough to adopt resolutions of sym- 
 pathy and pass around the hat. 
 
XIII 
 
 HOW FAR SHOULD A 
 CHRISTIAN GO? 
 
 IT is easy to ask confusing questions 
 about war. For example: Should 
 a Christian go with his country into 
 an unjust or unnecessary war? But 
 questions of this sort are not so difficult 
 as they usually appear. It all depends 
 upon the point of view. When we look 
 at America out of our own selfish hearts 
 we usually see nothing but a huge organi- 
 zation quite apart from ourselves which 
 we are at liberty to step into or out of at 
 will. From this point of view it is easy 
 to see that a Christian should not follow 
 his country into an unjust or unnecessary 
 war, and for a moment everything is clear ; 
 but the next moment it occurs to us that 
 parting with one's country at the forks of 
 the road is not an easy matter; and then 
 all is confusion. It is as impossible to 
 get a clear vision of a question of duty 
 
How Far Should a Christian Go? 147 
 
 as to war from a selfish point of view as 
 it is to get a clear vision of a question of 
 duty about anything else from a selfish 
 point of view. 
 
 But there is another point of view. In 
 the light of the teachings of Jesus 
 America does not appear as a huge organ- 
 ization which one is at liberty to step into 
 or out of at will. Clearly Jesus had no 
 conception of a nation as a machine or 
 corporation. I cannot conceive of him as 
 thinking of a nation as anything more or 
 less than a body of individuals bound to- 
 gether by the bonds of brotherhood. I 
 have no doubt that he would recognize the 
 right of neighbors to bind themselves to- 
 gether with an extra bond — the bond that 
 ties a people into the separate bundle we 
 call a nation. Certainly my obligations 
 are stronger toward those whose fortunes 
 may be affected by my conduct — those 
 whom I have the power to help or hurt — 
 than toward tLose who are practically be- 
 yond my reach. If all this is true the 
 question whether I should go with my 
 country into an unjust or unnecessary 
 war resolves itself into the question 
 
148 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 whether I shall stand by my brotherhood; 
 and in the light of the teachings of Jesus 
 such a question answers itself. Jesus does 
 not ask us to endorse the conduct of our 
 brothers, but he does ask us to stand by 
 them. It is folly to say that if I take 
 any part in an unjust war I thereby en- 
 dorse injustice. A loving mother will 
 stand by her criminal son to the end, but 
 no one thinks of saying that she thereby 
 endorses his crimes. 
 
 If I find that my family is drifting 
 into an unjust fight I must oppose it with 
 all the power I can command; but the 
 moment the fight begins the situation 
 changes, and my duty changes with it. 
 My family is now in peril and I cannot 
 forsake my loved ones in peril. Whether 
 they are in the wrong or not is no longer 
 the question : they are in peril and I must 
 stand by them. I cannot put on superior 
 airs and say that I am a member of the 
 world-family and I cannot afford to have 
 anything to do with petty neighborhood 
 squabbles: my family is in peril and I 
 must stand by my loved ones. I am not 
 going to help the enemy. I am not going 
 
riow Far Should a Christian Go? 149 
 
 simply to stand by and see that there is 
 fair play. I am going to stand by and 
 fight : and I am going to fight for my own 
 people. 
 
 And as a member of the great Ameri- 
 can family my duty is just as plain. In 
 the light of the teachings of Jesus it is 
 impossible for me to conceive that it was 
 wrong for America to enter the Great 
 War. Matters had come to such a pass 
 that it would have been a crime to stay 
 out. To stay out would have been to vio- 
 late our conscience; to shut our ears to a 
 high moral appeal; to put our own com- 
 fort before every moral obligation just as 
 the enemy had put military necessity be- 
 fore every moral obligation. But if Amer- 
 ica had been in the wrong, our duty as 
 members of the great American family 
 would have been just as plain. If my 
 country should drift or blunder into an 
 unjust war it is my duty as a Christian 
 to act as a member of the family. I will 
 not fight for the purpose of helping my 
 country in an unjust cause, but I will 
 fight all the same. I will fight to save my 
 country. I will not forsake my country 
 
150 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 in its hour of peril. I will no more at- 
 tempt to evade my duty to my country 
 by insisting that I am a world patriot and 
 therefore my duty is to the world as a 
 whole, than I will attempt to evade my 
 duty to my family by insisting that I be- 
 long to the world-family and that there- 
 fore my duty is to the world-family as 
 a whole. 
 
 The man v>'ho says he is too broad to 
 love his own country better than other 
 people's countries probably does not mean 
 that he is too broad to love his own wife 
 and children better than other i)eople's 
 wives and children, but that is what he 
 says. World-patriotism has a high and 
 virtuous sound, but it is only free-lovism 
 run to seed. It is simply an extreme way 
 of sajang that in matters of love there are 
 no boundary lines which one is bound to 
 respect. 
 
 But a Christian must not only stand by 
 his country in war. He must stand by his 
 Master. He must uphold and magnify 
 his will. He must insist that from begin- 
 ning to end everything that is done, 
 whether in America or "somewhere in 
 
How Far Should a Christian Go? 151 
 
 France," shall be done in harmony with 
 his teachings. 
 
 We American Christians must unite in 
 a mighty effort to fix the gaze of the na- 
 tion upon the highest star in sight and to 
 hold it back whenever it shows signs of 
 yielding to the impulses of selfishness or 
 sheer animalism. 
 
 We must turn the minds of the people 
 to God's great purpose for the race and 
 to their share in his plan to rescue human 
 beings from every bond that holds them 
 down and to give them a chance to achieve 
 their divine destiny as men in the kingdom 
 of God. 
 
 We must set our faces as a flint against 
 all greed and hate and demand with all 
 the force at our command that no eye 
 shall be taken for an eye or tooth for a 
 tooth. 
 
 We must remember and help America 
 to remember that God has made no pro- 
 vision for letting down the moral law to 
 meet the exigencies of war, and that 
 whether martial law is declared or not the/ 
 God of heaven and not that monster idol. 
 Military Necessity, is still God over all. 
 
152 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 We must insist that America has no 
 right to use any severer force or any more 
 force than is necessary to meet the highest 
 moral ends in accordance with God's 
 plans for the race, and that to go a step 
 further is to infringe u]Don the preroga- 
 tive of God himself. "Vengeance belong- 
 eth unto me: I will recompense," saith 
 the Lord. 
 
 We must insist that as a father must 
 not lay aside his fatherhood when he is 
 called to punish his son, so men must not 
 lay aside their brotherhood when they are 
 called out to fight their fellow men. A 
 true father does not punish his son with 
 glee or hate, but with a breaking heart. 
 
 We must guard the moral manhood of 
 the nation both at home and at tlie front. 
 We must place proper moral restraint 
 around our young men in the trenches and 
 give them every moral and religious op- 
 portunity; and we must stand ready to op- 
 pose every unworthy proposal that may 
 threaten to compromise or in any way 
 injure the manhood of the nation at home. 
 
