/ 
 
 9f 
 
 THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
 PRESENT CRISIS 
 
THE CHALLENGE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK 
 
 Author of ''The Meaning of Prayer" ''The Manhood oj 
 the Master," etc. 
 
 ASSOCIATION PRESS 
 
 124 East 28th Street, New York 
 
 1917 
 
 ir\ 
 

 Copyright, 1917, by 
 
 The International Committee of 
 
 Young Men's Christian Associations 
 
 / 
 
 printed m the united states of America 
 
 OCT 10 1917 
 ©C;.A473949 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 I did not intend to write an essay on 
 the War, and I am glad to see that I 
 have avoided doing so. Many informing 
 treatises are throwing Hght on every as- 
 pect of the great struggle, and it is not 
 likely that there will be lack of more. 
 But when all the special treatises have 
 had their say, an inner problem still re- 
 mains unsolved. In what mood shall a 
 Christian, or for that matter an idealist of 
 any kind, face the catastrophe? With 
 what considerations and insights can he 
 support his faith and hope.^ And how 
 can he harmonize his ideals with his ne- 
 cessities of action in a time of war.^ The 
 morale of our people critically depends 
 upon their answer to such questions. 
 
 If one attempts to write upon the War 
 with these needs in mind, the result can- 
 not be an impersonal treatise. One must 
 say out what his own thought has done 
 in adjusting life to the strange and hor- 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 rible events of these days; he nwist plead 
 for the attitudes that seem essential to 
 the saving of man's spiritual treasures. 
 This little book, therefore, is a message, 
 not an essay, and while the pronoun of 
 the first person is absent, the background 
 of the argument is none the less the 
 struggle of the writer to see his way and 
 keep his soul alive in this terrific genera- 
 tion. If taken, then, for what it was in- 
 tended, it may be worth the reading to 
 some other who is finding this a difficult 
 time in which to think, believe, and live. 
 At least, in this hope, it has been written. 
 
 Harry Emerson FokSDick. 
 
 September 1, 1917. 
 
 Tl 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
 PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 The first question to be answered by 
 any individual or by any social group, 
 The real handle facing a hazardous sit- 
 to a difficult uation, is whether the 
 
 situation • • • x u x. 
 
 crisis is to be met as a 
 
 challenge to strength or as an occasion 
 for despair. Henry Fawcett, a young 
 Englishman, hunting with his father, 
 suffered an accident staggering enough to 
 break the nerve of ordinary men: his 
 father shot at a partridge, hit his son's 
 eyes, and entirely blinded them. Writing 
 about the matter afterward, young Faw- 
 cett said, "I made up my mind inside of 
 ten minutes after the accident to stick 
 to my main purpose as far as in me lay. " 
 He kept his word^worked his way 
 
 if 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 through Cambridge University, was made 
 Professor of PoHtical Economy there, was 
 elevated to be Postmaster-General of 
 England, and gave to the British people 
 a generation ago the Parcel Post that we 
 in America have just achieved for our- 
 selves. He took hold of his situation by 
 its real handle; he met it as a challenge 
 to his strength and not as an excuse for 
 disheartenment. 
 
 Even a little observation of popular 
 reactions to the Great War reveals many 
 men inwardly looking at the catastrophe 
 in unrelieved dismay. It means to them 
 despair, not challenge. One of the most 
 important battles of this generation is 
 being fought behind closed doors, where 
 men are making up their minds whether 
 this war is to leave them social pessimists 
 or not. Wiile many voices, therefore, are 
 speaking of the signijBcance of the War for 
 political, diplomatic, financial, and mili- 
 tary interests, something more ought to 
 be said about the meaning of the War to 
 our personal attitude and faith. All con- 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 structive agencies, after the war is over, 
 will depend for their success upon the 
 vision and energy of those who have not 
 been driven by the present catastrophe 
 into cynicism. That many are becoming 
 cynical, are growing dubious of social 
 possibilities, are surrendering to practical 
 skepticism the faith which they never 
 would have surrendered to speculative 
 doubt, is clear to anyone who talks much 
 with men. Materialism as a theory never 
 would have convinced them. But the 
 horrors of Verdun, the mutilated bodies 
 of Belgian boys, the bleaching bones of 
 countless children left by the Russian 
 retreat along the military roads of Poland, 
 and, after sixty generations of Christian 
 opportunity, some five million wounded 
 men in the hospitals of Europe — how 
 shall we keep heart in the face of this? 
 
 One natural consequence of such a 
 reaction to the War is a lavish accusation 
 of failure against the ideal agencies on 
 which men had counted to improve the 
 world. As in nervous prostration a man 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 becomes most fretful against those whom 
 in normal health he loves best, so, many 
 people, in the collapse of nerve which the 
 War has caused, bring the accusation of 
 futility against the best loved of their 
 faiths. What most we had relied upon, 
 seeing that it has not saved us from the 
 very evil its purpose w as to cure, we now 
 in exasperated disillusionment throw upon 
 the scrap-heap. Christianity is a failure 
 — ^how often has the charge been spoken 
 and how much of tener has the doubt been 
 thought! 
 
 An initial mistrust as to the wisdom of 
 this attitude is suggested by the simple 
 fact that if one is to call Christianity a 
 failure because it has not forestalled this 
 war, logically he must box the compass 
 before he is through and call failures all 
 those agencies on which we might have 
 counted to prevent the catastrophe. If 
 for this reason Christianity is a failure, so 
 too is education. War may be wicked 
 from the standpoint of religion, but just 
 as truly is it foolish from the standpoint 
 
 V 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 of intelligence, and the universities of 
 Europe and America have been estab- 
 lished long enough to have taught men 
 before this the futility of war. If Chris- 
 tianity is a failure because it has not 
 prevented the present disaster, so too is. 
 commerce. It promised to bind the dis- 
 severed races in an economic unity so 
 close that what happened to one would 
 happen to all, and so to make the race 
 one family. On that interdependence 
 Norman Angell had taught us to rely for 
 the increasing unprofitableness and, as 
 some of us dared hope, the increasing 
 improbability of war. But now the eco- 
 nomic bonds are torn asunder; they have 
 proved to be causes of strife, not barriers 
 against it. If anything is a failure, surely 
 that social idealism is, on which we have 
 been priding ourselves these recent dec- 
 ades past. Only a small proportion of 
 those who read these words are likely to 
 be Socialists in a technical sense, and yet 
 all of us had counted on the international 
 Socialist brotherhood, uniting so many 
 5 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 million workmen of so many nations in a 
 league pledged explicitly and absolutely 
 against war. Great confidence for the 
 future was begotten when in Berlin's pub- 
 lic square 100,000 Socialists at the time 
 of the Agadir incident lifted their hands 
 unanimously against war with France. 
 And yet, in spite of brave attempts, the 
 voice of the Socialists against this cata- 
 clysm has been pitiably weak. Christian- 
 ity a failure.^ Then surely international 
 law is. The international conventions, 
 guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, 
 had expended on them the best brains 
 that statesmanship could supply, but 
 they are scraps of paper now. The leagues 
 and covenants to make the world a more 
 fraternal place, although they are the 
 finest work of our best international 
 lawyers, have been torn to tatters by 
 military necessity. If anything has failed, 
 international law has. 
 
 Does any sane man think, however, 
 that it is possible to be content with such 
 a sweeping charge of failure against our 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 ideal agencies? Are they hopelessly to 
 be thrown into the discard? A man who 
 has fallen into a pit might as well saw off 
 his own legs in despite because they did 
 not prevent him from falling in. On 
 second thought, he will do well to keep 
 those legs; they are his only hope of 
 ever climbing out again. His attitude 
 toward them is sadly incomplete if he 
 sits at the pit's bottom, blaspheming the 
 feet that he should have walked straight 
 with. And in the reconstructive age that 
 shall succeed the war, mankind must keep 
 and confidently rely upon those ideal 
 agencies which, with too facile tongues, 
 some folk call failures. Education, fra- 
 ternalized commerce, social idealism, in- 
 ternational law, and Christianity — these 
 are not ready for the discard. They are 
 humanity's great hope. This war is not 
 so much an occasion for despair concern- 
 ing them as it is a challenge to a better 
 understanding and a finer use of them. 
 
 \ 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 II 
 
 If a man, however, with any satisfac- 
 tion and confidence, is thus to face the 
 Reasons for Pi^esent crisis m terms of 
 accepting the challenge, he must have 
 
 present crisis something more than a 
 as a challenge , ^ . ''^. ^ . 
 
 determination so to face 
 
 it. Only a frivolous mind can easily be 
 optimistic at a time like this. One who 
 today feels no strain upon his faith has not 
 taken his faith seriously enough to at- 
 tempt the direct application of it to the 
 actual facts of the war. Let him take his 
 former social hopes into the trenches, the 
 hospitals, the desolated homes of Europe, 
 let him face his old faiths with the elemen- 
 tal human factors that made this war 
 possible and that will make the prevention 
 of its repetition difficult, and he will crave 
 some solid reasons for continued hope, 
 some intelligible justification for accept- 
 ing the crisis not with dismay, but as a 
 challenge to his courage and devotion. 
 One intelligible reason for the attitude 
 8 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 which we recommend is to be found in the 
 very factors that make this the most ap- 
 palHng war in history. What conditions 
 necessarily precede the most distressing 
 conflicts that mankind can know? Are 
 they not always conditions of intimate 
 relationship? For this reason the worst 
 of all fights is a family fight. One can- 
 not have a heart-breaking quarrel with a 
 total stranger; there are not points of 
 contact enough. But one can have a 
 dour time in his own family. The very 
 relationships that offer most gracious op- 
 portunities for satisfaction, peace, and 
 self-development are the same relation- 
 ships that offer the most exasperating 
 chance for misunderstanding, discord, 
 and collision. Now, the basic reason 
 for this war's appalling extent and ter- 
 rific character is that it is waged in 
 a world of increasingly intimate rela- 
 tionships. The ends of the earth have 
 been crowded together as man has con- 
 quered distance with his swift inventions. 
 The points of contact between nations 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 and races have been indefinitely multi- 
 plied. More than once the telegraph sta- 
 tions around the world have been aligned 
 for a message that made the swift circuit 
 of the globe. Such a message left Oyster 
 Bay one night when Mr. Roosevelt was 
 President. It was a minute later when it 
 went through Denver and a minute later 
 still when it dived out through the Golden 
 Gate. Then it slid past Manila, sang 
 through the Indian Ocean, leaped over the 
 boundary of Asia into Europe, jumped 
 across England, came up from its long 
 bath in the Atlantic on the bleak shores of 
 Newfoundland, and set the telegraph re- 
 ceiver ticking almost before the trans- 
 mitter had ceased — around the world in 
 nine minutes! A fellowship of life so 
 close and intimate has followed in the 
 wake of these new means of communica- 
 tion that we need not be surprised to learn 
 that when war was declared in Europe 
 food prices in Siam went up 100 per cent. 
 The bullets that fly at the front today 
 fly further than bullets ever went before. 
 10 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 They strike not only the men and boys in 
 the trenches and the women and children 
 at home. They strike the business man 
 in Shanghai and the family with a son of 
 military age in San Francisco ; their whirr 
 calls brown and black men from the an- 
 tipodes and is answered by cannon on the 
 warships of a nation that until a genera- 
 tion ago represented the acme of racial 
 exclusiveness. 
 
