The War and its Issues John Oman President White Library Cornell University _ Cornell University Ubrary D 524.054 1916 War and its issues : 3 1924 027 858 467 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027858467 THE WAR AND ITS ISSUES CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS C. F. CLAY, Manager ILonBon: FETTER LANE, E.C. EBmilurai) : loo PRINCES STREET i^tta ffiotft; G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS JSomSsH, Calcutta anU itlaStaa: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. Toronto; J. M. DENT AND SONS, Ltd. Sroftgo: THE MARUZKN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA AH rights reserved THE WAR AND ITS ISSUES AN ATTEMPT AT A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT by JOHN OMAN, M.A. Author of f^ishn and Authority, The Problem of Faith and Freedom, The Church and the Di'vine Order, etc. Cambridge : at the University Press 1916 First Edition 1 915 Second Edition 1916 N PREFACE WHILE the original germ of tkis paper was a speech at Queens' College, it grew to its present form and dimensions purely through the impulse to think out my own relations to the present crisis. Though work done in that way, without thought of a public, is apt to be heedless of the possibilities of misunderstanding, the result is now published, partly in the hope that in the present great perplexity even its imperfect guidance may help to a better solution, and partly from a sense that, if what one hears in the ear in the closet demands moral co-operation, it should be preached on the house-top. J. o. Westminster College, Cambridge. March 1915. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION THIS small book has on the whole been treated with a kindness, which, the less it can be ascribed to its merit, the more it affords assurance that many find themselves in agreement with its general purpose. Two criticisms it has, however, met from persons not otherwise unsympathetic. The first questions the view that commercialism is a previous issue to war, and inclines to think that the abolition of war may successfully be made a direct and immediate aim, not confused with any other problem. To what I have already said I have nothing to add by way of argument. The question can only be determined by our whole outlook upon life and our whole impression of how the forces of history work together. But, if I have nothing to add, our experiences of the past few months would seem to have added a great deal. Our victory over the love of Hfe has been wholly amazing. Life seems to have been easy to offer for love of country and for what seems the righteous cause. Yet, alongside of that dedication of life has gone, untransformed, the old commercialism, exploiting the occasion to PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION vii make money, eloquent on strikes and wages, and silent on their origin in undue private profit. Directly, that may seem no support of my position, but, if every right judgment of events rests on an understanding of human nature, it does seem to show that a selfish rivalry in gain is a more radical form of conflict than any rivalry in arms. The other criticism is directed against the view that the claim of the state to the service of its subjects rests on its own service to the moral in- dividual. So far as I know, this has remained mere criticism, without any attempt to present positively the other view. Apparently it springs from the general impression that a theory which subjects the state to the individual cannot produce in practice the same self-sacrifice of the individual, in a struggle for political existence, as the theory which subjects the individual to the state. The state is somehow felt as a kind of bigger personaHty, which ought to impose its authority on us directly by its very mass. On this question, it may well be that I have not made clear, as I ought, the foundation of my thinking. When one builds long on one's principles, it is easy to forget that they may be covered out of sight by the building. In this case, the funda- mental conviction is that man belongs as certainly to the family of God, by his spirit, as he belongs to a universe, by his body. He is not a unit, living in chaos, but a member of God's family, living in an ordered world. Out of that position all his viii PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION obligations rise ; and as he understands and accepts them, he attains his true freedom. Especially, as we each of us determine that true kinship of our spirits, shall we determine our whole conception of society and of all its institutions, be it family or church or state. This kinship has two distinct aspects. They are clearest in their application to the family — the type and, possibly, the root of the other social organisations. The family has an instinctive origin and a moral goal. Both are necessary, but both are not regulative of our ideal. Progress in family life consists in turning a blind instinct of grouping by kinship into a moral fellowship based on respect for its humblest member. In a society where that is possible, the family, as a mere natural tie, may be an evil, not a good. As a sort of vague group feeling, it may be set up as a fetich to which the just claims of individual action and affection and the public claims of truth and righteousness are alike sacrificed. Not till the family passes beyond the mere sense of blood relationship, with its tendency to make affection a stagnant pond with no outlet, and becomes a fellowship of service to mankind, in which each member has his true place, by having his own task, has it attained its true ideal. In the same way with the state, if we start with the instinctive bond, we have a half material, half mystical entity, ruling by a mass feeling of the herd. As these instinctive bonds are the earlier. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION ix they may, for immediate purposes, be the stronger. The rear is always larger than the van and to hark back easier than to strain forward: and the state as a mixture of a super-personality and a diffused force, before which we bow and to which, without question asked, we pass our children through the fire, is undoubtedly a mighty power in battle. A state, on the other hand, which is a larger family, a fellowship of moral persons based on respect for the humblest subject, offering itself as a sphere for serving the highest good of mankind, and corrupted when it is a mere alliance of profit and prejudice, can only demand service, because it also is a servant. That appeal may be deeper, but we must also admit it to be more restricted. A free man, nevertheless, is precisely one to whom that appeal is absolute and who admits into his life no other imperative. Progress in that kind of freedom must in the end be the measure of all real progress ; and if progress is not artificial, but an approach towards reality, the ultimate security of a state must be the measure in which it advances towards that moral goal. Even at our stage of progress, blind, instinctive patriotism is more of a danger than a safeguard, and, as the world becomes closer knit together, that balance on the wrong side wiU steadily increase. In any case, to be the servant of the servants of humanity is the high imperative of freedom, and points the way to a higher interest even than the nation. The test of X PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION nations, as of men, is the faith which will not sacrifice the eternal securities to the necessities of the moment, nor doubt that the higher appeal is, in the end, the stronger. Nations mostly fall, as for example, the Roman Empire fell, by sacrificing the safeguards of freedom to the fears of the moment. The sight of free men, serving, with all they have, free institutions, in order that, in the ages to come, states may better learn to serve the humblest, and free men find it easier to live, remains, amid the ruin, both a glory and a portent. And if we are ever able, without sacrificing more than we gain, to resort, under stress of circumstances, to other compulsions than that which they have obeyed, it will be because the significance of that devotion will not be altered, or its guarantee for our future freedom thereby destroyed. As I was finishing the above, a long criticism by Mr J. M. Robertson came into my hands-^. He treats me with a forbearance which, I may venture to think, shows that he feels we are more in agree- ment than his use of me, as a stalking horse for a diatribe against Christianity, allows him to admit. For myself, I feel that our general outlook, not only on the war, but on the whole hope of society, is so much in accord, and that he is so much better a Christian than he knows, that I would fain have him understand me better. In the first place, it never entered into my head R. P A. Annual, 1916. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xi that a person, with views even remotely resembling my own, could take part in aggression. The only question was whether there could be any occasion when one, who believes that the service of love is a stronger power than force to overcome evil, and who, for his own ends, would not resist, force by force, might, in defence of human rights, feel himself involved in the task of resisting a public oppressor. Second, I think I guarded myself pretty carefully against the view that war was justifiable as a purifying influence. Because calamity may work some good is no reason for bringing on calamity. A fire in your chimney will probably clean it, but it is better to call in the sweep. Thirdly, if hybris, insolent pride, is the sole cause of aggressive wars, it certainly seems more incon- sistent with my principles than with Mr Robertson's. Moreover, is not that exactly the quality which makes men seek gain without service and mainly by dexterity ? That is what I mean by commercial- ism, the spirit to which profit and hybris over the less fortunate or more scrupulous is a sufficient justification for all its labours. With regard to my prophecy about the time when we shall be on better terms with the Germans, I admit that their method of warfare has, since then, quite naturally stirred up a new bitterness which has put oflE the day of its fulfilment. But forgiveness must always be possible to the penitent j xii PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION and, if the Germans have inflicted evil, no small part of it has returned upon their own heads. Whatever may be hoped from their rulers, I have not yet lost faith in the soundness of the heart of the great German people, nor ceased to hope that it will be open to the bitter teaching of experience, and some day cast out that military hybris which is costing them so dear. Mr Robertson's doctrine of perpetual hatred is so unlike himself, that I trust to live to see the day when he will be in the fore- front of an attempt to replace it by a better under- standing. When, after the war, he says to his great God, Reason, "Save the people," he will not exclude the Germans, even if he add, "Not kings, nor thrones, but men." J. o. December 1915. CONTENTS PART I A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT CHAP. PAGE I. Three judgments of war . 3 II. Matters for consideration . 11 III. Irreconcilable perplexities . 17 IV. A practical solution . . 22 V. The natural and the spiritual . 27 VI. Individual duty , . . 33 VII. The judgment of the churches 48 PART II THE MORAL ISSUES I. Social . ... 67 II. Military ..... 76 III. Political . ... 