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 XiWision TX 1954 
 
 ,F26 
 
 Section 
 
OCT 25 1918 
 
 ®fje jMenbenijall Hectureg, Jfourtl) 
 Beltocreb at Be^auto Umbersrttp 
 
 061 CAl St 
 
 Religion and War 
 
 by y 
 
 WILLIAM HERBERT PERRY FAUNCE 
 
 President of Brown University 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 CINCINNATI 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
Copyright, 1918, by 
 
 WILLIAM HERBERT PERRY FAUNCE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Foreword. 5 
 
 I. The Attitude of the Old Testament. 9 
 
 II. The Attitude of the New Testament. 41 
 
 III. The Pacifism of the Rationalists . 75 
 
 IV. The Moral Leadership of the Church. 103 
 
 V. Light on the Cloud. 133 
 
 VI. The Rebuilding of the_World. 161 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 V 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 Has Christianity any message to a world 
 at war? Does true religion ever sanction 
 war? Is there scriptural basis either for 
 pacifism or militarism? Does the world-war 
 mean the collapse of the church and the ulti¬ 
 mate failure of the Christian faith? What 
 will be the final issue of the war—a relapse 
 into barbarism or the coming of a new and 
 higher social order? 
 
 These questions have sorely perplexed the 
 Christian world for the past four years. 
 They are answered in the following lectures 
 with a rare insight and sanity in interpreting 
 the Scriptures and with fearlessness in fac¬ 
 ing facts. This discussion gives scant com¬ 
 fort either to the professional militarist or 
 to the incurable pacifist. It affords a 
 rational and religious basis for true patriot¬ 
 ism, world internationalism, and triumphant 
 righteousness. 
 
 The Mendenhall Lectures of DePauw 
 
 5 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 University, to which this series of addresses 
 belongs, was founded by the Rev. Marma- 
 duke H. Mendenhall, D.D., of the North 
 Indiana Conference of the Methodist Epis¬ 
 copal Church. The object of the donor was 
 “to found a perpetual lectureship on the evi¬ 
 dences of the Divine Origin of Christianity 
 and the inspiration and authority of the 
 Holy Scriptures. The lecturers must be per¬ 
 sons of high and wide repute, of broad and 
 varied scholarship, who firmly adhere to the 
 evangelical system of Christian faith. The 
 selection of lecturers may be made from the 
 world of Christian scholarship, without re¬ 
 gard to denominational divisions. Each 
 course of lectures is to be published in book 
 form by an eminent publishing house and 
 sold at cost to the Faculty and students of 
 the University.” 
 
 Lectures previously published: 1913, The 
 Bible and Life, Edwin Holt Hughes; 1914, 
 The Literary Primacy of the Bible, George 
 Peck Eckman; 1917, Understanding the 
 Scriptures, Francis John McConnell. 
 
 George R. Grose, 
 
 President DePauw University. 
 
 6 
 
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my 
 kind, 
 
 I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom as¬ 
 signed. 
 
 — Tennyson. 
 
/ 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF THE OLD 
 TESTAMENT 
 
 Religion is constantly presented as the 
 remedy for war, yet religion has usually been 
 the prop and often the cause of war: therein 
 lies the problem which the whole world now 
 faces. Religion—which for the western 
 world means Christianity—abhors and re¬ 
 bukes war and steadily plans to end it; yet 
 religion in its various forms is appealed to by 
 every warrior as his sanction and main mo¬ 
 tive power. “They that take the sword shall 
 perish with the sword,” cries the warning 
 voice of the Nazarene; but “Forward with 
 God” has been the cry of every commanding 
 general. 
 
 Surely, it is time to ask as to the relation 
 
 of faith in the unseen to the sanguinary 
 
 struggles that have devastated the world 
 
 century after century. We may not solve 
 
 the ancient enigma, but we can at least try to 
 
 9 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 understand it. It is not enough to lament 
 that the time is out of joint; if we can under¬ 
 stand in some measure how the disjointing 
 has come about, it may seem to us not a 
 cursed spite but a sacred summons that we 
 were born to set it right. Let us turn first to 
 the ancient writings which are sacred to 
 three great religions and have largely shaped 
 the history of the last two thousand years. 
 
 The moment we open the historical books 
 of the Old Testament we are plunged into 
 war. More bloody narratives it would be 
 hard to find in any records of the past. The 
 nomad tribes of the early chapters show a 
 fine loyalty to the cause of the tribe and the 
 tribal god, and an absolute indifference as 
 to the means by which that loyalty was ex¬ 
 pressed. In one of the earliest fragments 
 of the literature, the “song of Lamech,” we 
 hear that ancient chieftain devoting the 
 newly acquired arts of civilization to the 
 slaughter of his neighbors and vowing a 
 vengeance that should be “seventy and seven¬ 
 fold.” A little later we read of Abraham’s 
 punitive expedition against the four Meso¬ 
 potamian kings, by which he rescued “all the 
 
 10 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 goods and the women also.” As soon as the 
 Hebrews are fairly out of Egypt and en 
 route for their promised land, they enter on 
 a series of wars which endured for centuries, 
 and which for pitiless severity and ruthless 
 atrocity are unsurpassed in human history. 
 “By war,” says Jahweh “I took you.” War 
 was the method by which the wandering 
 tribes of Israel entered Palestine, war their 
 constant reliance for protection, for unity, 
 for progress. And such war was usually un¬ 
 restrained by any pity for age or sex, by any 
 thought of human brotherhood or any fear 
 of a hereafter. 
 
 Among the earliest poems preserved in 
 literature is the magnificent song of Deb¬ 
 orah—superb in its patriotism, its faith in 
 the unseen, and pitiless in its taunting of 
 a fallen foe who had been treacherously 
 slain. The Philistine captain Sisera, weary 
 and thirsty, had eagerly accepted Jael’s 
 proffer of sacred Oriental hospitality. 
 When she had brought him forth milk and 
 butter in a lordly dish, and he lay quiet in 
 unsuspecting slumber, she drove the tent- 
 
 pin through his temples, and all Israel 
 
 11 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 greeted her as “blessed above women.” The 
 great song gloats over Sisera’s downfall and 
 bis mother’s sorrow, rolling the sonorous 
 phrases as a sweet morsel under the tongue: 
 “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: 
 at her feet he bowed, he fell: Where he 
 bowed, there he fell down dead. . . . The 
 mother of Sisera . . . cried through the 
 
 lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? 
 . . . So let all thine enemies perish, O 
 
 Lord.” 
 
 The narrative which we find in the books 
 of Joshua and Judges pictures a nomad peo¬ 
 ple, a crude chaotic society, capable of noble 
 loyalty and devotion and equally capable of 
 appalling atrocities in warfare. Many chap¬ 
 ters in the story are as repellent to the 
 modern sense of justice and truth and mercy 
 as any that can be found in recorded history. 
 Joshua combined fine faith in the unseen 
 with equal faith in the power and legitimacy 
 of “frightfulness.” When Jericho was cap¬ 
 tured, only one family, that of Rahab, was 
 spared; with that exception “all that was in 
 the city, both man and woman, young and 
 
 old, and ox, and sheep, and ass,” perished. 
 
 12 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 Then Joshua—whose name is another 
 form of Jesus—turned his attention to the 
 Amorites, who had made a confederation 
 against him. In a battle lasting all through 
 a summer’s day,—which the lost book of 
 Jasher poetically represents as lengthened 
 by the standing still of sun and moon— 
 Joshua quite annihilated the Amorites. By 
 way of striking terror to all other foes 
 Joshua dragged out of a cave the five Amor- 
 ite kings and said to his military officers: 
 “Come near, put your feet upon the necks of 
 these kings.” After this symbolic triumph, 
 Joshua hanged the five kings on five trees, 
 and then cast their dead bodies into the cave 
 from which he had dragged the living men. 
 Such was an Israelitish victory in the brave 
 days of old. 
 
 In the disorganized period of the Judges, 
 when every man did that which was right in 
 his own eyes, Gideon, the heroic chieftain, 
 led by desire for blood-revenge for the slay¬ 
 ing of his brothers, swooped down with his 
 immortal three hundred upon the Midianites 
 and put them to rout. The elders of Suc- 
 coth, who had refused food to Gideon’s 
 
 13 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 “faint yet pursuing” band, he slew with all 
 the ingenuities of Oriental cruelty. “He 
 took the elders of the city, and thorns of the 
 wilderness and briers, and with them he 
 taught the men of Succoth”! What dark 
 possibilities lie behind that ironic “teaching” 
 of the men of Succoth we prefer not to im¬ 
 agine. The strangely mingled elements in 
 Gideon’s character appear in the fact that 
 while he had gone against Midian at the 
 command of Jehovah, yet out of the spoils 
 of the victory which he melted down he made 
 a golden image and set it up in his own city 
 and “it became a snare unto Gideon and to 
 his house.” 
 
 Abimelech, the son of Gideon, slew sev¬ 
 enty brethren, burned a fortress containing a 
 thousand men and women, and was about to 
 burn another when his head was broken by a 
 millstone thrown down by an unknown wo¬ 
 man. Samson was acclaimed a national 
 hero, yet his only greatness seems to have 
 been physical. Ehud slew the king of Moab 
 by treachery, saying, “I have a message of 
 God for thee,” and then, as the king rose to 
 receive it, plunging a sword through the 
 
 14 
 
 r 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 king’s body. Yet of Ehud it was said that 
 the Lord raised them up a “saviour.” Forty 
 and two thousand of the Ephraimites were 
 slain by the men of Gilead when the 
 Ephraimites failed to pass the test imposed 
 at the fords of the Jordan and said “Sib- 
 boleth” instead of “Shibboleth.” 
 
 These strange stories of mingled bright 
 and dark, of shining faith and abhorrent 
 cruelty, bear on their face the marks of 
 verisimilitude. In a crude age “God’s good 
 men” were crude enough. They were the 
 best men of their time, but the time was 
 primitive and barbarous. They conceived 
 their God as a tribal deity, fiercely jealous, 
 pitilessly punishing disobedience, placated 
 by human sacrifice, as in the case of Jeph- 
 thah’s daughter, a God in whose service all 
 deeds were right if they led to victory. They 
 readily admitted that other gods might exist, 
 but there was only one God for them, the 
 great and terrible Jehovah, who had said 
 amid the thunders of Sinai: “Thou shalt 
 have no other gods before me.” Other gods 
 might confer favors on the tribes who served 
 them, but the Israelites were sure that their 
 
 15 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 God would do far more. So Jephthah told 
 the Moabites he was quite willing to com¬ 
 pare the achievements of the God of Israel 
 with those of the god of Moab: “Wilt not 
 thou possess that which Chemosh thy god 
 giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever the 
 Lord our God shall drive out from before us, 
 them will we possess.” Thus Jehovah and 
 Chemosh were neighboring deities, but 
 Israel would have nothing to do with Che¬ 
 mosh, being convinced that Jehovah could 
 give more victories and larger territory than 
 all the other tribal gods of Palestine. 
 
 It is therefore clear that the sanguinary 
 wars of the twelve tribes were not waged in 
 spite of their religious faith, but because of 
 it. Warfare was not a lapse from moral 
 purpose, but was the fierce and resistless in¬ 
 carnation of that purpose. The people 
 fought not in occasional forgetfulness of 
 Jehovah, but in devout remembrance of his 
 explicit commands. They regarded every 
 ambush, every raid into the enemies’ coun¬ 
 try, every destruction of a village, as the best 
 possible service of their God. Nationality 
 
 and religion were one. To be constantly 
 
 16 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 ready for war was the finest proof of reli¬ 
 gious devotion. The singer who wrote, 
 
 “Blessed be Jehovah my Rock, 
 
 Who teaches my hands to war, 
 
 And my fingers to fight,” 
 
 may have belonged to a later age, but he 
 breathed the spirit of the entire history. 
 “Up to the eighth century,” says George 
 Adam Smith, “the history of Israel was 
 largely one of conquest.” The book of 
 Judges declares that the reason why Je¬ 
 hovah did not drive out the Canaanites all at 
 once, but allowed them to be only gradually 
 exterminated, was that the Israelites might 
 have material for constant practice in war¬ 
 fare. 
 
 Before going out to war, sacrifice was al¬ 
 ways offered and the oracle was consulted as 
 to the will of Jehovah. All the conflicts of 
 the tribes were wars of Jehovah. He was 
 the “Lord of hosts”—a term which is ex¬ 
 plained by its accompanying phrase, “God 
 of the armies of Israel.” The sacred ark 
 was both the shrine of worship and the stand¬ 
 ard-bearer in war. It was carried into the 
 
 17 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 shock of battle because it was the dwelling 
 place of Jehovah. In the great battle with 
 Amalek Jehovah is not only present but vis¬ 
 ibly active. We read that “Jehovah cast 
 stones from heaven on Amalek.” Hail¬ 
 stones, storm-winds, the lightning and the 
 thunder frequently bore witness to the divine 
 participation in the good fight. The proph¬ 
 ets addressed the people before the battle, 
 promising rich booty to every fighter, and 
 the sweet singers of Israel gathered after the 
 battle to praise Jehovah who had given the 
 Israelites the necks of their enemies and en¬ 
 riched them with captives and spoils. Just 
 as in Homer’s Iliad the hero Achilles 
 dragged the dead body of Hector tied to his 
 chariot seven times around the walls of Troy 
 and no Greek voice failed to applaud his 
 atrocious revenge, so when the Israelites 
 plundered the slain warriors, when they took 
 hostages, levied enormous tribute, destroyed 
 women carrying life unborn, razed towns so 
 that the region was sown with salt, they 
 never dreamed of any displeasure from their 
 God. For his sake they did those things and 
 
 of his appreciation they were sure. 
 
 18 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 After Israel had entered Palestine the 
 spirit of warfare was kindled afresh and the 
 standards were scarcely higher. The occa¬ 
 sional raids now became pitched battles, en¬ 
 counters in the desert gave way to the sieges 
 of great strongholds, and the kings of Israel 
 always possessed a standing army. Hence 
 the war was on a larger scale and with in¬ 
 creased brutality. Samuel and all the 
 prophets that followed after were very clear 
 as to Israel’s duty. “In leading the war 
 propaganda,” says Professor J. M. Powis 
 Smith, “the prophets were second to none. 
 The existence of Israel was at stake, and 
 with it was involved the existence of Jehovah. 
 The god and his people must stand or fall 
 together. The wars of Israel were the wars 
 of Jehovah.” The nation desired a king 
 chiefly as a military leader, and by military 
 arts was the site of Jerusalem captured from 
 the foe and the city of Jerusalem defended 
 throughout its history. The monarchs felt 
 that the best defense of the kingdom was to 
 engage constantly in offensive war, and no 
 prophet questioned the right and the duty. 
 Indeed, the prophets often outdid the kings 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 in barbarity. Samuel’s fiercest invective 
 against King Saul was because Saul in 
 slaughtering all the Amalekites had spared 
 their King Agag and also saved alive “sheep 
 and oxen and lambs.” Sternly Samuel 
 cried: “What meaneth then this bleating of 
 the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the 
 oxen which I hear? . . . The Lord, he hath 
 also rejected thee from being king.” Then 
 the relentless prophet, who as a child had 
 heard the divine voice in the silence of the 
 tabernacle and had answered, “Here am I,” 
 called for Agag, and “Agag came unto him 
 delicately.” Then the enraged Samuel 
 cried, “As thy sword hath made women 
 childless, so shall thy mother be childless 
 among women,” and he “hewed Agag in 
 pieces before the Lord,” that is, as a gift or 
 sacrifice to the Lord. And none in Israel 
 questioned the anger of the prophet or the 
 justice of the execution. 
 
 David, the man after God’s own heart, 
 was one of the moral leaders of his age. In 
 him the warrior and the singer, the shepherd 
 and the king, the adventurer and the admin¬ 
 istrator are finely combined, and we have a 
 
 20 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 character unsurpassed by any hero in that 
 age of the world. No one of Homer’s men 
 will compare with the son of Jesse in tender¬ 
 ness and fidelity and rectitude. But in war 
 he was a child of his era. He seized Saul’s 
 sons and “hung them up unto the Lord in 
 Gibeah.” The cutting off of thumbs and 
 great toes, or of heads and hands, the depor¬ 
 tation and the torture of captives are men¬ 
 tioned again and again without a tremor. 
 When David captured the royal city of the 
 Ammonites, he did to the people things that 
 are best left to the obscure simplicity of the 
 archaic story. “He brought forth the peo¬ 
 ple that were therein, and put them under 
 saws, and under harrows of iron and under 
 axes of iron, and made them pass through 
 the brickkiln; and thus did he unto all the 
 cities of the children of Ammon.” Thus 
 proudly and without one regret does Israel 
 record some of the deeds of the man who 
 was believed to have written: “Like as a 
 father pitieth his children, so the Lord 
 pitieth them that fear him.” But the chil¬ 
 dren of Ammon did not fear Jehovah, and 
 
 were therefore not included in the precepts 
 
 21 
 
V 
 
 RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 of compassion—so ruled the highest con¬ 
 science of humanity a thousand years be¬ 
 fore Christ. 
 
 It would be a simple matter to institute a 
 “deadly parallel” and print in adjoining 
 columns the worst barbarities of modern 
 warfare, and those committed in the wars of 
 ancient Israel. We need only notice that 
 many passages in the ancient book of Judges 
 are startlingly like extracts from the reports 
 of Lord Bryce on atrocities in Armenia and 
 in Belgium. Listen to this: “They beat down 
 the cities, . . . they stopped all the wells 
 of water, and felled all the good trees: only 
 in Kir-haraseth left they the stones thereof.” 
 And how sadly modern is this: “Joshua drew 
 not his hand back, . . . until he had ut¬ 
 
 terly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. 
 . . . Behold, the smoke of the city as¬ 
 
 cended up to heaven, and they had no power 
 to flee this way or that way: . . . and 
 
 Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for¬ 
 ever, even a desolation.” And the heart of 
 the modern Turk might seem to speak 
 through the Hebrew psalmist who wrote, 
 
 “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth 
 
 22 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the 
 blood of the wicked.” 
 
 The Deuteronomist puts into the mouth 
 of Israel’s early lawgivers words that seem 
 to have been copied from proclamations re¬ 
 cently posted in Dinant or Louvain: “When 
 thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against 
 it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall 
 be, if it make thee answer of peace,.and open 
 unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people 
 that is found therein shall be tributaries unto 
 thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will 
 make no peace with thee, . . . thou shalt 
 . . . save alive nothing that breatheth.” 
 
 So old and so new, so utterly antiquated and 
 so completely modern is the spirit of nation¬ 
 ality clothing itself in the garb of religion, 
 and the power of religion to arouse the deep¬ 
 est passions and energies of humanity. 
 
 It is instructive to compare the following 
 passages: “Thou shalt surely smite the in¬ 
 habitants of that city with the edge of the 
 sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is 
 therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge 
 of the sword. And thou shalt gather all the 
 
 spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, 
 
 23 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the 
 spoil thereof every whit, for the Lord thy 
 God: and it shall be an heap forever: it shall 
 not be built again . 1 2 “Beginning with to¬ 
 day, no more prisoners are to be taken. All 
 prisoners are to be put to death. The 
 wounded, whether armed or not, are to be 
 put to death. Prisoners, even when they 
 are organized in large units, are to be put to 
 death. No living man is to remain behind 
 us.” • 
 
 Compare again the utterance of religious 
 leaders more than a thousand years before 
 Christ with the utterance of certain Chris¬ 
 tian ministers in the twentieth century. 
 “The children of Israel inquired of the 
 Lord: . . . Shall I yet again go out to 
 
 battle against the children of Benjamin my 
 brother, or shall I cease? And Jehovah said, 
 Go up, for to-morrow I will deliver them 
 into thine hand. . . . And the men of 
 
 Israel turned again upon the children of 
 Benjamin, and smote them with the edge of 
 
 1 Deut. 13.15, 10. 
 
 2 Order of the day, issued by General Stenger, commander 
 of the 38th Brigade, August 26, 1914. 
 
 24 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 the sword, as well as the men of every city, 
 as the beast, and all that came to hand: also 
 they set on fire all the cities that they came 
 to. 1 ” “Ye shall be his warriors, called to a 
 costly crusade against barbarism and cun¬ 
 ning, bestiality and fraud. . . . Brethren, 
 make an end of this generation of vipers 
 with German blows and German thrusts. 
 So deal with foes who like highwaymen have 
 set upon us that they may never again be 
 tempted to attack German men.” 2 
 
 Or compare once more a terrible Hebrew 
 poem of vengeance with still more terrible 
 verses published in 1914. The Hebrew 
 utterance carries us back to the ingenious 
 cursing of Oriental races in far distant 
 times: “Let his children be fatherless, and 
 his wife a widow. Let his children be contin¬ 
 ually vagabonds, and beg: . . . Let there 
 be none to extend mercy unto him: neither 
 let there be any to favor his fatherless chil¬ 
 dren. Let his posterity be cut off; and in 
 the generation following let their name be 
 blotted out. Let the iniquity of his fathers 
 
 1 Judg. 20. 27sq. 
 
 2 Pastor Johann Rump, of Berlin. 
 
 25 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 4 . 
 
 be remembered with the Lord; and let not 
 the sin of his mother be blotted out. . . . 
 
 When he shall be judged, let him be con¬ 
 demned : and let his prayer become sin” 1 
 The modern poem written by Heinrich 
 Vierordt in 1914 is just as explicit in details 
 and identical in spirit: 
 
 “O Germany, hate! Salvation will come of thy 
 wrath. 
 
 Beat in their skulls with rifle-butts and with axes. 
 These bandits are beasts of the chase, they are 
 not men. 
 
 Let your clenched fist enforce the judgment of 
 God. 
 
 Afterward thou wilt stand erect on the ruins of 
 the world. 
 
 Healed forever of thine ancient madness. 
 
 And of thy love for the alien.” 
 
 In such verses, and in scores of others like 
 them, we see clearly that the religion of 
 some modern nations is simply and avowedly 
 the religion of Joshua and Gideon, and pro¬ 
 fesses no advance on the creed of the He¬ 
 brew tribes who in the name of their Deity 
 saved alive nothing that breathed. The only 
 
 1 See Psalm 109. 
 
 26 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 difference is that Israel sinned in darkness 
 while modern men sin against light. 
 