 Plainly a world of such unprecedented 
 intimacies offers a double chance to its 
 inhabitants. On the one side lies the 
 finest opportunity for racial solidarity 
 and international brotherhood that man- 
 kind has ever known; on the other the 
 most abysmal possibilities of friction, 
 collision, and terrific war. Did we really 
 think that mankind was so ideal that 
 dealing with this new situation of multi- 
 plied relationships, difiicult to handle, 
 full alike of blessing and of curse, it could 
 get all the sweet and none of the bitter? 
 The passions that breed war are deep in 
 the human heart; the traditions that sup- 
 W 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 port war are venerable. How could man 
 learn what war would mean in this new 
 world-neighborhood without trying it? 
 How could he handle so new and intricate 
 a situation and not mishandle it? Yet 
 the very conditions that make the con- 
 sequence of his mishandling so terrible 
 are the same conditions on which are 
 founded our hopes of racial unity and 
 world-wide brotherhood. Say, as we 
 must, that this war in its extent and horror 
 surpasses all its predecessors, yet who 
 would give up the chances of growing 
 internationalism and an ultimate federa- 
 tion of the world that lie in the very in- 
 timacies which make the widespread hor- 
 ror possible? The whole course of man- 
 kind's increasing interdependence indi- 
 cates that in this war we are paying the 
 heavy price for the upward climb toward 
 solidarity. We are fighting the war on 
 the way up, not on the way down. Give 
 man time and he yet will learn to handle 
 the new relationships for fraternity and 
 not for war. 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 Our own American slates passed llirough 
 a colonial period when the points of con- 
 tact increased beyond \]\(t flower of wis- 
 dom and good will to handlf^ them. The 
 friction of mutual j(talousi(;s, impossif>Ie 
 between strangers, diffir;ijlt to avoid Ijc- 
 tween neigh})ors, issur^d in tariff wars and 
 even in the invasion of armed bands. At 
 last, within memory of many living, one 
 of the great wars of history was fought 
 before the colliding interests between the 
 states were accommodate^] irj a federation 
 that no misunderstanding ever again will 
 break. Such is the course of social evohj- 
 tion. Tljose quarrels of the states were 
 met on the way up toward unity. They 
 grew out of tljr- friction of irjr:r(;asing 
 intimacy. Weak men wen* dismayc^d at 
 them; courageous men saw the opportuni- 
 ties in tljc very relationships that were 
 being al^used. Today tljr* same prr^bh-iri 
 on a world-wide scale invites the faith 
 and challenges the hope of rn(*n. It says: 
 Look ihroufjh the t(;rror of tlje [present 
 }jour at th(' basic: elements tljat rrjakr* it 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 possible for seven-eighths of mankind to 
 be engaged in the same war. For in the 
 very interdependence of all races and 
 nations lies the possibility of realizing 
 Joseph Cook's dream: '*The nineteenth 
 century made the world into a neighbor- 
 hood; the twentieth century will make 
 it into a brotherhood. " 
 
 Another reason for accepting this pres- 
 ent crisis in terms of challenge rather 
 than dismay lies in the fact that this is 
 the first war in history that has made men 
 widely say that Christianity is a failure. 
 Christendom has not hitherto so per- 
 ceived the incongruity between war and 
 the Christian Gospel as to feel that the 
 continuance of war was a reflection on 
 Christianity's effectiveness. Some of the 
 early Fathers, to be sure, Tertullian, 
 Cyprian, Lactantius, denounced war as 
 unchristian, but from the time of Con- 
 stantine the Church and war congenially 
 have lived together. Many of war's 
 worst horrors were alleviated, some 
 of its worst excesses curbed, and the 
 1^ 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 Church's sanctuaries and truces became 
 oases in the midst of hostihty. Al- 
 ways there was a standing disagreement, 
 however latent, between Christ and or- 
 ganized slaughter. But one looks in vain 
 for any such widespread consciousness as 
 we face today that the persistence of war 
 is a staggering blow to the claims of 
 Christianity. Said Athanasius, "It is 
 not permitted to kill; but in war to slay 
 the enemy is both legitimate and worthy 
 of all praise." Said Augustine, "What is 
 the evil in war? Is it that men who are 
 to die anyway die that the victors may 
 live in peace? To complain of this is the 
 part of the timid, not the religious." 
 Said Luther, "Permanent peace is a 
 dream and not even a beautiful one. 
 But war is an essential element of 
 God's scheme for the world." The 
 popes sent armies out to battle and 
 blessed their banners for the fighting. 
 Henry VIII's bishops, as Shakespeare 
 rightly pictures them, urged the king to 
 war. And when unbelievers were in 
 15 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 question some Peter the Hermit stormed 
 Europe with urgent calls to slaughter, 
 ''Deus vulV — God wills it. Nor can any- 
 one who listens today fail to hear echoes 
 of this historic attitude that accepted 
 war, unconscious of any essential incom- 
 patibility between the spirit of Christ and 
 the spirit of a battlefield. 
 
 Christianity and war lived in peace to- 
 gether as did Christianity and slavery. 
 For generations none perceived dishar- 
 mony between these two. If some now 
 call the Gospel a failure because war per- 
 sists, what would they have said if, with 
 awakened conscience in the matter, they 
 had lived while Christianity and slavery 
 walked arm in arm down the centuries? 
 John Newton, who wrote, "How sweet 
 the name of Jesus sounds in a believer's 
 ear!" tells us of blissful seasons of prayer 
 to Christ, while on slaving expeditions 
 along the African coast. Cotton Mather, 
 our own Puritan prophet, thanked God 
 with full heart for the arrival of a cargo 
 of slaves and molasses, overdue from the 
 16 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 West Indies, but at last come safely in at 
 Boston port. Nothing in history seems 
 to us more essentially unchristian than 
 the slave raids in Africa, the merciless 
 conditions of transportation, and the in- 
 humanities of the slave's life as slavery 
 spread. Consider a system one of whose 
 characteristic expressions could be an 
 advertisement like this, published in our 
 own country in 1825: 
 
 "Twenty dollars reward, — ran away 
 from the subscriber, on the 14th instant, 
 a negro girl named Molly. She is 16 or 
 17 years of age, slim made, lately brand- 
 ed on her left cheek, thus, 'R,' and a 
 piece is taken off her left ear on the same 
 side; the same letter is branded on the 
 inside of both her legs. 
 
 Abner Ross, 
 Fairfield District, S. C." 
 
 And then consider that one of the last 
 defenses of that system was written by a 
 Christian bishop. 
 
 17 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 But the day came when men began to 
 cry: "Christianity is a failure, it has not 
 stopped slavery." The incongruity be- 
 tween the Gospel of God's Fatherhood on 
 the one side and holding a fellow-being 
 in serfdom on the other, had at last be- 
 come evident. That was one of the cli- 
 mactic days in history. Aristotle tells us 
 that a few people in his time thought that 
 slavery was unethical. Such occasional 
 insight doubtless had persisted through 
 centuries, a subterranean stream rising in 
 sporadic fountains, some of which we 
 know. But at last the stream emerged fully 
 into the light. Men saw, with regard to 
 slavery, the clear implications of the Gos- 
 pel; they perceived that Christianity and 
 slavery could not perpetually live to- 
 gether in the same world. The issue was 
 drawn: Christianity would be a failure 
 if it did not stop slavery. And from the 
 day that the issue was drawn, the result 
 was assured. It was not Christianity 
 that failed; it was slavery. 
 
 When, therefore, men cry today that 
 18 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 Christianity is a failure because it has not 
 stopped war, a man of faith may well 
 thank God and take courage. 
 
 This, too, is a climactic day in his- 
 tory. For so long time the Gospel and 
 war have lived together in ignoble amity ! 
 If at last the disharmony between the 
 spirit of Jesus and the spirit of war is 
 becoming evident, then a great hope has 
 dawned on the race. Only a little while 
 ago many were telling us that Christian- 
 ity had nothing to do with social ques- 
 tions, that it was a gospel of salvation for 
 the individual out of the wreckage of a 
 ruined world. They urged ministers to 
 "stick to the Gospel" in its application to 
 the separate souls of men and to keep a 
 quiet tongue about the wider applications 
 of Christ's truth. And now we are told 
 that Christianity has failed because it has 
 not stopped war ! It is confessed then, that 
 Christianity does have something to do 
 with social questions, that it will be 
 judged and judged rightly not alone by 
 what it does for individuals, but by what 
 19 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 it makes of the world in which individuals 
 must live. As for war, the same charge 
 confesses that the issue is drawn between 
 that and the Gospel. Many opinions as 
 to ways and means for bringing perma- 
 nent security will be entertained, but 
 underneath diversity of method, the main 
 issue is clear: Christianity will indeed 
 have failed, if it does not stop war. 
 
 If, then, the issue is drawn, this is no 
 time for despair. The situation is a 
 stirring challenge to our strength and our 
 devotion. Impossible to conquer? Rather, 
 as an old reformer cried, ''The only differ- 
 ence between the difficult and the impossi- 
 ble is that the impossible takes a little 
 longer time." If mankind had no other 
 outlook than an indefinite recurrence of 
 wars like this, hope for a worthy future 
 for the race would have to be surrendered; 
 stoical fortitude would be our best re- 
 course. But no such disheartened coun- 
 sel need content us. The conclusion of 
 this world-drama, now at its climax, 
 need no more see the triumph of war than 
 20 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 our fathers' generation saw the triumph 
 of slavery. If we will, we may have 
 another victory for Christian ideals. 
 
 A further reason for accepting the 
 present crisis as a challenge lies in the 
 assurance that comes from the perspec- 
 tive of history. The tremendous events 
 through which we now are living tend 
 to preoccupy all our thoughts. We are 
 obsessed by the immediate, because the 
 immediate is so absorbingly terrific. But 
 it is not treachery to the importance of 
 the present hour to retreat from it far 
 enough to see it in the perspective of the 
 centuries. We do not lose faith now when 
 we read of the Peloponnesian War that 
 ruined Athens. But contemporaries did. 
 Euripides' skepticism had> for its back- 
 ground that appalling conflict which 
 brought the pride of his Achaia to the 
 dust. How modern is his ancient cry! 
 
 "When faith overfloweth my mind, God's provi- 
 dence all embracing 
 Banisheth griefs; but when Doubt whispereth, 
 Ah, but to know! 
 
 21 
 
 W 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 No clue through the tangle I find, of fate and 
 of life for my tracing." 
 
 We do not lose faith now when we 
 read of the old barbarian invasions that 
 devastated Europe, although they over- 
 threw the civilization on which man's 
 choicest hopes seemed to depend. But 
 multitudes of contemporaries did, and 
 Augustine's '' City of God" is the splendid 
 attempt of a man who would not sur- 
 render hope to steady his fellows in the 
 time of their dismay. The man who 
 wrote it, aged and unconquered, died 
 while the victorious barbarians were 
 hammering at his city's gates. We do 
 not lose faith now when over against the 
 French Revolution's fair beginning, prom- 
 ising liberty, fraternity, equality, we note 
 its dismal end — the tumbrils rumbling 
 through the city's streets and the falling 
 guillotines. But contemporaries had a 
 bitter struggle to keep heart and Words- 
 worth in the dismay of the time retreated 
 to the woods and later described his pain- 
 ful disillusionment: 
 
 22 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 "I lost 
 All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, 
 Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, 
 Yielded up moral questions in despair." 
 
 How often have such earthquakes, like 
 the Great War now, thrown the saints 
 upon their faces in dismay! Yet in the 
 retrospect of history, Peloponnesian wars, 
 barbarian invasions, French revolutions 
 take their proper and significant place. 
 They do not now appear as hopeless 
 blockades to human progress. Rather 
 they emerge like rocks around which 
 the advancing stream of the human 
 river swirled for a while and made its 
 progress more evident by the commotion. 
 And in our better hours we know that 
 this present catastrophe so will take its 
 place in history. It is not the end of all 
 things, the finale of our hopes. The 
 unique thing about our generation is not 
 the War. War has always been here. In 
 over 3,000 years of written history since 
 1496 B. C. there have been hardly more 
 than 227 years of peace. The unique 
 23 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 thing about our generation is the way 
 the very people who decide for war, as 
 President AYilson did, are thinking about 
 it. Their obvious abhorrence of war, their 
 increasingly clear insight that whatever 
 may be the necessities of immediate ac- 
 tion, war, regarded from the standpoint 
 of the ideal, is the last word in idiocy and 
 infamy as a w^ay of settling international 
 diflSculties in the twentieth century — 
 this is more distinctive of our time and 
 country than war itself is. And when a 
 man senses this, he throws aside the 
 despair that in weaker hours confuses him 
 and goes out to do his "bit" for that 
 Divine Purpose in the world, which this 
 war may impede, but which it cannot 
 stop. He determines to play his part, 
 that this war may impede the Divine 
 Purpose as little as possible and that out 
 of it may come indeed a world made 
 "safe for democracy." Behind this atti- 
 tude he feels the confirmation of history. 
 Ahead of it he sees the promise of hope. 
 