86 IV. International 95 V. Ecclesiastical . no VI. Religious , 126 PART I A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT o. CHAPTER I THREE JUDGMENTS OF WAR If, during a great war, to carry on our common business as usual manifests an indomitable spirit in the nation, much more should diligence in the business of thinking. A nation which distress and conflict only summon to deeper earnestness and reality in its judgments, and to a more sincere and strenuous purpose to be rid of self-deception, must, in all that concerns its deepest Hfe, be unconquer- able. This tribulation, like all others, can only be of profit to them that are exercised thereby, and that must mean to them who are stimulated to deeper reflection and higher resolve, and who will on no account postpone the task of considering the issues till quieter times. Only because times of pro- sperity, when routine seems adequate to the whole conduct of Kfe, are not propitious for reflection are these great calamities permitted. Deliverance from conventionality and unreality are far greater needs for our thinking than outward calm, and any great upheaval which shakes men's trust in material well- being and forces them to ask what remains when I — z 4 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. earthly succour fails, may do more to make clear the true spiritual issues of life than ages of medita- tion in ease and quiet. The great ages of spiritual insight have usually been ages of political unrest, often of national calamity, days when life was cheap and the treasures of civilisation were going up like smoke. And the reason is not hard to find, for no one quite satisfied with the world ever can discover the true purpose even of this world. All the most penetrating religious judgment has been what is usually called apocalyptic, judgment in which time has faded from view and men are enabled to see the eternal issues of life as they might on their death-beds. Thus it was with the prophets, and thus also with the Early Christians, and thus also with all the deepest religious souls. And war is ever a kind of apocalyptic with its carelessness of our civilisation and all its belongings and its reckless disregard of hfe and all its securities. Ancient judgments vanish Kke ancient treasures, and ideas men had thought eternal are discovered to be only the fashion of a departing time. And when this war is over a new age will be upon us also, a better or a worse according as we bear our- selves in the material and the spiritual conflict, but certainly another age, and those of us who are not prepared to reconsider all our judgments and help to build a new heaven and a new earth will not be able to retain the old, but will only wander in i] THREE JUDGMENTS OF WAR 5 the new time as shadowy ghosts of a vanished past. Nothing less may finally suffice than a revision of all our judgments of life and duty, and in seeking a right judgment of the war and of the calls which rise out of it we ought to realise that it is in- separable from that larger task, for we are face to face not merely with a new event but with a new age. Three judgments of war are possible and neces- sary — a political, a historical, and a rehgious. The first, if the output of literature is evidence, is thought most necessary and practicable. The immediate policies of cabinets and their diplomacies have been discussed on every side, and unceasing efforts have been made to appraise the blame for bringing such a curse upon humanity. By this labour we would no doubt willingly justify ourselves in the eyes of our neighbours, but the extent to which a justification of our cause before the common human conscience has become a necessity for ourselves is the fact of significance. How should we be weakened if we lost the sense that, if judged not perhaps on absolute perfection in our motives or absolute faultlessness in our actions, but at least as men are in the world, we could not justify our hostilities! Patriotism by itself is no longer sufficient, unless it be the patriot- ism which would have its country just even more than powerful. Such patriotism, we feel, can have 6 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. patience and endure in a way impossible for mere flag-waving. That result must be even more significant for the future than the present, for if statesmen once learn that a war which cannot be justified before humanity cannot be carried on successfully, a new guarantee of peace will have been found. Wherefore, this political judgment of the war must go on in the midst of the conflict both for the sake of our present success and our future security. The second, the historical, is less in evidence. When passions are inflamed and only one side can be heard, both the temper and the knowledge seem wanting for a verdict on the movements of panic, the national jealousy, the sense of thwarted ambition and injured honour which made the fuel to be kindled by the doings of statesmen. Yet a mere political judgment is a superficial way of treating even politics. A statesman, absorbed only in the doings of cabinets and without imagination and insight to understand the effect upon the minds of whole peoples, would be merely a politician. His work must stand in the end in the whole light of history in relation to all its principles and aU its results, and the prime question wiU be, how far he had a prophetic mind to forecast the true issues of his time and forestall the verdict of history. More- over, if we are to see what we are reaUy contending for and what obstacles have to be overcome in i] THREE JUDGMENTS OF WAR 7 seeking a stable peace, we must all do our best to pass such a judgment, seeking to understand our enemies and to judge them as we would ourselves be judged. Even for success that temper is important, for it is a psychological blunder, which his experience at school ought to have knocked out of anyone capable of learning anything, that blind passion is an asset in fighting. In that court of history we may not be able to justify all our doings, but, if we are sincere in our good-will and are prepared to learn our defects in consideration and to amend our ways, we are bound to see better the victory we need and to secure its fruits by stronger means than force. Our hope is that the peoples themselves will take their whole destiny at home and abroad into their own hands, and that, by reason of good-will and mutual understanding, their judgments of themselves and others will become less and less political and more and more historical. The result could not fail to be a franker policy, a policy hating subterfuges, and, in consequence, some better sub- jection of our international relations to right reason and some less scope for unreason and the promptings of individual ambition. The third, the religious judgment, is even less in request, especially among some religious people who might have been most expected to seek it. 8 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. A few professors of various subjects have been led to express themselves with less passion if not more impartiality, and a few of the younger and less ecclesiastically minded laymen and of the more heterodox and unsubmissive kind of cleric are deeply exercised in mind; but if one were to judge by such outward manifestations as the tone of the religious press, resolutions at ecclesiastical gatherings, sermons on the war, occasional dehver- ances of persons prominent in the religious world and by the frequency with which in private gatherings the religious official is the most belli- gerent person present, no kind of problem exists for the religious mind to solve. To defend the political justice of our cause, not without satisfaction that a good thousand years of Christianity have passed over our enemies in vain, would appear to be the sole religious task. And the sounder the ortho- doxy the less the sense of any possibility of conflict between war and Christianity or any sense that the causes of the war may be deeper than politics and be in the idolatry of riches and pleasure, and private disregard to obligations, and blindness to the claims of poverty and need. That our whole conventional Christianity may be going up in flames with other results of man's labour is so little feared, that part of this warlike zeal is derived from the hope that, among other results, we are to build again Zion after the old external, traditional, outwardly visible and prosperous institutional form, i] THREE JUDGMENTS OF WAR 9 and the liveliest hope of all is to see German theology perish in the flames with German Imperialism. Any further religious judgment we seem to be expected to postpone to the time when we shall again have "calm of mind, all passion spent." But is religion a mere device for calm weather, and is the church to carry on her business only when the state affords her leisure? On the con- trary, what judgment on any event is worth any- thing which is not in some sense religious ? Surely a historical judgment is less concerned with material gains than with spiritual victories. Courage, sin- cerity, love of freedom remain abiding possessions for mankind long after the material victories have crumbled into dust. History has been called revelation, and what other account of it is adequate, for is it not a record of human labour in setting up ever more perfect standards of truth and beauty and goodness? Even a political judgment must in the end be religious. A statesman who labours for his nation as if it could live by bread alone and as if national honour always wrought back to questions of territory and markets, a statesman not guided by the conviction that righteousness alone estabhshes a nation, is a mere blind leader of the blind, and the best forces are not at his com- mand, for he neither knows where to seek them nor how to use them. But the need for a religious judgment first concerns the church, and the first duty is to judge 10 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. i herself if she would judge anything else aright. First of all she must consider what reality is in her faith and sincerity in her practice, for a religious judgment of war must concern itself with nothing less than the final, the eternal order of love, the Kingdom of God which is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost for which the church stands. The task of seeking that kingdom she may neither suspend nor compromise. War must never be more to her than as surgery to health, and that means she must never cease to judge it in relation to health, and labour for the health which will no more need surgery, remembering that surgery can only destroy an obstacle and that health itself must work the cure. At present the church as a whole is too much like a social reformer who, having seen the police called in, suspends indefinitely his purpose of establishing social order upon social regeneration, instead of being stirred to lament his failure and renew his efforts. CHAPTER II MATTERS FOR CONSIDERATION Contrary to what might have been expected, perplexities upon the whole relation of war to Christianity seem most to beset the naturally pugnacious. The naturally mild, with strange frequency, eloquently and uncompromisingly treat question as heresy. That may be somewhat explained by what Mr Bertrand Russell calls "the verbal blood-thirstiness of many quiet literary men," which springs from the attraction for the imagina- tion of situations in vivid contrast to their own practical attitude towards life. The protection afforded by accepted views on theology against all question indicates that something is also to be ascribed to responsiveness to suggestion. A high degree of responsiveness to social impression, a capacity for appropriating the better elements of the consciousness of the crowd around, is a mark of the religious mind. In creative religious minds that is balanced by a unique power of spiritual isolation which enables them both to understand and to judge; but such minds are few and those which are less religious forces than religious media are 12 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. many. When this impressibility finds its sphere in popular preaching, which is "a giving back in flood what has been received from the audience in vapour," receptiveness for impression naturally prevails still more, until the power of resisting a widespread and intense wave of emotion long enough to reflect on it becomes impossible. Even those causes should not be too hastily regarded as unworthy. It would be a sorry business if the heroism of our souls could never travel except on the leaden feet of our practical effectiveness; and it would be far indeed from praise to say that we maintained our independence of mind by closing it to this great and deep corporate emotion. Nor are there wanting still more sacred springs of feeling from which this unquestioning zeal is fed, of which two specially deserve mention, springs which well up strong not only in the best but in the most independent and courageous. First, if anyone who has laboured for years to call men to service and sacrifice and only found increasing love of pleasure in the young turn to increasing love of money with ripening years, till man's soul seemed dying under the gilded enervating cloud of prosperity, suddenly sees this cloud rise and reveal spiritual visions of courage and devotion and endurance of hardships and sheer manhood and defiance of death — all the forces which redeem the soul and renovate the world — ^how can he be coldly critical of the cause f ii] MATTERS FOR CONSIDERATION 13 Second, if a man has faithfully gone out and in among his people as their minister or cherished close relations with men as their fellow Christian, and knows what hearts are feehng in this crisis of our national affairs and what sorrows have fallen upon the households of his friends, how can he question the righteousness of our cause? Can he, with the vision before his eyes of manly faces known to him from boyhood, now lost for ever to mortal sight, and with their mothers' sobs in his ears and the hot dty faces of their widows haunting his sleep, reason over their nameless graves ? With one's feet on such sacred ground, is it not sacrilege even to question that so high a sacrifice could only be for the holiest cause? These are good reasons, and if we have lived apart from them and never been stirred by the amazing simplifying of human Hfe back to sheer loyalty and personal affection, with all it has meant of reality and sincerity, we are in no position to weigh any question regarding either war or peace. Are we not right to think that we are witnessing one of the great struggles for a freer and a juster world, one of those wars for which religion has often been invoked and of which religion has been the spring and stay, one in which it might well seem that the sole duty is to come to the help of the Lord against the mighty ? How often has religion, and not least the Christian religion, been invoked in such issues! 