 We must keep our house swept clean 
 in the sight of heaven. We must not do 
 
How Far Should a Christian Go? 153 
 
 our sweeping with the bhnds shut, as did 
 the old woman who insisted that when the 
 sun was shining in the room it raised such 
 a dust. 
 
 We must stoutly resist the popular 
 notion that the greater the amount of 
 bloodshed, the better. We must earnestly 
 insist that bloodless measures shall be used 
 wherever practicable, sternly set ourselves 
 against all cruelty and do everything that 
 human ingenuity and human compassion 
 can suggest for the amelioration of all the 
 horrors of war, both at the front and at 
 home. 
 
 We must hearten the fighters at the 
 front, comfort the grief-stricken at home, 
 use the opportunity which the presence of 
 death gives us to invite men to accept 
 eternal life, give ourselves to works of 
 relief and mercy, and cheer and inspire 
 the world by our example of unselfish and 
 loving service. 
 
 And we must pray. Of course we must 
 pray. We must pray for our enemies, 
 but not as hypocrites. We must pray for 
 ourselves, but not as greedy vultures. We 
 must pray for our country, not for mere 
 
154 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 success in arms but for its triumph in the 
 right. We must pray for peace, but as 
 sane men and women, not as enthusiasts, 
 remembering that our prayers will go no 
 farther than our hearts, and that though 
 we pray till doomsday we shall not re- 
 ceive the gift of real peace so long as we 
 insist upon putting our own wills and 
 plans in the way of the wills and plans of 
 the Prince of Peace, 
 
XIV 
 
 THE BUSINESS IMMEDIATELY 
 BEFORE US 
 
 WE had just begun to dream that 
 the world had gotten far 
 enough along to abolish war, 
 and we were seriously thinking of taking 
 our swords to the smith to be turned into 
 plowshares, when the awful shock came 
 and woke us up. After that we did not 
 know what to think, except that our 
 dreams were premature. That is, until 
 the other day. The other day we suc- 
 ceeded in working our way through chaos 
 to another conclusion. We decided that 
 after all is said and done we shall still 
 have use for our common sense — the kind 
 of sense that will not let you throw away 
 your gun while there are still fresh tracks 
 of wild beasts in the forest. Hereafter it 
 will take something more than the golden 
 
 155 
 
156 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 dreams of the professional pacifist to as- 
 sure us that there will never be another 
 war, or that it is worth while to hope for 
 a lasting peace so long as savagery and 
 tyranny are allowed to run loose in the 
 world. 
 
 I am glad that the war has done this 
 much for us. I am glad that we have 
 begun to realize that before peace can 
 come the savage and tyrant must go. I 
 am glad that we are at last convinced that 
 it is not the part of wisdom to cover a 
 slumbering volcano with roses and then sit 
 down on the roses. 
 
 Surely this is something to be thankful 
 for. 
 
 But it is not enough. What we need 
 to realize just now is that it is not the 
 part of wisdom to sit down at all. We 
 cannot abolish either savagery or tyranny 
 by ignoring it any more than by covering 
 it. There must be a change deep down at 
 the heart of things. 
 
 A lustful brute attempts to violate the 
 sanctity of a home, and because the en- 
 raged husband has the audacity to throw 
 himself in his way, jumps upon him and 
 
The Immediate Business Before Us 157 
 
 tears him to pieces. A pious ideahst might 
 insist that the only Christian way to deal 
 with such violent eruptions is to bid the 
 monster go in peace with the assurance 
 that his own home shall be accounted 
 doubly sacred; but to the ordinary mind 
 such a provision against future outbreaks 
 does not seem altogether adequate. 
 
 When the German war god, in his fury 
 at the Belgians for daring to throw their 
 bodies in the way of his savage purpose 
 to violate the sanctity of their homes, 
 sprang upon them and tore them to pieces, 
 there were idealists who suggested that 
 the only Christian course to pursue was to 
 bid the tyrant to go in peace with the 
 assurance that he should suffer no harm, 
 and that the sanctity of his own home 
 would be duly guarded; but somehow — 
 
 But, as our friends the enemy would 
 say, we have harped on that string long 
 enough. 
 
 All the promises of the pious idealists 
 to the contrary the world will never be 
 safe from such eruptions until there has 
 been a change deep down at the heart of 
 things, and we might as well come to the 
 
158 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 question that is immediately before us. 
 
 What can we do while waiting for this 
 
 ^ change deep down at the heart of things? 
 
 What can we do as a nation? 
 
 As I have said, in the light of the Mas- 
 ter's doctrine of individual responsibility 
 it seems clear that he expects a nation to 
 act exactly as the individuals who compose 
 it ought to act. I should have no difficulty 
 in deciding what course I should pursue 
 if I were surrounded by savage neighbors. 
 So long as savagery dominated the com- 
 munity my doctrine of "preparedness" 
 would have few limits. I would do my 
 best to live on friendly terms with all 
 men, but I should neglect no means to 
 prepare myself for the worst. I should 
 not refuse to fortify my home because, 
 forsooth, my wife was gentle and my chil- 
 dren harmless. At the same time I should 
 not stir up my next-door neighbor's bad 
 blood by flaunting my pre})aredness in his 
 face. I should not imagine that I could 
 hasten the day of peace and safety by 
 marching up and down my back yard 
 an hour every day with my best gun on 
 my shoulder and stopping now and then 
 
The Immediate Business Before Us 159 
 
 to point it at my neighbor's window. I 
 should not make faces at him or sneer at 
 his children or dare him to kick my dog. 
 
 But I should keep my gun loaded. I 
 should keep several guns loaded. 
 
 But the moment the community began 
 to settle down to civilized ways I should 
 begin to reduce my preparedness. I would 
 remember that preparedness, even when it 
 is not flaunted in the face of the enemy, is 
 never soothing, and that if I would en- 
 courage peace I must be willing to meet 
 it at least half way. And I should not 
 stop when I had reduced my armament 
 one half. As the community settled down 
 to civilized Avays I should go on selling off 
 my guns and munitions, and I should keep 
 on until one day when a mad dog came 
 around I would discover that I didn't 
 even have a superannuated pistol in the 
 house. 
 
 Is that all I would do? No. As a 
 Christian living in a community that was 
 gradually settling down to civilization I 
 should do my best to hasten the settling 
 down process. I should try by neighborly 
 ways to develop in the community a sense 
 
160 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 of neighborlmess. I should try to get peo- 
 ple into the habit of thinking of the com- 
 munity as a brotherhood. In a thousand 
 ways I should appeal to their slowly de- 
 veloping sense of moral manhood. I 
 should not be content to bring them to 
 a gentleman's agreement to live together 
 as gentlemen: I should try to transform 
 the community into a brotherhood — a 
 primitive brotherhood such as that which 
 exists among boys in every well-regulated 
 community. 
 