 24 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 III 
 
 If the reader's assent has at all been 
 gained by the reasons wliicli we have 
 An ap' noted for aecepting the world's 
 
 preclation crisis as a challenge and not 
 
 of force • / 1 • 
 
 as an oeeasion for desi)air, 
 
 the natural progress of our thought leads 
 us to consider th(i practical directions 
 which that challenge takes. To lis in 
 America the War is now no longer a mere 
 theory to he discussed; it is upon us as a 
 call to action, a stupendous fact whose 
 range and depth of influence no man can 
 measure. \\ hether or not we sliould our- 
 selves have voted for America's participa- 
 tion in the struggle, the War is ours now, 
 and its cli alien ge U) our Christianity is 
 unescapable. To what does it summon 
 us? 
 
 As Christians we are summoned, for 
 one thing, amid all the obsessing influ- 
 ences of war, to keep a clear insight into 
 the limitations of force as an agency in 
 human life. This does not mean that 
 25 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 force can be dispensed with. Indeed, 
 since the whole temper of our thought is 
 so anti-mihtaristic, we may well take 
 special pains to do justice to force, to 
 grant it all the value that its usefulness 
 deserves. Those who put force on one 
 side and love upon the other, as though 
 there were between them an unavoidable 
 antipathy, are creating one of those false 
 dilemmas which are a common stumbling- 
 block to useful thinking. Force and love 
 are not necessarily antithetical. Doubt- 
 less it is the absolute ideal that children 
 should be reared by moral suasion only, 
 without compulsion. But because most 
 of us were not absolutely ideal children, 
 we are thankful that we were not reared 
 on an absolutely ideal schedule. We are 
 glad that some things not otherwise ob- 
 tainable in us were helped by the judicious 
 application of force in the hands of love. 
 Love in its high reaches is not a soft and 
 cooing thing — it is life's most searching 
 and tremendous power, and neither in 
 the family nor in the commonwealth 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 ought it so to delight in the comfort of 
 tenderness that it refuses the discipUne 
 of force. 
 
 The love of Jesus is commonly appealed 
 to by those who would altogether dis- 
 pense with force. One has only to read 
 the many conflicting interpretations of 
 Jesus' sayings in their application to the 
 questions which this war presents, to see 
 how difficult, if not quite impossible it is, 
 to build with confidence any solution of 
 our special problems on a literal pressing 
 of the texts. The Master never faced in 
 his own experience, never directly con- 
 sidered in his teaching a national prob- 
 lem such as Belgium met when the Prus- 
 sians crossed the border. To be sure he 
 fraternized with centurions, taking them 
 for granted as unreprovingly as in his 
 parables he took slavery for granted, but 
 no cause can be made out for or against 
 either slavery or war from this natural 
 attitude of his. The fact is that Jesus did 
 not directly face our modern questions 
 about war; they were not his problem, and 
 27 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 to press a legalistic interpretation of 
 special texts, as though they were, is a 
 misuse of the gospels. 
 
 It is clear, however, that that boundless 
 love of hi^, which was the center of his 
 life, was no mild and dovelike thing. It 
 had terrific aspects. The love of Jesus 
 looked on Lazarus, lying untended at 
 Dives' gate, and then the love of Jesus 
 looked on Dives, and God have mercy on 
 him after that ! The love of Jesus looked on 
 pious Israelites coming up to the Father's 
 temple to pay their tithes and make their 
 offerings of sacrifice, and then the love of 
 Jesus looked upon the hucksters who rang 
 this piety upon their counters for their 
 private gain; and the love of Jesus took a 
 whip of cords and drove them out. Jesus 
 pictures the ideal of life ilnder the figure 
 of a shepherd, and the tender aspects of 
 the shepherd's ministry so captivate our 
 imagination that we would leave the pic- 
 ture with no shadows in it. Not so our 
 Lord. He is under no such soft illusions 
 about life. He follows through his figure 
 28 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 till the thief comes, that he "may steal 
 and kill and destroy"; he adds the wolf 
 as well, who if he can "snatcheth them 
 and scattereth them"; and then the 
 shepherd proves his quality — ^while the 
 hireling flees — ^by setting to in desperate 
 encounter to protect his sheep. Jesus 
 knew that a true shepherd could not al- 
 ways be a gentle man; at times the call 
 must come for force. The love of Jesus, 
 as we often are reminded, said, "Bless 
 them that curse you, pray for them that 
 despitefully use you"; and that same love 
 of Jesus, looking on the violaters of the 
 poor, also said, "Ye serpents! Ye off- 
 spring of vipers! How shall ye escape 
 the judgment of hell?" Love like his 
 does not always speak gently and act 
 gently; love never can speak and act 
 gently with effectiveness unless it has 
 behind it capacious possibilities of moral 
 indignation. Indeed so stern an aspect 
 did the love of Jesus have that the 
 greater problem which the serious in- 
 terpreter must face and which pacifist 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 writers commonly forget, is not to har- 
 monize the Master's love with so tem- 
 poral a thing as the use of force for 
 moral ends, but to harmonize it with 
 so prodigious a conception as the word 
 hell — familiar on his lips — even in its 
 most merciful interpretation must con- 
 note. ''These mine enemies that would 
 not that I should reign over them, bring 
 them hither and slay them before me" — 
 no soft and comfortable soul, afraid of 
 force, put words like that into his picture 
 of the Eternal. Just as in the Master's 
 love there are heights of tenderness and 
 horizons of compassion where even our 
 imaginations cannot reach, so, in the 
 presence of obdurate iniquity, depths of 
 sternness are there that make us quail. 
 We have been too soft in our thought of 
 him; we have remembered the 6th chapter 
 of Matthew's gospel and have forgotten 
 the 23rd; and some of the most egregious 
 misinterpretations of him ever written 
 have but lately come from extreme paci- 
 ts, identifying love with gentleness. 
 30 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 While, therefore, none can be dogmati- 
 cally sure what Jesus would say about our 
 duty in this present war — although we 
 can be sure that Jesus would hate war 
 and all that makes it possible — one does 
 not see how a soul who spoke as Jesus 
 spoke could forbid as intrinsically wrong 
 the use of force for moral ends. And if, 
 in answer the familiar text is pleaded, 
 ** Resist not evil," surely both the con- 
 text and the whole temper of the Master's 
 life make clear that the meaning there is 
 not passive acquiescence in inic^uity, but 
 rather that magnanimity of spirit which 
 Paul summed up in his parallel word: 
 "Recompense to no man evil for evil." 
 For force in Jesus' thought must always 
 be wielded with a heart of love behind and 
 a purpose of good will ahead. 
 
 Those who would dispense with force, 
 who at a stroke would lift all opposition 
 to evil from the physical to the moral 
 plane, and fight iniquity w ith reason and 
 love alone, do not estimate aright what 
 sin can do to human life. They have an 
 31 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 unsupported confidence that no heart ever 
 grows so callous in iniquity that it is un- 
 responsive to the appeal of tenderness. 
 Such folk should go to court some day 
 when the little children and the fathers 
 who have beaten them are brought in. 
 If anything in heaven above or on the 
 earth beneath can love and forgive be- 
 yond limit it is a little child. And these 
 children have so forgiven and so loved 
 again the brutal men whose rage has been 
 vented on their defenseless bodies. Yet 
 forgiven repeatedly by these little ones, 
 beset by the appeals of their own chil- 
 dren's unconquerable love for them, these 
 men have gone on beating the scarred 
 bodies of their own offspring with ob- 
 durate cruelty. Sin can work that result 
 and does work it in human hearts. This 
 is the deep damnation of sin — that it 
 makes men's spirits callous until the 
 nerves are paralyzed that once thrilled to 
 the touch of tenderness and the appeal of 
 reason. The state's force cannot save 
 these men from their brutality — only 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 love can do that — but it can stop the 
 beating of the children. What do we 
 really think Jesus would have said about 
 it — Jesus who, facing something like it, 
 said it were better for a man, with a 
 mill-stone round his neck, to be flung 
 into the sea, than to offend one of these 
 little ones? 
 
 It is true that the advance of society 
 is marked by the progressive substitution 
 of moral suasion for physical force: in 
 wedlock, where men once captured wives 
 and held them by brute strength, but 
 now woo them instead; in parenthood, 
 where a father's power of death over 
 a child was once constraining and where 
 now force is a last resort; in education, 
 where no longer is the birch the tree 
 of knowledge; in penology, where phys- 
 ical compulsion gives way before more 
 generous treatment of the criminal — 
 everywhere the advance of social life 
 involves the gradual displacement of 
 brutal constraint by reasonable persua- 
 sion. But this advance of human- 
 83 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 ity will not bring us utterly past the need 
 of force until it has eliminated more of 
 sin than as yet has gon^ out of us. Any 
 day on any street any man of us may face 
 an exigency where sin is expressing itself 
 in forms that far have overpassed the 
 power of reason and gentleness immedi- 
 ately to handle. We must use force. 
 The wolf has come and we must be 
 shepherds and not hirelings. 
 
 It sometimes is maintained that even 
 in international relations no emergency 
 ever arises which a peaceful good will 
 cannot meet. Writes an enthusiastic 
 pacifist, "Suppose half of Belgium's sons 
 who were killed in battle had died in- 
 stead as unarmed martyrs resisting Ger- 
 man progress, but not to the point of 
 bloodshed — could even the Prussian host 
 have advanced?" To which the answer 
 seems suflBciently obvious : of course they 
 could have advanced, just as they swept 
 through unresisting and now enslaved, 
 Luxemburg; advanced, if there were any 
 determined opposition, as the old Romans 
 34 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 slaughtered the unresisting Jews on Sab- 
 bath days when the Jews died rather than 
 fight. One admires those ancient He- 
 brews, but it is their loyalty to principle 
 that he admires and not their intelligence. 
 No more fallacious reading of history is 
 possi})le than that which represents the 
 peaceful peoples as safe from aggression. 
 The fact is that there never yet has been 
 an agricultural civilization that grew rich 
 in prosperity and weak in power that did 
 not become victim to some predacious 
 military nation. The gradual substitu- 
 tion of moral for physical force in inter- 
 national relations is as certain as human 
 progress, for there can be no assured hu- 
 man progress without it, but mankind is 
 not yet so free from elemental sin that 
 any nation can count on spiritual sweet- 
 ness as a safeguard against rampant greed. 
 Even Jesus did not })less the peaceful; he 
 blessed the j^eace-makers; and peace- 
 making in any human relationship may 
 any day involve resort to force. 
 
 When such exigencies come, no man 
 
 35 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 can be sure how far the use of force may 
 have to go. To say that we may use 
 force up to the point of kiUing and not 
 beyond is in practice often an impossible 
 distinction. It is here that the crucial 
 difficulty and horror of the Christian 
 arise, alike in personal experiences where 
 he has taken life to protect another and 
 in the frank and brutal slaughter of a 
 war. Only a few question the rectitude 
 of parental compulsion or the wisdom of 
 having our police. The difficulty comes 
 when the use of force involves killing. 
 Personality is for Christians the one ab- 
 solute value in the world, and to push the 
 use of force to the point where it kills 
 seems blatant denial of all that Christians 
 say about the worth of persons. To be- 
 lieve that a man is a son of God and your 
 brother and yet to kill him — in what fla- 
 grant contradiction do those two things 
 stand ! 
 