14 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. Would the preparation for Christianity have been as favourable had the Greeks been defeated at Marathon ? Would Christianity have developed as effectively had Charles Martel failed at Tours? Would the religious history of Scotland and Holland have been the same with smaller sacrifices for national independence ? And there is a still broader fact. A famous Belgian has said that aU countries, even nominally Christian, are free, with the possible exception of Russia, while no country not Christian can compare even in freedom with Russia, and that that heritage has not been won or even maintained by parliaments, but, in the last resort, by the Christian demand, "Let a man deny himself." Ultimately it rests on those who prefer liberty to life, and that price a religious estimate of the human soul, in some form, alone can enable us to pay. All progress has blood upon its garment, and where that sacrifice has been offered the high beKef of spirit above body, of the eternal above the temporal, of faith above sight, has been working. In spite, therefore, of all misuse of the name of God by Arndt's countrymen, may we not sing as he did : The God who let the iron grow, 'Tis clear no serf he wanted, if we are quite sure that this is a war of freedom, and if we wish to oppress none but would have aU as free as ourselves? Yet the perplexity still remains that violence is not the means whereby Christianity expects to II] MATTERS FOR CONSIDERATION 15 attain true freedom or any abiding spiritual posses- sion. The sceptre of Christ's kingdom is the cross of obedience and service, the giving of the life, and not the defending of our own or the taking of another's. In that case no Christian can accept the method of war as justifiable in itself or its victories as by themselves of decisive value, or even admit in war more than a stern negative necessity which only a better victory won by a better method could redeem from evil and turn to good. No situation, therefore, ever could arise in which the practical tasks of conflict should suppress and not evoke thought, and in which anyone, speaking in the name of Christ, would have no higher, no prior concern than victory in arms and no task except to stand on the heights like Moses with uplifted hands and bless the people who fight in the vaUey. The task of the church and, therefore, of all particular churches must rather be to contend for such a victory of the spirit as would make us triumph if necessary in defeat as Israel and Greece have done before us. And how is that to be, if not by an earnest reUgious judgment of our whole state in its bearing upon the causes of conflict, and of the whole order of holiness and love in its bearing upon our conduct and aims while war is being waged, and upon the true conditions of a stable peace which we hope to establish after it and which we cannot accomplish merely by means of it? i6 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. ii The spirit which resents this task as an irrele- vance and an unpatriotic hindrance is merely impatient, and mainly because it confuses the spiritual glosses of sentiment with the austere sincerity of love. The unreality which has entered religion through that confusion, has made it almost a habit in the churches to employ all present distress to suppress criticism and reflection as enemies of practical success. Instead of being roused by great issues to new zeal for reality, they cherish any kind of convention as a holy thing which for a day longer will keep out the weather. But our first task is to rid our souls of that calami- tous delusion. CHAPTER III IRRECONCILABLE PERPLEXITIES But, how shall we reflect, if, the moment we face the problem, we are met by a conflict of loyalties which neither reason, nor conscience, nor spiritual insight can hope to harmonise? On the one hand, can we realise at all what war means and what Christ stood for without having the whole question settled for us of the impossibility of concord between Christ and BeUal? How can we speak of the Father who numbers our hairs and makes all things to work for our good, without whom not even a sparrow falls, if we compromise at all with a system for which human beings are mere masses to be hurled at each other's throats, and which devises ingenious machinery and pours out endless treasure for their destruction? And how can an order based upon respect for individual rights and mutual service and common good-will, an order of love based upon respect for the worth of the humblest moral personality, be promoted by the race hatreds and murderous passion bred by war ? Is it not better to tolerate any wrong than wrong our own consciences by implicating ourselves O. 2 18 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. in such brutal and insensate slaughter ? What can murder by machinery have to do with the religion of One who taught us not to resist evil, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies, to esteem it our chief perfection to be like our Father in Heaven who sends His rain upon the evil and the good aHke ? Nor does the matter end with precepts, which might have their justification in the occasion, so that, while they might be absolute as against personal rancour, they might not be absolute as against moral indignation ; or, while they might be absolute against personal injury, they might not apply to the oppression of others or to public resistance to an act which wrongs humanity. A more general and a more impressive consideration springs from the nature of the kingdom of God as righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. Such a combination of righteousness and peace and joy in spiritual blessings is presented as possible precisely because their security is not by might nor by power but by God's Spirit, because the strong thing in the world in the end is not violence but the sacrifice and service of love. If, then, in spite of all that appears to the contrary, the meek shall inherit the earth, because they alone find the true uses even of this present life, what part can we have on any ground even of righteousness with this wholesale slaughter? What does war see but crowds, or value but mass victories ? Especially what do we think of the persons over whom we Ill] IRRECONCILABLE PERPLEXITIES 19 would pass to triumph ? How is our kindly nature changed ! Those of us at least who have known the Germans as generous and warm-hearted friends, and have learned much that deserves our best gratitude from their labours, ought to be able to realise that every death among them, as among ourselves, leaves a blank in some family circle which for some heart wiU never be fiUed again while Hfe shall last. Yet in these days we hear with ever diminishing pain that two thousand of them have gone to the bottom or that their casualties are to be numbered in millions. Can a strife which breeds in us such a temper be rightly regarded with anything except detestation and horror ? The soldier never employs any description of it except heU, and one begins not only to accept the figurative expression but to wonder whether, if anyone has deliberately brought such a plague upon humanity, the universe can do without the reality as easily as we have supposed. But, on the other hand, can anyone so dissociate himself from the struggle of his people in so generous a conflict for human freedom ? The position is put vehemently but clearly and unmistakably by one of our few distinguished theologians. " If a Chris- tian cannot side in it and strike with every atom of his energy, then a Christian is a being who, so far as this world is concerned — and this is the world in which we have to do right or wrong — has committed moral suicide, and I have no interest in him. The war presents to every creature whose country is 2 — 2 20 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. involved in it the one great moral issue of our time : and for a man to say he can do nothing in it is to vote himself out of the moral world. ... I cannot understand and I don't want to understand one who thinks we should just sit still and let the Germans repeat in Kent or the Lothians what they have done in Belgium." As he took the liberty of disagreeing very positively and emphatically with his country on the Boer war, the writer manifestly means ^^ justly involved." But, if justly, what then ? Opposition to one's country in an unjust war has at least more force, if not more right, when it involves the duty of supporting it in a just one. And war is not all movements of masses. As God sees, it is also individual loyalty and self- sacrifice and victory over them who can only kill the body and after that have no more they can do — ^not even destroy a righteous cause. Perhaps only this habit of judging in masses makes the material brutality bulk so large and the spiritual sacrifice seem so small. Moreover, if the sin of murder be hatred, the soldier is the least guilty person among us and the rough language of the trenches is a more Christian utterance than the polite and pious utterances of the editorial sanctum. Finally, the most ardent pacifists have not denied that the nation, being what it is and having always been prepared to defend its own rights by force, would have been in a worse moral plight, if, after using various poHtical combinations to safe- Ill] IRRECONCILABLE PERPLEXITIES 21 guard its own interests, it had stood out and grown rich over the miseries of others, than it is now, defending the weak, and resisting the forces of an overbearing militarism. In that case, it seems a poor resort to say : This is right on your lower moral platform, but I can have no part or lot in it on mine. A higher moral platform involves only a more vicarious relation to our brothers' imperfect state. The war is either right or wrong and, if any duty is to be done, even though it rise out of the imperfect state of the world around us, the religious man is precisely the person who must acknowledge no consideration save duty. A higher moral plat- form is not a position from which we see ourselves isolated from the sin of the world. Rather it proves itself higher mainly by affording us a wider view of our concern with its evil even as with its good. Perhaps the basis of feeling upon which we act in this matter is even broader stiU and is simply that where loyalty and faith and sacrifice and victory over the fear of death are found, religion cannot be out of place. CHAPTER IV A PRACTICAL SOLUTION As a nation we have always loved such a com- promise between our principles as makes a pleasant family party of our loyalties. If that meant not being religious overmuch, we were the more satisfied ; and in ordinary times the method works with a smoothness highly agreeable. But days come when religion is not worth anything unless it is worth everything, days when only the things which cannot