 Watch a gang of fairly civilized boys. 
 If a fellow gets out of humor and becomes 
 obstreperous he is at once given to un- 
 derstand that he must "be good" or he 
 will be put out of the game. If he re- 
 fuses to be good they not only put him 
 out of the game, but they warn him that 
 if he continues to give trouble he will get 
 a sound thrashing. And if he continues 
 to give trouble they are as good as their 
 word. But they don't go beyond their 
 word. They don't jump on his stomach 
 with their feet or grind their heels into 
 his face. As a rule they only use such 
 force as may be necessary to bring him 
 
The Immediate Business Before Us 161 
 
 to the point where one is ready to be 
 good. 
 
 Now a nation should act in the very 
 same way. If it is the duty of every 
 American who has a savage neighbor to 
 fortify himself to the extent of his peril 
 and no further, it is the duty of Ameriea 
 to fortify itself against such savage neigh- 
 bors as it may have to the extent of its 
 peril and no further. If it is the duty of 
 every American to try to bring his neigh- 
 bors together on a fraternal basis, it is 
 the duty of America to try to bring its 
 neighbors together on a like basis. If 
 our God-given sense of brotherly obliga- 
 tion demands that we should unite even 
 in boyhood to force the disturbers of our 
 peace to "be good" for the general good, 
 it demands that nations (which are essen- 
 tially brotherhoods ) shall combine to force 
 the disturbers of their peace to be good 
 for the general good. 
 
 But it is hardly worth while for nations 
 to try to get together on a brotherly basis 
 if the followers of Jesus are not going to 
 fall in with their Master's plan to get the 
 race together on a brotherly basis. And 
 
162 What Did Jesus Tesuch About War? 
 
 we are not going to fall in Avith this plan 
 until we have rid ourselves of some illu- 
 sions. We must at least get rid of this 
 great American illusion which is always 
 putting the cart before the horse and as- 
 suring us that if we will seek first the 
 peace of our selfish dreams "all these 
 things shall be added" unto us. We think 
 that if we can only get the peace we are 
 yearning for, brotherhood and all the 
 other beautiful things of the spirit will 
 come tumbling down from heaven into our 
 laps. But the peace we are yearning for 
 is not the peace that comes down from 
 heaven. What we really want is not peace 
 at all, but, as I have said, freedom from 
 disturbance. We want an uninterrupted 
 chance to make money and have a good 
 time. We don't want to sit down to our 
 cards at night with the unpleasant reflec- 
 tion that the game may be interrupted any 
 moment by a shrieking shell bursting 
 through the window and exploding at our 
 feet. We don't want any disagreeable ex- 
 periences. W^e don't want any zeppelins, 
 submarines, bloody bandages, scare heads 
 in the newspapers, calls to the front, extra 
 
The Immediate Business Before Us 163 
 
 taxes, nerve-racking explosions or the 
 sight of detached heads, arms and legs fly- 
 ing about in the air. We don't want any 
 interruptions to Big Business, the exist- 
 ing order, our party program, good roads 
 or "twin-sixes." The only thing about 
 war that pleases us is the pretty Red 
 Cross nurse. We don't like war: there- 
 fore we pray for peace. But we pray for 
 our kind of peace. 
 
 God has never promised the world any 
 such peace. He has never promised a 
 peace that can be dropped down into our 
 laps. He has never shown any desire to 
 spoil his children by shielding them from 
 disagreeable interruptions or by multiply- 
 ing their chances for better investments 
 and longer joy rides. The only peace he 
 has promised is his own peace. And that 
 kind of peace comes into our hearts and 
 not into our laps. And it does not come 
 in response to our call for a better chance 
 to indulge our selfish appetites. It comes 
 only when we have left the low depths 
 where selfish cattle graze and have risen 
 to the quiet heights of manhood in the 
 kingdom of God. When the human race 
 
164 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 arrives at the heights of spiritual man- 
 hood where men Hve and walk with God 
 as their Father and with one and another 
 as brothers, then we shall have peace with- 
 in, and not until then may we be sure of 
 uninterrupted peace without. 
 
 When that time comes outward peace 
 will be a blessing, not a peril. . . . 
 
 I might as well admit just here that in 
 the light of the teachings of Jesus I can 
 see no sign of the millennial dawn in any 
 of our plans for national peace, either 
 pacifistic or militaristic. Somebody has 
 quoted a wise mother as saying that about 
 all we can do for our children is to tide 
 them over until they can learn some sense. 
 And that, it seems to me, is all we can 
 hope to do through our national or inter- 
 national peace measures. At best we can 
 only tide the world over from day to day 
 until it learns some sense ; in other words, 
 until it reaches manhood. The elaborate 
 plans we have made to enforce peace, 
 whether by international agreement or by 
 military preparedness, are only temporary 
 contrivances, and it is our duty to accept 
 
The Immediate Business Before Us 165 
 
 them not as solutions to the problem but 
 as temporary bridges which give us our 
 chance to lay deep foundations for the 
 permanent structure that will follow by 
 and by. All the preparedness measures 
 which the human mind can conceive can- 
 not convert nations into true brothers, nor 
 can they even force them at all times to 
 act like true brothers. You cannot organ- 
 ize nations into a true brotherhood: you 
 can only organize them into an artificial 
 brotherhood, wliich will go to pieces at the 
 next unusual outbreak of savagery. And 
 such outbreaks are liable to occur just so 
 long as the world is content to develop 
 the bodies and brains of men and leave 
 their spirits to shrivel up and be blown 
 away. Men may cross their hearts and 
 swear themselves blue, but all the solemn 
 pomp and circumstance of treaty-making 
 will not make them keep a treaty if their 
 spiritual vision is not sufficiently developed 
 to discern the difference between a sacred 
 promise and a scrap of paper. This does 
 not mean that our peace measures are 
 valueless: it only means that, as I have 
 said, the}^ are temporary bridges and we 
 
166 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 must not risk too much weight upon 
 them. 
 
 There is danger, indeed, that some of 
 these temporary structures may fall by 
 their own weight. The moment one's 
 measures of protection from a lawless 
 neighbor become conspicuous and irritat- 
 ing they cease to protect and become a 
 peril. The moment a nation's prepared- 
 ness reaches dimensions that make it con- 
 spicuous it is likely to become irritating, 
 and a preparedness that is irritating may 
 prove more perilous than no preparedness 
 at all. It should not be forgotten that the 
 custom of "pistol-toting" which was in- 
 troduced as a peace measure had to be 
 abolished as a peace measure. 
 
XV 
 
 HOW CAN WE HASTEN THE 
 DAY OF LASTING PEACE? 
 