 Facing this issue some Christians, 
 notably the Quakers, have framed their 
 answer in uncompromising idealism. I 
 36 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 will not kill, says such a Christian. Under 
 no circumstances, even when my own 
 existence is at stake, or a woman's honor 
 or a child's life is concerned, or moral 
 principles are involved that I confess to 
 be of essential value to mankind, will I 
 ever kill. In personal relations I will 
 never so oppose evil as to run any risk of 
 ending the physical existence of anybody, 
 and as for war, I will have no part in it. 
 The nation may jail me, my friends de- 
 sert me, and public opinion call me trai- 
 tor, but I will not fight. The business of 
 war is killing men, and to that business I 
 will not consent, in it I will have no share. 
 The enemy may be ruthless beyond reach 
 of the immediate persuasions of reason 
 and good will; he may burn our cities, 
 rape our women, mutilate our children — 
 but I will not kill. Personality is sacred 
 and my hand shall never violate it. 
 
 Thus some Christians have spoken and 
 no one who rightly measures the con- 
 trast between the Cross of Christ and 
 screwing a bayonet into a fellow-man will 
 87 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 lightly scorn their spirit. But this is not 
 the only way in which a Christian may 
 speak. I, too, count personality su- 
 premely sacred — so another Christian 
 may say — ^but personality and physical 
 existence are not identical They are 
 not identical in myself. My personality 
 is God's most sacred trust to me; it is the 
 thing I am, my soul, and to gain the 
 whole world and lose that were a poor 
 bargain; but any day I must be ready to 
 surrender my physical existence for an- 
 other's welfare and for the ideals that 
 make us men. What is true of me is true 
 of others. Their personality is one thing; 
 their physical existence is another. Any 
 day the exigency may arise where, with 
 no depreciation whatsoever of my esti- 
 mate of personality's absolute, unrivaled 
 worth, I may, for a woman's safety or a 
 child's life, have to strip some man's 
 physical existence from him, if I can, and 
 trust God that in the world unseen his 
 abiding personality may be recovered 
 from his sin. Nothing is worth more than 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 personality, but many things are worth 
 more than physical existence, whether 
 mine or another's, and when the race for- 
 gets that, the days of moral grandeur are 
 ended and the doom of heroism come. 
 Therefore, when other measures fail, I 
 shall not hesitate to throw my life, at any 
 risk to my body or to his, against one 
 who assails what should be inviolate, nor 
 shall I ever call the Belgians iniquitous 
 because they risked their own physical 
 existence and the invaders' in a magni- 
 ficent endeavor, in the face of perfidy, to 
 keep their word. Bayonets do not reach 
 as far as personality; they reach only 
 physical existence, and the problem of 
 personality passes far beyond an earthly 
 battlefield. So a man may speak and 
 be a Christian. 
 
 If such a willingness upon a Christian's 
 part to risk his own and others' lives in 
 physical encounter, when rampant evil 
 resists other cure, seems a compromise 
 with his ideals, it is only such a compro- 
 mise as is involved in all endeavor to live 
 39 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 for ideals amid unidcal conditions. War 
 is unchristian, l)ut so is our economic 
 system with its terrific inec^uities. Our 
 economic competition is the war perpetual 
 that runs through all the days of so-called 
 peace and is one of the major causes of 
 that more o1)vi()us war that uses sword 
 and shrapnel. No one who deeply sees 
 the evils that our fight for wealth brings 
 on man, with an incidence more terrible 
 than war because it is so continuous and 
 unrelieved, can call it Christian. War 
 brutalizes men? So does our economic 
 system, ruining multitudes with hours of 
 labor that no life can endure, under con- 
 ditions that no character can sustain. 
 War kills men? So does our economic 
 system, resisting the expense of safer con- 
 ditions of labor, blowing men up need- 
 lessly in mines, pulverizing them in un- 
 guarded machinery, poisoning them every 
 day with deadly gases, and on our Ameri- 
 can railroads running up a death-rate that 
 no necessity ever can excuse. War ruins 
 childhood? So does our economic system, 
 40 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 using up children like grist in our mills, 
 and withstanding by every means that 
 money can buy and legal talent can sug- 
 gest all movements for their relief. There 
 are }jra\'e and unselfish aspects U) our 
 commercial life as there are to war, and 
 noble men are engaged in both, but no 
 one who knows the under side of our 
 fight for rtioYKty can help knowing the 
 horror of il. 'i'here is hardly a kind of 
 agony on a modem battlefield that has 
 not its counterpart somewhere in our 
 economic struggle. 
 
 Shall a man say, then, that because 
 the economic system Is unchristian he 
 will have none of it? He could say that 
 if he were in earnest about absolutf.dy 
 uncompromised ideals. He could sell hLs 
 stocks and bonds, give up hLs position, 
 refusfi to buy and sfill, and as a non- 
 resistant pacifist willingly suffers any loss 
 rather than share directly or indirectly 
 in a war, so he could go out alone to live 
 as a monk, free from the entangle- 
 ments of an unchristian business world. 
 41 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 But that man would be shouldering 
 off on others the necessity of dealmg 
 with life's stern, forbidding problems 
 and would be retreating into a spirit- 
 ual vacuum to nurse his absolute ideals. 
 Such an attitude is rank individualism 
 and is obviously unethical. No more can 
 we play the recluse in the face of such a 
 war as this, content to say that fighting is 
 unchristian and that we will have none of 
 it. The answer to such an attitude need 
 involve no defense of war. From the 
 standpoint of every high ideal, war is un- 
 christian — essentially, hideously unchris- 
 tian. After a look at Europe, let no man 
 ever again speak of a Christian war! The 
 Christian's definite and unrelenting hos- 
 tility to that international paganism from 
 which war inevitably comes, we shall deal 
 with later. But if, in the present stage of 
 human society, moral values are at stake 
 which ruthless violence attacks, we cannot 
 remain outside the critical problem thus 
 thrust upon us as though we lived in 
 another and a better world. We must 
 42 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 help to meet the crisis, with all its wretched 
 necessities, as sharers in a mutual re- 
 sponsibility which no one rightly may 
 evade. To do anything else is to shoulder 
 off on others the burden of meeting life's 
 harsh and unideal emergencies. It may 
 even mean that we sit safely in the lee of 
 the men who use massed force against 
 massed force for righteousness' sake, not 
 because they like to do it but because it 
 has to be done, and that we credit what 
 is really our ignoble individualism with 
 being a fine service of ideals. A noted 
 English pacifist said to the writer that in 
 the present estate of the world he judged 
 that England could have done nothing 
 else in 1914 save to go to war, but that as 
 for himself, he was a conscientious ob- 
 jector and would have no part in it. He 
 acknowledged a social necessity, in the 
 meeting of which he refused any share. 
 Nothing could be more immoral. For, 
 however heartily we may hate the emer- 
 gencies that the evil of the world presents, 
 we must stay within the problem of 
 43 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 international entanglements, as we stay 
 within the economic system, to play our 
 part as best we can in the redemption 
 of both. As a great English Christian 
 put it: *'The War presents to every crea- 
 ture whose country is involved in it the 
 one great moral issue of our times and for 
 a man to say he can do nothing in it is to 
 vote himself out of the moral world. " 
 
 Even "conscientious objectors" — rather, 
 they especially and most of all — should 
 face this truth. As the Quakers lumi- 
 nously have shown, a man may be 
 unalterably averse to fighting and yet 
 may take more than a negative attitude 
 toward war. Forbidden by their scruples 
 to engage in war, how often have they 
 stopped the mouths of their traducers by 
 their active, sacrificial contribution to 
 the cause for which others fought! Since 
 they came into existence, every war 
 waged around a moral issue has felt the 
 weight of their support. Sometimes, as 
 in Whittier's day, the Quaker's blazing 
 indignation against moral wrong has fed 
 44 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 the flames of the conflict. Sometimes, as 
 in England now, the most hazardous 
 enterprises that the war could fiirnish, 
 like sweeping the seas for mines, have 
 specially attracted the Quaker volunteers. 
 In many wars their money has gone 
 where they could not and they have 
 outbraved th(i l^rave in deeds of mercy on 
 the hattlefleld. 1'hey shouldered what 
 part they could of the common burden; 
 they acknowledged their share in the 
 social emergency; th(*y could not fight, 
 but they revealed in ways as periKjus as 
 battle their unspoiled conviction that 
 some things are worth fighting for. One 
 does not need to agree with such a Quak- 
 er's program in ord(ir to honor his sj)irit. 
 Today he pcjints the only way of self- 
 respect for a ** conscientious objector.*' 
 The first Vjusiness of any man whose 
 scruples will not let him fight is to find 
 a post of danger and sacrifice in the com- 
 mon cause that will save him from the 
 deadly sin of shirking. 
 
 As for the Christian who believes that 
 45 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 when force is ruthlessly employed for 
 wrong, it may have to be met by force 
 employed for right, the present war must 
 come to him with a call for service clear 
 and undeniable. He surely cannot thrust 
 on others the meeting of the crisis, while 
 he escapes. He must bear his part, and 
 in those hours when he carries up to God 
 the sad and tangled confusion of the 
 world's affairs, and seeks in the divine 
 light the clue of duty through the laby- 
 rinth of conflicting rights and wrongs, he 
 may plead America's cause in sincere and 
 hearty prayer: 
 
 O God, bless our Country! We la- 
 ment before Thee the cruel necessity of 
 war. But what could we do.? Our dead 
 by hundreds lie beneath the sea; the 
 liberties that our sires baptized with 
 their blood and handed down to us in 
 trust, so that they are not ours alone but 
 all humanity's, are torn in shreds; and a 
 foe is loose against us whom we have not 
 chosen, whom we have not aggrieved, 
 and who in his will to conquer counts 
 solemn oaths to be but scraps of paper 
 46 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 and the chivalry of the seas an empty 
 name. We have grown weary, to the 
 sickness of our souls, sitting comfortably 
 here, while others pour their blood like 
 water forth for those things which alone 
 can make this earth a decent place for 
 man to live upon. What could we do? 
 With all the evils of our nation's life, 
 that we acknowledge and confess with 
 shame, we yet plead before Thee that 
 we have not wanted war, that we 
 hate no man, that we covet no nation's 
 possessions, that we have nothing for 
 ourselves to gain from war, unless it be 
 a clear conscience and a better earth for 
 all the nations to live and grow in. We 
 plead before Thee that if patience and 
 good will could have won the day, we 
 gladly should have chosen them, and pa- 
 tience long since would have had her per- 
 fect work. And now we lay our hand 
 upon our sword. Since we must draw it, 
 O God, help us to play the man and to 
 do our part in teaching ruthlessness once 
 for all what it means to wake the sleep- 
 ing lion of humanity's conscience. 
 
 47 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 IV 
 
 We have endeavored to do justice to 
 the use of force as an agency in human Hfe. 
 77,^ But the peril with most 
 
 limitations Americans is not that they 
 
 ^ ^''^^ will undervalue force dur- 
 
 ing these days of war; the peril is that they 
 will be obsessed by it. In war the instru- 
 ments with which men endeavor to achieve 
 their ends are instruments of force ; and in 
 the thought of our generation what guns 
 and battleships and submarines and aero- 
 planes and the massed strength of charg- 
 ing men, armed to the teeth, can do is 
 dominant. We Christians need chiefly 
 to be reminded of what these things can- 
 not do; we are challenged to an unre- 
 mitting emphasis upon the limitations of 
 force, and its futility for all the higher 
 ends of human life. War, like all use of 
 physical compulsion, is at its best a 
 surgical operation. By surgery you may 
 restrain an alien growth, but surgery 
 jiever cures. The positive, constructive 
 
 4a 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 forces of health must cure and without 
 them surgery is a cruel failure. So war 
 at its best can do one thing and one 
 thing only. It can halt some external 
 work of evil, it can blow away, as in the 
 American Revolution, oppressive condi- 
 tions that thwart free development. But 
 that is all. Its work is all negative, elim- 
 inative. The agencies of positive health 
 in social life are not akin to war ; they are 
 good will and friendship and cooperation. 
 Only these can cure any social ill and 
 without them the work of the knife is a 
 bitter failure. 
 