be shaken remain. Then the mixture of two unreconciled principles proves a mere separ- able compound without natural affinity or chemical combination: and the failure is as great in practice as in theory. We can harmonise any views by softening their contrasts and not being very ardent about either, but, in the day of decision, no one does any good for either cause who belongs to both because he has zeal for neither. Thus to strike in war and not strike with all our might is to prolong the agony and run the risk of turning an acute attack, which may only re-establish health, into a lingering chronic disease; while if CH. IV] A PRACTICAL SOLUTION 23 the whole of the Sermon on the Mount may be practical politics, half of it certainly won't be, and a half and half application of it still less. For both, if we are to accomplish any victory, we must strike with all our might. If no other way can be found, it would be better to believe that, from the confusion of good and evil in which we are so deeply involved, clear-cut issues are not open to us, and admit that any vehement inconsistency is truer to the whole of reaKty than an abstracted balance of opinion or a reasoned generality about duty. For that solution some justification might even be derived from Christ's example, for when did He ever concern Himself about logical consistency and when was He ever afraid to push home the immediate issue from fear that a proper balance of opinions might not be preserved? He proclaimed Himself meek and lowly and the refuge of the meek and lowly, and He denounced the hypocrites who devoured widows' houses and made long prayers, without even at- tempting to harmonise sayings so opposite in tone and substance. Perhaps it may be impossible to imagine Him engaged in war, but is it not equally impossible to imagine Him meeting the call and the suflFering of our time merely with a negation about non-resistance or a general proposition about pacifism ? But while Christ's moral consistency may not be reducible to logical propositions, it is so eflEectively 24 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. attained through a clear, penetrating and complete moral relation to life that we feel sure of finding in it the power ultimately to harmonise all our conflicting moral ideas and duties. And it is just such a living, practical, working solution, a solution not of reasoning, but of sympathy and insight, that every individual should seek and which he should never be content to lack. If there is inconsistency in our whole moral relation to life, it must be such inconsistency as we have in worship and recreation or in youth and manhood or, what is perhaps more appropriate to the situation, in health and sickness, in which our eye can still be single, and not some way of viewing Hfe with such moral spectacles as have a Hne across the middle under which we see only individuals and over which we see only the movements of masses. The solution offered by J. B. Mozley in his famous sermon on war seems to depend on just such a combination of a mass and an individual judgment. Christianity, he maintains, in accepting the state, accepts war, even between Christian nations. Nor does "accept " mean mere toleration. Rather it might seem that war is the permanent basis of the state, a blessing to be for ever cherished. The discussion leaves the impression of Christianity as a state institution handling men in masses, entirely unrelated to Christianity as a kingdom of righteousness, peace and brotherly love, a kingdom iv] A PRACTICAL SOLUTION 25 the sceptre of which is the cross of forgiveness and personal surrender. But Christianity accepts neither the state, nor the family, nor anything in nature or society in that absolute fashion. If Christianity could be said to accept any natural bond, it would be the family. Christ shows the Father, sends His Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba, Father, unites us as brethren and teaches that every family in heaven and earth is named from God. Yet the family, though thus glorified, is entirely subjected to His Kingdom, so that a man may have to rend all family ties for His sake and the gospel's. Moreover, by that very subordination the family has found its true basis. By losing its merely natural Hfe it has found its true ethical life as a school of mutual help and discipline. At first sight we seem to be met by a mere paradox, as if Christianity demanded the sacrifice of the family, yet, while thus despising the family in principle, by some strange historical accident, had managed to be the supreme power for purifying and exalting it in practice. But no natural tie ever is purified and exalted except by subjection to a greater spiritual fellowship. On the day Jesus thus subjected the family to the kingdom of God its true efficiency in the world was secured. Nor to this day is it otherwise. A family circle, however gracious and aflFectionate, which is concerned only with its own interests, affords no noble discipline 26 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. iv for its members and breeds a selfishness disastrous even to the natural life of the family itself; while a family affection which nourishes sympathy with the homeless and calls out a sense of public duty in all that concerns the welfare of humanity, in watering others, is watered itself. As well, therefore, might one say that because Christianity accepts the family it accepts family feuds or the vendetta, as that because Christianity accepts the state it accept^ war. As weU say, because Christianity accepts men and women, it accepts lust. But in Christ there is neither male nor female — the most fundamental of all human distinctions being only accepted to be transfigured into love and service by subjection to a greater, an all-embracing fellowship. Much less, therefore, may the state which is a unit so much more artificial, so much less based on nature, demand to be accepted with all its methods as an object of nature. The state too must find itself by losing itself in a higher fellowship and in serving a larger purpose than its own, and upon that subjection aU its security as an organisation for justice and freedom depends. If all free states are the product of Christianity, it is because Christianity has set up something greater above them by which they can be blessed, not as they are organisations by war and for war, but as they serve humanity, if not in peace, at least for peace. CHAPTER V THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL No serious Christian judgment, therefore, can accept war as the ultimate basis of society, as eternally in accord with the Christian basis of love and service and overcoming evil with good. That Christianity must seek to overcome war is not in doubt, and the only question is, How does it set to work on that task ? But that is a deeper question than mere pacifism can answer, and for the reason that, Uke all other natural forces which are rooted in the elementary struggle for life and progress, war can only be overcome by being appropriated. War will only be overcome when a moral substitute has been provided for it which will absorb all its qualities of strenuousness, indignation at wrong, indifference to property and life, for, to the end, justice and freedom can be defended only by the courage, devotion and self-sacrifice which fears not them that kiU the body and after that have no more that they can do. The Bible is full of wars and metaphors from warfare. It offers no peace except by victory. It 28 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. blesses the peacemaker, but not the peaceable. The peacemaker's is the prophet's reward, the reward of the most fearless, resolute, unconquerable fighter, of the man most daring in transforming, not rejecting, the natural forces. As far back as the early prophets, we have in the midst of cruel wars a picture of peace established in righteousness, but no prophet preached disarma- ment even when he preached the foUy of trusting in alliances and armies. What the ancient prophets preached about was property, not war. The man who covets his neighbour's field and seizes it, is doing exactly the same in principle as the king of Assyria who gathers the nations as one gathers eggs, and the magnitude of the latter crime in no way alters the identity of principle. And where a field is taken by violence, the act is manifestly morally the same as the taking of a country; nay, it may be worse, for the robbery is purely selfish, while the national robbery may be governed by a kind of patriotism. Mere power to do greater wrong does not in itself alter the moral situation, for we can as easily prove ourselves wicked servants with one talent as with ten. But the prophets did not stop there. Robbery by law, through influence and chicane, is also the same in principle. Even there the prophets did not call a halt, but found exactly the same principle in any advantage, however com- mercially valid, taken of the misfortunes, poverty or defenceless state of others. Nor is it necessary to v] THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL 29 seize the field, for the same principle is present in coveting it. So long as we have the will and are only restrained by want of power, we not only involve our own characters in the evil principle, but help to approve it and keep it in operation. That kind of moral judgment rests on the view that peace can be no mere absence of strife, but requires active good-will and a justice which recognises the con- sideration required by God for all His children. In short, it proceeds on the principle that strength is for helpfulness and not for victory over the weak. In that case, all who live for position, money or any kind of material power, are involved in the tyranny of immoral force as much as if they were fighting in an unjust and predatory war. Still more definitely, Jesus Christ starts from the kingdom of God, which is of God's securing, and illustrates in endless ways its unlikeness to the kingdoms man has established by violence. In contrast to the opulent, the noble, the warriors, those who have won great things for themselves, the citizens of this kingdom are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the peacemakers, the persecuted. The very essence of the faith He requires is faith in the might of this kingdom with its method of acceptance of God's appointment and willing sacrifice in the service of love, in the assurance that, in serving it, all that truly concerns us God will preserve. From such preaching we should expect, as the 30 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. immediate deduction, direct opposition to the grossest forms of violence. Especially we should expect immediate and direct opposition to slavery and war, with an anti-slavery and a peace society as the first form of organisation. Instead of taking this seemingly open high- way, Jesus proceeds, like the prophets, to speak of property. Again He denounces the outwardly reHgious who by legal devices devour widows' houses, and He differs only in making the question of property more central and more radical. He says we are not to lay up for ourselves treasures upon earth, and it is as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye. Whatever further that may mean, it at least means that every Hfe which secures itself from without and concentrates its efforts on personal gain, is a life alien from the new order. Everyone who uses his gifts not for service, but to isolate himself by gain in the world, is on the side of the material, the cruel, the murderous side of war. That is radical treatment, but it is not yet as radical as Jesus is prepared to be. Again we have the assertion, made with a clearness and breadth never before attained, that to desire is to impUcate ourselves in the immoral principle — lack of power not altering evil purpose. And He does not stop even at that most comprehensive of all negations, the suppression of desire, but goes on to demand absolute consecration to the service of God by v] THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL 31 serving our fellows with all powers and possession whereby any superiority is conferred upon us. This moral judgment of true justice is summed up in the conception of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is that self-complacent attitude of the soul which is made possible by esteeming ourselves for our privileges and by shutting our eyes to the certainty