 Here let us digress to make two remarks. 
 The first is that though it is quite natural to 
 reproach ancient religion with the incite¬ 
 ment to so many wars, it is at least to the 
 credit of the Hebrew religion that it did in¬ 
 cite to something. Religion clearly mani¬ 
 fested itself in very brutal fashion in the far 
 centuries before Christ, but it was at least a 
 power to be reckoned with. It was never a 
 spectator of life’s drama, never a neutral in 
 the great contests of humanity. It may have 
 been—it often was—utterly mistaken in its 
 view of what was right, but never for a mo¬ 
 ment did it admit that right and wrong come 
 out at the same place in the end. It was 
 never an invertebrate and languid desire for 
 a better world, but a determined and aggres¬ 
 sive attempt to better the world we have. 
 The religion of the Pentateuch was at times 
 crude and violent, but it was at least more 
 vital and achieving than a set of propositions 
 or a hope for a good time coming. It was a 
 positive and achieving force. It mightily 
 stirred up the old world, as when a great 
 
 27 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 wind stirs up the ocean, bringing to light 
 mire and dirt as well as pearls and sunken 
 treasures. It is to the credit of Israel’s reli¬ 
 gion that it exposed and roused and ener¬ 
 gized Israel’s soul. While the Hebrew reli¬ 
 gion did stir the cruder passions of men, it 
 also gave them a sense of brotherhood and 
 a vision of the eternal righteousness which 
 lifted them little by little into the light of a 
 new day. Their God at least was real and 
 active on the side of right. This conviction 
 made the Hebrew prophets the moral lead¬ 
 ers of their time—and of all other times as 
 well. 
 
 The other remark is this: the modern crit- 
 
 % 
 
 icism of the Old Testament has enabled us 
 to view all the fierce “wars of Jehovah” with 
 no loss of theistic faith. A thousand diffi¬ 
 culties that pressed upon the church in the 
 days of Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll 
 are now gone forever. The “mistakes of 
 Moses” trouble no one to-day. When forty 
 years ago the Bible was seen as a solid block 
 of revelation, every sentence divinely ut¬ 
 tered, as a single book without inner devel¬ 
 opment of thought, the wars of Jehovah 
 
 28 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 were a burden grievous to be borne. The 
 only explanation offered by the old com¬ 
 mentaries is that the Amorites and the Hi- 
 vites and the Jebusites deserved to be killed 
 off anyway, and that since God commanded 
 the slaughter, we his subjects have no right 
 to question his action. Such an answer was 
 a mere evasion and an incentive to doubt. It 
 was not even up to the level of Abraham’s 
 perception when he declared that even “the 
 judge of all the earth shall do right.” 
 
 But modern Biblical study has relieved us 
 of this provocation to skepticism. It has 
 taught us that the early moral development 
 of every nation includes barbarous codes of 
 duty which none the less have tremendous 
 sanctions behind them. It has shown us that 
 the prophets were right in regarding their 
 highest moral perceptions as a “Thus saith 
 the Lord,” even though later ages should 
 declare that the law was given merely be¬ 
 cause of the hardness of their hearts. Israel 
 never received a divine command to slaughter 
 “everything that breatheth,” but Israel did 
 receive command to oppose the foulness of 
 surrounding idolatries and cleave unto its 
 
 29 
 
I 
 
 / 
 
 RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 own real God, and the only way of doing this 
 appeared to be the method then adopted by 
 every human tribe—the method of ruthless 
 extermination. Wrong in their method, 
 they were gloriously right in their cause. 
 Cruel in their means, they were nobly loyal 
 in their end. Jehovah did love Israel, did 
 hate Chemosh, did summon David from fol¬ 
 lowing the flocks, and did say to that age and 
 all ages to come: “Thou shalt love the Lord 
 thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” 
 
 But is this all that we can say regarding 
 the Old Testament attitude toward war— 
 that it allowed and encouraged and com¬ 
 manded hostility toward all outside the 
 chosen race? Far from it. In the later 
 documents of the Old Testament we find the 
 dawning of a new light which shines still 
 brilliantly across the Christian era. In the 
 later prophets there are voices that proclaim 
 a noble universalism, that affirm Jehovah to 
 be the God of the whole earth, and strive to 
 lift Israel out of its narrow particularism 
 and make it a light-bearer to the nations. 
 The early prophets who saw in Jehovah only 
 a jealous tribal Deity, who believed the con- 
 
 30 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 fines of Israel to be the boundaries of his 
 love, who saw no means of propaganda save 
 military invasion and no mission for Israel 
 save through the extermination of her foes, 
 failed utterly to save Israel from continual 
 dangers which ultimately issued in national 
 subjugation and exile. The sword of Gid¬ 
 eon and Samuel and David and Solomon 
 led the nation to transitory triumphs which 
 were ended by the sword of Assyria. 
 
 The later writings of the Old Testament 
 show a double tendency. Some of them still 
 cling to the old narrow particularism, while 
 others lead the people into a truly interna¬ 
 tional horizon and a world-wide conception 
 of religion. The book of Esther, which does 
 not even mention the name of God, is as na¬ 
 tionalistic as the book of Judges. Its charm¬ 
 ing picture of woman’s fidelity to her race is 
 nevertheless filled with the exclusiveness and 
 relentlessness of a narrow sect. The ab¬ 
 sence of God from this book means the ab¬ 
 sence of humanity. Ezekiel in his glowing 
 visions of a reestablished ceremonial includes 
 several “hymns of hate”—against Ammon 
 and Moab and Edom. His denunciation of 
 
 31 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 Tyre, that “sat at the entry of the sea, the 
 merchant of many peoples unto the isles,” is 
 a magnificent piece of Oriental invective 
 which thrills every reader to-day. But her 
 traffickers and pilots and mariners are to him 
 beyond the pale of human sympathy or di¬ 
 vine help. 
 
 But side by side with these writings we 
 find books almost Christian in their outlook. 
 The book of Jonah might well be in the New 
 Testament. Its great message of the uni¬ 
 versality of God’s love has been sadly ob¬ 
 scured by futile discussion regarding the 
 anatomy of the sea monster. But its real 
 function is to show us how a narrow secta¬ 
 rian prophet, sent against his will to convert 
 a city far outside of Israel, is led by forces be¬ 
 yond his ken into the proclamation of a love 
 that is “broader than the measure of man’s 
 mind,” and a Divine Providence that in¬ 
 cludes not only all Ninevites but “also much 
 cattle.” Those last three words in the book 
 were two thousand years ahead of their time. 
 
 The little book of Ruth takes us quite out¬ 
 side the borders of Israel into a family of the 
 
 despised people of Moab. As we see the fair 
 
 32 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 young Moabitess standing “amid the alien 
 corn,” we feel at once how petty was the 
 scorn of Israel for its neighbors, how futile 
 the barriers that hatred had erected between 
 the two peoples. Thousands of Christian 
 exiles have repeated her words, “Thy people 
 shall be my people, and thy God my God,” 
 as if they had come from some Christian 
 apostle. 
 
 But it is the writing prophets of the later 
 period and the singers of the later psalms 
 who are the true internationalists. Elijah 
 was plainly and simply a nationalist. His 
 duty was to rebuke one king, his mission was 
 to slay the false prophets of a single king¬ 
 dom. Elisha was similarly bounded in hori¬ 
 zon and felt no call to any work beyond Is¬ 
 rael’s narrow walls. But the prophecies now 
 grouped under the name of Isaiah glow and 
 throb with a vaster vision. In the earlier 
 chapters of Isaiah we read of “an altar to Je¬ 
 hovah in the midst of the land of Egypt,” 
 and of the coming day when “nation shall 
 not lift up sword against nation, neither 
 shall they learn war any more.” 
 
 But it is in the second Isaiah that we find 
 
 33 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the prophet dilating with marvelous wealth 
 of imagery on the universal rule of Jehovah 
 and his direct and personal relation to all the 
 peoples of the world. The old exclusiveness 
 of Joshua and Samuel and Elijah has quite 
 vanished, and we hear new words, like the 
 strains of a morning song: “How beautiful 
 upon the mountains are the feet of him that 
 . . . publisheth peace.” And that peace is 
 to be so deep and broad as to include even 
 the beasts of the field and the humblest 
 plant. “Instead of the thorn shall come up 
 the fir-tree; and instead of the brier shall 
 come up the myrtle-tree.” Jehovah is no 
 longer a local Deity, but “the God of the 
 whole earth shall he be called.” Israel’s 
 horizon must be pushed out: “Enlarge the 
 place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth 
 the curtains of thine habitations.” The old 
 ceremonial feasts and fasts are no longer 
 needful, they are even disdained by the 
 prophet: “To spread sackcloth and ashes 
 under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and 
 an acceptable day to the Lord?” Hence¬ 
 forth a different standard is to prevail: “Let 
 the oppressed go free, . . . and break 
 
 34 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 every yoke, . . . and I will cause thee to 
 ride upon the high places of the earth.” The 
 petty complicated ceremonial of the older 
 days gives way to the broad ethical demands 
 of the new prophecy. Israel was no longer 
 the monopolist of divine favor but “a witness 
 to the peoples.” Israel was saved to serve. 
 The nation was elected, not because of its 
 deserts, not through any caprice of the di¬ 
 vine will, but purely as a missionary nation, 
 a people chosen for a world-wide service. 
 Instead of boasting of divine favors Israel 
 should be humbled by the divine summons to 
 serve mankind. 
 
 Hence the prophet addresses other na¬ 
 tions, Egypt and Tyre and Babylon, with a 
 new note in his message. He has sympathy 
 for those foreign peoples, some admiration 
 for their commerce, their civilization, their 
 manufacture. The great prophet of the 
 exile sees the whole sweep of human history 
 as divinely directed, and foretells a 
 
 . . . divine event, 
 
 To which the whole creation moves.” 
 
 The splendor of the material possessions of 
 
 35 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 other nations does not anger him, as it would 
 have angered the early prophets. Their 
 beautiful fabrics, their fragrant spices, their 
 precious stones are all to be made tributary 
 to the one great kingdom that Jehovah shall 
 establish. Though the center of that king¬ 
 dom shall be at Jerusalem, yet it is a Jeru¬ 
 salem so transformed and glorified that it is 
 made the spiritual “mother of us all.” 
 
 Now we can see why it has been said that 
 “the idea of a Weltgeschichte dates from 
 Isaiah.” Everywhere in his sublime chap¬ 
 ters there is the sense of universal law per¬ 
 vading human life. He does not appeal to 
 any miracles, but to the inevitable sense of 
 God in human history. “Jehovah sitteth on 
 the circle of the earth,” and the whole his¬ 
 toric process is the revelation of his im¬ 
 manent presence. Hence a monarch so far 
 outside Israel as the Persian Cyrus becomes 
 the divine messenger, and Jehovah says, “I 
 have raised him up.” Persian, Assyrian, 
 Egyptian, Tyrian—all are included in the 
 resistless sweep of the divine purpose, and 
 the history of the whole world is Jehovah’s 
 
 judgment on the world. No land shall es- 
 
 36 
 
ATTITUDE OF OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 cape his justice and no people be placed out¬ 
 side the circle of his love. 
 
 We see, then, how the Old Testament, be¬ 
 ginning with the dark barbarities of blood- 
 revenge and tribal warfare, and depicting 
 war as the normal life of an established king¬ 
 dom, finally reaches a higher level and re¬ 
 flects the first gleam of the coming dawn. It 
 never wholly detaches itself from the sacred 
 places of Judaism. Israel’s religion remains 
 a kind of Zionism still. But it does begin to 
 see that Jehovah has many a dwelling place 
 outside of Zion, many a follower in Persia 
 and Egypt and the isles of the sea, and that 
 somehow and at some time the thousand wars 
 of old shall be replaced by the thousand 
 years of peace. 
 
 37 
 

 
Who does not recognize that his divine Master 
 could be manlikely indignant? Who does not glory 
 in those burning words of hot impatience with 
 which Jesus showed that he could not abide the 
 meanness of canting Pharisees and sophist Sad- 
 ducees? Who has not been led into new thoughts 
 of manly life by hearing Jesus rebuke Chorazin and 
 Bethsaida, as well as by hearing him console and 
 forgive the adulteress? We must not let these 
 scenes go out of the life of Jesus. If we do, we 
 shall forget to be indignant with meanness and 
 oppression. 
 
 —Phillips Brooks. 
 

CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF THE NEW 
 TESTAMENT 
 
 In passing from the Old Testament to 
 the New Testament we pass from the realm 
 of precepts to the realm of ideals. We 
 can no longer ask, “What is written in the 
 law?” but, rather, “What is included in 
 the moral ideal of our Leader?” To the 
 prosaic literalist such a transition is dis¬ 
 concerting and baffling. We find in the 
 New Testament no stone tablets “graven 
 with the finger of God,” no definite com¬ 
 mands as to kinds of seed that may be sown 
 in our gardens, as to the architecture of a 
 tabernacle, as to the organization of the 
 people for worship or for labor. We have 
 left behind us the whole network of definite 
 precepts which covered the later life of 
 Israel, and we find ourselves in the free air 
 of Christian idealism. We find men no 
 
 longer saying, “To the law and to the testi- 
 
 41 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 mony,” but crying with a new, strange 
 fervor, “Let us go with Him to prison and 
 to death.” We are no longer looking back 
 to the sharp outlines of Sinai, but forward to 
 a visionary City of God. We find that the 
 old minute regulation of human life in all its 
 details has been sloughed off, and in its place 
 we have a great passion of loyalty to an ideal 
 embodied in a Person. If, therefore, we ex¬ 
 pect the Nazarene to tell us just when war is 
 justified and when it is forbidden, we shall 
 expect a vain thing. War in the New Testa¬ 
 ment is never justified and never explicitly 
 forbidden. 
 
 A mere surface reading of the Gospels, a 
 mere collection of proof-texts will therefore 
 lead us nowhere. It is as easy to quote iso¬ 
 lated texts on the one side as on the other. 
 The Sermon on the Mount certainly forbids 
 retaliation. It contains that simple, sweep¬ 
 ing injunction which changed the face of the 
 world for Tolstoy: “Resist not evil.” It 
 breathes a benediction on the peacemakers. 
 Jesus again and again uttered sentences 
 which seem to threaten the annihilation not 
 
 only of war but of government itself. “All 
 
 42 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 they that take the sword shall perish with the 
 sword.” “My kingdom is not of this 
 world.” ‘Tut up thy sword into its sheath.” 
 “Whosoever shall smite thee on the right 
 cheek, turn to him the other.” These fam¬ 
 ous sayings, uttered without qualification, 
 admitting neither exception nor compromise, 
 have been for two thousand years a mitiga¬ 
 tion of human hatred, a code of action liter¬ 
 ally adopted by some religious sects, and a 
 standing challenge to philosophers and 
 statesmen. These difficult utterances, as 
 Harnack tells us, have for centuries been 
 quoted to show that either the gospel is im¬ 
 possible or that the church is now unchris¬ 
 tian. Scornfully the thoughtless world 
 speaks of the “other-cheekers.” Ironically 
 the advocates of “red blood”—which some¬ 
 times seems to mean blood that does not cir¬ 
 culate through the brain—ask if a Christian 
 is to be merely a “mollycoddle.” Some 
 things are hidden from the wise and prudent, 
 though revealed to a carpenter’s Son. 
 
 Jesus was born of a warlike race and in a 
 
 land that still echoed with the tramp of 
 
 armies. He probably saw the gleam of 
 
 43 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 Roman spears in Galilee, and he certainly 
 often met the Roman legions in Jerusalem. 
 The Galilaeans were always ready for mili¬ 
 tary revolt. They longed to emulate the 
 deeds of their ancestors. It would have 
 been easy for Jesus to join the Zealots and 
 lead an army against the Roman power. 
 He might have become a second, and per¬ 
 haps more successful, Judas Maccabaeus. 
 But he never encouraged the smallest mili¬ 
 tary or political revolt. His complete re¬ 
 nunciation of the ordinary method of revo¬ 
 lution, his abstinence from the usual pro¬ 
 grams of political change, have often been a 
 stumbling-block to violent reformers. Thus 
 a reputed Chinese official wrote of Jesus: 
 “Provincial by birth, mechanic by trade; 
 . . . never was one worse equipped to 
 found a commonwealth.” 
 
 But if proof-texts are to be our authority, 
 we must cite them all. There is no qualifica¬ 
 tion in his clear statement, “I came not to 
 send peace, but a sword.” When the final 
 clash came with the Roman officers, and the 
 terrified disciples were looking for explicit 
 direction, he gave it: “He that hath no sword, 
 
 44 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 ) 
 
 let him sell his garment, and buy one.” No 
 fiercer invective can be found in the whole 
 Old Testament than the words which came 
 white-hot and hissing from the Nazarene, 
 when he faced those who “devour widows’ 
 houses and for a pretense make long pray¬ 
 ers.” When he found such double-faced 
 leaders in the forecourt of the sacred temple, 
 he did not rely on words alone, but with a 
 brandished whip of braided cords he drove 
 them out and with the force of his mind and 
 his body purified the national shrine. 
 
 Moreover, Jesus was at least respectful to f - 
 
 a government founded on force. He paid 
 
 taxes to support a tyrannical government 
 
 and a recreant church, and on one occasion 
 
 apparently worked a miracle in order to pay 
 
 them. He uttered no condemnation of King 
 
 Herod, and to the governor, Pilate, he said: 
 
 “Thou couldest have no power at all against 
 
 me, except it were given thee from above.” 
 
 When he came into intimate contact with the 
 
 Roman centurion, he commended his faith 
 
 and found no fault with the profession of a 
 
 soldier, just as John the Baptist bade the 
 
 soldiers be “content with their wages,” but 
 
 45 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 in no way condemned the taking of wages 
 for performance of the soldier’s task. 
 
 The balancing of proof-texts evidently 
 yields us no result, but leaves us—as that 
 method of research always has done—per¬ 
 plexed and irresolute. Our categories of 
 “pacifist” and “militarist” do not fit the 
 facts. As in all great spirits, there is some¬ 
 thing in Jesus that defies our labels, some¬ 
 thing that “breaks through language and 
 escapes.” Some other method we must 
 adopt if we would find the mind of the 
 Master. 
 
 But if we are willing to give up the book¬ 
 keeper’s method of arranging texts in 
 columns and attempting to strike a trial 
 balance, we are set free to enter sympathet¬ 
 ically into the ideal and purpose of our 
 Lord. If we could look on life through his 
 eyes, surely all his scattered sayings would 
 lose their dissonance and melt into the “lost 
 chord” which the struggling world so needs 
 to recover. Because we know his temper 
 and attitude toward life we are very sure of 
 some things that his hard sayings cannot 
 mean. 
 
 46 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 Whatever the vivid, picturesque pacifist 
 teachings of Jesus may mean, they surely do 
 not mean moral cowardice. To find in them 
 mere avoidance of pain and toil, mere retreat 
 from danger, is to give the lie to his whole 
 life. No possible array of texts could make 
 us believe that Jesus lived in fear of either 
 Caiaphas or Herod. It is the militarist who 
 is in fear and therefore rattles the saber and 
 indulges in "frantic boast and foolish word.” 
 Jesus may have been impractical when he 
 said, "Resist not evil,” but surely he was not 
 afraid. 
 
 The hard sayings of Jesus cannot mean 
 the passive acceptance of evil as if it were 
 good. They cannot inculcate the duty of 
 neutrality in the face of crying injustice and 
 oppression. They cannot mean that the 
 Christian is to sit on the "bleachers” of life 
 while other stronger souls plunge into the 
 game. They cannot be meant to praise a 
 fugitive and cloistered virtue. They can¬ 
 not mean evasion of responsibility and a 
 weak refusal to take sides when good and 
 evil are in deadly grapple. When we read 
 
 that "Jesus looked round about him with 
 
 47 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 anger” in the presence of the hard-hearted 
 Pharisees, we are sure he was not a moral 
 neuter. When he blazed forth with vol¬ 
 canic speech, “Ye serpents, ye generation 
 of vipers, how can ye escape the damna¬ 
 tion of hell?” we are sure that if he did not 
 lay violent hands on human beings, it was 
 not because of any indifference to their 
 deeds. 
 
 His hard sayings cannot mean the loss of 
 self-respect and self-reverence. Mere abase¬ 
 ment in the presence of power, the Uriah 
 Heep attitude, the invertebrate spirit which 
 cries “Good Lord” and “Good devil” with 
 equal facility, which has no convictions to 
 express or to preserve—that we cannot for 
 a moment attribute to Him who said of the 
 tyrant: “It were better for him that a mill¬ 
 stone were hanged about his neck, and that 
 he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” 
 The quiet dignity of Jesus before the mob 
 and before Pilate assures us that mere self- 
 effacement at another’s command was no 
 virtue in his sight. 
 
 The pacifist sayings of Jesus cannot mean 
 the abolition of all human values and the ad- 
 
 48 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 vocacy of social anarchy. He evidently 
 valued the home as a human institution and 
 was loyal to it. He must have valued the 
 carpenter’s trade to which he gave so many 
 years. He liked to watch the laborers in the 
 vineyard, the sowers of the seed following 
 the furrow, the fishermen casting their nets 
 and gathering of every kind. Human labor 
 was to him a precious thing. He never in¬ 
 culcated a Buddhistic closing of the eyes and 
 relaxing of human effort. No; to any stu¬ 
 dent of the life of Jesus, the saying, “Resist 
 not evil,” and all the sayings that go with it, 
 never can mean cowardice, nor easy acquies¬ 
 cence in wrong, nor weak self-effacement, 
 nor indifference to the precious things that 
 are threatened by evil powers. It is at least 
 good to clear the decks by casting overboard 
 suggestions that are plainly false. We 
 know them to be false because we know him 
 to be true. We interpret a single saying by 
 his entire life. 
 
 “Did Jesus approve or condemn war?” we 
 ask. But we might as well ask, “Did he ap¬ 
 prove or condemn commerce, or taxation, or 
 
 government, or science, or art, or education, 
 
 49 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 or men and women?” What sort of com¬ 
 merce or government do we .mean? What 
 kind of warfare do we refer to? Economic 
 war may be quite as disastrous as a military 
 campaign. A modern boycott may produce 
 far more suffering than did an ancient battle. 
 Jesus certainly did approve some kinds of 
 persistent aggressive resistance to evildoers. 
 His whole life was devoted to such resistance. 
 He flagellated the hypocrites and oppressors 
 of the common people. His entire career 
 was an incarnation of the precept of one of 
 his disciples: “Resist the devil and he will 
 flee from you.” “Even the noble example of 
 a Tolstoy,” says Professor Benjamin W. 
 Bacon, “cannot blind us to the fact that the 
 Sermon on the Mount teaches no doctrine 
 of a non-resistant God.” 
 