 Suppose that the dearest hopes of our 
 military leaders were fulfilled and that 
 Germany were conquered by force of 
 arms until she must confess it and abide 
 by such terms as we and our allies chose 
 to impose, what after all would be ac- 
 complished? We could compel Germany 
 physically to vacate violated territory; 
 we could compel Germany to pay indem- 
 nity, we could cripple the piratical schemes 
 of pan-Germanism — such things we could 
 49 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 do by force, and leaving it there, would 
 thrust vmder the ashes of Germany's 
 failure embers of undying hatred that in 
 a generation would flare up again in fire. 
 We would cure nothing. War by itself 
 never cures anything. Mankind is for- 
 tunate if war even restrains the evil it 
 was meant to halt and does not create 
 new evils worse than those attacked, as 
 surgery sometimes scatters the cancerous 
 poison that it tries to cut away. But 
 even when a war does the restraining 
 work to which it sets itself, it can cure 
 no radical social wrong or offer to human- 
 ity a single solid hope. Only good will 
 can do that. We Christians need to say 
 this to ourselves until it makes the circuit 
 of our blood and comes back to our 
 hearts again. The knife of the surgeon 
 is cutting in; can we supply the construc- 
 tive forces of social health to make the 
 operation worth while? 
 
 We need to say this to ourselves 
 emphatically because whatever may be 
 the fine ideals with which a nation enters 
 50 
 
THE prj:sent crisis 
 
 war, as President Wilson phrased them 
 for us in his noVjle message, hate thrives 
 in war-time like germs in a congenial 
 medium. We have heard much ahout the 
 cult of hatred in Germany; we have 
 cringed at Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate" 
 against England. But such a spirit is 
 not peculiarly indigenous in Germany. 
 Here is Henri de Regnier's song of hate 
 from France: 
 
 "I swear to cherish in my heart this hate 
 Till my last heart-throb wanes; 
 
 So may the sacred venom of my blood 
 Mingle and charge my veins! 
 
 May there pass never from my darkened 
 Ijrow 
 The furrows hate has worn! 
 May they plough deeper in my flesh, to 
 mark 
 The outrage I have borne! 
 
 By towns in flames, by my fair fields laid 
 waste, 
 
 By hostages undone, 
 By cries of murdered women and of babes. 
 
 By each dead warrior son, . . . 
 
 ^ 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 I take my oath of hatred and of wrath 
 
 Before God, and before 
 The holy waters of the Marne and Aisne, 
 
 Still ruddy with French gore; 
 
 And fix my eyes upon immortal Rheims, 
 Burning from nave to porch, 
 
 Lest I forget, lest I forget who lit 
 The sacrilegious torch!" 
 
 * One quotes this not chiefly to condemn 
 it, but to note how natural it is, how 
 spontaneously it rises from the mood 
 that war creates, how certainly we shall 
 be tempted to it in America. Whatever 
 conceivable good this war might possibly 
 do will be undone by such a spirit. If 
 that mood prevails, and in the settlement 
 of the war is dominant, then the war is 
 all sheer waste, a mad expenditure of 
 blood and tears and treasure, with noth- 
 ing to show for it save graves and poverty 
 and broken hearts and bitter rancor and 
 a world grown worse, not better. For our 
 own sakes and for the world's sake, though 
 we fight we must not hate. We are 
 Christians. We know when we think of 
 52 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 it that had we been born in Germany, 
 there is not one chance in a million that 
 we would be doing other than the Ger- 
 mans do. We know that had we been 
 the inheritors of the Prussian tradition, 
 the pupils from early childhood of the 
 Prussian instruction, and the instinctive 
 patriots that all good men are, we should 
 be thinking what the Germans think 
 today. Underneath they are not differ- 
 ent men and women from ourselves, and 
 they can no more be conquered in the 
 inner citadel of their hearts by force alone 
 than could we. We never really sur- 
 render to anything but good will. Neither 
 will they. Force is evidently the neces- 
 sary prelude to that capitulation. There 
 is no hope for the world with an autocratic, 
 military Germany triumphant. We must 
 win the war. But we must keep our- 
 selves unembittered ; we must fight all 
 bitter policies in our government; our 
 good will must be unwearying and strong. 
 We must be as ready to forgive as is God. 
 And in those secret hours when we carry 
 53 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 the tragedy of this war before the throne 
 of God we must pray for more than our 
 country; we must pray for our enemies: 
 
 O God, bless Germany! At war with 
 her people, we hate them not at all, and 
 underneath the cruel divisions that force 
 on us this sorry business of mutual de- 
 struction we acknowledge before Thee 
 those underlying unities that yet will be 
 there and will be beautiful when war is 
 over. Our enemies, too, are sons of God 
 and brothers for whose sake Christ died. 
 We acknowledge before Thee our part in 
 the world's iniquity that rolls this bur- 
 den on Thy heart and crucifies the Son 
 of God afresh. We dare not stand in 
 Thy sight and accuse Germany as though 
 she alone were guilty of our international 
 disgrace. We all are guilty. We confess 
 with shame that the present horror is the 
 natural fruit of sins in which we all have 
 shared. We beseech Thee against those 
 things in Germany and in us that make 
 war possible. And especially we lift up 
 our prayer for every good impulse in 
 every German heart, for all misgivings 
 among Germany's people that cast doubt 
 upon the policies of f rightfulness and ter- 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 ror, for all the forces of a forward-look- 
 ing democracy within her, and for every 
 German Christian on his knees who is 
 asking Thee for the dawn of peace and 
 brotherhood. Save to the great service 
 of the world, we beseech Thee, the won- 
 derful qualities of the people whom we 
 fight; let them not perish from the earth, 
 burned in retributory fire. We need their 
 strength to be our admiration and our 
 help, as it now is our despair. O God, 
 bring us all. Thy wayward people, to 
 such a penitence and shame at having 
 made Thy world by sin so sad a place, 
 that we may learn brotherhood with that 
 same diligence which now we give to war. 
 
 It is no counsel of perfection to urge 
 such an attitude. This never can be an 
 impossible ideal to reach, even in war, 
 while we have before us the admirable 
 words of Edith Cavell, as she went out to 
 execution: "I see now that patriotism 
 is not enough. I must die without hatred 
 or bitterness toward anyone." 
 
 Especially should those who go to the 
 front with the army purge their spirits of 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 all hate. We are constantly reminded 
 that war brutalizes men; but we often 
 forget that that depends on the man. 
 The reactions of soldiers to the influences 
 of war are as diverse as the response of 
 people everywhere to life's less strenuous 
 appeals. Some are ruined by war and 
 some are redeemed by it to a purity of 
 devotion and a wealth of sacrificial spirit 
 they have never known before. Some are 
 besmirched by war and some are cleansed 
 by it, consecrating their bodies to chastity 
 for service's sake. The elders among us 
 who saw the conflict between the states, 
 say that some men went into the Civil 
 War and came out beasts. But some 
 came back from the sights of suffering 
 and deeds of horror and sacrifices of sur- 
 passing heroism more tender and beauti- 
 ful of spirit and rich in sympathetic 
 humanity than they had ever been before. 
 A brave and radiant friend of the writer, 
 suffering the tragic consequences of in- 
 fantile paralysis, was addressed in sym- 
 pathy by an acquaintance who said, 
 56 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 ''Affliction does so color the life. " ''Yes," 
 was the swift answer, "and / propose to 
 choose the color,'' That such an attitude 
 is possible toward war by those who are 
 in the thick of its abominations is plain 
 enough from the testimony of these recent 
 years. Donald Hankey is dead now but 
 he has left an imperishable witness from 
 the midst of the battlefield : "I have seen 
 with the eyes of God. I have seen the 
 naked souls of men, stripped of circum- 
 stance. Rank and reputation, wealth and 
 poverty, knowledge and ignorance, man- 
 ners and uncouthness, these I saw not. 
 I saw the naked souls of men. I saw who 
 were slaves and who were free: who were 
 beasts and who were men: who were 
 contemptible and who honorable. I 
 have seen with the eyes of God. I have 
 seen the vanity of the temporal and the 
 glory of the eternal. I have despised 
 comfort and honored pain. I have under- 
 stood the victory of the Cross. O Death, 
 where is thy sting .^ Nunc dimittis, 
 Domine.'' 
 
 57 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 Christians are challenged by this war 
 not only to a recognition of the limitations 
 The case ^^ force and to a spirit 
 
 against of unconquerable good 
 
 militarism ^jjj^ ^^^ ^^ ^ ceaseless 
 
 attack upon the whole system of unchris- 
 tian international relationships of which 
 war is a natural expression. There is one 
 marked difference between the sudden 
 crisis which calls upon a man to attack a 
 ruffian in the street, and the crisis which 
 issues in war. We have not specially 
 prepared for the former. We have not 
 taken it for granted, expected it, armed 
 for it, and assiduously planned for years 
 to meet it. But in international relation- 
 ships we count war an integral part of our 
 system. We assume it as an event to be 
 expected, and the nations arm themselves 
 against each other and train themselves 
 to slay each other, reckless of expense, as 
 though war and international relations 
 were inseparable. We scheme with mu- 
 58 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 tual distrust in secret diplomacy, make 
 compacts and leagues to each other's 
 hurt, and act in every way as though a 
 condition of international suspicion, envy, 
 and latent hostility were the normal state 
 of the world. Of course war comes. We 
 shall as easily get peace out of the present, 
 dominant idea of international affairs 
 as we shall get figs from thistles. Chris- 
 tian people are challenged to a definite 
 and unending assault upon this immoral 
 and needless paganism. 
 
 Some are still so wedded to the present 
 idea of international relationships that 
 they find even the worst issue of them, 
 war, not only unobjectionable but posi- 
 tively desirable. They still talk of the 
 glory of war. The writer once heard a 
 learned judge, justly famed for legal 
 talent and literary genius, declare that 
 a country needed a war about once in 
 thirty years. As well call in the floods of 
 the Mississippi because incidentally they 
 leave more fertile soil; as well call in 
 the San Francisco fire because it showed 
 59 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 the pluck of a brave people and made the 
 building of a greater city possible. There 
 are better ways of accomplishing such 
 results than by disasters. Fire and flood 
 are not glorious; all the glory is in the 
 spirit of mankind which is made of stuff 
 too splendid not to show its mettle even 
 in the worst calamities. And war is not 
 glorious, though oftentimes in war men 
 are. 
 
 One who knows w^hat really is happen- 
 ing on European battlefields today and 
 calls war glorious is morally unsound. 
 Says an eye-witness: "Last night, at an 
 officers' mess there was great laughter at 
 the story of one of our men who had 
 spent his last cartridge in defending an 
 attack. 'Hand me down your spade, 
 Mike,' he said; and as six Germans came 
 one by one round the end of a traverse, 
 he split each man's skull open with a 
 deadly blow." That is war. Says a 
 Young Men's Christian Association secre- 
 tary: "Many times these fingers have 
 reached through the skulls of wounded 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 men and felt their throbbing brains." 
 That is war. An oflScer's letter from the 
 front reads: 
 
 "An enemy mine exploded here a few 
 days ago and buried our brigade. Many 
 of the men were killed, but some were 
 not much hurt; so we dug them out and 
 used them over again." 
 