 DREAMING of peace is like 
 smoking a pipe: it soothes the 
 nerves but it does not seem 
 materially to alter the situation. We must 
 have another pipeful before dinner. The 
 world may smoke its peace pipe until the 
 end of time and it will never be safe from 
 war until something is done materially to 
 alter the existing situation. And thus far 
 only one plan has been offered which 
 promises to make the necessary altera- 
 tions. Our own plans, we must admit, do 
 not go beneath the surface of things. The 
 program of Jesus alone aims at the root 
 of the matter. This program does not 
 undertake to heal the ancient breach be- 
 tween the lion and the lamb by teaching 
 the lion good manners ; it goes deeper : it 
 aims at changing the lion's nature. You 
 can never be sure that the lion will not 
 
 167 
 
168 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 eat the lamb until he shows a decided 
 preference for straw. When you find him 
 as the prophet saw him, eating straw like 
 an ox, you will know the problem is solved. 
 No lamb would suffer any uneasiness at 
 the close proximity of a beast who ate 
 straw like an ox. 
 
 But this is not all. It is a plan that 
 works. We have not tried to work it very 
 often or on a very large scale, but we have 
 tried it enough to know that it will work 
 anywhere and on any scale. We have 
 tried it in all sorts of hearts and homes 
 and communities that were torn with 
 strife, and it has worked. I have seen 
 Christ come into a storm-tossed heart and 
 work his miracle of peace as wonderfully 
 as he worked it that stormy night on Gah- 
 lee. I have seen him work it on a storm- 
 tossed home and turn a shrieking hell into 
 heaven. I have seen him work it in a wild, 
 strife-filled community and transform it 
 almost overnight into a blissful haven of 
 rest. There is no question as to its worka- 
 bility. It always works. The only trouble 
 is, we so seldom work it. 
 
 That has been our trouble in all ages. 
 
The Day of Lasting Peace 169 
 
 The most humiliating fact in history is 
 that mankind as a whole has never shown 
 any abiding interest in the problem of 
 working out its own salvation. It has 
 been very curious to see how far it could 
 develop the horse, the cow, the dog, the 
 canary, the rose, but it has never had any 
 great curiosity to see how far it could de- 
 velop a man. It has given much serious 
 thought to the possibilities of sundry 
 weeds and roots. It has manifested a com- 
 mendable interest in the divine destiny of 
 the cabbage. It has at times suffered no 
 little anxiety over the potato's soul. But 
 so far as history shows it has never lost 
 a night's sleep over the future of the 
 v/orld's manhood. It has never been satis- 
 fied to develop a horse or even a cabbage 
 half way, but it has always been content 
 with the partial development of men. If 
 a potato had an intellect and a spirit as 
 well as a body, mankind would never rest 
 until it had developed its intellect and its 
 spirit as far as it had developed its body; 
 but in the case of a man it is usually con- 
 tent if his body is developed to full size 
 and his intellect to half size. The spirit 
 
170 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 may go. There has never been a time 
 when the race as a whole has been inter- 
 ested in the problem of bringing men to 
 complete manhood — to the point where a 
 man is a full grown man intellectually and 
 spiritually as well as physically. 
 
 I have called this the most humiliating 
 fact in history. Hardly less humiliating 
 to a Christian, however, is the fact that 
 although the followers of Christ have been 
 in possession of his plan for the develop- 
 ment of the manhood of the race for 
 nearly two thousand years, there is not a 
 country on earth today in which there are 
 enough men of high moral power to pre- 
 serve peace in great crises even within its 
 own borders. 
 
 It is high time we were taking our re- 
 ligion seriously. If Christ has placed 
 upon us the task of cooperating with him 
 in the business of making men for his 
 kingdom it is time we were settling down 
 to our task. Our slowly awakening con- 
 sciousness of national peril has trans- 
 formed hundreds of American plants into 
 plants for the making of munitions. What 
 we are now needing is a rapidly awakening 
 
The Day of Lasting Peace 171 
 
 consciousness of Christian responsibility 
 that will transform every home, every 
 church and every school in the land into 
 a plant for the making of men. 
 
 There was a time when vv^e loved to 
 boast that every American home was a 
 cradle of liberty and manhood. I am not 
 sure that I know just what the average 
 American home is today, but I find it 
 difficult to think of it as a home at all. One 
 has a lurking suspicion that it is a board- 
 ing house. And boarding houses, we 
 know, are not cradles of liberty and man- 
 hood. As for our churches, one can hardly 
 speak of them as a whole. Undoubtedly 
 most of them were built as plants for the 
 making of men, and undoubtedly many of 
 them are still working at their original 
 job; but one does not need to go to the 
 statistics to discover that in recent years 
 many more have been overhauled and 
 equipped for other jobs. And as for our 
 schools 
 
 But one has no heart to talk about our 
 schools. The greatest educational ideal 
 the world ever knew was the American 
 ideal, and until the Great Invasion our 
 
172 What Did Jesus Teach iVbout War? 
 
 universities and colleges were undoubtedly 
 turning out more complete men — men 
 who were developed spiritually as well as 
 physically and intellectually^ — than all the 
 universities and colleges of Europe com- 
 bined. No nation ever had as many men 
 of great moral power as America had in 
 the last century. But the Great Invasion, 
 in which Germany took possession of 
 nearly all our great educational strong- 
 holds in a single night, and did it so 
 quietly that most people never knew what 
 happened — the Great Invasion changed 
 all that. It is true there are many little 
 colleges and a few big ones which are still 
 magnifying the ancient ideal with all their 
 ancient zeal and devoting their entire 
 equipment to the business of making men 
 by education — not mere instruction, which 
 only reaches the intellect, but education, 
 which develops the whole man ; — but most 
 of the captured institutions no longer 
 show any great enthusiasm for either edu- 
 cation or men. They are no longer con- 
 tent to put a boy on one end of a log and 
 a Mark Hopkins on the other. One may 
 saj' that it is because there are no longer 
 
The Day of Lasting Peace 173 
 
 enough Mark Hopkinses to go round, 
 which is true : but it is also true that they 
 are no longer interested in the problem 
 of making enough Mark Hopkinses to 
 go round. They are no longer trjang to 
 develop men to the highest power accord- 
 ing to the ancient American plan; they 
 are trying to make machine men according 
 to the German plan — tremendous machine 
 men after the German ideal who can run 
 tremendous machines after the German 
 pattern. And they are making them — 
 not men but machine men, built from the 
 ground up for a single purpose and so 
 completely specialized that only the par- 
 ticular faculty developed is recognized as 
 the man, while all the rest is merely a 
 hanger-on like a vermiform appendix. 
 