 We cannot in our thinking separate mili¬ 
 tary resistance to evil from all other kinds of 
 resistance, because in actual life there is no 
 such separation. Some kinds of commerce, 
 as in Africa, have been more deadly than any 
 war could have been. Some factory systems 
 have drained the life-blood out of employees, 
 
 and some factory towns have had in days of 
 
 50 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 peace a larger death rate than can be found 
 in the trenches. Certain forms of taxation 
 have brought hunger and death to the poor 
 and made social and moral advance impos¬ 
 sible. Some kinds of manufacture, as for¬ 
 merly in the case of sulphur matches, have 
 caused diseases as dangerous as shrapnel 
 wounds, and some kinds of labor, as that of 
 the underground workers in caissons, are as 
 perilous as service in a battery at the front. 
 The fierce competitive struggles of the in¬ 
 dustrial world have slain mute thousands 
 who “now rest in unvisited graves.” 
 
 But, it may be said, this is not what we 
 
 mean by war proper, which is the application 
 
 of physical force to a man’s body, in order to 
 
 change his mind. Yet such an application 
 
 of physical force in order to restrain a man’s 
 
 will or change his purpose is seen whenever 
 
 a policeman restrains a burglar or a squad 
 
 of policemen holds a mob at bay. It is seen 
 
 whenever a strong man snatches his wife or 
 
 child from the grasp of a ruffian. It was 
 
 seen when Christian missionaries at Peking 
 
 sheltered their women from the Boxer mobs 
 
 raging just outside the gate. Tolstoy is per- 
 
 51 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 fectly logical and consistent. He sees that 
 the condemnation of all warfare, however 
 great may be the cause and however awful 
 the evil which confronts us, inevitably means 
 the refusal of the individual man to protect 
 women and children, the weak and the help¬ 
 less, from every form of physical violence, 
 and means the total abolition of police pro¬ 
 tection and of all authoritative government 
 throughout the world. With admirable lu¬ 
 cidity Tolstoy has shown us the dread alter¬ 
 native. Either we must say that there are 
 rare times when resistance to evil requires 
 that a man’s total personality—body and 
 soul, reason and emotion, and hands and feet 
 —must be flung against the evildoer, or we 
 must say that all forcible protection of the 
 weak is wrong and all authoritative govern¬ 
 ment is anti-Christian. Ninety-nine out of 
 every hundred of the wars of the world may 
 be evil and only evil, unredeemed by any 
 high aim on either side. But to say that the 
 hundredth contest is of the same complexion, 
 and that no possible armed conflict can ever 
 have any justice on either side, is to make the 
 
 Christian teaching irrational and impossible 
 
 52 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 —which is just what some men desire to do. 
 We refuse a religion which makes Jesus in¬ 
 dorse and approve all the “wars of Jehovah” 
 or the wars of Napoleon. We equally re¬ 
 fuse a religion which confines all resistance 
 of evil to a closet meditation or a lachrymose 
 lament. 
 
 There are two kinds of reformers—those 
 who oppose the symptoms of disease and 
 those who search for the causes of disease 
 and seek to remove them. Both kinds 
 are needed, but the Founder of Christianity 
 deliberately chooses to deal with causes 
 rather than results. In medicine the half- 
 trained physician, when called to cure a 
 fever, seeks merely to reduce the tempera¬ 
 ture by external applications. He knows 
 little about the cause and cannot deal with it. 
 But the bacteriologist, hidden in his labora¬ 
 tory, has no time for bags of ice or soothing 
 lotions. He is finding the germ, determin¬ 
 ing its nature and habits, and by a single 
 generalization may prevent an epidemic that 
 would have taken a thousand lives. He may 
 never see a patient or take a fee, but he may 
 
 banish yellow fever from a continent. Not 
 
 53 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the hospital, but the laboratory, is the great 
 need of the suffering world. 
 
 In social reform there are two kinds of 
 workers—those who open the soup kitchen, 
 or establish the bread line, or drop money in 
 the beggar’s hat, and those who promulgate 
 a finer ideal of social relations and spread a 
 new spirit throughout the social order. He 
 who establishes a juster relation between the 
 house of have and the house of want may win 
 no popular applause and leave behind him 
 no sumptuous building to bear his name; but 
 by preventive effort he has done more to 
 benefit the world than if he had given free 
 luncheons in a hundred cities. Mrs. Brown¬ 
 ing, when she wrote “The Cry of the Chil¬ 
 dren,” did more for English childhood than 
 if she had opened many orphan asylums. 
 Dickens’s Christmas Carol was a greater hu¬ 
 man gift than the hanging of costly presents 
 on a thousand Christmas trees. Abraham 
 Lincoln emancipated four million slaves 
 without a personal attack on a single slave- 
 driver. It is the petty mind that exhausts 
 itself in direct assault upon a single evildoer 
 or a single institution; it is the deep-souled, 
 
 54 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 large-visioned leader who creates conditions 
 in which the evildoer cannot prosper and the 
 poisonous institution shrivels up and decays. 
 The real leader of men deals with roots, not 
 fruits. 
 
 Jesus did not have a word to say regard¬ 
 ing the concrete flagrant evils which have 
 often enlisted the stoutest efforts of his fol¬ 
 lowers. Slavery elicited from him no direct 
 protest. The method of John Brown at 
 Harper’s Ferry would have been even more 
 hopeless in the first century than it was in the 
 nineteenth. The publican Zacchseus was in¬ 
 duced to repent and make restitution, but 
 the iniquity of the Roman taxgathering re¬ 
 ceived no explicit rebuke. The woman who 
 was a sinner was received into fellowship, 
 and her alabaster box has sent its fragrance 
 round the world; but Jesus led no raid upon 
 any house in which such sinners congregate. 
 To organize a posse and attack one slave¬ 
 holder, one extortioner, one prostitute—that 
 is easy; that creates a great noise and is soon 
 forgotten. But to introduce a new attitude 
 into human hearts, which shall ultimately 
 
 make these concrete evils seem futile or de- 
 
 55 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 testable—that is the far finer work of the 
 thinkers and saviours of humanity. 
 
 Jesus delivered a frontal attack upon 
 race prejudice and racial arrogance, which 
 two things have been the source of most of 
 the wars of the world. He would conquer 
 those insidious foes not only by verbal con¬ 
 demnation but by replacing them with the 
 great conception of human brotherhood. 
 That scorn for unlikeness, that disparage¬ 
 ment of difference, which has often set king¬ 
 doms and races against one another, he 
 sought to replace by a new conception of 
 unity in variety—“to one man ten talents, to 
 another two, to another one.” The division 
 between Orient and Occident which has led 
 superficial thinkers to say, “Never the twain 
 shall meet,” he met with a glowing picture of 
 the time when they shall come from the east 
 and the west, the north and the south to sit 
 down in the kingdom of God. The bitter 
 spirit of an exclusive nationalism he con¬ 
 demned when he faced the Jewish leaders 
 and cried, “God is able of these stones to 
 raise up children unto Abraham.” He was 
 
 attached to his nation and its capital. He 
 
 56 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 could weep over Jerusalem, as the exiled 
 Dante over Florence when he saw its ideals 
 forsaken and its doom near. He seldom, if 
 ever, went outside of little Palestine. But 
 his thoughts spread out far beyond those 
 narrow boundaries, as “a fruitful vine whose 
 branches run over the wall.” The despised 
 Samaritan woman, condemned by race¬ 
 hatred even more than by lack of character, 
 engaged his sympathy, and their noonday 
 conversation at the well-curb will outlast the 
 conversations of Socrates and his friends in 
 the Athenian jail at the hour of sunset. The 
 Syrophoenician woman found his ear as 
 readily as if she had been born in Nazareth. 
 The instinctive antipathies of men, founded 
 on peculiarities of skin and hair and accent 
 and custom, became in the presence of Jesus 
 childish and irrational, and all tribes and 
 nations were potentially included in the 
 simple statement, “All ye are brethren.” 
 
 Another root of war—some would have us 
 
 believe the chief one—is economic. Men 
 
 fight not from mere instinctive antipathies, 
 
 we are told, but from a sight of possessions 
 
 just beyond their reach. The “outs” ever 
 
 57 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 desire to be the “ins”; they will get who have 
 the power, and the persistent cause of war is 
 economic greed. Well, did any teacher ever 
 deliver stronger assaults on base and debas¬ 
 ing greed than did the Nazarene? The 
 prophet who had nowhere to lay his head 
 showed all men how to sit loose to posses¬ 
 sions, how to rise superior to all physical 
 deprivation. Aristotle believed a man could 
 not attain the highest character without 
 property. His “great-souled man” would 
 lose his virtue in some measure if he lost his 
 goods. But Jesus found models in creatures 
 that “have neither storehouse nor barn” and 
 in flowers that “toil not, neither do they 
 spin.” “Blessed are the poor” is a saying 
 that men have thought it wise to dilute into 
 “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “Woe unto 
 you that are rich” is a passage on which we 
 seldom deem it prudent to discourse. 
 
 As for the exactions and oppressions of 
 
 human greed, Jesus could not abide them. 
 
 The lust of power seemed to him both 
 
 pathetic and terrible. The man who “took 
 
 his fellow servant by the throat” is pilloried 
 
 forever in a famous parable. “Which is the 
 
 58 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 greatest,” Jesus queried, “he that waiteth on 
 table or he that sitteth as guest of honor? 
 But I am among you as waiter.” If war 
 comes from greed, whether of princes or 
 peoples, Jesus was the greatest of all the 
 opponents of war. “Those who defend 
 war,” said Erasmus, “must defend the dis¬ 
 positions which lead to war, and these dis¬ 
 positions are absolutely forbidden by the 
 gospel.” When the Christian disposition 
 prevails among men, they cannot fight. 
 Their antagonistic desires are seen in pro¬ 
 cess of reconciliation. Their interests may 
 conflict at the surface, but below them is a 
 deep and permanent unity, as of trees whose 
 branches chafe and clash in the wind, but 
 whose hidden roots are intertwined. If the 
 world-order which Jesus desired and fore¬ 
 told could be introduced on earth, all wars 
 would automatically and inevitably cease. 
 
 But it is said that Jesus did not foresee the 
 
 long evolution of humanity and hence did 
 
 not provide for the age-long conflicts which 
 
 human progress involves. He expected the 
 
 end of the age was to come at once, and 
 
 therefore his ethics is “end ethics”—the 
 
 59 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 peaceful exhortations of a man who did not 
 think it worth while to revolt. In other 
 words, as M. Wilfred Monod has said, 
 “Jesus is a Noah who is mistaken as to the 
 time of the deluge and to whom therefore the 
 ark is worthless.'’ Certainly John Stuart 
 Mill did not believe in the imminent ending 
 of the world, yet he said: “Not even now 
 would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to 
 find a better translation of the rule of virtue 
 from the abstract to the concrete than to en¬ 
 deavor so to live that Christ would approve 
 our life.” 1 
 
 There can be no greater fallacy than to 
 suppose that an ethical system must be aban¬ 
 doned if there be discovered any error in the 
 founder’s time-table. “Of that day and hour 
 knoweth no man . . . not even the Son,” 
 said Jesus, but his ignorance of the time could 
 make no essential difference in his funda¬ 
 mental attitude toward life. “If Jesus ex¬ 
 pected,” writes Professor Shailer Mathews, 
 “that the Kingdom would be established 
 by catastrophe—and after all legitimate 
 allowance is made for apostolic coloring 
 
 1 Theism, p. 235. 
 
 60 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 in the reports of his words, it is not im¬ 
 probable that this was in his expectations— 
 such a catastrophe was not central in his 
 teachings .” 1 It is right to do right, whether 
 we work in the morning hours or are facing 
 an evening sky. Justice, truth, and love do 
 not depend on how many minutes the hour¬ 
 glass has to run. When Francis of Assisi, 
 playing a game of chess, was asked what he 
 would do if he knew the Lord would come 
 again that night, he answered: “Finish the 
 game; for his glory I began it.” Christ’s 
 eschatology may not have been ours; on that 
 the record is not clear. Probably he did ex¬ 
 pect a speedier end of the age than we can 
 expect. But his eschatology could not trans¬ 
 form his ethics. He did not know the times 
 or the seasons, but he did know the purpose 
 and the goal of life; he did know the char¬ 
 acter which can alone save individuals from 
 greed and envy and save nations from fra¬ 
 tricidal strife. 
 
 We must never abandon the teaching of 
 Jesus merely because it seems impossible. 
 Suchteachingis quite impossible on the lower 
 
 x The Gospel and the Modern Man, p. 253. 
 
 61 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 levels of existence. It appears fantastic in¬ 
 deed to the hard-headed men who have re¬ 
 duced all life to physical terms, all history 
 to a struggle of beasts “that tear each other 
 in the slime,” and all politics to the precepts 
 of Machiavelli. How should men living in 
 the basement see the horizon that is visible 
 from the roof or the watchtower? “If life,” 
 says Professor P. T. Forsyth, “be a comedy 
 to those that think, and a tragedy to those 
 that feel, it is a victory to those that believe.” 
 Without the capacity to believe in ideals and 
 by believing make them come true no nation 
 can rise above barbarism. With belief in the 
 Christian ideal of humanity any nation may 
 rise into a region where war shall seem the 
 crowning absurdity and horror, never to be 
 undertaken until all other kinds of resist¬ 
 ance have been explored to the uttermost 
 and all possible modes of reconciliation have 
 been exhausted. Then if war must come, 
 and again the whip of small cords must be 
 braided, and again the temple purified, it 
 will be with a “Father, forgive them,” that 
 we strike. 
 
 We need not dwell long on the remainder 
 
 62 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 of the New Testament, since the ethics of the 
 apostles is necessarily derivative and subor¬ 
 dinate to the ethics of Jesus. Out of Paul’s 
 numerous references to the soldier’s life, to 
 governments, to slavery and to social prob¬ 
 lems we find it again difficult to construct a 
 single consistent formula. His was surely a 
 flaming spirit, intense, impetuous, sweeping 
 resistless to its goal. He appreciated to the 
 full the soldier’s equipment and attitude. 
 The whole armor of God is described piece 
 by piece and with evident enjoyment of ef¬ 
 fective weapons. “A good soldier,” “a man 
 that warreth”—such is his ideal of the Chris¬ 
 tian. He was on excellent terms with the 
 chief captain and the soldiers who rescued 
 him from the mob in Jerusalem and with the 
 centurion in whose charge he sailed from 
 Ceesarea for Rome. Nowhere does he by 
 any act or word reflect upon the soldier’s 
 life as an unrighteous calling. Facing gov¬ 
 ernors and kings who were supported by 
 Roman might and accompanied by full¬ 
 armed troops, he seems to have accepted the 
 use of force as essential to government. In 
 
 all his long journeys he was under the pro- 
 
 63 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 tection of the Roman power and always 
 speaks with respect of constituted authority. 
 
 And in his epistles he goes so far in re¬ 
 conciling himself with the imperial power 
 that he may easily be misconstrued. “Fear 
 God, honor the king,” “Submit yourselves 
 to every ordinance of man,” “The powers 
 that be are ordained of God”—these sayings 
 have been highly esteemed by every absolute 
 monarch in Christendom. We do not hear 
 of Paul’s rebuking Festus or King Agrippa, 
 as Nathan rebuked David or Elijah threat¬ 
 ened Ahab. The great leaders in the asser¬ 
 tion of human liberty have gone to the 
 rugged Old Testament prophets for ex¬ 
 ample and inspiration, rather than to the ur¬ 
 bane New Testament apostle. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, he declined, as did 
 Jesus, to rely on physical force as essential 
 to the achievement of moral ends. Amid 
 perils of robbers and perils in the wilderness 
 and perils among false brethren he went ap¬ 
 parently unarmed. “Our weapons are not 
 carnal,” he wrote to Corinth. “As much as 
 in you lieth,” he said to the Romans, “be at 
 peace with all men.” “Now ye also put off 
 
 64 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 all these: anger, wrath, malice, . . . put 
 
 on . . . meekness, humbleness of mind, 
 
 long-suffering”—so he wrote to Colosse. 
 He has much to say on the endurance of evil 
 with patience and serenity. Though a He¬ 
 brew of the Hebrews, he cannot brook a nar¬ 
 row nationalism. Greek and Jew, Barbar¬ 
 ian and Scythian, are all the same in God’s 
 sight. The real Israelites are not all born in 
 Israel. The sturdy Roman officers, the pol¬ 
 ished students of Tarsus and Antioch, the 
 barbarous people on the island of Malta—he 
 could associate with them all on terms of true 
 equality. 
 
 Paul’s treatment of the runaway slave 
 
 Onesimus has proved a stumbling-block to all 
 
 those who demand authoritative precepts 
 
 rather than inspiring ideals. It would have 
 
 been easy to arm the slave against his master 
 
 and bid him defend his new-found liberty. It 
 
 would have been a simple matter to gather 
 
 groups of Christian slaves and train them for 
 
 self-defense. To incite revolution in the 
 
 streets of Jerusalem and in the catacombs of 
 
 Rome would have been vastly easier than to 
 
 preserve the poise of one who deems the liber- 
 
 65 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 ation of the spirit far more important than 
 physical release. To deserve and preserve 
 the respect and courtesy of the Roman mag¬ 
 istrates, and at the same time preach a doc¬ 
 trine which must ultimately unseat them, ab¬ 
 rogate their laws and destroy their empire— 
 that was the task and the achievement of the 
 apostle to the Gentiles. Perhaps his attitude 
 may be interpreted by that of the great 
 French writer, Romain Rolland. Driven out 
 of France by popular disapproval because he 
 tried to believe in and express a human 
 brotherhood which might survive the present 
 war, he quietly took up his abode in Switzer¬ 
 land. There he continued to speak as a 
 Christian of the first century might have 
 spoken when the legions of Caesar were flash¬ 
 ing their eagles in the sun. Before the war 
 had begun he wrote words which should 
 never be forgotten: “I am not a soldier in the 
 army of force; I am a soldier in the army of 
 the spirit. ... I will not be a party to 
 hatred. I will be just to all my enemies. In 
 the midst of passion I wish to preserve the 
 clarity of my vision, to understand and love 
 everything. . . . Hatred is more deadly 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 than war, for it is an infection produced by 
 its wounds, and it does as much harm to him 
 it possesses as to him it pursues.” 
 
 The epistles of Peter and James and John 
 are full of this spirit of reconciliation, of 
 brotherhood, of world-wide democracy. They 
 are stern and uncompromising with evil, but 
 they suggest no social or political agitation. 
 The Apocalypse contains many pictures of 
 mighty combat in the well-known style of 
 such writings, and we cannot at this distance 
 determine the meaning of the lurid visions. 
 But we know that out of the conflicts comes 
 victory over the beast, and the peace and joy 
 and song of a celestial city. The nations of 
 the earth are to bring their honor and glory 
 through many gates into the one city, and 
 
 “Forget long hates in one consummate love.” 
 
 Our study of the New Testament shows 
 us, then, that Christianity abhors and rejects 
 war as a settlement of disputes or a means of 
 progress. It knows a finer, nobler way of 
 reaching momentous decision. It Cannot 
 condone deception, theft, maiming, murder, 
 because these things are done in uniform and 
 
 67 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 to the waving of gorgeouys banners. It strips 
 off the tinsel and the gold lace from warfare 
 and shows us the horrid savagery which too 
 often is done in the name of justice and 
 mercy. Yet Christianity has no opposition 
 to governments maintained by force or to the 
 protection of weakness by strength. It bids 
 us resist the devil and all his works, and that 
 resistance may demand the total personality, 
 soul and body, of a man or a nation. The 
 individual may be forced to repel a burglar 
 by descending for a moment to the burglar’s 
 physical level and using the burglar’s own 
 weapons. But if the individual stops there, 
 he merely becomes like the intruder he would 
 repel. If he be true citizen, much more true 
 Christian, he will at once proceed to over¬ 
 come the evildoer with good. He will lay 
 plans to reclaim and reform him and receive 
 him back some day into genuine human fel¬ 
 lowship. America followed that method 
 when it sent its troops to repel the infuriated 
 Boxers, and later sent back a huge indemnity 
 fund and offered to educate Chinese students 
 in its own schools and colleges. To shoot was 
 
 needful to preserve life, but to pass beyond 
 
 68 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 shooting into educating was necessary to pre¬ 
 serve the Christian ideal of the nation. We 
 must let loose on the world the resistless 
 transforming forces of Christian love. 
 
 For the government of the United States 
 to offer no impediment to the government of 
 Germany in its ravishment of Belgium, its 
 sinking of the Lusitania, its torpedoing of 
 hospital ships, its deportations and mutila¬ 
 tions, would make the United States an ac¬ 
 complice in these crimes. For two and a half 
 years we tried to impede by written protests. 
 Then we began to realize that our words 
 were as idle tales to Germany unless we 
 could act as well as talk. We realized that 
 our speech was insincere and our indignation 
 but feigned unless we should oppose the total 
 force of our people—moral, social, financial, 
 physical—to the monstrous Thing that was 
 trampling down the weak peoples of Eu¬ 
 rope. Such opposition is not merely per¬ 
 mitted, it is demanded, by Christianity. 
 
 But Christianity can never stop with mere 
 opposition to evil. It seeks to overcome the 
 evil with good, and ultimately to incorporate 
 
 the evildoer again in the circle of humanity. 
 
 69 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 The state wins a war when it has adminis¬ 
 tered a military defeat. Christianity never 
 wins until it has changed the mind and heart 
 of the enemy. It uses physical force as the 
 necessary means to a moral triumph. It 
 looks beyond the capture of guns and men to 
 the defeat of the lust for world-dominion, 
 and to the establishment of the principle that 
 greatness among nations, as among indi¬ 
 viduals, is measured simply by capacity and 
 willingness to serve in the cause of all hu¬ 
 manity. 
 
 Love is never weak submission to wrong. 
 “Of course mere pacifism is not Christianity. 
 A nation that wished to test Jesus’ faith in 
 love would have to do more than refuse to 
 fight .” 1 Such a nation would have to clothe 
 itself in a passionate devotion to human wel¬ 
 fare which would be a true “Flammen- 
 werfer ” throwing afar its heat and light. It 
 would have to be as enthusiastic in service as 
 
 i 
 
 others have been in conquest. It would dare 
 to show collectively and on a vast scale the 
 very virtues that we prize most in a single 
 
 1 Soares, “Social Institutions and Ideals of the Bible,” p. 
 354. 
 
 70 
 
ATTITUDE OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 human being. It would dare to accept 
 Christ’s ideal at any cost and live it out. It 
 would amaze the world and become the 
 pioneer of human progress. It would show 
 the world that the song once heard over 
 Bethlehem may yet become the international 
 anthem of humanity. 
 
 “Rejoice, O world of troubled men. 
 
 For peace is coming back again. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 And men will wonder over it. 
 
 This red upflaming of the pit, 
 
 And they will gather as friends and say: 
 
 ‘Come let us try the Master’s way. 
 
 Ages we tried the way of swords, 
 
 And earth is weary of hostile hordes: 
 
 Comrades, read his words again, 
 
 They are the only hope for men. 
 