 Sons of God and brothers of Jesus Christ 
 — ''dug them out and used them over 
 again"! That is war. Said a group of 
 German prisoners, as they bared their 
 gashed forearms, "We were dying with 
 thirst, we had our choice of doing what 
 some men do in such a case — drink the 
 blood of an enemy, or else drink our own. 
 We are Christians : so we cut our own arms 
 to get drink." That is war. War is not 
 the gay color, the rhythmic movement, 
 the thrilling music of the military parade. 
 War is not even killing gallantly as 
 knights once did, matched evenly in 
 armor and in steed and fighting by the 
 rules of chivalry. War now is dropping 
 bombs from aeroplanes and killing women 
 61 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 and children in their beds; it is shooting, 
 by telephonic orders, at an unseen place 
 miles away and slaughtering invisible 
 men; it is murdering innocent travelers 
 on merchant ships with torpedoes from 
 unknown submarines ; it is launching clouds 
 of poisoned gas and slaying men with 
 their own breath. War means lying days 
 and nights wounded and alone in No- 
 Man's Land; it means men with jaws gone, 
 eyes gone, limbs gone, minds gone; it 
 means countless bodies of boys tossed into 
 the incinerators that follow in the train of 
 every battle; it means prison camps 
 vicious with the inevitable results of en- 
 forced idleness ; it means untended wounds 
 and gangrene and the long time it takes to 
 die; it means mothers who look for letters 
 they will never see and wives who wait 
 for voices they will never hear and chil- 
 dren who listen for footsteps that will 
 never come. That is war — "Its heroisms 
 are but the glancing sunlight on a sea of 
 blood and tears" — and a man who calls 
 it glorious is mad. And through all these 
 62 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 physical horrors runs a horror more appal- 
 Kng still, the persistent debauching and 
 brutalizing of men's souls. One who uses 
 his knowledge and his imagination to 
 perceive in its abominations what war 
 really is, while he might never dream 
 of using Walt Whitman's language, 
 finds it hard to be sorry that the lan- 
 guage has been used: "Wars are hell- 
 ish business — all wars. . . . Any hon- 
 est man says so — ^hates war, fighting, 
 blood-letting. I was in the midst of it 
 all — saw war where war was worst — not 
 on the battlefields, no — in the hospitals: 
 there war is worst: there I mixed with it, 
 and now I say God damn the wars — all 
 wars : God damn every war : God damn 
 'em ! God damn 'em ! ' ' 
 
 The last stand of those who still cling 
 to the old illusion that there is something 
 glorious about war is on the claim that 
 war awakens the heroic qualities in men. 
 To such an indictment as we just have 
 brought against war, a very plausible 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 counter is quite possible. Where is it 
 that the ministers of Christ, so the re- 
 tort might run, look for their finest illus- 
 trations of loyalty and courage and sacri- 
 fice? When most they wish to inspire 
 that devotion to moral causes on which 
 the welfare of the world depends, where 
 instinctively do they look for allusions to 
 grip the heart? To war. And what 
 hymns do they sing? "Onward, Christian 
 soldiers, marching as to war"; ''The Son 
 of God goes forth to war"; "Soldiers of 
 Christ arise, and gird your armor on." 
 War so inglorious and horrible as you 
 depict? Then why is it the foundation 
 of some of the finest chapters in Scripture, 
 some of the most inspiring hymns, and 
 many of the most appealing passages in 
 preaching? 
 
 This question is worth asking and worth 
 answering. The defendants of militarism 
 often catch Christian ears with this ap- 
 peal. Bernhardi's appalling book, stating 
 the purpose of the German war -party, 
 says that war is Christian because it en- 
 H 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 courages obedience, devotion, and self- 
 sacrifice. And he is right in saying that 
 war uses these noble qualities in men. 
 Today deeds of heroism are being per- 
 formed upon the battlefields that, when 
 the war is over, will be recalled and 
 cherished as spiritual treasures for the 
 race's memory. The Prussian ensign 
 who, fatally wounded, gathered the flag 
 he carried to his breast, that falling in 
 death upon it he might hide it from the 
 capture of the enemy, presents what a 
 picture of devotion! Or the French 
 commander, calling for a volunteer for a 
 fatal mission, who saw his OAvn son step 
 out, for an instant looked at him with 
 blanched face, and then sent him forth 
 never to return — ^where shall one seek 
 for more absolute loyalty? Bernhardi is 
 right in this: the record of war is full of 
 deeds whose nobility the race never can 
 forget. 
 
 This fact, however, as Bernhardi and 
 many a milder advocate of militaristic 
 glory do not see, is the basis for the most 
 65 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 scathing charge against war. Shall not 
 a man of Christian insight say this in 
 answer? O war, I hate you most of all 
 because you lay your hands upon the 
 finest qualities in human life, qualities 
 that rightly used would make a heaven 
 on earth, and you use them to make a 
 hell on earth instead. You take our 
 spirit of courage and devotion, and in- 
 stead of letting it be a benediction in the 
 world, you use it to burn cities and sack 
 cathedrals and slay men. You take our 
 loyalty that well used would redeem the 
 world, and you harness it to a movement 
 that inevitably means the rape of women, 
 the murder of children, and the starvation 
 of whole populations. You take our reli- 
 gion, and to help your deadly work 
 you rend our God in pieces and make of 
 him a score of tribal deities to whom men 
 pray, as old barbarians, before our Lord 
 had come, prayed to their idols as the 
 gods of war. You take our science, the 
 fruit of our dedicated intelligence, and 
 you make even of that an effective minis- 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 ter of hate, so that while Napoleon in his 
 wide experience never saw a battle-line 
 over fifteen miles long, we have battle- 
 lines 500 miles long, and death falls from 
 the sky and bursts from the earth and 
 hurtles from unseen ambuscades twenty 
 miles away. This is the deepest charge 
 against you, that you take our noblest 
 powers and prostitute them to destructive 
 ends. 
 
 How can Christian people fail to see 
 that they are challenged to a tireless fight 
 against the system of international rela- 
 tionships that makes this gross abuse of 
 noble powers a possibility? Men are 
 glorious in war. After a charge a wounded 
 American, who was fighting with the 
 troops in France, exclaimed: ''We went 
 over the parapet at five o'clock and I was 
 not hit till nine. They were the greatest 
 four hours of my life." Where was the 
 glory there? In war? No, in the spirit 
 of the man — and that spirit is no specialty 
 of war. Captain Scott had it when he 
 crossed the Antarctic continent; Judson 
 67 
 
THE CHALLENGE OP 
 
 had it when he invaded Burma for Christ; 
 Garrison had it when he launched the 
 campaign for aboUtion. It is the spirit of 
 adventure, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and 
 scorn of danger. The most enheartening 
 revelation of the war is the clear evidence 
 it gives of how widespread in ordinary 
 people these elemental qualities of man- 
 hood are. Clerks, ploughmen, bankers, 
 day -laborers from the streets; lawyers, 
 physicians, ministers from their profes- 
 sions — what prodigies of heroism are they 
 all performing! "Look at those millions 
 of men," a recent writer cries, "every 
 man with his back to his home and his 
 face toward his flag, and meditate on the 
 incredible, immeasurable, unimaginable 
 power of patriotism!" But having a 
 human nature to deal w^ith that has such 
 powers of devotion, cooperation, and tire- 
 less energy within it, this is the most 
 colossal crime that the race can commit, 
 to use these splendid qualities for slaugh- 
 ter. What a world could be made here, if 
 they were harnessed to a better cause! 
 68 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 Is there anything impossible to a race with 
 powers Hke these? 
 
 There are many who seriously think 
 that it is impossible to do away with war 
 and the conditions that produce it. They 
 do not call war glorious, but they do call 
 it necessary. They have no faith that 
 humanity can put its bayonets and can- 
 non in the museums where they belong 
 with racks and thumbscrews and the 
 shackles of the slave. And one reason 
 for this skepticism is that Christian 
 people have presented as the cure for 
 international hostilities panaceas so piti- 
 ably inadequate that no one who knows 
 the problem could believe in them. We 
 never can cleanse the huge Augean stables 
 of our world-wide armaments and wars by 
 gathering a band of people who will per- 
 suade some other people never, under any 
 circumstances, in the face of atrocities 
 however great, to fight. The task before 
 us is too gigantic to be handled by such 
 means. Neither can we greatly help the 
 situation by fervid campaigns for unpre- 
 69 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 paredness, urging individual nations to 
 disarm. Such negative movements for 
 disarmament are bankrupt. Their failure 
 is not due to any untruth in their main 
 contention that to be prepared for war is 
 to invite war. The old illusion that a 
 great military establishment is an insur- 
 ance against war has been finally dis- 
 sipated, let us hope, by the present cata- 
 clysm. Large armaments are a certain 
 road to war, and militarism, posing as 
 the angel of peace, is the most feckless 
 and muddle-headed sham in history. 
 
 The nations, however, even if they 
 know for certain that armaments mean 
 war, will not individually disarm. In the 
 early days of our Western frontiers men 
 carried six-shooters and were quick on 
 the trigger, not because they were bad 
 men. They were the same men they had 
 been before, unarmed and peaceable in 
 Eastern towns. But they were afraid. 
 In the wild, anarchic life of the frontier 
 there was no social order to guarantee a 
 peaceful man his life and liberty. No 
 70 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 community was organized that repre- 
 sented the force of all at the disposal of 
 all for the good of all. How useless to 
 argue with individual men in such a 
 situation, that carrying guns encouraged 
 fighting and that therefore each man 
 should throw his gun away! They may 
 not doubt the abstract proposition, but 
 they keep their guns. They are afraid. 
 Only one measure ever made them dis- 
 arm. The communal life was organized 
 and the forceful protection of life and 
 liberty was delegated to a social order 
 that policed the towns. Fear was re- 
 moved, and the arms which once seemed 
 indispensable became a needless burden, 
 an anachronism. 
 
 No other hopeful road lies open before 
 the nations. We keep armed because we 
 are afraid. Perhaps that fear is our dis- 
 grace, our moral failure to trust the spirit- 
 ual powers of friendship and good will; 
 but when we so begin to think and are 
 almost ready to repent of dreadnoughts 
 and regiments, Austria ^rikes Serbia, 
 71 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 Germany devastates Belgium, and all 
 the ancient fears come back again. There 
 is only one road out. We must have a 
 a federation of the world. No other solu- 
 tion is great enough to deal with our 
 critical need. The nations today are 
 living on the wild, anarchic frontiers of 
 history, carrying their guns in mutual 
 fear, because there is no league of nations 
 to police the w^orld. The forces of good 
 will and brotherhood that are latent in 
 mankind have no fair opportunity to do 
 their saving work. They are stifled by 
 the apparent necessity of armed distrust. 
 No urgent appeals to the nations one by 
 one to lay aside their armaments will 
 meet with favorable response. No nega- 
 tive proposal of any kind can solve the 
 problem of our divided world. The only 
 solution of international discord is inter- 
 nationalism. Wherever force is needed, 
 the force of all must be put at the disposal 
 of all for the good of all. 
 
 Does this federation of the nations seem 
 an impossible ideal .^ But already a con- 
 72 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 Crete proposition that has for its vouchers 
 the leading statesmen of the world is 
 framed and offered for our support. To 
 the principles of the ''League to Enforce 
 Peace" President Wilson has given his 
 assent; and ex-President Taft, Premier 
 Lloyd George, ex-Premier Asquith, Mr. 
 Balfour, Lord Grey, Viscount Bryce, and 
 Premier Briand have promised their sup- 
 port.^ 
 
 Such a massing of international influ- 
 ence around an endeavor after world- 
 wide cooperation for the good of mankind 
 has never been known before. No one 
 supposes that the task is a light one. Was 
 it easy even to form a federation of our 
 American states? No one supposes that 
 he can foresee the details of the plan, the 
 steps which one by one across years and 
 
 ^ Lloyd George said In a Guildhall speech: "The peace and 
 security for peace will be that the nations will band them- 
 selves together to punish the first peace breaker who comes 
 out." Said President Wilson in an address to the Senate: 
 "In every discussion of the peace that must end this war, it 
 is taken for granted that that peace must be followed by 
 some definite concert of power, which will make it virtually 
 impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm 
 us again. Every lover of mankind, every sane and thought- 
 ful man, must take that for granted." 
 
 73 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 centuries will lead to the goal. But this 
 federation of the world not only can be 
 achieved; it must be. All the forces of 
 man's economic and moral life demand 
 that it be done. Better far to live in 
 isolation, each nation behind its Chinese 
 wall, than to come out into our new world- 
 wide intimacies and then not learn the 
 secret of mankind's larger unity that alone 
 can bring peace instead of war. And to 
 this unwearying conflict against our pres- 
 ent international paganism in favor of 
 this federation of the world, the Christian 
 people supremely are challenged. 
 