 We have put down the sacrifice of Bel- 
 gium as the most horrible crime in modern 
 history. It may be the most horrible, but 
 it is not the most unnatural. The most 
 unnatural crime in modern history is the 
 sacrifice of German manhood to the un- 
 bridled ambition of the German autocracy. 
 Led on by its inordinate tliirst for world- 
 power the German government deliber- 
 
174 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 ately turned its people from the task of 
 developing their spiritual manliood — 
 something which could only hinder its 
 program instead of helping it — and un- 
 dertook to convert them into machines 
 such as it could use to the best advantage 
 in the achievement of its ambition. For 
 generations the German universities in 
 their efforts to make out of their students 
 bigger and better machines to meet the 
 government's demands, systematically 
 sacrificed the spiritual to the material as 
 one would prune a tomato vine down to 
 within an inch of its life to produce an 
 enormous tomato. We used to wonder at 
 Germany's extraordinary intellectual vi- 
 sion. Since the Great War began we have 
 been wondering at her equally extraordi- 
 nary spiritual blindness. But there is 
 nothing amazing in either: you cannot 
 gain the whole world, or the kind of vision 
 that is necessary to gain it, without losing 
 your own soul. It was as natural that 
 Germany should gain its marvelous intel- 
 lectual vision at the expense of its spiritual 
 vision as it is for one end of a seesaw 
 to go up while the other comes down. 
 
The Day of Lasting Peace 175 
 
 Heaven forbid that we should gloat 
 over this horror of a great darkness wliich 
 has fallen upon those who hate us ; but may 
 Heaven forbid that we should continue 
 to follow in their steps and thus invite 
 upon ourselves the same terrible fate. 
 
 I have recently read somewhere that a 
 college professor, who modestly leaves 
 you to infer that he is not a religious man, 
 has written a book to show that nearly all 
 the best equipped professors in our larger 
 colleges are agnostics. I am not disposed 
 to believe that he has proved his point or 
 can prove it, but it is somewhat discon- 
 certing to reflect that we have professors 
 in American colleges who can persuade 
 themselves that the prevalence of agnosti- 
 cism in their profession is a matter of such 
 pride as to warrant its publication in book 
 form. Agnosticism may be only an intel- 
 lectual attitude, but everybody except the 
 agnostic knows that it is not a sign of 
 moral power. No man begins to make 
 any progress toward spiritual manliood 
 until he can stiffen his knees and hold up 
 his head and affirm something. He need 
 not say the whole creed, but he must be- 
 
176 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 heve in something. He must believe in 
 something other than himself. . . . 
 
 After all is said and done the fact re- 
 mains that the only hope of lasting peace 
 among nations is a lasting peace among 
 individuals, and experience has taught us 
 that the only hope of a lasting peace 
 among individuals is the peace which re- 
 sults from harmony with God. If this is 
 true our path of duty is plain. We must 
 stop dreaming over our peace-pipes and 
 get up and go to work to bring men into 
 harmony with God. And we must do our 
 work according to Christ's own plan. We 
 must cooperate with him in his great pro- 
 gram for rescuing human beings from the 
 bondage of animalism and lifting them up 
 to the heights of spiritual manhood where 
 (their spiritual eyes being opened) they 
 will recognize their true place and des- 
 tiny and will fall in step with God as 
 their Father and with one another as 
 brothers. 
 
 This and this alone is the solution to 
 our problem. 
 
 I do not mean to say that the present 
 
The Day of Lasting Peace 177 
 
 war is not important. It is tremendously 
 important. But we might as well face the 
 truth: its value is going to depend upon 
 the use we make of it. Twenty years 
 from today we may be able to say that it 
 was worth a hundred times more than it 
 cost; but we may have to say that it was 
 worth a hundred times less. War is too 
 big a price to pay for a draw game that 
 will leave the world where it was before. 
 It would be better — far better — to burn 
 up all the money and flesh and blood we 
 are going to spend on it at once and be 
 done with it than go on with the present 
 horror if we are not going to get any- 
 thing more out of it than a mere artificial 
 peace that will affect only our material 
 interests. We cannot afford such a hor- 
 ror for mere material advantage of any 
 sort. The game is not worth the candle. 
 And certainly we cannot afford to tramp 
 up and down the world hunting savagery 
 and tyranny until we have soaked the 
 earth with our blood if the hunt is going 
 to end while these beasts are still roaming 
 the forests. War is no longer a sport. It 
 is the biggest sacrifice we can make of 
 
178 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 anything ^ye have a right to part with, and 
 Heaven knows we cannot afford to pay 
 such a price for anything that is super- 
 ficial or temporary or only of material 
 benefit. We must demand something last- 
 ing, and that means we must demand 
 something spiritual. The only way we can 
 get out of this war what we are putting 
 into it is to use it as an opportunity for 
 spiritual enrichment. We must make it a 
 part of Christ's great plan for eternal 
 peace. W^e must turn with scorn from 
 every selfish impulse and cast ourselves 
 into the breach for God and humanity, re- 
 solved that every law of God ^vliich ty- 
 rants are trampling under their feet shall 
 be rescued and exalted in the earth, and 
 that every oppressed human being witliin 
 our reach shall be set free and lifted up 
 and given a chance to achieve the highest 
 end of his being. 
 
 And this means that we must go back 
 not only to the program of Christ but to 
 Christ. Xot to the Christ of our selfish 
 dreams; not to the Christ of our senti- 
 mental fancies; not to the Christ of our 
 
The Day of Lasting Peace 179 
 
 literal interpretations, but to the Christ — 
 the Christ of the Cross. 
 
 It is only in the light of the face of 
 Christ — Christ, the hero; Christ, the 
 champion of the oppressed; Christ, the 
 ideal and hope and inspiration of our man- 
 hood ; Christ the f ountainhead of our com- 
 passion; Christ the lover of men and the 
 hater of hate and greed and selfishness 
 and tyranny and all the chains that de- 
 prive men of the chance of manhood — it 
 is only in this light that we can hope to 
 find our divinely appointed path through 
 this horror of a great darkness. 
 
 Let us go back to Ch/ist. It may be 
 that in the light of his face we shall see 
 how far we have missed his spirit and how 
 little sincerity and how much of selfish- 
 ness there has been in our prayers for 
 peace. It may be that he will fill our 
 hearts with his own compassion for the 
 oppressed and his own indignation against 
 the oppressor that w^ll never let us rest 
 with the cry of bound aiid bleeding hu- 
 manity in our ears. It may be that in his 
 presence we shall learn to hate the smell 
 of warm blood upon the sword of the ty- 
 
180 What Did Jesus Teach About War? 
 
 rant at least as much as we have been 
 hating to hear about blood in this terri- 
 ble war against tyranny. It may be that 
 he will put into our hearts his own love 
 for humanit)^ — a love so broad and deep 
 that we can love our enemies with humil- 
 ity and not irritate them to vengeance by 
 thanking God that we are not as they are. 
 It may be that he will open our eyes to a 
 vision that will keep us from consuming 
 our lives in the making of baubles and 
 turn us back with an unquenchable en- 
 thusiasm to our divinely appointed task. 
 