 Love, and not hate, must come to birth, 
 
 Christ, and not Cain, must rule the earth.’ ,n 
 
 1 Edwin Markham. 
 
Secret retributions are always restoring the level, 
 when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is im¬ 
 possible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and 
 proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain 
 set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles ever¬ 
 more the ponderous equator to its line. 
 
 — Emerson. 
 
 Keep yourself easy, for all things are governed 
 by the universal nature. Besides, you will quickly 
 go the way of all flesh, as Augustus and Hadrian 
 have done before you. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PACIFISM OF THE 
 RATIONALISTS 
 
 Sitting in my library by the light of the 
 evening lamp, I sometimes gaze up at the 
 crowded shelves and ask what all those dead 
 authors had to say on the great problem of 
 war and peace. Quietly the books now re¬ 
 pose side by side, but as regards this great 
 problem their writers were often as far 
 asunder as the east is from the west. Which 
 of them were against war, as a calamity and 
 absurdity, and which of them regarded war 
 as a necessity for the discipline and educa¬ 
 tion of the nations? Which of the thinkers, 
 dreamers, prophets, poets, were truly inter¬ 
 national in their world-view, and which of 
 them were egoistic, provincial, chauvinist, 
 anti-Christian? Who have been the prot- 
 estants and who the apologists ? 
 
 When we ask that question we come at 
 
 once upon a startling paradox. The great 
 
 75 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 advocates of the substitution of reason for 
 force, the great believers in international 
 amity and cooperation, have often been re¬ 
 jecters of the Christian faith, and the proph¬ 
 ets of that faith have often been the ardent 
 apologists of war. On the serried shelves 
 we can see the works of August Comte and 
 Hume and Rousseau and Buckle and Her¬ 
 bert Spencer, pleading for the enthronement 
 of reason above force, denouncing war as a 
 brutal survival of the past; and beside them 
 are the writings of many ecclesiastics from 
 all Christian churches, affirming that, in the 
 last analysis, government always rests upon 
 force, and that Christian nations can never 
 by any advance in character or legislation 
 escape the final appeal unto Caesar. The 
 chief prophet of a necessary change from a 
 militant to an industrial civilization is Her¬ 
 bert Spencer, while the classic defense of war 
 is the famous sermon of Canon Mozley. 
 
 Even to-day the loudest voices in the cause 
 of world peace are usually the non-Christian 
 voices. It is Jean de Bloch, the Jew, who 
 has with great skill shown the economic 
 futility of subjecting national disputes to 
 
 76 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 the adjudication of gunpowder. It is Felix 
 Adler and Jacob Schiff who have punctured 
 the sophistries of force often more effectively 
 than priests and bishops. The socialists on 
 Boston Common—whose social philosophy, 
 if they have any, I reject—are sometimes dis¬ 
 playing more sympathy with the dreams of 
 primitive Christianity than are we who have 
 learned by skillful exegesis to explain those 
 dreams away. In some of the so-called “rad¬ 
 ical” publications we often find more con¬ 
 vinced advocacy of international concord 
 and organization than in the average “reli¬ 
 gious” weekly. Here is the challenging 
 paradox—that the chief opponents of war 
 in the last two hundred years have been men 
 having no visible alliance with the creeds or 
 the institutions of the Christian religion. 
 
 Of course there are exceptions to any such 
 general statement. Tolstoy has disturbed 
 the world precisely because of his union of 
 pacifism and Christianity. Wicklif and 
 George Fox so far returned to the primitive 
 faith that they condemned all appeal to force 
 as unchristian. Whittier gave the Christian 
 faith a pacific interpretation, as the Quakers 
 
 77 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 have always done. Dr. Channing pleaded 
 with far-reaching voice for the rejection of 
 the philosophy of force as the basis of human 
 society. It is also true that some men—for 
 example, Friedrich Nietzsche—have rejected 
 both Christianity and world-peace, and for 
 the same reason. But in spite of conspicuous 
 exceptions it remains true that the strongest 
 pleas for law in place of war have come from 
 thinkers who profess little sympathy with 
 historic Christianity. Richard Cobden, whose 
 motive power was humanitarian rather than 
 religious, was ever pleading for the peaceful 
 expansions of commerce, while Mazzini, fired 
 with deep religious faith, urged every nation 
 to stand with its total military force for the 
 rights of the weak and defenseless through¬ 
 out the world. Wordsworth, Carlyle, and 
 Ruskin have all agreed with John Milton in 
 finding room in Christianity for the calling 
 and virtues of the soldier. The leaders of the 
 Church of England to-day have no question 
 as to the rightness of some wars. But the 
 two most eminent opponents of war now liv¬ 
 ing in England, John Morley and Bertrand 
 Russell, stand voluntarily aloof from organ- 
 
 78 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 ized religion. What are the reasons of this 
 disappointing alignment? 
 
 One reason is obvious. If war is in es¬ 
 sence irrational, then the rationalists should 
 be everywhere arrayed against it. We use 
 the word “rationalist” in no invidious sense. 
 It is a term of description only. By a ration¬ 
 alist we mean one who regards the world as 
 entirely explicable through the ordinary 
 reasoning processes, and therefore has no 
 use for the mystical, the subconscious, the 
 supernatural. We do not mean to describe 
 a set of beliefs or unbeliefs, but an intellec¬ 
 tual tone and temper. Thus W. E. H. 
 Lecky speaks of “the spirit of rationalism; 
 by which I understand not any class of de¬ 
 finite opinions or criticisms, but rather a cer¬ 
 tain cast of thought, or bias of reasoning, 
 which has during the last three centuries 
 gained a marked ascendency in Europe.” 
 And in the same connection he says, “To 
 those who would investigate the causes of ex¬ 
 isting opinions, the study of predispositions 
 is much more important than the study of 
 arguments .” 1 
 
 1 Rationalism in Europe, pp. 14, 16. 
 
 79 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 The rationalistic temper is, of course, re¬ 
 volted by the ever-recurring spectacle of 
 nations at war, because war itself is a species 
 of insanity, an abdication of reason. The 
 cast of mind which habitually relies on rea¬ 
 son as the sole organ of truth and the sole 
 arbiter of duty is affronted and outraged by 
 war, which confessedly seeks not truth but 
 power, and makes it one’s supreme duty “not 
 to reason why.” War cannot determine 
 which of two nations is right in a dispute 
 over a boundary line. It can only determine 
 which is the stronger—as when two farmers 
 seek to determine where a fence should run 
 by arming themselves with pitchforks. The 
 contest may prove decisively which farmer 
 has the stronger arm or the longer fork—it 
 certainly cannot prove where the fence ought 
 to run. It proves merely what is, and has no 
 decisive value in determining what ought 
 to be. 
 
 Thermopylae certainly showed that the 
 
 Persian army was stronger than the Greek; 
 
 it could not show that Persia was in the right. 
 
 It was not the right which triumphed when 
 
 England attacked and defeated the Danish 
 
 80 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 fleet off Copenhagen in 1807. It was not 
 the right which triumphed when the Ger¬ 
 mans captured the French army at Sedan. 
 We believe that the right did triumph at 
 Yorktown and at Appomattox. But is it 
 not probable that war has settled things 
 wrong quite as often as it has settled them 
 right ? And when a dispute is settled wrong, 
 is it settled at all ? 
 
 It is this essential irrationality of proced¬ 
 ure which repels the rationalist and deprives 
 him of all possible sympathy. He cannot 
 admit any slightest good in a method which 
 is confessedly the acme of unreason. He 
 sees in it a mere reversion to brute force, a 
 terrified desertion of all that distinguishes 
 men from animals, a final plunge into dark¬ 
 ness and despair. Animals habitually live in 
 fear of one another, and to blind fear the 
 only reply is blind force. When two nations 
 give up all trust in treaties, all confidence in 
 diplomacy, all hope of persuasion by reason, 
 all appeal to international law, and simply 
 betake themselves to bayonet and howitzer, 
 they fall to the animal plane—or, rather, far 
 
 below it, for they demonstrate a capacity for 
 
 81 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 cruelties no animal ever practiced and a 
 bestiality below that of any beast. The 
 mystic may see in war the play of super¬ 
 natural forces; the man in whom great affec¬ 
 tions and loyalties are dominant may admire 
 its splendid devotion. But the man of criti¬ 
 cal temper, trained from his youth to ask, 
 “Cui bonoV’ sees in most of the wars of his¬ 
 tory but a witches’ dance of unreason and the 
 supreme evidence of human folly. 
 
 In our time there has been a remarkable 
 attempt to meet this objection by inventing 
 and expounding a philosophical defense of 
 war. That defense, as set forth by Nietzsche 
 and Treitschke and Cramb and Mahan, is 
 that, while war may be a blundering method 
 of settling a boundary line, it is a legitimate 
 and reasonable method of deciding which of 
 the contestants has the more fully developed 
 personality, and so which of the two is the 
 worthier to acquire possession and domina¬ 
 tion. Right living certainly produces might 
 —so runs the argument. If, then, a nation 
 becomes mighty, it thereby demonstrates its 
 essential rightness of life. Let it then raise 
 
 its banner, challenge its weaker neighbor to 
 
 82 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 the ordeal of battle, assured that its triumph 
 in war will be a vindication of its moral 
 worth. Since right produces might, might 
 is the final test of right. In all history—thus 
 the defense argues—the worthiest nations 
 have become the strongest. By obedience to 
 laws—the laws of nature and of man—by 
 discipline and virtue and industry, by science 
 and organization and cooperative labor, a 
 nation accumulates power. Then it may wel¬ 
 come the test of battle. “To arms, ye brave!” 
 The verdict of war will be the verdict of his¬ 
 tory and the judgment of God. The vic¬ 
 torious nation will have demonstrated its self- 
 discipline, its inherent virtue, its moral value, 
 its right to dominate a larger section of the 
 world. This argument, wrought out in a 
 voluminous literature, is the modern defense 
 of war. Is it valid? 
 
 From the standpoint of mere logic the ar¬ 
 gument has no value whatever. Right does 
 indeed involve might; but it does not follow 
 that might involves right. It is a well-known 
 fact that health produces wealth. But can 
 we reverse the statement and say that wealth 
 
 is the test of health, and that wherever we 
 
 83 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 find a wealthy man we are sure he has lived 
 a healthy life? If might is the infallible test 
 of right living, then Mr. John L. Sullivan 
 must have been a paragon of virtue. If 
 physical strength is the proof of moral value, 
 the pugilist and the longshoreman are indeed 
 the saints of the earth, and the frail Mrs. 
 Browning and the delicate, sensitive Keats 
 are indeed convicted of high crimes and mis¬ 
 demeanors. In the poem where William 
 Blake describes the fascination of “tiger, 
 tiger, burning bright,” in the forest, he asks, 
 “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” 
 Certainly, the world has room enough for 
 both tigers and lambs, for the strong and the 
 weak which together make up the magnifi¬ 
 cent variety of the parti-colored and mani¬ 
 folded creation. But is the tiger’s supe¬ 
 riority of thigh and claw a proof of superior 
 social or moral value and his right to dom¬ 
 inate forest and pasture? So the tiger 
 thinks. So all creatures think before the 
 dawn of reason and the arrival of conscience. 
 For men to think so and reason so is to 
 descend to the life and the law of the jungle. 
 
 But let us approach this famous—or in- 
 
 84 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 famous—modern defense of war from an¬ 
 other angle. We must define our terms. 
 “Right produces might”—yes, but what sort 
 of might? Do we mean physical, or mental, 
 or social, or spiritual might? What sort of 
 might did right living produce in Francis of 
 Assisi ? It gave him neither strength of body 
 nor power of purse, nor support of govern¬ 
 ment, much less the help of an army or navy. 
 It stripped him of all earthly possessions, and 
 gave him, naked, poor, despised, a moral in¬ 
 fluence still potent throughout the world. 
 What sort of might was developed in John 
 Wesley by his strict “Methodist” living at 
 Oxford and for long years after? He told 
 the taxgatherers he had “two silver tea¬ 
 spoons in London and two in Bristol,” and 
 could not recall anything else in his posses¬ 
 sion that was taxable. Yet his invisible 
 power to reform and remold England was 
 greater than that of any member of Parlia¬ 
 ment or any Cabinet officer in his day. 
 
 So it is with nations. The physically 
 weakest have often, perhaps usually, been 
 the most influential in the realm of ideals and 
 
 so have shaped the history of humanity. 
 
 85 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 Phoenicia was mightier than Greece, but left 
 no trace behind her, because her might was 
 physical and commercial. The city of Tyre, 
 famous for her ships that bore the traffic of 
 the world, was far less influential than 
 Bethlehem, “little among the thousands of 
 Israel.” Right produces many kinds of 
 power, and to identify right with one kind 
 only, with military and naval power, is to 
 belittle it beyond measure, and to shut our 
 eyes to the great realities of history. Napo¬ 
 leon was anticipating the modern argument 
 when he said: “God is on the side of the 
 strongest battalions”—a crude and cynical 
 test of divine approval. It is unquestionably 
 true that the realized presence of God makes 
 battalions strong. But we cannot reverse 
 the statement and say that strong battalions 
 prove the divine presence, since strength 
 may come from below as well as from above, 
 and Milton’s Satan had immortal courage 
 “never to submit or yield.” 
 
 The trouble with this argument is that it 
 
 would draw conclusions from a single local 
 
 event when we need an induction as wide as 
 
 the world and as long as time. A man can- 
 
 86 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 not tell whether the tide is rising by watch¬ 
 ing one wave that breaks defeated on a sandy 
 beach. We cannot judge which of two men 
 is in the right by the outcome of a duel, or 
 which of two nations is of more value by 
 awaiting the result of an international duel. 
 Watching history the centuries through and 
 the world over, we may begin to find a basis 
 for some conclusion. A universal conflict 
 involving the entire world throughout its 
 whole history would indeed give an adequate 
 and final test. In that sense the “history of 
 the world is the judgment of the world.” An 
 induction drawn from many centuries of hu¬ 
 man struggle must have some validity. We 
 are sure that if Mohammedanism showed 
 itself stronger than eastern Christianity for 
 seven hundred years, there must have been a 
 moral vitality in the followers of the prophet 
 that was lacking in the decayed and super¬ 
 stitious churches of the Orient. We are con¬ 
 fident that if right and might are parallel 
 lines they will meet at infinity. But there is 
 no one point in all the world’s unfolding 
 story where we can be sure that they will 
 coincide and that physical superiority will be 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the evidence of moral worth. In a thousand 
 cases the contrary has been, and will be, true. 
 Ultimately, indeed, the right must win on 
 the world’s vast arena; to divorce right and 
 might forever is the deepest pessimism. We 
 cannot for a moment believe in “truth for¬ 
 ever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the 
 throne.” To believe that right is to be finally 
 defeated is to lose all interest in doing right. 
 Rut the right has stood on a thousand scaf¬ 
 folds, and the wrong may yet sit on a thou¬ 
 sand thrones. To say that whatever climbs 
 the throne is thereby proved to be right is to 
 turn all history upside down, is to make 
 Calvin right and Servetus wrong, to give to 
 Pilate the governor a nobler character than 
 to his victim, Jesus. 
 
 But there is a second reason for the al¬ 
 most universal protest of rationalism against 
 war; and that is the naive faith of the ration¬ 
 alists in the integrity and purity of human 
 nature. To them the human being is a sim¬ 
 ple, reasonable compound—if not a chemi¬ 
 cal mixture, at least a purely organic growth 
 under chemical and biological laws. They 
 
 see, of course, the tragedy of the world and 
 
 88 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 feel it keenly, but believing as they do in the 
 rationality of the world process, they must 
 believe in the rationality of each human be¬ 
 ing who is the product of that process. 
 Human nature has indeed its dark sections, 
 as a checkerboard has its dark squares; but 
 to them it is black spotted on a fundamental 
 white, not white spotted on black. Their 
 “cast of thought” will not permit the drama 
 of life to turn out a tragedy. They are fully 
 persuaded that history is an orderly process 
 of evolution under law, and each human be¬ 
 ing is an orderly section in the orderly 
 process. Why disturb the fundamental har¬ 
 monies of life by talk about sin, about the 
 problem of evil, about Dantesquian visions 
 of the purgation of the soul through pain? 
 Man is in essential harmony with the envi¬ 
 ronment from which he sprang; hence the 
 tragedy of life is more apparent than real, 
 and the evil of which the theologians talk is 
 merely the shadow of goodness, is “silence 
 implying sound.” When Henry D. Thoreau 
 was dying a friend said to him: “Henry, 
 have you made your peace with God?” To 
 
 which Thoreau answered with charming— 
 
 89 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 or appalling—naivete: “John, I didn’t know 
 God and myself had quarreled.” To ra¬ 
 tionalism there is no quarrel between the 
 universe and any creature in it; why, then, 
 should there be anywhere a battlefield? Evil 
 is on its way to inevitable goodness; why 
 fight to bring about the inevitable? Since 
 the checkerboard is fundamentally white, 
 why scrub so fiercely to remove the black 
 squares, which, after all, do give variety to 
 the board and furnish opportunity for an 
 interesting game? “Why so hot, my little 
 man?” 
 
 An interesting contrast might be drawn 
 between the world-view of such religious 
 leaders as Pusey and Keble in England and 
 that of their American contemporaries, 
 Emerson and Theodore Parker. Pusey 
 wrote to Keble as a penitent to a father con¬ 
 fessor, speaking of himself as “scarred all 
 over and seamed with sin,” “a monster” in 
 his own eyes, “covered with leprosy from 
 head to foot.” He was ready for expiation 
 by vigil, by fasting, by incarceration, by any 
 means which could lift the burden of guilt 
 
 from his soul. Rut about the same time, the 
 
 90 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 New England Transcendentalists were ex¬ 
 alting humanity to the n th power. “Never 
 wrong people with your contritions or with 
 dismal views of society,” wrote Emerson, in 
 serene detachment from both society and 
 contrition. More polemically Theodore 
 Parker wrote: “I think that the thing which 
 ministers mean by sin (commonly pro¬ 
 nounced ngsin-n-n-n) has no more existence 
 than phlogiston, which was once adopted to 
 explain combustion. I find sins, i. e., con¬ 
 scious violations of natural right, but no sin, 
 i. e., no conscious and intentional preference 
 of wrong as such to right as such; no condi¬ 
 tion of enmity against God.” 
 
 After quoting a writer of somewhat simi¬ 
 lar views, William James says: “If we are in 
 search of a broken and a contrite heart, 
 clearly we need not look to this brother. His 
 contentment with the finite incases him like a 
 lobster-shell and shields him from all morbid 
 repining at his distance from the Infinite.” 
 Such “healthy-mindedness,” of course, sees 
 in human nature no dark valleys, no fright¬ 
 ful abysses, no volcanic terrors, only formal 
 
 Italian gardens where the wildness of nature 
 
 91 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 has been subdued to geometrical patterns 
 and nurse-maids and children need fear no 
 evil. Such rationalism would treat the 
 tragedy of sin with a sort of “mind-cure” 
 philosophy, by denying the essential exist¬ 
 ence of the evil in man. It definitely rejects 
 the conception—to quote again from Wil¬ 
 liam James—of “there being elements in the 
 universe which make no rational whole in 
 conjunction with the other elements, . . . 
 
 so much dirt, as it were, and matter out of 
 place.” For them the real is the rational, 
 and the rational is the only real. The whole 
 expanse of human life is divided up into neat 
 house-lots and fenced in by their logic. There 
 are no longer any dark forests visible, no 
 boulders, no wild flowers, nothing wild, but 
 all is tame, correct, tagged and labeled and 
 deadly dull. Such untamable things as “in¬ 
 stinct,” “telepathy,” “the subconscious,” “the 
 subliminal self,” as well as the older concep¬ 
 tions of sin and penalty, are rejected in-' 
 stantly, as too unscientific for admission into 
 the ordered thought-paddock of the ration¬ 
 alist philosophy. It looks upon Professor 
 Huxley as guilty almost of lese-majeste 
 
 92 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 when he speaks of the “infinite wickedness” 
 of humanity, and it prefers the easy expla¬ 
 nation of Mr. Buckle, who found the cause 
 of all human character in climate, coast lines, 
 mountains and rivers, soil and food. 
 
 Here we reach the deepest reason for the 
 pacifism of the rationalists. They stand op¬ 
 posed to war for precisely the same reason 
 that they stand aloof from historical Chris¬ 
 tianity, because in both religion and war 
 there is an appeal to transcendental interests 
 and supernatural powers. Professor Fisher, 
 of Princeton University, puts the case none 
 too strongly when he says: “Rationalism 
 strikes at war by striking at the conception 
 of faith, duty, and loyalty to larger social 
 wholes. . . . The sensualistic ideal of 
 
 rationalism, in so far as it succeeds in realiz¬ 
 ing itself, may cast out war between states; 
 but it puts in place of it social death and dis¬ 
 solution, perhaps civil strife within states. It 
 may destroy war between states, and a great 
 deal more besides; but it can construct no 
 vital unity of mankind; it can generate no 
 real principle of social life and organism.” 1 
 
 1 International Journal of Ethics, October, 1917, p. 106. 
 
 93 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 Both war and religion summon men to rise 
 above conventional standards and habitual 
 calculations and stake all they have and are 
 in defense of intangible values and ideal 
 ends. The men who go to war are indeed led 
 by mixed motives, as are all men who go 
 anywhere. But their action is not to be ex¬ 
 plained by hunger for bread or gold or land. 
 The economic motive they profess to scorn, 
 and their profession of higher aims is often 
 justified, even though the means which they 
 use may be often evil. They have not rea¬ 
 soned out their action and based it on the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number. 
 Deeper than any reasons they can give is the 
 profound inner revolt against injustice, 
 tyranny, slavery, and the inner urge which 
 drives them on is not explicable merely in 
 terms of geography or iron-mines or wheat- 
 fields. A tax on tea in 1775 was surely a very 
 small matter; thousands of Americans 
 thought it too small to fight over. But behind 
 that tax was an immortal principle—no taxa¬ 
 tion without representation, or, as we now 
 more broadly state it, no just government 
 without the consent of the governed. There 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 we have an intangible ideal, a sense of tran¬ 
 scendental values, a challenge to existing in¬ 
 stitutions, that has called millions in recent 
 centuries to seal their faith with their blood. 
 