that the equi- valent of privilege is not merit but responsibility. The perversion of privilege into merit is the root of all immoral force, and the whole world-system springing from it can only be destroyed and a better put in its place by beginning with that root. We must deal with the delusion that the wealth or ability, the endowment, material or mental, or even moral, such as tenacity of wiU, which God has given us, is a just ground for saying in pride. See what I am, what a position I ought to have in the world ! See how I shall conquer it, how I shall lay up treasures of various kinds, and how weaker men will go down before me and be swept out of my road or even be trodden down in it for me to march over ! In principle such an attitude merely makes us one with the conqueror who seeks his kingdom in blood and wrecked homes and women's tears. Success on this principle, moreover, breeds a pestilent atmosphere of pride, luxury and self- indulgence which any just moral judgment must agree with the Gospels in condemning more severely than sins of the flesh, except that sins of the flesh under its influence may cease to be outbursts of 32 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. v natursd passion and become a system of self- pleasing for which, one's fellow-creatures may be sacrificed deliberately. Nor have we here merely the principle of the worst aspects of war ; we have also the poisonous atmosphere which the tempest of war is needed to cleanse. To object to war when this corruption is destroying our state is like objecting to the cleansing fire after we have suffered the accumulation of pestilential decay. And so great is the moral and even the social danger that no sacrifice even of life would be too great, if a higher judgment of the duty of power and possession than its devotion to the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life should spring out of the blood-drenched ground. CHAPTER VI INDIVIDUAL DUTY A Christian is a member of a society which represents the kingdom of God. That, at least, means a rule not established by force, and a peace victory in war cannot give nor defeat take away. And he belongs to it by faith, which means he has rejoiced to see for himself that to the methods of the kingdom of God all might ultimately belongs. This society he finds wheresoever two or three of any nationality are met in Christ's name. To meet in His name means to believe in the powers in which He believed and to use them by the service of love He rendered. But if to be a Christian means to belong to a kingdom the rule of which is love and the sceptre of which is the cross of sacrifice, does that mean he is not implicated at all in the earthly kingdom or at all responsible for its maintenance? Granting that only the defects of our state make war necessary for maintaining righteousness, can he wholly deny responsibility for these defects ? And clearly the one thing no one may ignore is responsibility. 34 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. The answer manifestly cannot be given merely by our attitude to war. The religious judgment has always been that it depends upon our whole relation to the social order — ^war being only an acute iUness arising from our whole method of competition, an illness which at least is sometimes better than chronic disease. Hence, however valuable its doc- trine of non-resistance by arms may have been to stir reflection, a society which has accumulated by another type of warfare the largest treasure upon earth any similar body of persons ever possessed, treasure of the kind which most wars arise to pro- tect, cannot have faced the real problem. The zeal of its members for social righteousness alone makes their position worthy of esteem. The central issue is that raised so clearly by John Woolman, one of the most Christlike of modern men — the evil of strengthening the hands of the oppressor, for to enslave others is always an acuter opposition to the whole Christian order than fighting others, unless we are merely fighting to enslave them. To treat a man as a chattel is a much graver denial that he is an end in himself than to say to him. You must die, as I should be willing to die in like case, rather than Uve as the instrument for giving victory to an unrighteous cause. We might put slavery rather on the level of murder than war, both alike denying our relation to man as an end in himself ; or at least it could only be distinguished by the dependence upon it of the vij INDIVIDUAL DUTY 35 existing social order — a distinction, however, not to be overlooked. To make life an end in itself and to make a man an end in himself are things so diflFerent that every good by which a man's soul is saved must be valued above life ; and freedom, the condition of truly possessing a soul, no man can ever have except by setting it above hfe. That is not to hold life a light possession or war a small evil, but it is to hold that there are worse evils than war — moral surrenders against which we must contend even to blood, and it may be the blood of others as well as our own. No mere material good can be sufficient justification, for all that a man has he will give for his life, but justice and liberty are spiritual blessings which never have been maintained at less hazard than life. Other ways of staking our lives we may see to be better than war, but will that necessarily determine that we stand aside when our nation is sacrificing itself for these blessings in the way of war ? Even though we see that war is an evil to be abolished and though we hope for the stage in our national life when we shall have developed such spiritual powers of resisting evil as to make war mere folly and crime, when no Christian would ever think of engaging in it, would that settle our duty at the present time ? Granting that we have not yet produced an order which will do the business of the national order, and that the nation, being what it is, is involved, 3—2 36 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. through all that is highest in it, in war, what then ? If it is not for commerce or for aggression, but for a national existence in which the happiness and, what is more, the liberty of millions of our feUow- creatures are involved, or for the defence of the weak or for policing the nations that justice may be established over them, or for repressing a nation which, as has been said of Prussia, by making its staple industry war, forces the same calamitous trade upon other peoples, does our relation to the higher order, which has only come for ourselves and not yet for the world, absolve us from our duty to the lower, which in its own less perfect way is seeking the same ends ? That cannot mean we are only to stand for the higher when it has arrived and that we may mean- time be content to Kve in the lower order and serve it only. No higher order ever does come except through the prophet prepared to suffer and, if need be, die for it. We are in the lower order as strangers and pilgrims seeking a city which has foundations and living in it now as its true citizens. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem," we should all say, "may my right hand forget its cunning." But in the captivity in Babylon men are to build houses and dwell in them, and take wives and beget sons and daughters, and seek the peace of the city and pray unto the Lord for it, for in the peace thereof they are to have peace. And if so, in the war thereof are they not likely to have war? vi] INDIVIDUAL DUTY 37 The moment we see any higher truth it becomes imperative for us and we only save our souls by- accepting its rule. But to live for it as if it were come, cannot mean that we can ignore the actual state in which we live, or be indifferent to the common duties because they do not always come to us in the highest way, or think the natural order can be set aside in any shorter way than by trans- forming it into the spiritual. And meantime what is our relation to the sacrifice of this natural order which may be lower, but which, such as it is, is carrying on the business of fighting for j,ustice and freedom and the weaker cause in the world ? The same problem appeared in what we saw to be an acuter form in slavery ; and the Early Chris- tian way of dealing with it is an example in the highest degree illuminating. Slavery in various forms is more continuous, more evil and worse to eradicate than war, but its organised form was easier to aboHsh because it could no longer exist as soon as the dignity of labour and the brotherhood of man were even dimly discerned; whereas war can only be abolished by discerning the Christian principle that privilege is responsibility and by establishing a rivalry not in self-seeking but in service. Yet Christianity did not start by ignoring the fact that society then rested on slavery. In conse- quence, there is a curious, an amazing absence of all opposition to the institution. Among Christians, at 38 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. least, we should have expected it to be prohibited from the beginning. Paul, however, sent a Christian slave back to a Christian master without one word of question regarding the right of one man to possess another. Early the Church recognised the danger to society which would arise from disturbing the institution. While from the first the slave was taught to regard himself as Christ's freed-man and to be free if he could, Peter's injunction not to be a busybody in other men's matters appears to be directed against interfering with other people's slaves. That attitude continued for centuries, and only after it became manifest that a new social order had arrived which could do without slaves, did the Church begin to teach that it was wrong for a Christian to be an owner of slaves and to interfere actively to aboHsh the whole system. But, if Christianity tolerated slavery, it had no room for the spirit which maintained it. When Paul recommended the slave as his own son to be to his master a brother beloved and when he laboured with his own hands and called himself a slave of Jesus Christ, he was creating a society in which slavery could not for ever be tolerated and providing that society with a basis in the dignity of labour which far more than replaced the old. Thus we can be sure that, while Christians did not from the beginning reject the institution and may have been so implicated in the Whole social order of their time that even to put away their own slaves vi] INDIVIDUAL DUTY 39 may have been only to expose them to greater evil and to create a general movement which might have involved a calamitous social revolution, they would hate the spirit of the mere slave-owner and never forget the man in the slave and distinguish carefully between the good which could be increased from the evil which could be diminished. If that method of procedure rightly exemplifies the method of Christianity, militant pacifism cannot be what is meant by not resisting evil. Four points that principle of non-resistance wiU, however, straight away determine for us. I. We should never accept war as eternally necessary. While we recognise that we shall always be subjected to its discipUne till we have provided a moral substitute for it by accepting the far austerer discipline of the service of love, we should have no part in the praise of its benefits, as if the creator of a war might be regarded as a public benefactor. Any evil may be turned to good in the sense that it may stir us up to overcome some worse evil of selfish luxury or slackness or worship of wealth. The great fire of London swept away many plague spots, yet it was a vast calamity, and we now find ordinary sanitation a more effective way with no need of that destructive method. So when war arises, we can only recognise it to be good, if we have degenerated into greed and sloth and self- indulgence and failed to call out service and sacrifice for spiritual ends. In that case our first business 40 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. is to ask how far we are implicated in the evil and how far we have failed in that good fight of faith which is its sole alternative. Every war is, in that way, a reason for heart searching, penitence and new consecration, a call so to live that, as far as we are concerned, a moral substitute for war shall exist and its evil no more be necessary. 