 Printed in the Vnited States of America 
 
SERMONS AND ADDRESSES 
 
 jMnmnrFrrrrm mn ..i... i ... i I'lur^w 
 
 J. H. JOfVETT D-D. Fifth Avtnut Prtsbyurian Church 
 
 ^ Kttu York 
 
 The Whole Armour of God 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.35. 
 
 "This popular preacher is, not only by his own people, 'out 
 also by large numbers of others, considered the very greatest 
 preacher. He is possessed of a rare and perhaps unequalled 
 combination of the very Qualities which captivate. His 
 thoughts are always expressed in the simplest possible diction, 
 10 that their crystalline clearness makes them at once appre- 
 hended." — Christian Evangelist. 
 
 EDGAR DE fflTT JONES Author ,/ "Th. lnn.r CircU" 
 
 The Wisdom of God's Fools 
 
 And Other Sermons. i2mo, cloth, net $1.15. 
 
 A volume of discourses, displaying the same facility for the 
 right word and fitting phrase which marked the author's pre- 
 vious work. Mr. Jones preaches sermons that read well — a 
 not at all common quality. He is a thinker too; and brings 
 to his thinking a lucidity and attractiveness which make his 
 presentation of great truths an artistic, as well as an inspiring 
 achievement. A note of deep spirituality is everywhere mani- 
 fest. 
 
 FREDERICK F. SHANNON Pa,ur of th. Reformed. Church-,n. 
 — — — ^-^^^— -— ^— ^^ ihi-Beishts, Brooklyn, N. Y- 
 
 The Enchanted Universe 
 
 And Other Sermons. i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 Mr. Shannon's reputation as an eloquent and forceful 
 preacher is still further enhanced by his new volume of ser- 
 mons. The fervid, glowing character of the popular Brooklyn 
 pastor's appeals, make the reading of his latest book, not only 
 an inspiring, but a fascinating exercise. 
 
 GEORGE W. TRUETT, D.D. >P«J^<»: ^'«' ^«>'"' 
 
 »■ — ' ' ■ Church, Dallas, Tex. 
 
 We Would See Jesus and Other Sermons 
 Compiled and edited by J. B. Cranfill. Net $1.15. 
 
 "One of the greatest — many would say the greatest — of all 
 the world's preachers to-day. It ranks high among the ex- 
 tant books of sermons, past and present and des«rves a pla«« 
 in millions of homes." — Biblical Recorder. 
 
 BISHOP CHARLES EDJVARD CHENEY 
 
 A Neglected Power 
 
 And Other Sermons. i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 •'Thoroughly evangelical in spirit, refreshing in Biblical 
 truth and abounding in helpful ministrations for every day 
 Hfe." — B-eangelical Messenger. 
 
QUESTIONS OF THE FAITH 
 
 JAMES H. SNOWDEN, P.P. 
 
 The Psychology of Religion 
 
 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 Psychology is one of the most rapidly advancing of modera 
 sciences, and Dr. Snowden's book will find a ready welcome. 
 While especially adapted for the use of ministers and teach- 
 ers, it is not in any sense an ultra-academic work. This it 
 evidenced by the fact that the material forming it has been 
 delivered not only as a successful Summer School course, but 
 in the form of popular lectures, open to the general public. 
 
 WILLIAM HALLOCK JOHNSON, Ph. P., P.P. 
 
 ProftssT 0/ Grtek and New Testament Literature in Lincoln University, f A 
 
 The Christian Faith under Modem 
 Searchlight 
 
 The L. P. Stone lyectures, Princeton. Intro- 
 duction by Francis L. Patton, D.D. Cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 The faith which is to survive must not only be a traditional 
 but an intelligent faith which has its roots in reason and ex- 
 perience and its blossom and fruit in character and good 
 works. To this end, the author examines the fundamentals 
 of the Christian belief in the light of to-day and reaches the 
 conclusion that every advance in knowledge establishes its 
 sovereign claim to be from heaven and not from men. 
 
 ANPREW fr. ARCHIBALP, P.P. 
 
 Author tj" The Bible Verified," "The Trend of the Centuries," eU. 
 
 The Modern Man Facing the Old 
 Problems 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 A thoughtful, ably-conducted study in which those prob- 
 lems of human life, experience and destiny, which, in one 
 form or another, seem recurrent in every age, are examined 
 from what may be called a Biblical viewpoint. That is to sajr, 
 the author by its .lluminating rays, endeavors to find eluci- 
 dation and solution for the difficulties, which in more or left 
 degree, perplex believer and unbeliever alike. ' 
 
 NOLAN RICE BEST Editor 0/ " The Cntinmi" 
 
 Applied Religion for Everyman | 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 Nolan Rice Best has earned a well-deserved reputation ifi 
 the religious press of America, as a writer of virile, trench- 
 antly-phrased editorials. The selection here brought together 
 represent his best efforts, and contains an experienced edi- 
 tor's suggestions for the ever-recurrent problems confronting 
 Church members as a body, and as individual Christians. Mr. 
 Best wields a facile pen, and a. sudden gleam of beauty, m 
 difficult thought set in a perfect phrase, ar an eld idea i»- 
 Tested with new meaninj; and grace, ia««to vnc at tvcfy tara 
 •f tk« page."— r^ ReMrd Htrmid. 
 
INSPIRATION FOR MEN 
 
 ROBERT fF. BOLIFELL 
 
 After College— What? 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net 75c. 
 
 A protest, in the form of autobiographical chapters, against 
 dawdling through college. The author is sprightly and read- 
 able, — anything but preachy — but does put some very whole- 
 some ancl helpful facts in such form as to grip the readei. 
 
 HALFORD E. LUCCOCK 
 
 Five-Minute Shop-Talks 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net ^i.oo. 
 
 One of the best things of its kind yet issued. In each 
 of these thirty or more brief addresses, Mr. I,uccock em- 
 ploys terse, epigrammatic language and contrives to compress 
 into a five-nunute talk the wisdom and counsel of a fifty- 
 minute sermon. Every word is made to tell— te tell some- 
 thing worth hearing and heeding. 
 
 CHARLES CARROLL ALBERTSON 
 
 Chapel Talks 
 
 A Collection of Sermons to College Students. 
 i2nio, cloth, net $i.oo. 
 
 Practical discourses on essential subjects delivered in vart- 
 ous colleges and universities, including Columbia, Cornell, 
 Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and Virginia. No one of these 
 sermons required more than twenty-five minutes to deliver. 
 They are characterized by earnest argument, familiar illus- 
 trations and forceful appeal. 
 
 CORTLANDT MYERS, D.D. Auth.r,f^R,alPrayir." 
 
 ' ^ThtRtal Hdlj StMt," ttt. 
 