 The men who “fired the shot heard round 
 the world” at Lexington would have been 
 far richer in earthly goods, with more pros¬ 
 perous homes and busier towns and cities, if 
 they had quietly submitted to the petty exac¬ 
 tions of the crown three thousand miles 
 away. But to them poverty with freedom 
 was dearer than all possible wealth with 
 diminished freedom and loss of all possibility 
 of self-respect. On the principle of the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number, 
 the American Tories had an excellent argu¬ 
 ment. On the principle of “certain inalien¬ 
 able rights” the Tories were wrong and the 
 heart of the colonies was sound. Every great 
 defensive war has seen a people turning its 
 back on the old ordered life of the trim 
 Italian garden, and plunging out into dark¬ 
 ness and chaos, assured that only so could it 
 preserve liberty on earth. Liberty cannot 
 be weighed in scales; it cannot be gotten for 
 silver, for man knoweth not the price thereof. 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 It is one of the imponderables and intan¬ 
 gibles. It has been abused; in its name a 
 thousand crimes are committed; many men 
 believe it is a menace and fear its growth. 
 Yet for this imponderable visionary ideal 
 men act in a way which defies all considera¬ 
 tions of profit and loss and drives the utili¬ 
 tarians to despair. Perhaps John Davidson 
 was quite right when he uttered his dislike of 
 the title of a certain book, “The Rise of 
 Rationalism in Europe,” and said: “There 
 never was a rise of rationalism; there was 
 only decay of imagination.” 
 
 Deeply are the roots of patriotism and re¬ 
 ligion intertwined. “If I forget thee, O 
 Jerusalem,” was the cry of one who was both 
 temple-singer and ardent nationalist. The 
 great national anthems usually blend both 
 points of view. We begin by singing “My 
 country, ’tis of thee,” and we end by singing: 
 “Our fathers’ God, to thee.” In such apos¬ 
 trophe there is a joyous emergence from the 
 local and the individual, and a projection of 
 the little self into a mighty and invisible 
 whole. That release from selfishness, that 
 
 outflow of the single personality into the 
 
 96 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 nation, the kingdom, into the life of hu¬ 
 manity and the life of God, is the essence of 
 both patriotism and religion. Inexplicable 
 it is to the formulas of Bentham and Buckle, 
 but easily understood by the man who has 
 once yielded his soul to its sway. Schiller 
 entered into the daily experience of millions 
 in church and state when he counseled: 
 
 “Be thou a whole, or if thou canst not bear that part, 
 Be part of a whole and serve it with a faithful heart.” 
 
 We now see the immense distance which 
 separates the pacifism of the rationalists 
 from the pacifism of Christianity. Both 
 modes of thought seek after world-peace. 
 The rationalist and the Christian together 
 oppose war as one of the greatest earthly 
 evils. They are both pledged to its ultimate 
 abolition. But the one opposes war as irra¬ 
 tional, as a mistaken move in the game; the 
 other opposes it as cruel and hideous, an out¬ 
 rage on humanity, an affront to God. The 
 one would suppress war by suppressing the 
 passionate loyalties and devotions out of 
 which war springs; the other by deepening 
 and broadening those devotions and enthu- 
 
 97 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 siasms until they include all humanity and 
 flow around not a single local government, 
 but a true Parliament of Man. Rationalism 
 would bring world unity by effective reason¬ 
 ing; Christianity by the establishment of 
 good will among men. One enlarges on self- 
 interest as indicating the path to peace, on 
 the economic damage and futility of slaying 
 one’s own customers and destroying one’s 
 own markets; the other insists on the moral 
 disaster involved in reducing God’s crown¬ 
 ing handiwork to cannon-fodder and in¬ 
 flaming a whole nation to hymns of hate. 
 
 So far as rationalism takes a materialistic 
 tinge, it is foredoomed to the failure which 
 attends all shallow thinking. The millen¬ 
 nium it paints is not the state for which a 
 weary world is longing. Its heavenly city 
 turns out to be a sort of glorified town of 
 Pullman, where common sense has laid out 
 all the streets and built every house, with 
 little aid from imagination or loyalty or un¬ 
 calculating devotion to human ideals. But 
 in the City of God, as seen from Patmos, 
 the height is equal to the length and the 
 
 breadth—the city soars as well as spreads. 
 
 98 
 
PACIFISM OF RATIONALISTS 
 
 Those who enter that city are done with 
 battle, in the old sense of fighting for terri¬ 
 tory or glory or gold. But we read: “There 
 was war in heaven,” that is, the passion for 
 an ideal, the willingness to fling away life 
 for intangibles and invisibles, the joy of end¬ 
 less combat in behalf of truth and right, that 
 shall go on forever, since eternal struggle is 
 the essence of eternal peace. 
 
 Christianity cannot permanently tolerate 
 
 war, any more than it can tolerate famine or 
 
 pestilence or desolating power. But it fears 
 
 the de-natured millennium of the rationalist 
 
 almost as much as it fears the blood and iron 
 
 of the imperialist. It cannot make alliance 
 
 with Herbert Spencer in order to escape 
 
 from Bismarck. It cannot be contented with 
 
 a future of full dinner pails and sanitary 
 
 tenements, and “deduce the laws of conduct 
 
 from the laws of comfort.” It appeals to the 
 
 totality of human nature, to its fears and 
 
 hopes, its ideals and loyalties, its passion for 
 
 the ultimate surrender, and its faith in God. 
 
 It counts the surrender of property and life 
 
 as nothing compared with the betrayal of a 
 
 trust, and in defense of weak peoples it flings 
 
 99 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 its total resources into the struggle. It 
 would be moral suicide for a Christian na¬ 
 tion to acquiesce in the schemes of another 
 nation which through fifty years of mis-edu- 
 cation teaches its people to demand “world- 
 power or down-fall.” To that demand there 
 is but one answer: “Down-fall it shall be!” 
 To the rationalist war may be the worst of 
 evils, since it interrupts all the normal course 
 of human life. To the Christian there is one 
 thing worse—the failure to resist evil, the 
 compromise * with unrighteousness for the 
 sake of quiet days, and the unwillingness to 
 die that truth may live. The mighty sum¬ 
 mons of the Christian faith is not merely to 
 “lay down your arms” and plant corn, but to 
 “take the whole armor of God” in a spiritual 
 and eternal campaign. It aims to create not 
 a nation of prosperous farmers or shop¬ 
 keepers, but an enlistment of all human be¬ 
 ings as soldiers of the common good. Its 
 goal is not the paradise of industrialism but 
 the City of God. 
 
 100 
 
It is the old struggle between the two principles 
 —right and wrong throughout the world. They are 
 the two principles that have stood face to face 
 from the beginning of time, and will continue to 
 struggle long after Judge Douglass and I shall 
 have gone to our graves. 
 
 —Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 The right is more precious than peace, and we 
 shall fight for the things we have always carried 
 nearest our hearts. 
 
 —Woodrow Wilson. 
 

CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MORAL LEADERSHIP OF 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 Many reproaches have been cast upon 
 the church for its lack of leadership in time 
 of war, and many have been deserved. But 
 we are in danger of reviling rather than un¬ 
 derstanding, and may “pour out the baby 
 with the bath.” The church is not the only 
 institution that has failed in the world’s 
 crisis to meet the world’s need, and Chris¬ 
 tianity is not the only force that has seemed 
 baffled and pathetically impotent. 
 
 Science with its clear, white light has 
 failed to illumine the international darkness, 
 and its amazing resources have been forced 
 into the destruction of cities, the desolating 
 of orchards and gardens, the mutilation of 
 millions of human bodies and the snuffing 
 out of lives that would have furnished us the 
 prophets and statesmen of the future. Do 
 
 we therefore cease to study science? 
 
 103 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 Socialism, which professed to rise above 
 all provincial hatreds, has failed utterly, and 
 allied itself only with the powers that be. 
 Does that fact render Socialism henceforth 
 a negligible quantity? Diplomacy has failed. 
 Shall it therefore be abandoned in favor of a 
 national referendum or a decision by news¬ 
 paper correspondents? Solemn treaties have 
 become scraps of paper. Shall we disdain 
 henceforth all treaties? Britain’s great navy 
 proved unable to protect Britain from war. 
 Shall navies therefore be treated as scrap- 
 iron? Democracy in Russia has been daz¬ 
 zled and blinded by freedom and has shown 
 itself a giant stumbling in the dark. Shall 
 we therefore surrender our previous faith in 
 democracy? 
 
 It may be said that since the special horror 
 of war is its moral tragedy, its orgy of hate 
 and greed and lying and lust and murder, 
 the church as the moral guide and instructor 
 of humanity is charged with a responsibility 
 such as attaches to no other organization or 
 movement. That is true. The church has 
 been presented with the greatest opportu¬ 
 nity that has come to it since the Napoleonic 
 
 .104 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 wars and no thoughtful man takes much 
 satisfaction in either the general attitude or 
 the specific achievements of our religious de¬ 
 nominations during the Great War. Why 
 are we dissatisfied? What did we expect? 
 What may we rightly expect and demand of 
 organized Christianity in time of desperate 
 national emergency? 
 
 The attitude of aloofness and indifference 
 wpuld be beyond forgiveness. A church that 
 stands utterly aloof from a nation in the 
 throes of mortal struggle should be rejected 
 by the nation forever after. A church given 
 over to quietism and other-worldliness in 
 time of national danger, a church that has no 
 message save that of “rest for the weary on 
 the other side of Jordan,” is a wholly super¬ 
 fluous affair, and the best reward it can ex¬ 
 pect from an indignant people will be a re¬ 
 spectful requiescat in pace . Archimedes, 
 busy with his geometrical figures in ancient 
 Syracuse, could ignore international move¬ 
 ments, and as the Roman soldiers burst into 
 his room could only cry, “Don’t spoil my 
 circles!” Goethe, aspiring to reproduce the 
 
 calm of Greek life, could listen unmoved to 
 
 105 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the thunder of the cannon at the battle of 
 Jena. But such self-absorption is inhuman 
 and therefore unchristian. 
 
 Our premillenarian brethren are easily led 
 into similar indifference to the human strug¬ 
 gle. If one expects that to-morrow the 
 heavens will literally be rolled together as a 
 scroll, he cannot feel overwhelming concern 
 regarding any clouds that now darken the 
 horizon. What matters a transient tyranny, 
 when soon there is to be a universal reign of 
 peace with its material throne in Jerusalem? 
 Why get excited over problems of the slums 
 when soon we are to walk the golden streets 
 within jasper walls? Why spend our life in 
 protest against what must vanish anyway, 
 and why organize against evils which shall 
 speedily be put to flight by a divine coup 
 d’etat? If we have discovered in certain ob¬ 
 scure texts the time-table of the universe, we 
 need not spend our days in the building of 
 railways or the transportation of supplies, 
 but may simply hold ourselves ready to get 
 aboard the train. This is the logical, and 
 often the actual, attitude of some good men. 
 
 Thus both the quietist and the literalist may 
 
 106 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 come together. Both may sit as mere spec¬ 
 tators of a struggle which is the battle of the 
 Lord. 
 
 On the other hand, it is a mistake equally 
 tragic for the church to adopt an ex cathedra 
 attitude in time of national crisis, and pro¬ 
 nounce collective and official judgment on 
 specific measures or individual leaders. The 
 “soap-box orator” is absolutely sure of the 
 measure immediately to be taken to end all 
 wars, but the Christian pulpit must have 
 wider vision. To denounce certain leaders 
 and demand their retirement, to advocate 
 one treaty and oppose another, to announce 
 from the pulpit the latest social or political 
 or international nostrum, is not only to di¬ 
 vide the congregation but is to close their 
 minds to the deeper message of the Christian 
 faith. “Master, speak to my brother that he 
 divide the inheritance with me,” cried one im¬ 
 patient hearer when Jesus was speaking, 
 which, being translated, means: “Let the pul¬ 
 pit speak to us about the justice of the eight- 
 hour day, the righteousness of the single tax, 
 the necessity of military conscription, the im¬ 
 portance of a change in the President’s Cabi- 
 
 107 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 net, or the fatuous policy of the Russians.’’ 
 But the reply of Jesus is not yet out of date: 
 “Man, who made me a judge or a divider 
 over you?” If Jesus of Nazareth felt no call 
 to render decision in a local quarrel, may not 
 his modern messengers hesitate to deliver 
 opinions on leaders and measures that 
 change from day to day? Great expert 
 knowledge and long training could perhaps 
 justify the preacher in specific announce¬ 
 ments on pending policies, but even then he 
 would be devoting his strength to the 
 machinery of government rather than to the 
 unveiling of those principles which lie below 
 all government—that mind of Christ which 
 must yet become the mind of humanity. 
 
 In no passage in the New Testament does 
 
 the mission of the church become more 
 
 luminous than in that declaration of Jesus 
 
 regarding his own mission which he made in 
 
 the synagogue at Nazareth. He had grown 
 
 to be thirty years of age, had battled with 
 
 tremendous inner temptations among the 
 
 crags of Judsea, and had passed through the 
 
 great illumination which came to him at his 
 
 baptism. Then returning to Nazareth he 
 
 108 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 was called on in the synagogue to state to his 
 fellow townsmen why he had left the carpen¬ 
 ter’s shop and what he hoped to^accomplish 
 in the dangerous calling of a radical prophet. 
 He found a fitting statement in a reinterpre¬ 
 tation of Isaiah’s message: “The spirit of 
 the Lord has anointed me to”—do what? 
 The silence of Jesus is as eloquent as his 
 purpose is positive. Not to denounce Herod, 
 as did John the Baptist; not to discuss the 
 justice of the taxes which he regularly paid; 
 not to approve or condemn the slaveholder, 
 or the government official, or the soldier; 
 but to go to the root of human life by enun¬ 
 ciating and interpreting certain great prin¬ 
 ciples or objects for which he was ready to 
 live and to die. Let us ponder each of them: 
 “to heal the broken-hearted, to give recovery 
 of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
 that are bound.” 
 
 The healing of lacerated spirits is univer¬ 
 sally recognized as peculiarly the function 
 of the Christian Church. To minister to 
 physical necessities, to give cups of cold 
 water or of coffee, to offer medical skill, is 
 
 clearly a noble task. But even the Red 
 
 109 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 Cross, which started out to relieve physical 
 ills, is forced to go beyond them, because the 
 physical is so tangled up with the mental, the 
 social, and the spiritual. The setting of 
 broken bones is needed, but the healing of 
 broken hearts is still more imperative. In 
 time of war, affections, as well as tissues, are 
 lacerated, bright dreams are shattered, griefs 
 are imposed for life, and the old naive trust 
 in the divine love is battered, if not de¬ 
 stroyed. The healing of the world’s heart 
 is more needful than the feeding of its 
 stomach. 
 
 There is very little of conventional com¬ 
 fort to be found in the teaching of Jesus. 
 The stoical commonplaces that we find in 
 Marcus Aurelius and in Benjamin Franklin 
 are wanting in the comfort of the Nazarene. 
 That trouble is common to all, that we must 
 be brave for the sake of others, that we 
 should be too proud to weep—all that is 
 quite foreign to the consolations of Jesus. 
 The musty proverbs which, like all proverbs, 
 merely skim the surface of reality, we do not 
 find in his teaching. Our modern sayings 
 
 that “There isn’t more cloud than sun,” that 
 
 no 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 we “mustn’t cry over spilt milk,” that “It’s a 
 long lane that has no turning,” are so desti¬ 
 tute of insight that they affront and anger 
 any man who is facing a real grief. And 
 those more pious platitudes, which remind 
 us that the Potter has power over the clay, 
 that what God does we must not question— 
 surely, miserable comforters are they all. 
 These pretended anodynes were never 
 offered by Jesus to Mary and Martha when 
 their brother died, nor to Jairus when he 
 bewailed his little daughter. 
 
 The prophet Isaiah, like the prophet of 
 Nazareth, heard the cry, “Comfort ye, com¬ 
 fort ye my people.” How was he to do it? 
 “What shall I cry?” Not the platitudes that 
 we find in all the pagan literature; but this: 
 “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” It was 
 a summons to let God into the present life of 
 Israel. The only real comfort is the revela¬ 
 tion of truth. The broken-hearted need 
 chiefly not ancient proverbs, not sympathetic 
 phrases and tender intonations, not official 
 condolence, but actual realization of the 
 truth that God is in his world, fighting its 
 
 battles, shouldering its burdens, suffering 
 
 ill 
 
4 
 
 RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 in its sorrows, and that we through the daily 
 doing of the prosaic and lonely duty may be 
 casting up a highway for God’s coming into 
 all the nations of the earth. Elisha, con¬ 
 fronted by a youth grieving for Elijah, 
 spoke no word of customary consolation. He 
 only prayed, “Open the young man’s eyes,” 
 and when the young man saw the spiritual 
 hosts, he had no need of pious speech. To 
 recognize the facts, to “see, no longer blinded 
 by our eyes,” is the only comfort human 
 hearts need. Unless we can see the facts, 
 heaven itself would offer no consolation: 
 
 “Yes, we may pass the heavenly screen, 
 
 But shall we know that we are there?— 
 
 Who know not what these dead stones mean, 
 This lovely city of Lierre.” 
 
 That act of Elisha leads us to the second 
 
 element in the moral leadership of the 
 
 church—the recovery of sight to the blind. 
 
 In war time our moral vision is blurred, and 
 
 we “see red” or do not see at all. Under the 
 
 awful stress of purely physical pressure, 
 
 when brutal terror threatens those we love, 
 
 when all the deepest passions of our nature 
 
 112 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 are blown to white heat, clear sight becomes 
 the rarest of possessions and yet remains in¬ 
 dispensable to moral action. The nation that 
 is fighting for its life strikes out blindly, in 
 the frantic necessity of striking somehow 
 and somewhere. “War is blows,” says a 
 noted Englishman, when urging America to 
 cooperate. Yes, war is blows; but blows 
 planted in the right place and at the right 
 time by those who understand the moral aim 
 behind the physical deed. Loud-voiced ora¬ 
 tors cry, “Don’t talk, don’t parley, don’t 
 think, just win the war,” as if we could 
 strengthen a nation’s hands by closing its 
 eyes. Unless there be some sublime moral 
 aim behind a defensive war the church must 
 wash its hands of the immoral and senseless 
 struggle. If there be such an aim that can 
 strengthen our hands by purifying our con¬ 
 science and enlisting the power of Christian 
 conviction, then the primary duty of the 
 church is to reveal the aim, address the con¬ 
 science, and show us that resistance to 
 tyrants is obedience to God. 
 
 Going to church ought to be entering 
 the Interpreter’s House. “I went into 
 
 113 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the sanctuary of God, then understood I,” 
 was the experience of the psalmist, an expe¬ 
 rience now grown rare and precious. There 
 is something almost hopeless about the aver¬ 
 age Sunday morning church service in our 
 large cities. The congregation ordinarily 
 represents the successful side of modern life. 
 At the head of each pew sits a man who has 
 succeeded under the present social and moral 
 order, and is interested in preserving it 
 against disturbing influences. He is sat¬ 
 urated with preaching, and as a “tired busi¬ 
 ness man” can hardly be expected to relish 
 any summons to rethink the propositions on 
 which his success is based. In the pulpit is a 
 man whose whole environment has sheltered 
 him from the rougher contacts of life. He 
 sees his congregation only in its best attire. 
 Men dress to hear him, as they dress for the 
 opera. If he sees them during the week, they 
 hush their voices, change their vocabulary, 
 and adopt temporarily his point of view. 
 Then on Sunday the sheltered prophet ad¬ 
 dresses the men who want to be sheltered 
 from disturbing conceptions and to have elo¬ 
 quent reaffirmation of what they already he¬ 
 rn 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 lieve. Can such a church be an Interpreter’s 
 House? 
 
 But in time of war no man in pew or pul¬ 
 pit can protect himself from what John 
 Morley calls the “volcanic elements” in 
 Christianity. Men come to church already 
 shaken in spirit, “they reel to and fro and 
 stagger like a drunken man, and are at 
 their wit’s end.” Their moral world has 
 suddenly been inverted. The Ten Com¬ 
 mandments have been abrogated. A procla¬ 
 mation has in a single hour created a hundred 
 million official enemies, and to plunder and 
 stab and kill them has become a public duty. 
 A man leaves wife and child at the national 
 summons and goes forth to deprive some 
 other wife and child of husband and father, 
 and to keep on doing it until the ground is 
 sodden with blood and cities are a charred 
 ruin and millions are starving and driven to 
 surrender. And that man’s neighbors and 
 brothers sit in the church on Sunday morn¬ 
 ing, all their vision blurred by tears and 
 anger, all their souls in insurrection, all their 
 nature crying out for a clue to the moral 
 
 maze. They have closed offices, shops, mills, 
 
 115 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 and homes in order to hear the Christian mes¬ 
 sage. The Christian preacher is the only 
 man in civilization for whom all business 
 ceases in order that his message may be 
 heard and pondered. Before him sit on Sun¬ 
 day men who have paused in the vital tasks 
 of modern life to learn what is worth while 
 and what is the goal of all their work. They 
 cannot be content to hear how men were 
 good in the eighth century B. C. They want 
 to know what is goodness now in the present 
 crisis, what Christ would do if he were here, 
 what his teachings mean when applied to the 
 concrete tragedy in which they are involved. 
 Is the man in the pulpit a real interpreter of 
 God? Can he help the confused and storm- 
 tossed souls before him to see the ultimate 
 realities of life ? 
 
 At such a time the teaching function of 
 the church looms large and imperative. Each 
 morning the daily newspaper storms our 
 minds with new facts, and each night we are 
 torn by conflicting duties and apparently in¬ 
 soluble problems. This sudden abrogation 
 of the Ten Commandments—is it reconcil¬ 
 able with ethics and religion? After years of 
 
 116 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 learning to love shall we now begin to hate? 
 Yet, if there is nothing to hate, surely there 
 is nothing worth fighting against. Can we 
 love our neighbor while we throttle him? Is 
 our old idea of love too narrow, too senti¬ 
 mental, too unreal to meet the actual situa¬ 
 tion? Is patriotism the highest duty of the 
 Christian, or is it mere clannishness and 
 selfishness, as when Dr. Johnson pronounced 
 it “the last refuge of a scoundrel”? Is the 
 teaching of Jesus applicable only to indi¬ 
 viduals and without any reference to the re¬ 
 lation of states to one another? Is there such 
 a thing as national altruism, and may a state 
 lay down its life for great ends as does the 
 single martyr or crusader? Is the League 
 of Nations a vain dream of the pacifists, a 
 mirage in the moral desert, or is it the logical 
 and inevitable outcome of good will to men? 
 Is war always an abhorrent thing, the mere 
 camouflage of capitalism and exploitation, 
 or are we right when we place the heroes of 
 Valley Forge and Gettysburg close beside 
 the goodly fellowship of apostles and proph¬ 
 ets? Is there any middle ground between 
 Bernhardi and Tolstoy? And if so, how can 
 
 117 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 we find it in the quiet hour of this Sunday 
 morning service? 
 