2. We must never consent to fight merely for a material triumph. If a Christian can engage in a war at all, he must be sure that spiritual issues are at stake, and while he would not have his cause defeated if any sacrifice would enable it to win, he must realise that victory might mean defeat and defeat victory in the higher warfare of the spirit, and that any true cause of freedom or righteousness cannot ultimately be defeated by them who can only kill the body. Hence he will concern himself to avoid mere military pride of arms and will never look upon war as a great game in which the only purpose is to win, but will be exercised about the spirit of his people, the avoid- ance of the moral evils of war and the creation of a juster and purer society worthy of the sacrifice of human lives. 3. We can have no part in any gospel of hate, as if at the present time the Germans were mere fiends in human shape. We may have to recognise that they have adopted a cause for which they must suffer, but we should do so in sorrow, as a judge who must condemn, yet who would be no judge did he vi] INDIVIDUAL DUTY 41 condemn with a light heart or in the heat of passion. Even more than towards others, we must exercise the judgment of charity towards the enemy, recog- nising that we are sure to hear of the evil and not the good and allowing for the possible bias of our own hearts. And while we know it is vain to say, Peace when there is no peace, or set up any other standard of peace except what will endure, we would not have a war pursued beyond that necessary point and would have no share in inflicting a ruin which was merely vindictive. We will not imagine that much conquest and little conciliation can destroy Germany and save Britain. 4. We should recognise that a peace to be abiding must be established in righteousness and a sense of mutual benefit and good-will. That may not be hindered by a fair conflict. Indeed at this moment, in spite of the German gospel of hatred of the English, which naturally springs from their feehng that, but for us, they would have succeeded, it would not be a very venturesome prophecy to foretell a time not very remote when we shall be on better terms with them than we have been during all these years while war has been threatening. By these convictions we shall be saved from worshipping at the shrine of militarism and shall remain open to the reflection that "if the peoples were wise, war is a game kings could not play at." But they do not settle for us any question of principle or, granting that our country is at war in 42 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. a right spirit and for a righteous cause, how the Christian has to answer the call that is made upon his manhood. The enormous holocaust of lives which has been offered up in this war must be taken into account in the magnitude of the crime, which someone must have incurred, of making it, but it settles no question of principle. A great war like this about great issues involves the question of principle far less gravely than our little wars, and even the question of our particular participation, for we participate in what we tolerate. We have seen how far the question of principle reaches down into the whole system of com- petition in which we share, and to our whole mental attitude and to the wrong grounds of our self- esteem. When that situation is understood, we see that behind the question of force lies the question of justice, and that the Apostle makes the funda- mental distinction when he distinguishes between gospel and law, not between gospel and force. Were it a mere question of force, we could repudiate it and be done with it, but law must carry on its business till there is a righteousness for which it ceases to exist. The law is not for the righteous, having no place in his motive and having been outdistanced by love as a rule of conduct. Yet the magistrate does not bear the sword in vain. And to introduce the police to prevent the stealing of a field is not vi] INDIVIDUAL DUTY 43 made different in principle from the introduction of an army to prevent the stealing of a country because people are more likely to be killed in the one case than in the other. The church as a society of the perfect order of God's kingdom which rests on nothing except personal insight into truth and the determination of aU duties by love, must no more consent to live for less than that order because of a war, than a teacher for knowledge because a boy is whipped, or a benevolent society for the appeal of kindness, because the police have had to be called in. But that does not determine what each individual person may have to do in the way of helping with the whipping or with calling in the police. No true reformer will call in the police merely for his own protection, nor any master punish merely for his own dignity. And it is equally clear, so soon as we understand our own hope, that we may not resist merely for ourselves or, indeed, at all unless we can say we should also wish to be resisted in a Hke case. But, so regarded, our own participation is far more difficult to decide even in a just action at law for our own gain than in a righteous war for a public good. In any case, so long as we accept the Christian treatment of slavery as typical of its method of dealing with a lower system of society, we cannot get out of Christianity a mere negative ruling on war. 44 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. If a man feel his call to go forth to fight his country's battle, we have a right to require him not to be swept off his feet by the mere emotion around him, to weigh his duty prayerfixlly, and to bear in mind, that if a Christian can fight, it may not be for mere victory in battle, but only for a greater victory of justice and right to which even his country must be subject. After that his Christianity must decide and we must respect its decision, whether it be to take arms, or to take part only in the healing ministries of war, or, even in this war, to put his life into the overcoming of evil in other ways. Only we must remind him that these ministries should all involve the same utter consecration of Hfe, the same endurance of hardness, the same courage, for they are all alike a willing acceptance of the evil as well as the good of our social heritage. So long as religion means a greater sense of social responsibility, no man can be governed by a mere negative ruling from any quarter. But, it is said, do we not derive an absolutely negative ruling from the example of Jesus Christ ? Can we even imagine Him as a soldier? To that we may reply. Can we imagine Him at all different from what He was? But that is not because we do not think other activities would not have been right for Him, but because of the supreme nature of His particular task and the very special character of His vocation. But suppose Him a man with such a vocation as ours, is it impossible vi] INDIVIDUAL DUTY 45 to imagine Him like Tolstoi's peasant soldier, who, even in war, is filled with inward peace, or like Socrates, marching barefoot as a common foot- soldier,. stiU in pursuit of wisdom ? At least it is much easier than to imagine Him, like many of the office-bearers in our churches, sitting aU day thinking about nothing but making money, or even studying theology with an eye upon a career. Hstd He, like Socrates, been a citizen of a free state which had to defend against barbarism a higher civilisation which was to bless humanity, might He not, like Socrates, have participated in the task? But even Socrates would be no officer in army or state, not wishing to control others in that external way, and courting no honour the position could confer, and above all being conscious of a higher mission. Our Lord's whole way of life went with being only a common foot-soldier and a private citizen in any case, but why we think He could not have been a soldier at all is for the same reason as we know He concerned Himself about no civic task. He has a vocation the very business of which was to make these interests subordinate to a higher rule. It is that task and that vocation which make it impossible to imagine Him different or His work different, or even to conceive it set in another historical frame. The fact that He was not in a free country and thgt the whole civic question had fallen into the background, allowed Him to make a far 46 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. simpler and clearer issue of a kingdom which was not of this world and which could not without loss have had an immediate national development, a rule to which, as we have seen, all states must be subject, if they are to realise their true purpose. If by such subjection all truly free states have been created, and if, as even Napoleon affirmed, Jesus Christ has thereby set up a dominion compared with which, in inwardness, in value for all life, in endur- ance, the work of the greatest conqueror is only a fleeting externality. He had a right surely to pursue His own vocation and hold all minor interests subordinate. When that is forgotten, and it is thought He would have been more perfect had He occupied Himself with every conceivable human interest, we forget not only that He had His own vocation from which it would have been no per- fection to depart for a scattered encyclopaedic activity, but that it was a vocation which regulates all others, not from without, but by giving each individual the spirit by which he can adequately deal with his own interests according to his own sense of duty. What His life should determine for us is (i) our own vocation and (2) its subordination not in the last issue even to the state, but to the kingdom of God. With regard to our vocation it determines that our guiding principle shall not be personal ease, honour or gain, but God's will, and it assures us of vi] INDIVIDUAL DUTY 47 guidance in discerning what our talents, time and circumstances require our vocation to be, if we seek that guidance in humility and freedom from anxiety. But the main way of seeking that guidance is to keep steadily before us that we are citizens of the kingdom of God, and that our warfare, in the last issue, is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. That must mean the need for moral victory beyond the physical as the aim of every man who would be a Christian warrior, and it must also mean for some that special concentration on that higher victory must be their particular vocation. Whether that should include all the recognised ministry of the church may well be questioned, as such mechanical distinctions do not belong to the kingdom of God, but it must be the task of every church in so far as it stands for God's kingdom, and, therefore, for a rule higher, wider and deeper than the state, in serving which the state also can only find guidance and abiding security. CHAPTER VII THE JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES A society which has come into existence for the express purpose of manifesting the Christian order of faith and love, ought also to have a judgment of its own relation to war, and that is not necessarily the same as would be arrived at in his own case by any individual member. Every schoolmaster may have his own view of the value of prisons, and he may have more hope or less of making a prison something of a school, but we should esteem him no teacher at all if he even dreamt of making the school a prison. Both may be means of guarding civil order, but only confusion can come from bringing the educational down into the sphere of the coercive. By making a like clear distinction between the rule of the kingdom of God for which the churches stand and which can only be accepted by personal insight and love, and the civil rule which can be forced upon others by arms, and by showing that while the latter progresses as it incor- porates the former, the former only loses by any kind of confusion with the latter, the issues of life will become clearer, and the principles of true progress become distinct and convincing. CH. vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 49 The central point is that a church, as a society of the Rule of God, deals with individuals purely on their own recognisances. That means the church's judgment of war as of all else should be individual. But to be individual in that sense means also to be catholic. Only when the church, or any church, attains this individual and catholic judgment, one which deals direct with the human conscience and penetrates through all the guises of rank, race or sect to man as a moral personality, is it