 The Man Inside 
 
 A Study of One's Self. By Minister at Tremont 
 Temple, Boston. i2mo, cloth, net 50c. 
 
 A four-fold study of the inner life of a man, in which the 
 popular pastor of Tremont Temple, discusses the forces that 
 make him, lift him, save him, and move him. The book is 
 prepared m bright, interesting fashion, and abundantly fur- 
 nished with suitable and forceful illustration. 
 
 JOHN T. FARIS PePular-Price Editions 
 
 The "Success Books" 
 
 Three Vols, each, formerly $1.25 net. Now each 
 60c net (postage extra). 
 Seeking Success 
 Men Who Made Good 
 Making Good 
 
 Dr. J. R. Miller says: "Bright and short and full of illus- 
 trations from actual life, they are just the sort that will help 
 young men in the home in school among associates and in 
 business." 
 
PROBLEMS OF WAR AND PEACE 
 
 EDffARD A. STEINER 
 
 Nationalizing America 
 
 121110, doth, net $1.15. 
 
 How to set in order our national house, so as best to face 
 the international crisis at the close of the Great War, bow 
 to secure better unity, solidarity and genuine nationalization, 
 are some of the problems to which Professor Steiner ad- 
 dresses himself. It is a book of rare quality written by a 
 man who thinks and feels deeply and who has a fiery patriot- 
 ism for the land of bis adoption. 
 
 The Confession of a Hyphenated 
 American i2ino, net soc. 
 
 "There is a wholesome ring to the book, containing^ many 
 wholesome suggestions for those who are coming to this land 
 to make it their future home." — Herald and Presbyter. 
 
 "A small book, but it is full of meat. It ought to exert a 
 powerful influence among naturalized Americans, but there 
 are also manjr things in it which native Americans would d« 
 well to read and ponder." — Albany Argus. 
 
 PrtftiiiT •/ Biiltry Mnd InurntUtnal 
 Rtlatitni in Sxuarthmm Ctlltf 
 
 Preparedness ; The American versus Mili- 
 tary Programme i2mo. cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 Dr. Chas. E. Jefferson says: "Prof. Hull has done a di»- 
 tinct service by presenting the case against enlarged militarr 
 preparedness at the present time. I wish that his words 
 might be read by millions of our people." 
 
 Hamilton Holt, Editor of The Independent says: "A 
 veritable arsenal of facts and arguments for all those who 
 know this side of the greatest issue now before the Amer- 
 ican people." 
 
 CHAMJ.es E. JEFFERSON, D.D. Br.adwa, TMi,msci. 
 
 ==^ ' Nsw Y»ri 
 
 What the War Is Teaching 
 
 Merrick Lectures for 1916 Ohio Wesleyan Uni- 
 versity. i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 In five brilliant discourses, Dr. Jefferson gathers up some 
 of the lessons of the European struggle. Until war is bitterly 
 hated, W can never be abolished. Europe has never really 
 hated war. Dr. Jefferson contends; that is why she is in the 
 trenches to-day. What she needs — what the whole world needs 
 — is to be made literally sick by its horrifying spectacle. 
 This, among other things the Great War is surely doing. 
 Titles of lectures are as follows: I. What War Is. II. What 
 Is In Man. IH. The Inexorableness of Law. IV. What 
 Armed Peace Leads to. V. The Indispensableness of RcligioB. 
 
PRACTICAL RELIGION-CHURCH HISTORY 
 
 »■■ ■ ' — =■ 
 
 tJ4^0LD BEGBIE Author of "TwieeBom Men'* 
 
 The Proof of God 
 
 A Dialogue With Two Letters. lamo, cloth, net 75c. 
 
 Tke author of "Twice-Born Men" here enters a new fiel4 
 Bf thought. It i» a most effective book — one that will be 
 read ana passed on to others. His method of meeting the 
 agnostic and the skeptic is admirable. Here is philosophy 
 presented in conversational form, pointed and convincing. 
 
 WILLIAM J. LHAMON, D.D, DeanofBibU School. Drurv 
 ' Collegt, Springfield, M», 
 
 The Character Christ— Fact or Fiction? 
 
 i2nio, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 A study of the Christian Gospels, prepared and presented 
 with a view to enforcing the slaims of tke historical Christ. 
 Attention is directed to the literary presentation of the cbar« 
 acter Christ. 
 
 C. L. DRAWBRIDGE 
 
 Common Objections to Christianity 
 
 Library of Historic Theology. 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 An ahly compiled volum« deafing with almost every cur- 
 rent objection to Christianity. The author write* with a 
 pretty full knowledge of these objections, having, as Secre- 
 tary ©f the Christian Evidence Society, lectured in the Lon- 
 don Parks and held his own against all sorts of questioners. 
 
 CHARLES J. SHEB BEARS Rtctor of S-wirford, 
 
 —————'——————— Oxon, England 
 
 Religion in an Age of Doubt 
 
 Library of Historic Theology. 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 To this great problem Mr. Shebbeare addresses himself, 
 claiming that with the old faith and the added insight of a 
 new teaching, believers may lay the foundations of a devo- 
 tional system, which furnishes a rational ground for a robust 
 faith. 
 
 W. J. SPARROW SIMPSON, D.D. 
 
 The Catholic Conception of the Church 
 
 Library of Historic Theology. 8vo, cloth, net 5^1.50. 
 
 Pr. Simpson's book supplies the information and assists in 
 t9naku[ a right judgment: What Christ taught and did; 
 wiwt St. Paul and tne Early Fathers conceived to be the 
 functions of the Church; the idea of the Church in the Coutr 
 cil of Trent, are among the matters ably discussed. 
 
 JOHN B. RUST, D.D. 
 
 Modernism and the Reformation 
 
 larao, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 Ihe aim of this able treatise is to defend the Protestant 
 Reformed faith, as against the liberalizing movement withii'i 
 the Romsn Church known as Modernism. The essential 
 principles »f Protestaniam are set forth in detail with an 
 •xhaustive review of the trend and methods of Modernism. 
 
JAPAN— MISSIONS AND POLITICS 
 
 KIYOSHI K. KAWAKAMI Author of "AmeHcmn 
 
 ■ Japanese Relations 
 
 Asia at the Door 
 
 A Study of the Japanese Question in Continental 
 United States, Hawaii, and Canada. Cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 "The most intelligent and trustworthy estimate of Japanese 
 influence and achievement in America that has yet been put 
 into print. It clears the international atmosphere of many 
 clouds, subterfuges, and delusiens." — North American. 
 
 MATTHIAS KLEIN Missionary of 
 
 ' Free Methodist Church 
 
 By Nippon's Lotus Ponds 
 
 Pen Pictures of Real Japan. Illustrated. Net $i.OO. 
 