 These are the poignant, searching ques¬ 
 tions that come up out of the pew in war 
 time, and they are not to be answered by re¬ 
 peating the Apostles’ Creed or singing of 
 “Jerusalem the Golden.” The people are 
 groping, stumbling, calling for guidance, 
 hungry for truth. “These men,” said an 
 English chaplain regarding his regiment, 
 “are not opposed to the church, but they are 
 disappointed in its leadership.” The most 
 deadening force in the community may be a 
 church that merely cries “Peace” when there 
 is no peace, or shouts “Win the war” without 
 any understanding of why or how it must 
 be won. 
 
 We may say that we do not wish to preach 
 war every Sunday, but the truth is we can¬ 
 not preach of anything that does not directly 
 bear on a world-conflagration. To ignore it 
 would be to ignore the air we breathe. Why 
 does war come to the nations, how is it to be 
 met, how may its sacrifices be borne, how 
 shall we deal with the conscientious objector, 
 
 how shall we keep the inner peace amid the 
 
 118 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 outer struggle, how shall wars be finally 
 ended, and how can this war consistently be 
 supported by disciples of the Prince of 
 Peace?—these are the insistent problems 
 which the church must help to solve or for¬ 
 ever lose its power of religious leadership. 
 No rising for prayers, no shaking of an evan¬ 
 gelist’s hand, no baptismal rites, no repeti¬ 
 tion of ancient formulas means anything in 
 war time unless the men who do these things 
 know where Christ stands in the modern 
 world and are ready at any cost to stand be¬ 
 side him. In a time of mental darkness and 
 spiritual agony one of the prime functions of 
 the church is recovery of sight to them that 
 are blind. 
 
 But the chief function of the church still 
 remains: setting at liberty them that are 
 bound. When Gladstone was reproached for 
 his variations of political opinion he an¬ 
 swered: “The reason is very simple; I was 
 brought up to dislike and distrust liberty; 
 I have learned to believe in it; that is the 
 secret of all my changes.” The Christian 
 Church was founded on the belief in liberty. 
 
 Its earliest message was a glad release from 
 
 119 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 superstition, from priestly oppression, from 
 the burden of man-made duties and man¬ 
 made dogmas. And within twenty years its 
 greatest apostle had to issue the warning 
 cry: “Be not entangled again in the yoke of 
 bondage!” The Christian Church was 
 founded in liberty, and it has learned to dis¬ 
 trust, and often dislike, liberty—that is the 
 secret of its changes. 
 
 Of course this is the penalty of having in¬ 
 stitutions of any kind—they imprison the 
 very ideas that gave them birth. A great 
 musician, like Beethoven or Wagner, dares 
 to break the conventional rules of music and 
 write harmonies which make the hearers 
 shiver. Soon multitudes praise him, and es¬ 
 tablish a new school in music, and that new 
 school, being duly organized and waxing 
 strong, forbids any innovation and shivers at 
 the composer who leaves the beaten track as 
 Beethoven and Wagner left it many years 
 before. 
 
 A political leader defies his party and, 
 drawn by a vision of to-morrow, he leads 
 forth a new group of radicals. Half a cen¬ 
 tury later that radical group, having estab- 
 
 120 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 lished themselves in power, deny the right of 
 secession and pour contempt on any man 
 who dares to follow their early example. 
 
 The Christian Church was founded in a 
 superb protest against the powers that be. 
 “Woe unto you Pharisees—you lawyers— 
 you that are rich—you that oppress the 
 widow and the fatherless!” It was a divine 
 secession from a national church that had 
 lost all sense of divinity. It was an exodus 
 from a religious desert, a break with the es¬ 
 tablished and fossilized hierarchy, a release 
 from burdens against which human souls 
 had for centuries protested. “Christ treated 
 the Old Testament with amazing freedom.” 
 Oftm he repeated, “It has been said by them 
 of old time, but I say unto you” something 
 very different. Under his quiet sentences is 
 the tlirob and heave of subterranean powers 
 that low and then erupt and overflow in lava 
 streams. But we who come centuries later 
 find ihe molten streams have hardened into 
 rock, We build our homes upon the arrested 
 flow, ^id devoutly hope never again will the 
 subterlanean forces disturb our dwelling. 
 
 The gjeat need of the church is to realize 
 
 121 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 that it can never succeed as an arrester of 
 movement, as a brake on the wheels, as a con- 
 server of the past. It can succeed only when 
 it is true to its original conception as the 
 inspirer of change, the leader of migrations, 
 the fountain of unceasing and resistless 
 energy. 
 
 The mighty wave of democracy now 
 sweeping round the world will either ujlift 
 the church to new leadership or leave it 
 stranded and deserted. Do we, the members 
 of the average church, really believe in de¬ 
 mocracy as the finest expression of the, 
 Christian temper, or do we fear its crudity, 
 its impulsiveness, its resistless advance? Do 
 the men who sit at the head of the pew really 
 desire democracy in church meetings, ir fac¬ 
 tory and mill, in municipal government, or 
 does the demos seem to them a dangerous 
 beast, to be confined as long as possible 
 within the political cage? And the nan in 
 the pulpit—is he like his Master? Can he 
 say, “It hath been said by Luther and Calvin 
 and the prayer book—but I say urto you 
 something wholly different”? Has he the 
 prophetic fire that burned at Penteccst, that 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 flamed out in Savonarola and Wiclif, or is 
 he afraid of that fire and eager to snuff out 
 each dangerous spark? Is he a leader in 
 spiritual adventure, so that strong men de¬ 
 light to follow him over new trails and up the 
 heights? Or has he long since ceased to 
 climb, and become simply a reader of the 
 guidebooks which tell how other men dared 
 to do it? It was of some such relapsed trav¬ 
 eler that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: 
 
 “The frozen peaks he once explored. 
 
 But now he’s dead and by the board; 
 
 How better far at home to have stayed, 
 Attended by the parlor maid!” 
 
 When we enter a strange church on Sun¬ 
 day we can test it by asking whether the mes¬ 
 sage produces in us the original sensation it 
 produced in Palestine. Does it give us the 
 feeling of opening doors, bolts withdrawn, 
 windows flung wide, and new vistas all along 
 the horizon, or does the church make us feel 
 that most doors are shut, that few things are 
 permitted or possible, that the world is a 
 smaller and bleaker place than we had 
 thought? “Them that are bound”—the 
 
 phrase is pathetic because it includes so 
 
 123 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 many. They do not lie in visible dungeons; 
 they may sit in the chief seats of the syna¬ 
 gogue, they may ride in costly motor cars, 
 they may stand with the dignitaries at some 
 great festival, yet they may be so bound by 
 personal appetite, by ancient superstition, 
 by fear of heresy, by dogmatic authority, 
 that all power of leadership has vanished, all 
 joy in spiritual adventure has become impos¬ 
 sible, and New Testament Christianity 
 seems a rather wild force that must be tamed 
 before it can be safely domiciled. 
 
 “Many of these so-called doctrines that 
 our fathers taught and believed in,” says Dr. 
 Johnston Myers, “are not important for this 
 age. We need not deny the old truth, but 
 we need new truth for the new era.” We 
 may go further, and say that if we fail to 
 find new truth, we are out of touch with the 
 very genius of Christianity. Christianity 
 said through its great Founder, “I have 
 many things yet to say.” It said through 
 John Robinson: “There is much more light 
 to break out of God’s Word.” It led Roger 
 Williams out of Massachusetts, John Wes¬ 
 ley to do his best work outside of the Church 
 
 124 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 of England, William Booth out of the Meth¬ 
 odist Church, and is always leading into 
 fresh fields and pastures new. So long as 
 a man is loyal to Christ he can be trusted to 
 go a long way. If he goes only a little way 
 and stops in terror, we know he is not loyal. 
 
 What we have been saying applies with 
 special force in war time, when disruption of 
 the old and revelation of the new come to 
 us with sudden shock. Processes that have 
 been proceeding slowly for a century are 
 “speeded up” and in the twinkling of an eye 
 the change has arrived. Old maps of the 
 world become swiftly out of date. Social 
 transformations come over night. Taxes 
 that we thought we never could pay are 
 cheerfully borne. Government becomes 
 enormously centralized and we all acquiesce. 
 Our daily food is controlled and divided 
 among us, our fuel is apportioned without 
 our consent, new laws are made each week, 
 new powers given to magistrates, a new 
 nationalization of industry is achieved, and 
 measures that we ridiculed or reviled are 
 adopted by a hundred millions without com¬ 
 plaint. 
 
 125 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 And in the relations of states to one an¬ 
 other the changes are so vast, so momentous, 
 as to thrill or stun us. Twenty nations, 
 some of which bitterly fought one another in 
 former days, are now leagued together for 
 mutual defense and for the sake of saving 
 freedom. Ancient foes, like England and 
 France, now are marching arm in arm; 
 Asiatics and Africans are working beside 
 European soldiers. A French general bends 
 over the tomb of Washington and an Amer¬ 
 ican general in Paris cries, “Lafayette, we 
 are here!” Such swift and dazzling changes 
 constitute the most striking challenge and 
 the most glorious opportunity that ever came 
 to the Christian Church. 
 
 Little things have been swept aside—let 
 us hope forever. Sectarianism has proved a 
 luxury that we may afford in peace, but too 
 costly to be endured in war. “Our unhappy 
 divisions” seem more unhappy than ever at 
 home, when they no longer exist at the front. 
 The Jewish soldier seizes a silver crucifix 
 from a dead comrade and holds it aloft be¬ 
 fore the eyes of a dying enemy. All denomi¬ 
 nations stand together in the trenches; may 
 
 126 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 they not stand together when the trenches 
 are filled up and the boys come home? All 
 churches meet in the same “hut” in the 
 camps; may they not meet when the camps 
 dissolve and the captains and the kings de¬ 
 part? 
 
 The church is humiliated, and it ought to 
 be, that it was so ramified and so split into 
 fragments that the nations have not been 
 able to intrust any important war task into 
 churchly hands. The chaplains have done a 
 noble work, but they had to leave the super¬ 
 vision of the churches to do it. The Young 
 Men’s Christian Association is composed 
 wholly of church members and inspired by 
 the Christian faith, but it exists only because 
 existing churches are so organized that they 
 cannot be utilized in a national crisis. “The 
 pathos of the present time,” said the Arch¬ 
 bishop of York on his visit to America, “is 
 that men everywhere through the shock of 
 war are being turned as never before to 
 Jesus Christ. Yet it is not to the organized 
 Church of God that they are looking for a 
 manifestation of Christ.” We all know that 
 
 to be true. The tremendous crisis has made 
 
 127 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, and the Red 
 Triangle bulk larger than ever in the world’s 
 confidence, and made institutional Chris¬ 
 tianity pathetically conscious of a message it 
 cannot utter, and a work it is not yet or¬ 
 ganized to do. We want no new gospel, but 
 we want, and must have, new organs of 
 utterance, new channels for action, if the 
 church is to resume its leadership of men. 
 
 The greatest opportunity of two thousand 
 years will come to the church when the war 
 is over. Then the great tasks of reconstruc¬ 
 tion will tax the highest genius of civiliza¬ 
 tion. Science, art, politics, government, law, 
 will all be straining their utmost resources 
 to create a new world on the ruins of the old 
 one. But Christianity must arise and make 
 itself heard throughout civilization with a 
 new commandment: “Thou shalt not rebuild 
 the old world order! Thou shalt not restore 
 the old tribal jealousy and nationalistic 
 hate! Thou shalt not repair the broken 
 altars of a tribal god!” Then Christianity 
 must show to the world the foundation of 
 peace—good will among men; and the 
 
 method of peace—a League which shall unite 
 
 128 
 
MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 the various states in the constructive tasks 
 of civilization. 
 
 The difficulties are great, but of the same 
 kind as those which once kept Italy a mass 
 of warring cities, and Germany a collection 
 of impotent principalities, and America a 
 weak line of mutually jealous colonies. Only 
 men of imagination can dream of the League 
 of States, and only men of faith can make 
 the dream come true. Rut to the church, 
 which has always dreamed of one fold and 
 one shepherd, which has always preached the 
 brotherhood of man, the plan for a great 
 international covenant comes as a glorious 
 vision, as a step toward the visible revelation 
 of the kingdom of God. Let the church 
 now seize its unique opportunity. Let it not 
 be robbed of its high mission by Socialism 
 or any other transient movement. It is 
 divinely and imperatively summoned now to 
 lead, to set men dreaming of the day of God, 
 to unite men in erecting the great new struc¬ 
 ture of international life. “He looked for 
 a city which hath foundations,” but he died 
 without the sight. Patriarchs looked for it; 
 Christians build it. 
 
 129 
 
Cling to faith beyond the forms of faith. 
 
 She reels not in the storm of warring words, 
 
 She brightens at the clash of “Yes” and “No,” 
 
 She sees the best that glimmers through the worst. 
 She feels the sun is hid but for a night, 
 
 She spies the summer through the winter bud, 
 
 • • • • • • • • 
 
 She finds the fountain where they wailed “Mirage!” 
 
 — Tennyson. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 “Men see not the bright light which is in 
 the clouds”—so laments the friend of Job 
 in a dark and distressful time. The clouds 
 themselves all can see. They lower, black 
 and thunderous, all along the horizon. Is 
 there any light within them or behind them? 
 
 Many reports from the battle-scarred 
 fields of Europe tell us of the singing of 
 birds amid the roar of the battle. When the 
 big shells are bursting and the ground is 
 quaking and upheaving, the larks soar un¬ 
 concerned in the sky and the less famous 
 birds fill the trees and bushes with song. 
 Why do the birds sing? Is it because they 
 see so little of what is going on, or because 
 they see so much? Is it because they are 
 subhuman and stupid and know no better, 
 or is it because they see farther over the land¬ 
 scape and deeper into the sky than men can 
 
 see? Do angels sing as well as birds, above 
 
 133 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the battlefield? Certainly, that first Christ¬ 
 mas song of “Peace on earth” was sung 
 above fields desolated by Herod when he 
 “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, 
 . . . from two years old and under.” The 
 cruelty that ravaged the earth could not 
 silence the song of the sky. 
 
 Surely nothing that we may say about the 
 incidental or ultimate benefits that come out 
 of the war can be construed as implying ap¬ 
 proval of war as a necessity. We simply 
 wish to point out that the future is not 
 utterly black, the world is not totally irra¬ 
 tional, and human civilization is not a foun¬ 
 dered ship beating on the rocks. We wish 
 to show that some good is left when four 
 fifths of the world is at war, and that 
 thoughtful souls need not lose faith in either 
 God or humanity. The benefits of war which 
 we are to consider are none of them intended 
 by those who incite war. It was Pharaoh’s 
 bitter oppression of Israel that turned out to 
 mean Israel’s freedom and glorious future 
 —small credit to Pharaoh! There are bene¬ 
 fits that flow out of tornadoes and typhoid 
 
 fever and conflagrations in great cities. 
 
 134 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 These calamities furnish opportunity for 
 splendid heroisms, for demonstrations of 
 human brotherhood, for the triumph of reli¬ 
 gious faith. The great earthquake and fire 
 that destroyed San Francisco a few years 
 ago is already seen to be a blessing. The 
 frightful explosion that destroyed a large 
 section of Halifax will unquestionably pro¬ 
 duce a finer city, with better buildings, more 
 significant architecture, safer and happier 
 homes. Yet we do not welcome earthquake 
 or explosion or arson, as a means of prog¬ 
 ress. The progress comes as a by-product 
 or a far-away and inevitable result brought 
 about in spite of human carelessness or 
 human cruelty. Suggestively and truly has 
 Goethe defined the devil as the power that 
 “steadily intends the evil and steadily ac¬ 
 complishes the good.” What are some of 
 the unintended mitigations of horror, some 
 of the gleams of light through the clouds of 
 world-tragedy? 
 
 One remarkable result of war is the moral 
 
 renovation of individuals. Millions of men 
 
 are suddenly brought to question their own 
 
 fitness for an arduous task and to subject 
 
 135 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 themselves to the critical scrutiny of a gov¬ 
 ernment in need of men. Millions are sud¬ 
 denly compelled to ask themselves: “What 
 am I good for in time of stress? What 
 worth-while things do I know how to do? 
 What is the value of my service to my fel¬ 
 low men?” Self-examination, long ago re¬ 
 jected as a piece of morbid Puritanism, is 
 suddenly forced upon a hundred million peo¬ 
 ple, all asking: “What shall I do,” not now 
 “to be saved,” but “to save my country?” 
 
 The most obvious of the new tests are 
 those regarding physical fitness. Is the man 
 sound in eyes, in teeth, in feet, in wind and 
 limb? With petty exactness we insist that 
 if he is sixty-one inches in height he must 
 weigh at least 110 pounds, and if sixty-two 
 inches tall he must weigh 112 pounds, even 
 though we know that such a requirement 
 would have ruled out some of the greatest 
 soldiers of the world. 
 
 Then we apply the deeper tests of psy¬ 
 chology. Has the would-be soldier a nerv¬ 
 ous system that can stand sudden shock? 
 Has he self-possession when men around him 
 
 are confused and terrified? After being 
 
 136 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 whirled around a dozen times on a piano- 
 stool can he then walk a chalk-line? Has he 
 a sense of direction which will enable him to 
 find his way in the dark over a strange coun¬ 
 try or through a trackless sky? 
 
 Deeper yet and vastly more important are 
 the tests of character. Can the soldier speak 
 the truth when sorely tempted to lie out of 
 a disagreeable situation? Can he keep his 
 soul clean and white amid the fierce tempta¬ 
 tions of a novel and exciting experience? 
 Can he sacrifice without whimpering all the 
 dear and pleasant things of life for a great 
 but distant ideal? These are precisely the 
 examination questions that were once put to 
 Galilean fishermen: “Are ye able to drink 
 of the cup that I shall drink of?” 
 
 The men who are thus forced to appraise 
 their own physical and moral selves, forced 
 to subject themselves to the pitiless verdict 
 of their fellows and submit to long and diffi¬ 
 cult training in order to attain fitness, fre¬ 
 quently undergo a surprising transforma¬ 
 tion in bearing and in attitude toward life. 
 The upsetting of civilization means the set¬ 
 ting up of some men. Men hitherto aimless, 
 
 137 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 spineless, disheveled, without any coherent 
 purpose in life, are suddenly straightened up 
 and straightened out. 
 
 The great trouble that we find with men 
 when they enter college to-day is not that 
 they are bad-hearted but that they are scat¬ 
 ter-brained. They are undisciplined, loose- 
 belted, and intellectually disjointed. They 
 are moving in many directions at the same 
 time instead of moving toward any goal. 
 Their ambitions end, like a broom, in a mul¬ 
 titude of small straws, when they should end, 
 like a bayonet, in point and power. Such 
 men often are versatile, ingenious, winsome, 
 but quite useless for any task. They are 
 charming but sprawling. And we see these 
 men corraled by a sudden summons, pulled 
 out of the old lassitude and self-complacency, 
 drilled in platoons, subjected to heat and 
 cold and storm and mud and endless priva¬ 
 tions, and in thousands of cases inwardly 
 transformed. As they walk the street we see 
 a new light in their eyes, a new purpose in 
 the squared shoulders. Thousands of men 
 are rescued from aimlessness and stagnation 
 
 and provided with a purpose in living. Of 
 
 138 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 course in many recruits the opposite result 
 is seen; there is a coarsening of fiber, a vul¬ 
 garization of mind or a descent to the purely 
 animal level. Also it must be admitted that 
 the splendid purpose injected into men by 
 the emergency of war often fades away when 
 the war is over. The returned soldier is not 
 always the saint. When the external au¬ 
 thority is relaxed he may slide back into the 
 old shiftless existence. But, after making 
 all possible exceptions and qualifications, we 
 must admit with gratitude that the tragic 
 experience of war means the physical and 
 moral rebirth of some men. 
 
 The development of womanhood in war¬ 
 time is a striking phenomenon. We have 
 seen thousands of women who have lived 
 hitherto a purely parasitic life suddenly 
 awakened to responsibility and devotion. 
 Women who have never found a cause worth 
 living for, much less dying for, have found 
 it now. Women who have all their lives 
 been consumers, not producers, mere 
 spenders of a father’s or husband’s money, 
 who have given their days to bridge or after¬ 
 noon teas, and their nights to doubtful shows, 
 
 139 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 have suddenly discovered and faced their 
 own culpable uselessness, have put on the 
 white gown and the red cross and gone over 
 mine-infested seas to do their bit. Love of 
 adventure is it, that moves them? Yes, 
 doubtless, in part. Motives are always 
 mingled, even in the noblest action. Rut it 
 is also real weariness with a life that does not 
 count, real revolt from existence that has 
 no moral or social value, real desire to co¬ 
 operate with the great leaders of humanity 
 in ushering in a finer and nobler era for the 
 world. And when they come back from the 
 front they can never be quite so naively use¬ 
 less again. 
 
 The growth of the capacity to make sacri¬ 
 fice for an ideal is noteworthy in war-time. 
 Men learn to do without things, they learn 
 how few things are essential, how soul-satis¬ 
 fying it is to strip off luxuries and super¬ 
 fluities, to put one’s bare body against danger 
 and one’s bare soul against the gaze of God. 
 Things are no longer in the saddle, but are 
 replaced by a great purpose and a new ideal. 
 And when the externals of life are thus 
 
 stripped away, and the eye is turned inward 
 
 140 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 and upward, the world of the spirit becomes 
 luminous and glows with the light of revela¬ 
 tion. Boys in their teens develop a spiritual 
 experience denied to most men of middle 
 age. Daily contact with death, which must 
 bring to some men stoicism or dogged fatal¬ 
 ism, brings to others an insight into the 
 motive and meaning of life which transforms 
 young boys into the prophets and seers of 
 a new age. Thus Charles Hamilton Sorley, 
 a student from the University of Cambridge 
 who was killed in action on October 13,1915, 
 at the age of twenty, wrote words which may 
 be a greater gift to the world than years of 
 ordinary prosaic living could have been: 
 
 “From morn to midnight, all day through, 
 
 I laugh and play as others do. 
 
 I sin and chatter, just the same 
 As others with a different name. 
 
 “And all year long upon the stage, 
 
 I dance and tumble and do rage 
 So vehemently, I scarcely see 
 The inner and eternal me. 
 
 “I have a temple I do not 
 Visit, a heart I have forgot, 
 
 A self that I have never met, 
 
 A secret shrine—and yet, and yet 
 
 141 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 “This sanctuary of my soul 
 Unwittingly I keep white and whole, 
 Unlatched and lit, if Thou shouldst care 
 To enter or to tarry there. 
 
 “With parted lips and outstretched hands 
 And listening ears, Thy servant stands; 
 
 Call Thou early, call Thou late, 
 
 To Thy great service dedicate.” 
 
 Do boys of twenty write like that? Never 
 until some mighty summons to sacrifice has 
 purged their souls and burned out all petty 
 ambitions and qualified them for spiritual 
 leadership. Then their twenty years may 
 include richer and deeper experience than 
 fourscore years spent in the chimney corner 
 or the club window. 
 