presenting amid the flux of time the eternal fellowship of the children of God. A church is found wheresoever two or three are gathered in the name of Christ. That means they believe in the powers in which He believed and employ them by the method of service He employed. Every such church incorporates nothing less than the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of God is nothing less than the only final and adequate order of love. According to that order alone the churches must judge war and all else besides. It is necessary, however, to be clear that love is not sentiment. Sentiment seeks only pleasant relations between men, whereas love seeks righteous and wise relations. Sentiment, moreover, depends on external qualities and is only possible towards persons agreeable to us, while love is an ethical regard for man as man and is possible towards aU and not least the most undeserving. Much of our troubled thoughts about war, even 50 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. as about death itself, arise from confounding the estimate of love with the estimate of sentiment, which arises again from neglecting those two require- ments which distinguish love from sentiment — righteousness and wisdom. Love comes not to destroy law but to fulfil it by- giving us the law of freedom by which we are delivered from it. Only by rising above law and being a law to ourselves, by accepting as the guide to aU our relations the law of love, can we escape the discipline of law. Only by discovering that life is service, not self-pleasing, and that all our privileges are means for higher service, are we free from law and all things are ours. But that is never discovered easily, and God's love takes no part in shielding us from the burdens and discipline of life whereby we learn. God treats none of His children as the foolish parents, who have done more than any other evU influence to corrupt our state, the sole labour of whose affection is to shield their children from the stress and sorrows of life and not to equip them to bear their part as soldiers who can endure hardness in the great battle. He will have His children " mount and that hardly to eternal Kfe." Wherefore, if He does not cause wars. He permits them, even as He allows vice to shatter the body, and sin, when it is finished, to bring forth death. And that goes with the body of our humiliation, with its pain, its weariness, its decay, in which He has placed us for our soul's good. vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 51 Love is fundamentally an estimate of man as an individual spiritual being whose own choice determines his destiny and whose eternal destiny is so great that no present affliction can be weighed for a moment against its attainment, and for whom death, however terrible in its pains and dread of unknown possibilities, is only the greatest of these purifying trials. And man is made free when he realises himself in spiritual treasures he values above life. Thus love, though it transforms all austerity and knows no such word as self-sacrifice, because aU its demands mean blessedness and the discovery of our true selves, accompUshes, beyond all legal demand, the ministries of austerity and sacrifice. The first requirement, therefore, of the church which embodies this order, is that all its judgments shall be individual: and, manifestly, its judgment of war cannot be an exception. This requires an unwavering respect for the individual's judgment of his own duty, with the one requirement that it be wholly sincere, and never detached, but sensitive to the movements around him, though never submerged in them. The task of the churches is to teach men the truth in the light of which all duty should be determined, to reveal to them the meaning of the cross by which all consecration is made possible, to impress them with the spirit of love for which all sacrifices are reasonable, and to lift up their hearts 4—2 52 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. to seek the guidance by which he that is spiritual can judge all things. More than that no country- has a right to ask from any church, and most of what is holiest and a great deal of what is strongest has gone into this conflict through that channel. When the crisis of this demand has come upon the young spirit, it has been striking to observe how often he has not conferred with flesh and blood, but has fought out the battle for himself, and has come out a wiser and a better man for determining yea or nay on no other ground than his own conception of his duty. The man who goes into this conflict on any lower ground, and merely by the pressure of the emotion of the multitude, is risking a spiritual danger which certainly it ought not to be part of any church's task to urge him to incur, for no duty can ever be religiously done under such pressure. Moreover, any attempt from the outside to impose upon men, in Christ's name, their duty by the authority of another is a denial of the significance of Christ for every individual's direct relation to God. Wherefore, any church which takes up a mere sergeant's relation to recruiting and which simply tells men their duty without manifesting to them the sources of guidance by which they may discover it for themselves^ is manifestly denying the supremacy of its own order and subjecting it to the temporary necessities of the state. Even the fear of compulsory service is not a sufficient justification, because thus to lose faith in the right relation of vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 53 the church to its members either shows we never had any real faith in it as the one true and effective relation or that we have an uneasy conscience about the duty itself. Moreover, if need be, it is a more respectable moral condition to fight at the bidding of the state than of the crowd, of law than of fear of being thought a coward, of no choice than of a choice on the usual grounds by which men are led to abandon their own judgment of good and do evil, for merely to follow the multitude is in itself to do evil. Except statistics, few things do more than war to make us lose the individual in the mass. Two men drowned in a fishing boat in times of peace awaken more our sense of the thoughts in the heart of a man in the relentless grasp of death, and the blank left in sorrowing hearts, than the sinking even of a cruiser with a crew of hundreds in times of war. Yet a sympathy fed by contact with poverty and suffering can put a soul even into statistics. The vast passionless figures of unemployment or sick- ness rise up before us as bare homes and hungry children and wan, wistful faces. And when we learn that the boy who used to come to our house and laugh with our children is dead with a bullet through his brain, we are startled into understanding war and realise not only that a warm heart has left many hearts in sorrow, but that the world is poorer by the loss of one whose modesty, courage and unworldliness might have made him a leader in a still greater warfare. 54 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. That insight also one stumbles upon at times with the lads who form the new rank and file. Rough-looking lads they may appear, without much thought of anything, fond of eking out their limited vocabulary with one sanguinary adjective, blushing at the thought of their comrades discovering that they ever were serious. But something lifts the veil for a moment and you discover that in no dim way there is a sense of high issues and no delusions about danger, that they have looked death in the face, and have come as a sacrifice from their mother's arms, the mention of whose name has perhaps caused the whole revelation, and that they trust, if those arms never receive them again, God's wiU. If they fall, you know the national life which "can do without heroes because it is itself heroic" will have suffered a loss not to be lightly estimated. The sadness of war is then truly realised, but, also, then and then only faith can live face to face with it. Every estimate of the moral personality on which faith rests, with every trust that God esteems each man even above the value for himself which He has placed in each man's heart, and that He has an eternal purpose with man's spirit for which He makes aU earthly events to work for good, is denied, if we see mere heaps of bloody dead. But if in some dim way we see as God sees, not armies with mere distinctions of numbers like spools in a great factory, but the revealing of the thoughts and intents of many hearts, while we are vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 55 surer than ever that war, especially among civilised and Christian peoples, must be the outcome of sinful cruelty and pride as well as stupidity and foUy, we can stiU say, "The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth." That kind of judgment should alone exist for every church, that estimate of pergonal sacrifice, personal thoughts, personal loss, and also that estimate of the personal good which alone could justify the anguish even in a righteous cause. And if so, we must ever keep before us an aim worthy of aU this travail of mind and body, an aim of juster and fairer conditions for individual men and women. There will be little place for drum-beating and glory and transference of territory and the pomp and circumstance of war, but much for securer homes, purer hearts, juster laws and any other good that can go into humble lives. The second requirement from the church which embodies the order of love is that aU its judgments must be catholic. These two demands, properly understood, are identical. So long as we see in each man the image of God, our interest must be catholic, while, the moment we group men by nations or classes or creeds, we are sectarian, and the size of our group is a wholly irrelevant consideration. Two or three gathered in Christ's name is a complete church, but then it is because the kingdom of God is there in the fellowship of man with man, simply in their 56 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. naked spiritual relation to God. In that way It is in principle nothing less than a kingdom of humanity in which family and state alike can only save them- selves by consenting to serve. But what failure is more conspicuous in this death struggle of the nations than the absence of this true cathcjicism, the Catholicism to which there is neither Austrian nor Russian, German nor British or French, because Christ and aU He stood for in our humanity is all in aU and to which names and trappings are nothing at all ? Conse- quently, so few religious ties existed for this war to rend that we have no open wound caused by it to keep alive in us the sense of our relation to all the children of God, and through them to all mankind. The Salvation Army and the Student Movement, and, in some wider but less intense because less personal way, the Church of Rome, alone suffer. For the rest to maintain their catholicity in any sense, individual or corporate, is a pretence which can hardly to-day delude even ourselves. All our churches in consequence have become mere national churches, not in the sense of reminding the nation that its highest interests are the interests of humanity because they are our interests simply as human beings, but in the sense of having no interest or charity beyond the national cause. The catholic note in the preaching and, what is worse, in the prayers is difficult to catch. Surely a German ought to be able to pray with us in our public vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 57 worship. Perhaps if we prayed with due humility, he would not object even to our praying for victory, for he could still join with us in the sense that we have all sinned and that any good is of God's grace, and he could alter the rest to suit his need and feel we were both approaching the throne of righteousness and not a merely national God. But when the tone of our prayers is, "Lord, we ask not victory for ourselves but for our cause, for we are altogether right and our enemies, for whom we pray in their delusion, are altogether wrong," would he not rightly conclude that we are not exercising a religious judgment at all, but at best a moral one of the utmost externality and, therefore, super- ficiality ? The catholic judgment is essentially an individual judgment, a judgment of motive, a judgment in the last issue of our idolatries. In that case a judgment of any war as exercised