 "The author has spent many years in the land ef cherry 
 blossoms, so that he has had ample opportunity to revise his 
 first impressions. He describes in graphic style, weddings, 
 New Year's ceremonies, funeral pageants, pilsriraages to 
 temples and tombs and many other curious features of Jap- 
 anese life." — San Francisco Chronicle, 
 
 MARGARET E. BURTON Author of " Notablt Women 
 
 ^^^^——^—^——^-^—^ of Modern China 
 
 The Education of Women in Japan 
 
 Illustrated, i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 "Miss Burton, who in her former books has written in- 
 terestingly concerning the women of China, now turns her at- 
 tention to Japan, and presents a thorough treatment ef the 
 question of the education of women in the Island Empire. 
 Particularly does she tell the story of the large contribution 
 which missionary enterprise has made to education." — Spirit 
 of Missions. 
 
 FRED. EUGENE HAGIN Missionary of the Disciples 
 ^^——— Church, Tokio, Japan 
 
 The Cross in Japan 
 
 A Study in Achievement and Opportunity. Illus- 
 trated, 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 "Every one interested in this wonderful little country of the 
 Orient should read this book. Mr. Hagin has not simply 
 been a casual observer, but a close, discriminating student of 
 Japanese life. The whole book is saturated, filled with the at- 
 mosphere of service and Christian altruism. One axceptianal 
 authority pronounces it the best book an Japan «v«r pub- 
 lished." — Missionary Tidings. 
 
 JOHN HYDE DE FOREST 
 
 The Evolution of a Missionary 
 
 A Biography of John Hyde De Forest, for thirty- 
 seven years Missionary of the American Board, in 
 Japan, by Charlotte B. De Forest. Illustrated, net 
 $1.50. 
 
 "Even the most csnservatiye critic will bless God f»r s* 
 Christlike a life and so devoted a ministry. CandidatM «t»i 
 young missionaries will find in these pages a norm for thetr 
 own imitation in those methods and actiTitioc whioh are 
 fundamental ia miisioas "— P*-"* f*"rlan P. Btath. 
 
EARLIER WORKS IN DEMAND 
 
 CHARLES G. TRUMBULL 
 
 Anthony Gomstock, Fighter 
 
 Illustrated, iimo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 "Probably there is «o man on this continent to-day wfc» 
 has doae more to clean things up than Mr. C«mst«olc haa, 
 or shown more splendid courage and endurance in the 4o(MS 
 of it. It is a splendid story, that will not only inspire its 
 ''eaders, but will send many a ma» out himself for the pood 
 cause of cleanness and righteousness in the land." — Chris- 
 tian Guardian. 
 
 FRANK J. CANNON— DR. GEORGE L. KNAPP 
 
 Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire 
 
 Illustrated, 8vo, cloth, net $1.50, 
 
 "Senator Cannon was born a Mormon, but has since seen 
 light. Nevertheless, his story of Brigham Young's life is not 
 a polemic. Born in a Puritan home, endowed with a for««- 
 ftil personality and a gift for administration. Brigham 
 Young is one of the most picturesque characters in our 
 Anerican life, and his biography reads like a chapter in the 
 life of an ancient patriarch, a modern politician and a busi- 
 ness promoter all rolled together." — Congregationalist. 
 
 CLARA E. L AUGHLIN ._ Autktr ,f 
 
 ' Everybody s Lontsome. 
 
 The Work-A-Day Girl 
 
 A Study of Present Day Conditions. Illustrated, 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 "Sociologically considered, this is a most important work, 
 written by a woman who has personally investigated the com- 
 ditions she recites. Her knowledge, bought by years of serv- 
 ioe, proves that environment alone is not responsible for the 
 perils of unguarded girlhood. For that reasen the book ap- 
 p«al6 individually to all who come in touch with the worka- 
 <i«y girl, and teaches that whether or not we be our broth- 
 er's keeper, there is no doubt as to our responsibility toward 
 •ur little sister of toil." — Washington Evening Star. 
 
 FREDERIC J. HASKIN ..^ Author or 
 
 ^^——^^——^•^^——— ' J'/ie American Gfverntneni" 
 
 The Immigrant : An Asset and a Liability 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.35. 
 
 "Persons are asking how they may best do their duty and 
 tlieir whole duty to those coming to our shores. This book 
 M a valuable light on the subject. It is full of facts and it 
 i* a cabbie and conscientious study as to the meaning of the 
 iaate. Any thoughtful person will find here amch valu- 
 able material for study and the boek is calculated to do much 
 '." — Htrali and rrtsbytir. 
 
ESSAYS. SlUDIES, ADDRESSES 
 
 FROr. HUGH BUCK 
 
 The New World 
 
 i6mo, cloth, net $1.15. 
 
 "The old order changeth, bringing in the new," T« m ft- 
 ▼iew of our changing world — religious, scientific, social — Hugli 
 Black brings that interpretative skill and keen insight which 
 distinguishes all his writings and thinking. Especially does he 
 face the problem of the present-day unsettlement and unrest 
 in religious beliefs with sanity and courage, furnishing in thi», 
 u in other aspects of his enquiry, a new viewpoint and clari* 
 ficd outlook. 
 
 S. D. GORDON' 
 
 Quiet Talks on John*s Gospel 
 
 As Presented in the Gospel of John. Cloth, net 85c. 
 
 Mr. Gordon halts his reader here and there, at some pre- 
 ieious text, some outstanding instance of God's tenderness, 
 much as a traveller lingers for refreshment at a wayside 
 spring, and bids us hearken as God's wooing note is heard 
 pleading for consecrated service. An enheartening book, and 
 a. restful. A book of the winning Voice, of outstretched 
 Hands. 
 
 ROBERT F. HORTON, P.P. 
 
 The Springs of Joy and Other Addresses 
 lamo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 "Scholarly, reverent, penetrating, human. The product of 
 ft nature mm& and of a genuine and sustained religious ex- 
 perience. The message of a thinker and a saint, which will 
 be found to be very helpful." — Christian Intelligencer. 
 
 BISHOP fTALTER R. LAMBUTH 
 
 Winning the World for Chri^ 
 
 A Study of Dynamics. Cole Lectures for 1915, 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 Ttis l>cture-Course is a spirited contribution to the dy- 
 namics of Missions. It presents a study of the sources of in- 
 •piration and power in the lives of missionaries, native and 
 foreign, who with supreme abandon gave themselves utterly 
 to the work to which they were called. 
 
 FREPERICK F. SHANNON, P.P. 
 
 The New Personality and Other Sermons 
 lamo, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 Mr. Shannon, pastor of the Reformed Church on tb* 
 lleifhts, Brooklyn, is possessed of lofty ideals, is purpose- 
 ful, more than ordinarily eloquent and has the undoubted 
 (tfts of felicitous and epigrammatic expression. This new vol- 
 nnie by the popular preacher is a contribution sf distinct TlUtM 
 to current termonic literature. 
 

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