 Another striking by-product of war is an 
 unprecedented impulse to national unity. 
 All parties and creeds, all institutions and 
 organizations, all sections of the social order 
 suddenly come together and close up in the 
 presence of the common danger from with¬ 
 out. The nation suddenly realizes that it 
 can no longer support hair-splitting distinc¬ 
 tions and rival organizations. At the front 
 there is a strange enforced democracy that 
 is startlingly suggestive. One young man 
 
 142 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 just returned from driving an ambulance 
 said: “The man who brought us our mail 
 every morning had been a chauffeur in New 
 York; the man next me was a professor in 
 the University of Chicago. On the other 
 side my neighbors were a Russian count who 
 had been living in America and an attractive 
 boy from a New England high school.” This 
 compulsory commingling of strangers and 
 aliens, this bare democracy under military 
 pressure, is one of the most far-reaching and 
 eye-opening experiences that can come to a 
 nation. These men thus forced to sleep and 
 eat and suffer together, thus compelled to 
 look into each other’s souls for months at 
 a time, can never be quite so separated by 
 artificial distinctions again. At least for a 
 time the rich man has seen the heroism of the 
 poor, for a time the poor man has learned the 
 simple human qualities of the rich, at least 
 for one period in its life the nation has re¬ 
 verted to the days of ancient Rome: 
 
 “Then none was for a party, 
 
 Then all were for the state, 
 
 Then the great man helped the poor 
 
 And the poor man loved the great.” 
 
 143 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 This leveling process may indeed mean a 
 leveling down; it may mean the submergence 
 of ideals in a common ruck of daily neces¬ 
 sities. That is the danger of all democracy, 
 in war and in peace. But we do not believe 
 it is usually true that, in Emerson’s phrase, 
 “men descend to meet.” Rather we hold 
 that men ascend by meeting. If we can 
 strip men of accidental and irrelevant dis¬ 
 tinctions and bring them close together in 
 pursuit of a common purpose, the benefits 
 are inevitable and permanent. 
 
 But it is the unity at home which is most 
 striking because it is not physical at all, but 
 wholly psychological and moral. We have 
 been a polyglot people in America, de¬ 
 scended from many diverse ancestors, carry¬ 
 ing conflicting ideals of liberty and happi¬ 
 ness. We have fought one another at the 
 polls, in the newspapers, in conventions, and 
 once through four tragic years of civil war. 
 Would America ever achieve any real unity, 
 ever find her soul? And while we were ask¬ 
 ing that question, a marvelous process was 
 going on before our eyes. The managers 
 of vast private business enterprises were on 
 
 144 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 their way to Washington, to serve the gov¬ 
 ernment at one dollar a year. The leaders 
 of organized labor were conferring with the 
 President of the republic. The chief sup¬ 
 porters of the President were men of the 
 opposite political faith. Conservatives and 
 radicals, reactionaries and forward-looking 
 men, university professors and day laborers, 
 men of thought and men of action, were 
 standing shoulder to shoulder as never before 
 in the history of the country. The nation was 
 never so united in the American Revolution, 
 when the number of Tories constituted from 
 one fifth to three fifths of the population in 
 each colony and tens of thousands of them 
 emigrated to Canada. It was not so united 
 in the Civil War, when even in Northern 
 States multitudes would placate and soothe 
 the “erring sisters” rather than defend the 
 Union by force. 
 
 What brought about this extraordinary 
 and swift unification of sentiment and will? 
 Nothing but a clear-cut and world-wide 
 moral issue. It is not the loss of a few Amer¬ 
 ican lives, not the destruction of a little 
 
 American property. It is the monstrous and 
 
 145 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 immoral theory of a certain warrior class 
 across the seas, the pretensions of a military 
 caste, the assertion of might in the face of 
 all the rights of mankind, which have 
 wrought this marvelous unity of soul and 
 made a hundred million think and feel as 
 one man. There is no welding power on 
 earth equal to the power of a conviction of 
 righteousness. Lust of land, desire for 
 plunder, thirst for glory, may bind men to¬ 
 gether for a time, but only a white-hot con¬ 
 viction of right can fuse a nation. With 
 deep reverence we might almost dare to 
 form a new beatitude: “Blessed are they that 
 do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
 they shall be united.” 
 
 This is the true naturalization of immi¬ 
 grants. No papers or documents can make 
 a stranger into an American. The mere 
 legal process may leave the foreigner cold 
 and alien, included but unassimilated. He 
 must be baptized into the spirit of America, 
 into our faiths and hopes and sacrifices, into 
 sympathy with the founders and leaders who 
 lived and died for our ideals, or he is not 
 truly naturalized. 
 
 146 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 In front of the City Hall in the city of 
 Newark is a statue of Abraham Lincoln by 
 Borglum. The great bronze figure is seated 
 on a bench, and often school children climb 
 upon that bench and nestle in the gaunt 
 bronze arm of the seated Lincoln. Recently 
 an immigrant father, a long-bearded Rus¬ 
 sian peasant, was seen standing with his lit¬ 
 tle daughter before the statue, while she was 
 explaining in the father’s native tongue who 
 Lincoln was, what he said and did, and how 
 he died. The foreign father listened with 
 impassive countenance and then was swept 
 by sudden emotion. Reverently he lifted his 
 small daughter with his great knotted hands 
 toward the bronze figure and she imprinted 
 a kiss on the furrowed cheek. Then the two 
 went in silence to their meager home. 
 
 That is the true naturalization of the alien! 
 That goes far beyond the legal formality, and 
 is a real adoption into the spirit and temper, 
 the principles and ideals of America. With¬ 
 out it we remain dissevered, discordant, 
 belligerent; with it we are one in power to 
 toil, to sacrifice, to achieve. The unity of the 
 
 nation is not economic, since man does not 
 
 147 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 live by bread only; not legislative, since laws 
 are powerless unless the people’s will is be¬ 
 hind them; not governmental, since govern¬ 
 ment has no reality apart from the consent 
 of the governed. The unity of the nation is 
 moral and spiritual; it consists in ideals held 
 dearer than life, principles ingrained in mil¬ 
 lions of souls, and the dedication of the whole 
 people to the protection of the weakest and 
 feeblest among us. This spiritual fusion is 
 achieved for many in days of peace; but it is 
 achieved on a vast scale and with incredible 
 swiftness in the high temperatures of a na¬ 
 tion struggling for liberty. 
 
 Another shaft of light out of the cloud is 
 
 seen in the unifying of Christian forces in 
 
 the vast work of ministration to the bodies 
 
 and souls of men. When we see a hundred 
 
 million dollars subscribed in a few days for 
 
 the work of a purely voluntary Christian 
 
 Association, when we see that Association 
 
 recognized and highly valued by all existing 
 
 governments, its workers welcomed to camps 
 
 and prisons in every grief-stricken land, and 
 
 millions of soldiers crying, “I was sick, and 
 
 ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came 
 
 148 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 unto me,” we are witnessing one of the great¬ 
 est religious movements in all history, whose 
 story will be told centuries hence as one of 
 the gesta Christi. The Young Men’s Chris¬ 
 tian Association is the Christian Church 
 lifted above its petty divisions, inspired by 
 a vision of human need, willing at last to 
 sidetrack its ritual, its dogma, its tithing of 
 mint, anise and cummin, and apply itself 
 whole-heartedly and unreservedly to the cry¬ 
 ing woes and dangers of the world. Its 
 superb crusade, not to possess Christ’s 
 sepulcher but to incarnate his life, carries us 
 back to the social and moral passion of the 
 first three centuries, when the Christian faith 
 spread all through Europe, winning its great 
 victories not by miracle or argument but by 
 the humble lives of believers who embodied 
 their faith in their daily deeds. 
 
 The denominations were standing 
 asunder, and so were powerless to meet this 
 need. No one of them could be recognized 
 by any government without bitter complaint 
 from all the others. Hence the Association 
 steps in as an undenominational and inter¬ 
 national church, denying no Christian 
 
 149 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 dogma, repudiating no ritual, but willing to 
 postpone debatables until the undebatable 
 need of humanity has been met by Christian 
 love. In the familiar “hut” all faiths— 
 Protestant, Catholic, and Hebrew—are wel¬ 
 come. There we see dogma at its lowest 
 terms and religion at its highest power. In 
 one Siberian hut thronged by Mohammedan 
 prisoners many copies of the Koran were 
 distributed, because, as the secretary simply 
 said, “It is better that these poor fellows 
 should pray in their own way than not to 
 pray at all.” Could not such largeness of 
 sympathy be shown in days of peace? 
 Surely; yet it was not shown until the shat¬ 
 tering of human ambitions by world-wide 
 tragedy had carried Christians beyond the 
 circumference to the glowing, imperishable 
 center of the Christian faith. 
 
 And thousands of other institutions sud¬ 
 denly began to live not to enlarge themselves, 
 but to serve the nation and enrich mankind. 
 For many years the colleges have sent out 
 bulletins each autumn announcing, “Largest 
 number of students in our history.” Would 
 
 any college be proud of such a bulletin in 
 
 150 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 time of war? By a sudden inversion of pro¬ 
 cedure the colleges vie with one another in 
 announcement of diminished enrollments 
 and depleted treasuries. The college with 
 the greatest loss of numbers and the largest 
 deficit feels itself most truly enriched in the 
 imponderables of spiritual possession. 
 
 Swiftly other institutions follow. Every 
 
 theater drops its curtain in the middle of the 
 
 evening that an appeal for the Red Cross 
 
 or for some form of relief may be made. 
 
 Ambulances are sent by hundreds across the 
 
 sea. Every club or society has its War- 
 
 Work Committee. Every newspaper gives 
 
 freely its space to appeals to the mind and 
 
 heart of the nation. The click of flying 
 
 needles is heard at every lecture and almost 
 
 every concert. The dwellers in hotels gather 
 
 constantly, rolling bandages and filling 
 
 boxes for unseen comrades beyond the ocean. 
 
 A great wave of altruism sweeps over the 
 
 land and a sense of the partnership of each 
 
 with all uplifts and ennobles the entire social 
 
 order. As John Jay Chapman has said, 
 
 “The mystics have always told us that every 
 
 private act carried with it consequences to 
 
 151 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 the life of all men and the future of hu¬ 
 manity. But no one ever thought that a 
 man would say to us: Drop that piece of 
 white bread which you are raising to your 
 lips! The fate of the world five hundred 
 years hence is at stake.” There are, of course, 
 obvious and appalling exceptions. There 
 are profiteers and grafters, men who have 
 no aim but to exploit human sorrow and put 
 money in their purse. These are warts and 
 moles on the body politic. But its heart is 
 sound. 
 
 The willingness to sacrifice for a brother’s 
 need, a brother forever to be unseen and un¬ 
 known, the cheerful yielding to restrictions 
 inconceivable in days of peace, is a genuine 
 revelation to us all. Food and light and 
 heat, meat and sugar and coal and a score 
 of things that we have regarded as private 
 property are now seen as part of the com¬ 
 mon stock of civilization, as physical means 
 to ideal ends. The ton of coal or the pound 
 of sugar belongs to humanity’s great store¬ 
 house; it is the possession of all liberty-lov¬ 
 ing men; and a passage in the New Testa¬ 
 ment which we have always explained away 
 
 152 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 now suddenly becomes the expression of the 
 national ideal: “Neither said any of them 
 that aught which he possessed was his own; 
 but they had all things common.” 
 
 What changes shall come to the social 
 order out of the universal reorganization 
 forced by war, no man can tell. We have 
 watched the Russian revolution with hope 
 and yet with fear. Those who struggle for 
 democracy may get more of it than they 
 want. But they cannot get more than Chris¬ 
 tianity wants. Already a change of temper, 
 a new scale of values, has permeated civiliza¬ 
 tion. Never again can we return to the old 
 petty individualism and laissez-faire. The 
 new world will be newly organized. The 
 only welcome man will be the man qualified 
 for team work. “Me” and “mine” will be 
 small words in a new world which has learned 
 to say the great word “our.” 
 
 Another striking result of war is the clear 
 conviction of sin. War is a great revealer 
 of motives. It lays bare the long-cherished 
 purpose, it exposes the festering hatred, it 
 throws a lurid light upon our past. We ask: 
 “Why did this awful tragedy fall upon the 
 
 153 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 peoples? What seed did we sow that could 
 thus spring up armed men?” We are driven 
 to self-scrutiny, we go home with ourselves 
 —and acquaintance with self is a rare 
 achievement in the modern world. War sets 
 whole nations discussing the ethical aspects 
 of human action, pondering the place of 
 morals in commerce and government and 
 diplomacy. It sets us asking: “Is our 
 boasted civilization any real advance on the 
 wonderful life of the thirteenth century, the 
 age of Dante? Are we living on a higher 
 plane than did the Greeks in the days of 
 Pericles? This constant increase in arma¬ 
 ment, this appalling multiplication of en¬ 
 gines of destruction, is it a rational or is it 
 an insane proceeding? What infection is at 
 the root of our life which makes it blossom 
 in this poisonous flower? If we in fear sud¬ 
 denly effect certain great reforms, could we 
 not have done the same things without wait¬ 
 ing for the coming of the terror?” 
 
 We have made great camps sanitary and 
 wholesome places for men to live in. Why 
 did we not do the same thing for the factory 
 villages where men sicken and babies die? 
 
 154 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 We have surrounded the camps with a 
 “barred zone”; could we not surround the 
 college and the bank and the mill with a zone 
 of protection for young and eager manhood? 
 We have insisted on character behind the 
 khaki; might we not demand character in 
 evening dress? If we banish the canteen, 
 could we not muster courage to banish the 
 saloon? Or is our war-time reformation 
 totally nonmoral, mere spasmodic action 
 under stress of fear? 
 
 We have fed the Belgians nobly; could we 
 not feed the slums of New York? We have 
 offered our resources, our time, and our 
 strength to the government; why not before 
 war came? We have kept open the hospital 
 and the “hut” every day and all night; why 
 do we open our churches but four hours a 
 week? We have forgotten sect and party 
 and overleaped all barriers to reach our fel¬ 
 low men. Do we intend to construct again 
 all those barriers when the war is over ? Do 
 we intend to contract once more our sym¬ 
 pathies and exclude from fellowship nine 
 tenths of those who profess and call them¬ 
 selves Christians? We have prayed ferv- 
 
 155 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 ently since the war came; why did we not 
 pray before ? 
 
 “Eyes that the preacher could not school 
 By wayside graves are raised; 
 
 And lips say, ‘God be pitiful,’ 
 
 That ne’er said, ‘God be praised.’ ” 
 
 Surely from the battlefield of the nations 
 comes a searchlight that sweeps over our 
 past and reveals the evils that we have per¬ 
 mitted to dwell among us. 
 
 We see ourselves at last and cannot ad¬ 
 mire all that we see. We have discovered 
 the imperialistic aims in enlightened Chris¬ 
 tian governments, we have discovered social 
 injustice in our cities and moral stagnation 
 in rural life. We have laid bare the roots 
 of industrial unrest, we have stripped away 
 the mask from employees who have no 
 loyalty to their task, and employers who 
 have no human interest in their men. We 
 have begun to realize that men who are home¬ 
 less and hopeless in days of peace cannot 
 be suddenly converted into efficient soldiers 
 in days of war. We have learned that if 
 we ignore the children in the tenements, we 
 
LIGHT ON THE CLOUD 
 
 shall later find anaemic and unfit men in our 
 trenches. 
 
 When the millions of soldiers return to 
 their homes, it will be with a changed per¬ 
 spective and a new sense of values. After 
 the great democracy of military service will 
 they willingly accept a peaceful economic 
 subordination? After working not for 
 wages, but for country, for honor, for free¬ 
 dom, will they return with the same aims and 
 ambitions as before they left their homes? 
 How will the homeland seem to those men 
 when they view it again after their great ex¬ 
 perience ? To all of us, whether we serve the 
 cause of freedom at the front or in the home, 
 there is coming a new perspective and a con¬ 
 sequent reorganization of life. But we face 
 that future without foreboding. Because 
 we believe in God we dare to greet the un¬ 
 seen with a cheer! 
 
 157 
 
To that primeval passion may we yet 
 
 Give ampler range in fields of vaster marge. 
 ’Gainst war itself, when this war passes, let 
 Our bugles sound a charge. 
 
 —William Watson. 
 
 Those about her 
 
 From her shall read the perfect ways of love, 
 And by those claim their greatness, not by blood. 
 
 — Shakespeare. 
 

CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE REBUILDING OF THE 
 
 WORLD 
 
 In the great prose-poem that we call the 
 “Book of Revelation”—a poem quite Ori¬ 
 ental, mysterious, and at times bizarre—we 
 find much that baffles our prosaic Western 
 mind. It certainly is not a time-table of 
 the future, and all attempts to find in it 
 definite predictions of things to come have 
 proved illusive and futile. But its majestic 
 symbolism has made it a treasure-house and 
 armory for all the reformers of the Chris¬ 
 tian world. One sentence in it sets our 
 minds traveling to far horizons: “I saw a 
 new heaven and a new earth.” 
 
 Apparently, the new heaven came first in 
 the prophet’s vision. The earth did not of 
 itself rise and develop into a celestial city. 
 But the new city descended out of heaven to 
 
 the old chaotic earth and transformed it. 
 
 161 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 The ideal world must appear in clear outlines 
 before the actual material world can be re¬ 
 shaped. Vision must come before reforma¬ 
 tion. Frederic Harrison says that mankind 
 will not “listen to a religion that is up in the 
 sky.” The fact is mankind will never listen 
 permanently to anything else. The old earth 
 needs not to be patched up here and there, 
 but it needs to be laid out on a wholly new 
 plan; it needs to be reconstructed socially, 
 politically, and spiritually after a new pat¬ 
 tern. If statesmen and reformers and mis¬ 
 sionaries have no vision, they are like a stone¬ 
 cutter without a “blue-print,” endlessly ham¬ 
 mering and chipping at granite blocks, with 
 no pattern to direct his chisel and no knowl¬ 
 edge of the relation of one block to another 
 in the rising walls. The busier the stone¬ 
 cutters are, the greater the chaos they pro¬ 
 duce unless they have seen the pattern in 
 the mount. The worst possible new world 
 would be one created by zeal and good in¬ 
 tentions without intelligence and vision. 
 Unless we carry the new heaven, the new 
 ideal, within, we can never remold the world 
 without. 
 
 162 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 That new ideal obviously means a new and 
 higher conception of God. The growth of 
 “new thought” in our age is a remarkable 
 phenomenon. It may take the form of 
 Christian Science, with its revered book and 
 revered founder, with its churches and pub¬ 
 lications and extensive organization, or it 
 may be found in a fugitive leaflet urging us 
 to concentrate our minds on truth and 
 beauty. It may take the form of an attempt 
 at philosophical system, as in the writings 
 of Trine and Dresser, or it may be a mere 
 exhortation to deep breathing, introspection, 
 and opening the mind to occult powers. It 
 is sometimes pantheistic and mystical, and 
 sometimes is a frank endeavor to secure by 
 mental means simply physical health and 
 financial success. But everywhere its origin 
 is the same—profound dissatisfaction with 
 the current conception of God. The new 
 modes of thought do not formally deny that 
 current conception; but they turn away from 
 it, because they find in it no nutriment, no 
 daily help, no lasting peace. It seems to 
 them hopelessly anthropomorphic, crude, un¬ 
 spiritual, antiquated. 
 
 163 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 The Great War has accentuated the diffi¬ 
 culty. On the one hand it has raised up 
 again the old conception of a God of battles, 
 “Lord of our far-flung battle line,” a su¬ 
 preme war lord, a glorified military chief¬ 
 tain; and on the other hand it has driven 
 men to a new faith in a God greater than 
 all creeds or sanctuaries that have tried to 
 contain him, more spiritual than any image 
 we can form within, a God who is light, 
 harmony, purpose, universal love in which 
 we live and move and have our being. When 
 we see belligerent nations calling on the 
 same God while they imbrue their hands in 
 one another’s blood, we are driven to one of 
 two conclusions: either there is no God at all 
 and each nation is worshiping its own fig¬ 
 ment of imagination, or the true God of the 
 universe is vaster, nobler, than these nations 
 have yet dreamed. We are driven to choose 
 between a tribal god, invented to stir and 
 inflame the multitude, and a God who is 
 universal presence, unconfined to any 
 church, unallied with any nation, incom¬ 
 pletely expressed in any creed or philoso¬ 
 phy, known only to the pure in heart. The 
 
 164 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 Great War has made life’s burdens so awful, 
 its contradictions so intolerable, that we must 
 have a greater God or none at all. 
 
 A static God, sitting on a throne, can 
 never satisfy an age in which thrones are 
 toppling and the struggling peoples of the 
 world are coming into their own. Mr. Wells 
 in his new-found fantastic theology pro¬ 
 claims a demiurge whom he calls the “In¬ 
 visible King.” But the world is “tired of 
 kings” and that symbol localizes and de¬ 
 grades the Spirit of the universe. The 
 “throne” has stood through all history and 
 stands to-day for an authority static, local¬ 
 ized, arbitrary, against which the world is 
 in revolt. The God who “came down” to 
 see what was going on at the building 
 of Babel, the tribal God of Joshua, Solo¬ 
 mon’s God who dwelt between the cherubim 
 on a golden chest, Milton’s God who laid out 
 the earth with celestial compasses, Cotton 
 Mather’s God who commanded the torture 
 of New England witches, and “Der alte 
 Gott,” with dripping sword stamped on Ger¬ 
 man coins of to-day—all these images must 
 
 give way to the God for whom a torn world 
 
 165 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 is crying, the God of Jesus, who is Spirit 
 and Truth. 
 
 Our world thirsts for the living God, 
 which means a God with all that character¬ 
 izes the highest life we know. He must be 
 personal; that is, he must have consciousness, 
 purpose, will; but he must be stripped of all 
 the petty limitations of “persons” as we 
 know them. He is not a person like Caesar 
 or Charlemagne or Shakespeare; they were 
 but sparks or fragments of personal spirit, 
 transient attempts at personality, momen¬ 
 tary hints of what Spirit may be. The 
 “three persons” of the historic creeds cannot 
 adequately describe him, nor could ten thou¬ 
 sand persons set him forth. He is the only 
 real person, that is, the only complete con¬ 
 sciousness, the only never faltering purpose, 
 the only wholly righteous will, the only per¬ 
 fect love. And if the essence of personality 
 is purposive love, love that never faileth, 
 love that can never know final defeat, then 
 in God we must see, as our fathers did not, 
 perpetual struggle to embody love in action, 
 eternal urge toward the incarnation of good¬ 
 ness. Since the highest and noblest thing in 
 
 166 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 us is the moral struggle, we must find in God 
 that eternal struggle, ever ending in tri¬ 
 umphant peace, and then developing out of 
 that peace again struggle and the achieve¬ 
 ments of creative love. That, and that alone, 
 is the highest life we can conceive. The 
 divine existence is not that of an Alexander 
 or a Solomon on a gorgeous throne, nor is 
 it the existence of a blind force or energy like 
 gravitation or radio-activity. It is the Life 
 in which all lives are included, the Personal 
 Presence of which all human persons are in¬ 
 finitesimal facets, the unceasing triumphant 
 Energy which is present in our struggle, 
 shares and suffers in our suffering that we 
 may share in his daily triumph and his in¬ 
 effable peace. 
 