 In one essential part of this campaign, 
 the innermost and preeminently essential 
 part of it, the Christian people have 
 unique responsibilities. Behind and 
 around all forms of organization which 
 our statesmen may devise for internation- 
 al cooperation, there must be developed 
 in all the people the international mind. 
 Once men of clannish tradition found it 
 hard to think in tribal terms; then men 
 of tribal mold strained their minds to 
 74 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 national dimensions; and now we with 
 our national sectarianisms find it difficult 
 to think ourselves citizens of the world. 
 No scheme of universal policy that state- 
 craft can devise will work until the people 
 are internationalists in their thoughts. 
 And Christianity is challenged by its 
 Master to give to men that horizon to 
 their loyalties, that Fatherland for their 
 sacrifice. If this seems a platitude, it is 
 one of those platitudes whose most ob- 
 vious applications have not yet been even 
 dimly seen by multitudes of Christians. 
 In 1860 a man in Maryland said, "I am 
 firstly a citizen of Hartford County; 
 secondly a citizen of Maryland; thirdly a 
 citizen of the United States." How 
 amazingly provincial such words sound a 
 generation after! One wonders if this 
 man was a member of a Christian church, 
 a believer in the Christian creed, a pray-er 
 to the Christian God. And then he sees 
 how many churchmen still are like him — 
 no disciples of Jesus in any deep, intelli- 
 gent sense. For the Christian's citizen- 
 75 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 ship must always begin at the other end 
 from Hartford County; he is firstly a 
 citizen of the Kingdom of God on earth, 
 a patriot for mankind. A Christianity 
 that is not international has never known 
 its Master. 
 
 No fine loyalties in human life, however 
 sacred and essential they may be, are 
 ever ruined, they are glorified by being 
 subjugated to a larger spiritual unity. 
 Jesus did not hurt the family when he said 
 a man should hate his father and mother, 
 his wife and children, if they stood 
 athwart the Kingdom's triumph in the 
 world; he made the family. Family life 
 in Christendom has grown beautiful just 
 because it has been subjugated to a 
 spiritual idea and made a moral, not 
 simply a natural relationship. National- 
 ism will not be hurt by being overpassed 
 in international concord and cooperation. 
 Rather, this alone can ever make national- 
 ism great, can cleanse it from its ignoble 
 strifes and mean ambitions, and can wash 
 patriotism pure from hatred and malig- 
 76 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 nity. As things stand now, patriotism is 
 half curse, half blessing. It runs to 
 chauvinism and sinister designs on other's 
 goods as readily as it does to noble sacri- 
 fice. It issues in slaughter as easily as it 
 does in service. Only one thing can save 
 nationalism from its perversions and that 
 is internationalism. Patriotism rteeds to 
 be mastered by a greater unity before it 
 ever can be really great itself. If it is to 
 mean unqualified blessing to the earth — 
 a generous rivalry in service and not a 
 malign consecration of selfishness under 
 a holy name — ^patriotism must surrender 
 its primacy to a world-wide loyalty, 
 wrought into the habitual thinking of 
 the people and expressed in agencies 
 of international cooperation and good- 
 will. 
 
 To work this inward transfiguration of 
 man's thinking, which alone can give 
 effectiveness to the outward devices of 
 our statesmen, is the task of religion. 
 Nothing but religion is adequate to the 
 task. The words of Dr. Charles E. Jeffer- 
 77 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 son ought to be nailed to the doorposts 
 of every Christian's memory: ^ 
 
 "Science cannot kill war, for science 
 has not the new heart, and whets the 
 sword to a sharper edge. Commerce can- 
 not kill war, for commerce lacks the new 
 heart, and lifts the hunger of covetous- 
 ness to a higher pitch. Progress cannot 
 kill war, for progress has no heart at all, 
 and progress in wrong directions leads us 
 into bottomless quagmires in which we 
 are swallowed up. Law cannot kill war, 
 for law is nothing but a willow withe tied 
 round the arms of humanity, and human 
 nature when aroused snaps all the withes 
 asunder and carries off the gates of Gaza. 
 Education cannot end war, and if by 
 education you mean the sharpening of the 
 intellect, the drawing out of the powers of 
 the mind, the mastering of formulas and 
 laws and dates and facts, education may 
 only fit men to become tenfold more 
 masterful in the awful art of slaughter. 
 Who will end war? The world has had 
 
 i"What the War is Teaching," pp. 198-199. 
 78 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 three historic scourges : famine, pestilence 
 and war. Each one numbers its victims 
 by the tens of miUions. Commerce killed 
 famine. By her railroads and steamships 
 she killed it. It lies like a dead snake by 
 the side of the road along which humanity 
 has marched up to the present day. 
 Science killed pestilence. The Black 
 Plague, the Bubonic Plague, Cholera, 
 Smallpox, Yellow Fever — all have re- 
 ceived their deathblow. Science did the 
 work. These foes of mankind lie bleeding 
 and half dead by the side of the road along 
 which the world presses on to a higher 
 day. Who will kill war? Not Commerce 
 and not Science, nor both of them to- 
 gether. Only Religion can kill war, for 
 religion alone creates the new heart. 
 Without religion we are without hope in 
 this world. Without God we are lost. " 
 
 79 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 VI 
 
 If religion has such a part to play in 
 the program of internationalism, we, as 
 The challenge Christians, are challenged 
 ^^ ^^^ to a searching examina- 
 
 tion of our faith and 
 works, and to a fresh devotion to our 
 cause. One of the wisest and most pic- 
 turesque explications of the present crisis 
 is attributed to Bergson, the French phi- 
 losopher. He says, in effect, that the chief 
 work of science has been to enlarge man's 
 body. Telescopes and microscopes have 
 increased the power of our eyes; tele- 
 phones have stretched our hearing to 
 some three thousand miles; telegraphs 
 have made our voices sound around the 
 earth; locomotives and steamship lines, 
 better than seven-league boots of ancient 
 fable, have multiplied the speed and pow- 
 er of our feet; and French big guns have 
 elongated the blows of our fists from two 
 feet to twenty-five miles. Man never 
 had such a body since the world began. 
 80 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 The age of the giants was nothing com- 
 pared with this. But man's soul — there 
 the failure Hes. We have not grown spir- 
 its great enough to handle our greatened 
 bodies. The splendid new powers which 
 science furnishes are still in the hands of 
 the old sins — greed, selfish ambition, 
 cruelty. The innermost necessity of man- 
 kind is a spiritual life adequate to handle 
 our new acquisitions. Some things we 
 can do without, but one thing, in this 
 war, has grown obviously indispensable. 
 We must have a new access of moral vi- 
 sion and power or we are utterly undone. 
 As a thoughtful Christian stands before 
 this challenge he must repent, for himself 
 and for the churches, the lamentable in- 
 adequacy of our organized religion to 
 meet the crucial need. Were it not for 
 such institutions as the Young Men's 
 and the Young Women's Christian Asso- 
 ciations, and the Federal Council of the 
 Churches of Christ, we should have to 
 cover our faces in confusion. This war 
 will fail of one of its most beneficent 
 81 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 results if it does not drive the sense of 
 shame into the Christian churches with 
 a poignancy that no excuses can paUiate. 
 In the presence of a gigantic task, calUng 
 for a federated Church, we stand a spHt, 
 dissevered flock of churches. In the pres- 
 ence of abysmal need, demanding a great 
 religion of comprehensive faith and de- 
 voted social spirit, we stand — how often! 
 — ^tithing "mint and anise and cummin," 
 and neglecting "the weightier matters of 
 the law." We are challenged by this war 
 to a renovation of our popular Christian- 
 ity, to a deep and unrelenting detestation 
 of the little bigotries, the needless divi- 
 sions, the petty obscurantisms that so 
 deeply curse our churches, to a new expe- 
 rience and a more intelligent expression of 
 vital fellowship with God. Unless we can 
 answer that challenge, there is small use 
 in our trying to answer any other. We 
 must have a great religion to meet a great 
 need. 
 
 The saddest aspect of Christian history 
 is the misrepresentation of Christ and the 
 82 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 spoiling of his influence, not by irreligious 
 men but by the ofl&cial exponents of reli- 
 gion. The belittling of religion by its 
 devotees is the most tragic narrative of 
 Christendom. The unhappy story began 
 with the Master's earthly ministry. As 
 he emerged among a people where the 
 minute disputes of rabbis w^ere so large 
 a part of piety, how great in contrast was 
 religion as it appeared to him! It meant 
 to him an inward fellowship with God so 
 close that to tell where he left off and God 
 began is like discerning the air's fragrance 
 from the sunlight on a radiant day. It 
 meant to him a thought of God that sent 
 him out to the help of men with a love 
 no sin could turn aside and no ingratitude 
 could quench, and with a hope that shone 
 for him on desperate days like a beacon 
 from below the line of the horizon, ad- 
 vertising from afar that the haven was at 
 hand. And after all these centuries, with 
 what an ample sweep do the truths move 
 that his religion meant to him! The 
 Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of 
 83 
 
THE CHALLENGE OP 
 
 man, the friendship of the Spirit, the 
 inexorableness of moral law, the suprem- 
 acy of the Cross, the campaign for the 
 Kingdom, the life eternal — what weight 
 and range must the words have that try 
 to tell what his faith meant to him ! 
 
 And coming so to men, with his great 
 religion, what opposition did the Master 
 meet that most perplexed and discon- 
 certed him? He faced bad men like the 
 Prodigal, but with a love and hopefulness 
 that never failed and never were dis- 
 mayed. He found selfish men, like 
 Zacchseus, but he refused to let their 
 meanness blind his eyes to their possibili- 
 ties. But another type of men he met, 
 that he could not understand and against 
 whose obdurate life his spirit spent itself 
 in vain. These were the religious men 
 who discussed whether it was the will of 
 God that men eat eggs which had been 
 laid on the Sabbath Day; and one school 
 said it was and another said it wasn't. 
 These were the religious men who by a 
 ritual word escaped their moral obliga- 
 84 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 tions to their parents or stood in the 
 temple thanking God that they had fasted 
 twice a week. Only one type of man, our 
 Master, with all the wide ranges of his 
 pity and compassion, could not under- 
 stand — the religious man who belittled 
 religion into technicalities and reduced 
 the service of the living God from ethics 
 to etiquette. How the Master's spirit 
 chafed against these! "Ye blind guides," 
 he said, and there was agony in the cry, 
 "that strain out the gnat and swallow 
 the camel!" 
 
 A thoughtful Christian cannot fail to 
 see that when our Lord comes now to us, 
 in the crisis of this terrific war, he finds 
 us too, with our petty emphasis on the 
 technicalities of sectarian religion, poorly 
 prepared to understand the spiritual 
 greatness of his message, unready to 
 interpret it to a world, whose footsteps, 
 lacking it, have manifestly taken hold on 
 ruin. Many a man among us, reared in 
 some special sect, as he now recalls the 
 preaching that he has heard remem- 
 85 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 bers how much of it concerned the minu- 
 tiae of the sect. At times he almost was 
 constrained to think that only where 
 he stood was holy ground, and he 
 alone with his few fellow-devotees elect 
 of God. So Ruskin tells us that he gave 
 up his evangelical faith because a sermon 
 that he heard at Turin was the last 
 straw: "A little squeaking idiot," Rus- 
 kin writes, "was preaching to an audience 
 of seventeen old women and three louts 
 that they were the only children of God in 
 Turin; and that all the people outside the 
 chapel and that all the people in the world 
 out of sight of Monte Viso, would be 
 damned." 
 