 And this new thought of God will include 
 
 a new idea of man. In learned treatises we 
 
 have set forth man as an “economic unit”— 
 
 dreary descent of man indeed! We have 
 
 pictured man not as a little lower than the 
 
 angels, but a little higher than the brutes. 
 
 We have somehow thought that when we 
 
 have discovered his origin we have fathomed 
 
 his purpose and ideal. But the creek from 
 
 167 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 which a ship sets sail may give no hint of the 
 spacious port at which it shall arrive. We 
 have discovered so many things about the 
 origin of life that we have shut our eyes to 
 its goal. The great question, after all, is 
 not where we came from but whither we are 
 
 i 
 
 going. The nineteenth century dealt mainly 
 with origins; the twentieth century must deal 
 with goals. 
 
 The great tide of democracy now swelling 
 and rolling round the world is sure to com¬ 
 bine with the great Christian conception of 
 man as the image or incarnation of God, and 
 the resulting faith, whether we call it demo¬ 
 cratic Christianity or Christian democracy, 
 will sweep away all cheap and cheapening 
 conceptions of the individual man. Men are 
 not puppets nor pawns, to be moved about 
 by monarchs or monopolists; they are not 
 “hands,” or tools, or means of production. 
 They are not the rebel subjects of a king in 
 the sky, and so they shall not be the economic 
 tools of a proprietor in the office. They are 
 pulses in the divine life, “charged with the 
 same creative energy that sets the planets 
 
 whirling.” They are as incandescent bulbs, 
 
 168 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 fragile enough, but luminous and glowing 
 with the mighty current generated at the 
 dynamic center of the universe. While they 
 gleam for their moment they share in the 
 “light that coming into the world lighteth 
 every man/’ They are local manifestations 
 of the central fire. Where they came from 
 archaeologists or biologists may dispute; 
 where they go to hereafter we can dimly 
 guess. But what they are we know: they 
 are receivers and containers of some little 
 portion of the infinite Life. 
 
 We may have forgotten this in the marts 
 of trade, and ignored it in the church, but 
 we discovered it on the battlefield. In the 
 camps and the trenches sleep and work side 
 by side the banker and the ditch-digger, the 
 violinist and the peasant, men transfigured, 
 socialized, self-realized, in a great human 
 unity, a devotion to a life beyond life and 
 a cause worth all their lives together. The 
 “Tommy” and the poilu develop unsuspected 
 loyalties and undreamed-of heroisms, as if 
 the commonest clay had suddenly been re¬ 
 molded by an unseen potter. They sing and 
 
 march and die as if moving to unheard music 
 
 169 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 and to unseen goals. From one of the great 
 battlefields Coningsby Dawson writes: “I 
 hate the thought of Fifth Avenue, with its 
 pretty faces, its fashions, its smiling 
 frivolity. . . . To lay down one’s life for 
 one’s friend once seemed impossible. All 
 that is altered. We lay down our lives that 
 the future generations may be good and 
 kind, and so we can contemplate oblivion 
 with quiet eyes. Nothing that is noblest that 
 the Greeks taught is unpracticed by the 
 simplest men out here to-day. They may die 
 childless, but their example will father the 
 imagination of all the coming ages.” These 
 are the men we have neglected or despised 
 as country clods, or city parasites, or factory 
 hands, and they turn out to be the uncon¬ 
 scious light-bearers of the future. And 
 when it is all over, and the camps fade away, 
 and the poppies bloom over the ugly 
 trenches, and the men are at home again, we 
 shall not dare to think of them, even the 
 maimed and broken ones, in the cheap way 
 we thought before. They will be to us 
 glimpses of the infinite life, sons of God, 
 
 who may if they will enter into all the 
 
 J7Q 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 strength and glory of sonship. So we shall 
 be returning to the spirit of him who saw 
 in fickle Peter the rock, and in James and 
 John the Sons of Thunder. 
 
 With such conceptions of man and God 
 we cannot fail to rise to a new idea of the 
 Christian Society. The church of the future 
 will be the visible embodiment of the king¬ 
 dom of God, ever striving to be as wide, as 
 catholic, as spiritual as the Kingdom itself. 
 It is a tragic thing that the church should 
 include only a segment of the Kingdom, only 
 those who agree on certain formulas or 
 rituals or modes of procedure. The church 
 must be composed of all Christ-like men, of 
 every race and faith and name. To share in 
 the Christian purpose is the only qualifica¬ 
 tion for membership, just as the hand is 
 made a member of the human body simply 
 by sharing in the blood that comes from the 
 heart. The fact that a man’s parents were 
 members in the church cannot insure his en¬ 
 trance; the fact that he has been through 
 initiatory ceremonies, however solemn, can¬ 
 not constitute him a member. The one re¬ 
 quirement for the church must be identical 
 
 171 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 with requirement for the Kingdom. In that 
 church will be rich and poor, learned and 
 simple-minded, philosophers who are 
 thought to have explained Jesus and chil¬ 
 dren who can only lisp his name—the Christ- 
 like quality makes them one. All such be¬ 
 lievers in the Christian attitude toward life 
 may utter that unique saying of the apostle 
 Paul, “The love of Christ constraineth 
 ( synechei) us,” which a friend of mine trans¬ 
 lates: “The love of Christ holds us together, 
 lifts us up and drives us on.” 
 
 The church will either broaden to meet 
 this ideal or it will shrivel until it becomes the 
 mere guardian of dogma, each sect jealously 
 guarding its own “distinctive tenets,” and so 
 putting at the center of its life the things 
 that belong far out on the circumference. 
 In that case the great task of the church 
 will be performed by other organizations, 
 which have become willing to ignore and for¬ 
 get in order that they may achieve and save. 
 The church of the future will care much less 
 about saving its tenets, or its ritual, but care 
 ever more and more about saving alive the 
 
 quality of spirit which was in the Nazarene. 
 
 172 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 To have that quality is to be in the Kingdom 
 and to possess the only real title to the fel¬ 
 lowship of the Christian Church. 
 
 It is a curious fact in the history of cer¬ 
 tain technical schools that the men who drop 
 out without finishing the course not infre¬ 
 quently make a greater outward success in 
 life than do those who remain to graduate. 
 And the explanation is not difficult. It 
 would be better, of course, if all could re¬ 
 main to the end of their course. But those 
 who drop out are often men of the volitional 
 rather than the intellectual type, men who 
 long for action and achievement, men whose 
 restless energy chafes against necessary re¬ 
 straint, while those who remain are some¬ 
 times men of the acquisitive and plastic type 
 who can learn lessons better than they can 
 organize and lead their fellow men. For the 
 same reason, those who have left the Chris¬ 
 tian Church to-day are sometimes the most 
 truly Christian section of the church, the 
 least sectarian, the most eager to reshape the 
 world. Could there be a greater tragedy 
 than that the passive temperaments should 
 
 be left to constitute the church, while the 
 
 173 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 more dynamic and constructive minds should 
 move away from it and seek other channels 
 for their moral energy? This must not be. 
 A static church will disappear with the dis¬ 
 appearance of the static conception of man 
 and of God. The real defense of the faith 
 is a steady offensive in behalf of the King¬ 
 dom of light. Into the Christian Society we 
 must welcome the most eager, aggressive, 
 advancing spirits of our day, if only they ad¬ 
 vance “with the cross of Jesus going on be¬ 
 fore.” 
 
 Then will come the making of the new 
 earth. We hear much about the rebuilding 
 of ruined cities and villages, the replanting 
 of farms and orchards, the reassembling of 
 scattered products of industry. All that is 
 important and must be done; it will be done 
 more swiftly than we think. Nature is al¬ 
 ready at work covering war-torn acres with 
 flowers, obliterating barriers with rains and 
 floods. The rebuilding of villages under 
 modern conditions will be swift. The re¬ 
 building of San Francisco was accomplished 
 as if by magic. Shell-holes will give place 
 to gardens, barbed wire make way for green 
 
 174 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 hedge-rows, and out of “No Man’s Land” 
 will rise home and market place and school. 
 Engineers will be called from the ends of the 
 earth to reconstruct ruined bridges and 
 tunnels and highways, and “city-planners” 
 will see their long-cherished dreams come 
 true in brick and stone and busy streets and 
 sheltered parks. 
 
 But the real problem is the reconstruction 
 of the social order so that in it may be visibly 
 embodied the ideals of the Christian faith. 
 The religion that we have seen “up in 
 heaven,” the great insight that God is love 
 and that man was made to love, must come 
 down to earth and be expressed in the en¬ 
 tire social, industrial, and political order. 
 Human society must be reconstituted on the 
 basis, not of happiness, or health, or comfort, 
 or bare justice, but on the basis of love. Are 
 we ready for all the social and economic and 
 political changes that reconstruction will in¬ 
 volve? Are we ready to consider again the 
 relations, labor and capital, the organizations 
 of laboring men, the methods of modern gov¬ 
 ernments, the relation of the white race to the 
 yellow race, and to consider all these prob- 
 
 175 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 lems in the light of what Christian love de¬ 
 mands of those who profess it? 
 
 The Archbishop of York during his visit 
 to America deliberately abstained from the 
 easy methods of denunciation. “The war,” 
 he said, “is a great opportunity out of which 
 to build up the greatest power in human life 
 —and that is the element of love. A love 
 for the divine Right, a love for one’s fellow- 
 men, a love for peoples of other lands—only 
 by cultivating universal love can the new 
 world be built upon great and lasting foun¬ 
 dations.” 
 
 Strangely enough, almost at the same 
 time there came a corresponding voice out of 
 Germany, showing that even in the land that 
 sings hymns of hate there are some who 
 have not bowed the knee. It is the voice of 
 a writer of fiction, Leonhard Frank, who 
 says: “The enemy is not the Englishman or 
 the Frenchman or the Russian. The enemy 
 is ourselves. Want of love, that is the ene¬ 
 my, that is the cause of all wars. Europe is 
 mad because she no longer knows how to 
 love.” ' 
 
 There is in all the world to-day a passion- 
 
 176 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 ate, but mistaken cry for mere justice. It 
 is no wonder that humanity, groaning under 
 long slavery and cruel wrong, should cry out 
 for justice. Men are seeing clearly that 
 modern charity covers a multitude of sins, 
 that the giving of doles to the poor can 
 never abolish poverty, and that much of our 
 philanthropy is but patching up of an out¬ 
 worn garment. Hence the cry, “Not 
 charity, but justice.” Hence the resentment 
 against ostentatious welfare work, and the 
 scorn for professional up lifters, and the de¬ 
 mand for something more fundamental than 
 improving the condition of the poor. Hence 
 many men have cut off their subscriptions 
 to mere relief work and have flung them¬ 
 selves into the crusade for social justice. But 
 will the establishment of justice alone mean 
 the coming of the Kingdom? 
 
 In a game of chess we see perfect justice 
 ruling all the movements on the checquered 
 board. Each piece perfectly observes the 
 rules of the game. Each bishop keeps on 
 his own white or black squares. No knight 
 ever encroaches unlawfully on his opponent. 
 Each small pawn is safe from illegal attack 
 
 177 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 by king or queen. Charity in the game is 
 unthinkable; laws established centuries ago 
 govern each wooden figure as it advances or 
 retreats. With what result? With the re¬ 
 sult of a dehumanized, mechanical relation 
 of all the pieces to one another, a wooden 
 society destitute of all the ardent sympathies 
 and glowing loyalties that mark the humblest 
 human family in the smallest human home. 
 Bare justice suffices for a game, but not for 
 human life. Men are not pawns, and “in the 
 course of justice no one of us should see sal¬ 
 vation.” A society held together by bare 
 justice would have no oppression, no 
 tyranny, and also no sympathy, no gratitude, 
 no joyous devotion to home or native land. 
 Bare justice is a prospect from which all 
 men would shrink if they could once see it 
 established. “Each to count as one and 
 none as more than one”—that is the dreary 
 millennium of the English utilitarians. It is 
 a state in which each lonely man gets his 
 rights and no man truly comes alive. It is 
 as illusory as the giving of suffrage to the 
 colored race in the Southern States, while 
 giving them nothing more. Of all men per- 
 
 178 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 haps the most unhappy is the man who has 
 gotten his rights and gotten no vital union 
 with his fellow men, no cooperative share in 
 the great human task. 
 
 Hence religion offers vastly more than 
 justice. It offers us the irresistible dynamic 
 of love. It brings out of the sky the trans¬ 
 forming faith that the binding force of the 
 universe is love, and that the only adequate 
 reconstructive force in society is that same 
 pervading resistless love. The only reason 
 why we reject love as weak, as mawkish and 
 impracticable, is that we do not know what 
 love is. 
 
 Some men deliberately propose a world- 
 order based on fear. Since wrongs may at 
 any time be committed, they propose that 
 each class in society shall organize for its 
 own defense and shall endeavor to be 
 stronger than the class which may threaten 
 encroachment. They propose that the na¬ 
 tions of the earth shall live in a perpetual 
 preparedness for defensive—which always 
 includes offensive—war. They honestly be¬ 
 lieve that the only safety lies in creating and 
 maintaining in each nation a universal fear. 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 The nation in whom that fear is most acute 
 will thus be the safest. If nation A doubles 
 its navy, nation B with enlightened fear 
 must also double its navy, which will force 
 nation A to another increase, and so on, 
 world without end. Practically, this means 
 that in a group of half a dozen great powers 
 each one must be stronger than the other five. 
 And all six nations must base their entire 
 national life on an all-pervading, ever-pres¬ 
 ent fear. Such a civilization is obviously 
 doomed to ever recurrent wars; what it per¬ 
 sistently fears and constantly plans for it 
 will surely get. There are only three pos¬ 
 sible bases for human society: mutual fear 
 which keeps men asunder, mutual hatred 
 which drives them into constant collision, and 
 mutual regard which induces them to com¬ 
 bine and cooperate. Have we not long 
 enough tried fear and hate ? 
 
 But we have only dimly understood, or 
 persistently misunderstood, what love is. 
 Surely, it is not supine resignation to evil. 
 It is not maudlin tenderness toward wrong¬ 
 doers. It is the most active and aggressive 
 
 and unflinching of all the forces with which 
 
 180 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 we have to reckon. How often have we read 
 the phrase “faith, hope, and charity” as if 
 the three virtues were arranged as an anti¬ 
 climax! We have understood it to mean 
 “faith, hope, and a bread-line.” Faith is the 
 all-achieving quality of the explorer, the in¬ 
 ventor, the leader of men. Hope is the 
 radiant energy of great spirits. And the 
 love which is greater than both cannot be a 
 gelatinous complacency, or a willingness to 
 drop a dole in a poor man’s hat. 
 
 Love is absolutely relentless. It is the 
 “hound of heaven,” ever following the hu¬ 
 man scent. Love can punish children and 
 childish men. Love can cry, “Ye serpents! 
 Ye vipers!” Love can force a surgical opera¬ 
 tion when only steel can banish disease. 
 Love can knock down the madman without 
 ceasing for a moment to love him. Love can 
 restrain by force the drunken man or the 
 drunken nation without any surrender to 
 the bitterness of hatred. The God who is 
 perfect love is also a consuming fire. His 
 love counts among its resources both his 
 heaven and his hell. 
 
 While I am writing these words a friend 
 
 181 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 asks: “Can you really love a man while you 
 are running him through with a bayonet?” 
 That is a fair question which is answered in 
 every hospital when the surgeon drives the 
 knife into a human body, as the only way 
 of bringing release from pain. And if a can¬ 
 cerous growth has fastened itself upon the 
 vitals of a nation, then to cut out whole 
 regiments with cold steel may be the only 
 way of saving that nation from a disease 
 which means death to itself and peril to all 
 humanity. 
 
 Instead of painting love as blind, we 
 should picture it with radiant, far-seeing 
 eyes. Love sees evil and is unafraid. It 
 blinks no fact in all the world of reality. It 
 wears no blinders as it faces the grim and 
 terrifying world. Just because it sees so 
 deeply, it believes so unquenchably. It sees 
 the cruelty and greed and lust in man, but 
 it sees the man behind the lust and cruelty 
 and greed. It sees the depths to which men 
 have fallen, and it sees that only a being so 
 great could have fallen so low. “Are you 
 going to drink like men or like beasts?” said 
 
 a visitor to a company of men in a tavern. 
 
 182 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 “What do you mean?” came the answer: 
 “Of course we shall drink like men.” “Then 
 you are going to get drunk,” said the visitor, 
 “for beasts never do that.” Love sees in the 
 very descent of man a proof of his power to 
 ascend. It is an inexpugnable faith that the 
 wrongs men commit are the measure of their 
 possible righteousness. 
 
 Love transforms society by enabling men 
 ultimately to conquer their enemies. Merely 
 to fight our enemies and do nothing more is 
 to rouse them to utmost hostility. “That 
 which resists, supports.” To march upon 
 the foe with an army, and do no more, is to 
 call forth all his reserves. To hate him is to 
 call out answering hatred. To love him in- 
 defatigably and uncompromisingly, to love 
 his inner self behind that hateful exterior, 
 and by relentless love to make him at last lov¬ 
 able—that is the attack against which human 
 nature is defenseless. If the enemy once 
 realizes that nothing he can do can stop our 
 loving him, nothing stop the projection to¬ 
 ward him of scorn for his cruelty and per¬ 
 sistent faith in his better self, he is forced to 
 
 surrender. Against such strange and in- 
 
 183 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 credible tactics there is no final defense for 
 men or nations. When Jesus under the 
 olives of Gethsemane addressed to Judas the 
 one word “Friend,” the traitor and the sol¬ 
 diers with him went backward and fell to 
 the ground. Had Jesus cried “Traitor,” 
 there would have been instant attack upon 
 him. But when he looked beyond the 
 treachery to the latent loyalty in the soul, 
 the miscreants were disarmed and flung to 
 the earth by the strange assault of love. 
 “Stranger to our age, Jesus was strange to 
 his own; so strange that men were driven 
 either to crucify him or else to take up the 
 cross themselves.” 
 
 It is vastly easier to go over wholly into 
 
 the method of Jesus than to go part way. 
 
 If we balance love and hate, if we say we will 
 
 love men so far as they deserve our love, and 
 
 hate them so far as they oppose us, we are 
 
 left confused and powerless. We get neither 
 
 the results of the Galilean nor those of the 
 
 Corsican, neither the victory of love nor that 
 
 of power. But when we go completely “over 
 
 the top,” when we say with the dying Edith 
 
 Cavell, “Patriotism,” that is, limited, local- 
 
 184 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 ized devotion, “is not enough; I must die 
 without hatred or bitterness toward anyone,” 
 we have passed over into the irresistible 
 might of the method of Jesus, and the enemy 
 is conquered, though he may not know it. 
 Hatred must surrender the moment it is sure 
 that love never will. 
 
 “Whether the time be slow or fast. 
 
 Enemies hand in hand 
 Must come together at the last 
 And understand. 
 
 “No matter how the die is cast. 
 
 Or who may seem to win, 
 
 You know that you must love at last— 
 
 Why not begin?” 
 
 The tremendous sentiment of nationality 
 has swept over the world in recent years as 
 a great emancipator of souls. It has made 
 the obscurest day laborer feel his participa¬ 
 tion in a million other lives, his responsibility 
 for future centuries. He has become a part¬ 
 ner with the generations before and after, 
 and is dignified and ennobled beyond meas¬ 
 ure. But this sentiment of nationality is 
 only a partial realization of Christian love. 
 
 185 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 “Thou shalt love thy neighbor” is not a doom 
 to a repulsive task; it is a summons to an ex¬ 
 pansion of personality, a release of spiritual 
 power, a citizenship of the world. All the 
 higher commandments of religion are re¬ 
 leases of the human spirit. They never shut 
 us in with the past, but summon us to emerge 
 from yesterday and create to-morrow. 
 
 Is it not a most significant thing that the 
 whole human race is to-day dreaming of a 
 League of Nations as the inevitable outcome 
 of the Combat of Nations? Any particular 
 scheme for a League we can riddle with ob¬ 
 jections. It is premature, fantastic, chi¬ 
 merical, unsound—yet somehow it will not 
 down! It is a dream cherished by millions 
 who before the Great War never heard of 
 it. Fifty years ago men whispered it in 
 peace conferences and were ignored as harm¬ 
 less visionaries. Twenty years ago diplo¬ 
 mats and statesmen began to look into the 
 matter with languid interest. Now we are 
 swept toward some such international or¬ 
 ganization by irresistible tides. The sorrows 
 of the grieving world, the millions of widows, 
 
 orphans, and cripples, command us to find 
 
 186 
 
REBUILDING OF THE WORLD 
 
 a better way of living together on a planet 
 which grows smaller every year. Cool- 
 headed statesmen begin to entertain and 
 ponder the plans of the visionaries. Mr. 
 Arthur J. Balfour said at Edinburgh, 
 “While I recognize the difficulties, I think 
 it mean and cowardly to shrink from them, 
 and I hope the civilized world will take that 
 great problem seriously and see it through.” 
 In his opinion the mean and cowardly are 
 not those who would abolish war, but those 
 who do not desire to abolish it. The cow¬ 
 ardly are those who shrink from any pact of 
 peace because they are still manacled by 
 ancestral fears. 
 
 In the same line is the declaration of 
 Frederick Edwin Smith, Attorney-General 
 of Great Britain, who, after pointing out 
 many difficulties in the path of any interna¬ 
 tional covenant, yet said: “It is worth while 
 trying for an ideal. It is better to hitch your 
 wagon to a star than to a machine gun.” 
 Truly that is the alternative: either we go 
 back to the bludgeon of the savage, now 
 skillfully transformed into a rapid-firing 
 
 gun, which would settle all problems with- 
 
 187 
 
RELIGION AND WAR 
 
 out appeal to any law or reason, or we go 
 forward on a dim but star-lit path to the new 
 earth. Do we dare to go? The real reli¬ 
 gion of valor is the religion of Jesus. With 
 unquenchable audacity it undertakes its sub¬ 
 lime task. Columbus found a new world; we 
 must construct one. We dedicate ourselves 
 to that creative task. 
 
 
 188 
 
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