 But as our Christian grew he saw how 
 certainly religion was greater than his 
 sect. The very hymnals unconsciously 
 advertised the fact. For even in his little 
 church, he sang with a Methodist, "Jesus, 
 Lover of my soul," and with an Episco- 
 palian, "Rock of ages, cleft for me," 
 and with a Congregationalist, "I love 
 Thy Kingdom, Lord, " and with a Presby- 
 86 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 terian, *' Jesus and shall it ever be, a 
 mortal man ashamed of Thee, " and with a 
 Unitarian, "In the cross of Christ I 
 glory," and with a Roman Catholic, 
 "Lead, Kindly Light," and with a Bap- 
 tist, "Blest be the tie that binds our 
 hearts in Christian love." 
 
 Surely religion was greater than his 
 sect. Still when he thought of folks, not 
 Christians, who never had heard of Christ, 
 unnumbered millions far and wide around 
 the world, the majority of the children of 
 God, he grouped them under one word — 
 "heathen." Then some things that the 
 heathen did began to disturb his soft 
 complacency. He found that some hea- 
 then in India pray like this : 
 "O Lord 
 
 From the unreal lead me to the real. 
 From darkness lead me to light. 
 From death lead me to immortality." 
 
 He found that some heathen In China 
 pray like this: 
 
 ''Spirits and men rejoice together, praising 
 God the Lord. What limit, what measure 
 87 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 can there be, while we celebrate his great 
 name? Forever he setteth fast the high 
 heavens and shapeth the solid earth. His 
 government is everlasting. His poor 
 servant, I bow my head and lay it in the 
 dust bathed in his grace and glory." 
 
 If our Christian was wise, he did not 
 from this conclude that all religions are 
 equally true and good. A man may not 
 here abdicate the first work of intellect, 
 which is discrimination. Buddhism, Con- 
 fucianism, and Christianity represent 
 quite distinct philosophies of the spiritual 
 life and can no more be equally true than 
 can contrasting hypotheses in science. But 
 with the outward sweep of his horizons he 
 did begin to see how much greater a thing 
 religion is than he had used to think, how 
 deep its fountains lie in human souls, 
 how unescapable is the spirit's thirst, like 
 the homing instinct of the bird, for the 
 God from whom it comes. He did begin 
 to see that as love is in human life, so is 
 religion ; that in forms low or high all men 
 know them both; that low they curse 
 88 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 men, and high, bless them with ineffable 
 benediction. And in hours of vision when 
 he saw it so, and heard the deep in man 
 calling out for the deep in the Eternal, 
 it seemed to him that he was coming close 
 to the heart of Christ, close to the springs 
 of his exhaustless passion to reveal the 
 living God, without whom man cannot be 
 really man. 
 
 When one in such a spirit comes to the 
 religious world today to work in it and 
 through it, a jargon pitched in an alien 
 key astonishes his ears. "You cannot sit 
 at my communion table," one sect is 
 saying; "Nor you at mine," another 
 cries. "Your rituals are inexact, your 
 ordinances are incorrectly understood." 
 He sees strange sights — in 1890, 137 
 different kinds of Christians in the United 
 States, now 165. And if he listens from 
 within, what bickering over details of 
 polity, what petty pressing of legalistic 
 texts, what endless splits twixt Tweedle- 
 dee and Tweedledum — as though our 
 Lord would not once more, if he were 
 89 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 here, wither with blistering scorn such 
 rabbinical belittling of the faith! Are 
 these times that seem to call for such 
 minute finesse? As one thinks of the 
 world today, shaken in an earthquake 
 that brings clattering down about our 
 ears the dearest dreams our hearts have 
 cherished, it does seem that religion 
 should grow great to meet her crisis and 
 opportunity, and casting aside the little- 
 ness that in calmer days might find ex- 
 cuse, ought to speak great words about 
 God and the Kingdom, lest men's hearts 
 turn to water in them and their strength 
 be gone. This is the challenge of the 
 present crisis to the Christians. The 
 New Testament does not say that "Every 
 knee shall bow and every tongue confess" 
 that our church or our theology alone is 
 true. The New Testament says that 
 "Every knee shall bow and every tongue 
 confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." If 
 we were large enough so to interpret him 
 that men could see him as he is, unper- 
 verted by our littleness, they soon 
 90 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 would understand his claim to spiritual 
 mastery. ''Our Father, who art in 
 heaven, hallowed be thy name"; ''Thou 
 shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy 
 heart and with all thy soul and with all 
 thy strength and with all thy mind, and 
 thy neighbor as thyself"; "By this shall 
 all men know that ye are my disciples, 
 if ye have love one for another"; "Thy 
 Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth 
 as it is in heaven" — is there anything 
 local or provincial about words like those? 
 Are they not as broad, as deep, as high 
 as human need? And are not his disciples 
 challenged to labor unceasingly for such 
 a generous freedom of opinion on details, 
 such a dominant emphasis on the central 
 message of the Gospel, and such a fra- 
 ternal federation of the churches for 
 united work, as will make the need of the 
 world the opportunity of Christ to come 
 to his own? 
 
 The practical need of this is made vivid 
 in an unexampled way by the world's 
 disaster. The nations are forever striving 
 91 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 to avoid war when it is too late; they try 
 to dam the stream after the spring 
 freshet has begun. The only way to 
 guard against war, so far as war arises 
 from the embittered passions of the people, 
 is by constructive campaigns of good 
 will, launched long before the first rum- 
 bling of a coming conflict. What now is 
 our surest reliance in America against any 
 unresolvable misunderstanding with 
 Chma? It lies m the $50,000,000 which 
 out of sheer good will our government 
 returned to China when the Boxer in- 
 demnity was paid. Hundreds of Chinese 
 students supported by the interest of 
 that fund are studying in America now, 
 and in every intelligent Chinese mind 
 there is a settled predisposition to trust 
 America. 
 
 We have just adopted a gigantic budget 
 of $7,000,000,000 for the purposes of war. 
 How magnificent — and how pathetic! 
 Consider what a very little of that prodi- 
 gious sum would do if, instead of being 
 voted after war begins, it were appropri- 
 92 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 ated before war was thought of for such 
 international service as the Boxer Indem- 
 nity Fund is furnishing. Utopian? On 
 the contrary the most sane and eco- 
 nomical statesmanship ! To spend billions 
 for the means of slaughter when millions 
 previously expended in good will for serv- 
 ice would often make the means of 
 slaughter needless, is folly so supreme as 
 almost to justify the saying that soldiers 
 often fight, not for their country but for 
 some blockhead of a diplomat^ The cost 
 of that folly we loyally will pay, and our 
 children after us will be paying it for 
 generations; but, as Christians, we may 
 not be silent about the folly itself nor 
 cease our unwearying antagonism to it. 
 So few times in history has any nation 
 done what America did for China, and so 
 overwhelming is the response to such 
 simple friendliness that the nations can- 
 not permanently be blind to the good 
 sense, as well as the ethical nobility, of 
 such a course. The extreme pacifists 
 insist that there is no situation which 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 kindness cannot handle. They are wrong 
 if they mean that kindness can begin at 
 any time, appealing to the Prussians, 
 for example, after the assault on Belgium 
 has been started. But they are right if 
 they mean that kindness begun soon 
 enough and practiced long enough in the 
 end will prove omnipotent. We yet shall 
 learn that the best armament of any 
 people is the friendship of the world, won 
 by constructive good will. 
 
 The application of this truth to the 
 churches' missionary program is manifest. 
 The cause of missions has too often been 
 presented in its significance for individuals 
 alone; it has been pictured only as the 
 snatching of souls one by one from ruin. 
 But this crisis in the world's life challenges 
 us to balance our view of missions with a 
 more social concept of their meaning. 
 The missionary enterprise is the Christian 
 campaign for international good will. We 
 must see that it is so and must handle it 
 as though it were so. What the nations, 
 through their governments, will slowly 
 94 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 learn to do, loath to leave old precedents, 
 bound by the sectarian narrowness of 
 national loyalties, Christians must do 
 now, and do with a lavish generosity that 
 they have not practiced hitherto. 
 
 We are told that some day we shall 
 have war with Mexico. How much our 
 own fault it will be if such a lamentable 
 conflict comes ! What Mexico needs is an 
 invasion of school teachers and social 
 workers and Christian preachers, who 
 have caught the idea of missions in their 
 international relationships; and if such 
 an invasion is not forthcoming, a military 
 invasion may indeed be necessary. One 
 suspects in many a case like this that we 
 have our choice. We are continually re- 
 minded of clashing interests that some 
 day will embroil us with Japan. Even the 
 present war could hardly be a more 
 grievous catastrophe than that. And 
 short of some league of nations which 
 may offer means of mediation and settle- 
 ment not today existent the surest hope 
 of avoiding conflict, of forestalling war by 
 95 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 friendship, is an energetic campaign of 
 good will now. If the Christians of 
 America do not want war with Japan, 
 they need not have it. Japan is not mad 
 enough to want war with America. Only 
 we must begin now, under the leadership 
 of Christian missionaries and statesmen 
 like Dr. John R. Mott and Dr. Sidney 
 Gulick, a determined movement within 
 our country against our needlessly insult- 
 ing legislation, when Orientals are con- 
 cerned, and we must organize such ex- 
 pressions of good will through our mis- 
 sionary agencies that, if possible, we may 
 create a predisposition in the Japanese 
 people to believe the best of us and not 
 the worst. The missionary enterprise at 
 its very heart is the impulse to share our 
 finest, and if the finest in America and the 
 finest in Japan were thoroughly known to 
 each other, the chances of collision would 
 be minimized to vanishing. Such a min- 
 istry of mutual interpretation and recon- 
 ciliation is committed to the churches. 
 The present war is an appalling commen- 
 96 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 tary upon our failure to fulfil or even to 
 acknowledge our obligations. We have 
 seen our duty in too little terms; we have 
 but dimly understood what the Master 
 wanted of us. We are challenged to 
 understand it now; the call is written in 
 lines of fire on the map of the world; and 
 we shall be renegade, indeed, if we do not 
 now accept before it is too late the oppor- 
 tunity for international service which this 
 war reveals. 
 
 Such is the challenge of the present 
 crisis. We have talked of it as though its 
 appeal were directed to the nations and 
 the churches. But we shall not deal fairly 
 with the world's appalling need if we fail 
 as individuals to hear the call it sounds 
 for each of us. A writer in the Atlantic, 
 to whom Good Friday, 1917, with its 
 sacred memories and its imminent en- 
 trance of America into the war, came 
 with overwhelming solemnity, has issued 
 a call that no one can honorably deny: 
 *'The greatness of the whole nation is so 
 inextricably bound up with its individuals 
 
THE CHALLENGE OF 
 
 that I beg again each one of you now to 
 say to himself or herself, *This means me. 
 It means me and my life, my best self, my 
 highest ideals, if the magnificent oppor- 
 tunities of the times are to be realized.'" 
 There may have been other days when 
 selfishness could find excuse in the smooth 
 ease of the nation's prosperity, but the 
 last shred of such excuse has been torn 
 now from every selfish undedicated life. 
 An American visitor at the French front 
 was allowed a three hours' conference 
 with Marshal Joffre. He has said, in the 
 writer's presence, that the most im- 
 pressive incident of the conversation 
 came when the Marshal drew from an 
 inner pocket a well-worn letter, written 
 by a French mother to her son in Canada, 
 and, with unsteady voice, read this: 
 
 "My dear boy: 
 
 "You will be grieved to learn that your 
 two brothers have been killed. Their 
 country needed them and they gave 
 everything they had to save her. Your 
 country needs you, and while I am not 
 98/ 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS 
 
 going to suggest that you return to fight 
 for France, if you do not return at once, 
 never come." 
 
 Multitudes are living in that spirit today. 
 He must have a callous soul who can 
 pass through times like these and not 
 hear a voice, whose call a man must an- 
 swer, or else lose his soul. Your country 
 needs you. The Kingdom of God on 
 earth needs you. The Cause of Christ 
 is hard bestead and righteousness is hav- 
 ing a heavy battle in the earth — they 
 need you. 
 
JUL -1 13^ 
 
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