not only in the church but in the world must bring it home to us as a profound reality and no mere form of words that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, our own people and church not less than the people and Protestantism of Prussia. If the final cause of war is unreality in the kindred forms of pharisaism and idolatry, of deter- mining our duties and our devotion by the things that appear, our English nation cannot be held guiltless. Can we say that we have valued the goods of the spirit, concerning which no one can 5 8 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. dream that he is impoverished because another is rich, above the wealth and position in which we mainly succeed, as Bacon says, not by our own merits but by the misfortunes of others, the things for which unjust wars have ever been made? Have we not been gradually losing any estimate of success by which men could be esteemed great among us except either on the estimate of plaudits or of possessions ? In that case, have we not among us aU the elements which create unjust wars ; and, if we are on the right side, is it not rather of God's mercy in saving us from temptation, than of our own virtue; rather that we belong to the nations which already possess, than that we have a better possession ? Have not our churches largely forfeited from lack of this true cathohcity both the right and the power to declare to Israel its sin ? Are they able to speak to the present distress with any clear prophetic voice ? Can we even make it evident that a nation which honours and puts into its legislature men who by a tenaciously selfish use of capital or advertising or invention — often annexed from another — have ruthlessly crushed aU rivals and left the widow and the fatherless with empty cupboards and held masses of workmen at their mercy, has no right in principle to condemn a ruler, who at least considers his people's possessions as well as his own, when he crushes and impoverishes a weaker nation ? And what have we to say to a vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 59 nation which treats with severity small robberies done by the hands and has so many devices for delivering those who do large appropriations with the head, especially if their success is great ? Occasional denunciations we have had, and they are necessary, and we should honour the few who have had the insight and courage to make them. But denunciations do not go far, and the only Hving and effective protest would be a society itself deUvered from all pharisaisms and idolatries. Even the churches wealth least frequents are largely governed by men of an arm-chair habit of body and a bank-note habit of mind — the same in type at least as those who make wars and never fight them — ^who demand from our churches success as worldly corporations and who will have no ministers except those who make visible success a large part of their ambitions. Hence much concern about numbers, funds and organisations and little about truth and love. In consequence we have sorrowfully lost the native attraction of men of peace, and badly replaced it by the driving of business men running a show. Instead of having a gospel for the poor, for man in his naked- ness and his need, the comfort is only for the already comfortable, the riches of grace only for those who already possess. Respectability, which is only another name for pharisaic morality, rules, and that deep moral estimate which rests every moral judgment on sincerity and which sees the 6o A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. publican and the harlot go into the kingdom of God before the outwardly religious, ceases to make itself felt. No church, therefore, is able to say in this age, "I and the children whom God hath given me are for signs and for wonders," but we are all more or less governed by a pseudo-external Catholicism which trusts not to the persuasion of truth, but to the impressiveness of display and which measures its Christian heritage by traditional marks and worldly visibility. "The heroic that is in all men" has therefore found in us no divine awakening voice, but we have appealed to men by their most super- ficial qualities, and have left to the war to call out that denial of self and taking of the cross, which ought to have been summoned to the service of the kingdom of God. But we are the church, and the judgment which must begin with the House of Jacob must begin with us. What victory have we been seeking to accomplish in the world? That is the question which deter- mines our responsibility for this war, and all our thoughts, right and wrong, regarding it ; and ac- cording as we see a better victory than the security of much goods laid up for us, we shall help forward the higher victory which alone can be worthy of so vast a sacrifice of agony and blood. Moreover, only by that judgment of sinful participation can we hope to discern our own duty in the strife and guard ourselves from the passion and hatred which obscure more than any smoke of battle the issues of a vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 6i stable, because a righteous peace. That judgment of ourselves is of more importance in this hour, when the lot is already cast into the lap and the disposing thereof is of the Lord, than any other judgment whatsoever. All this may seem a feeble result and the forging of a poor soft weapon wherewith to face Germany's absolute, unquestioning religion of war. While we are asked to keep an eye on the great moral issues and to continue to believe in an order of the spirit which war cannot overthrow, but without the succour of which no war can ever work us abiding good, while we ask the concentration of the churches upon this higher concern and even allow individual differences of duty in respect to the war in face of it, Germany packs her churches with people intent on nothing but victory. Her pulpits all echo to the note of absolute right and the prayers breathe an unwavering confidence that God is her great war ally. On the face of it the German seems the stronger method. It has succeeded in waking up the primitive Berserker who deifies his rulers, regards aliens as plotters against his Hfe, sees absolutely for the moment nothing but a network of deceit around him and has no purpose in the world except to tear it in pieces. An equally primitive sense that all other peoples are in com- parison barbarians and that the world ought grate- fully to receive German civilisation even on the point of a lance supports this rage by the assurance 62 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. that God cannot so much as have conceived the possibility of Gernaany's defeat. Is not this irrup- tion of primitive man's energy, concentration, obsession if you will, into a people with the highest scientific and mechanical skill an alarming portent, and is it not folly to suppose that we can counter it in a mood of calm and even hesitating reflection ? But in the end man can only sustain himself by reality, and that is why the temper of reason, with all its seeming weakness, has always won in the world. When we see a whole nation, transported out of itself, ascribe with absolute unanimity plots to other people which they themselves have spun, when men who have Uved for science inquire no more after facts, men who have turned grey in historical research investigate nothing, men who have taught the whole world the value of first principles lose sight of any principle but national interest, we have a strange sense of loss of contact with reality, almost a sense of mental alienation. The Berserker attitude in short, which is so ener- gising to the savage, does not sit quite rationally upon the modern mind and suggests rather fixed illusion than fixed resolve. In that case the reality of strength is very far from being equal to the appearance of it even for the moment, and the danger besets it which besets every obsession, of being undermined by hard facts and turning suddenly into disillusionment. Already we have seen how the Prussian exercise of "f rightfulness" vii] JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCHES 63 which is only a modern version of skulls, dances and war-paint, though it has frightened plenty of people, has not affected at all, except perhaps in the wrong way, the people whose fear would have mattered. Duty done on calm reflection knows no such fear, and for that abiding temper a reasoned acceptance of our tasks and even a humble reflection on our faults are no loss. A nation slowly, unwillingly, individually convinced, a nation which has sup- pressed all blind rage in the determination to suffer from no illusion, and which, therefore, cannot encounter worse than it has foreseen, would prove the most amazing portent even as a force for victory in arms: for how is it to be discouraged or dismayed ? That we are such a country a knowledge of our history does not encourage us to assume, for, even in our most unjustifiable wars, the same blindness to every view of the situation except our own has taken possession of us, and at all times the same Berserker rage slumbers in our bosom. But we ought, now we see it in another, at once to judge it with charity and to discern that it is neither wisdom nor strength, and to strive even in the midst of conflict not to see anything except as it is and not to judge any issue except at its true value. But even if appearances were all against it, the judgment of the church and, therefore, of all churches, must seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness and trust that victory in arms wiU 64 A CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT [ch. vii be added to it. Nay, if we were sure it would not be added, we should still have to follow it, because it never can be the view of any Christian man that a war is justifiable merely on material issues, or that it ever can be lost if the moral victory is won. Such a judgment concerns motives and moral issues, recognising no action as right which is not rightly done and no victory as good which is not a victory of righteous purpose. If a church is to retain any right to be called a church of Christ, that must unfailingly continue to be its point of view. The state no doubt must concern itself more directly with the task of winning its war, but the state also is blind if it thinks that to be the only or even the main issue. Even for it the great questions are social, military, political, international, even ecclesi- astical, and for them the individual and cathoUc judgment, in other words the Christian judgment, remains the central practical concern. PART II THE MORAL ISSUES o. CHAPTER I SOCIAL War is a struggle for victory in arms, and failure through slackness or cowardice would mean moral failure and, therefore, failure in aU its issues. But a war for such success only would be mere pillage and murder, and success in it would create such insolence and greed that we should be safer undergoing the humbling discipline of military disaster. Every moral issue must in the first instance be concerned with ourselves. If we would take the mote out of our brother's eye, we must first deal with the beam in our own. Our study, if it has done anything, has shown us where we must begin. The peace-maker cannot deal first or directly with war. He must begin with property and our whole sense of service and responsibility in society.. Before any military question there ought to be a social question; and before any social question there ought to be a personal question. Unless we are seeking justice at home, it is hypocrisy to fight for it abroad; and unless we have the true justice 5—2 68 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. which regards our powers and possessions as means for serving and not for conapelling service, as obligations not merits, it is hypocrisy to advocate it in the nation. In order to have power to resist immoral force among the nations, we must not as a people Hve by the same immoral principle of com- petition; and if we are to have power to resist it in our society, we must worship another God than material success ourselves. Every war is apt to be a social war, leaving the nations, generally on both sides, either freer or more enslaved. The French Revolution, for example — the nearest modern parallel to the present shock of nations — ^had a social origin and issued in the deliverance of aU Western Europe from serfdom. The source of that victory is to be sought in the rehgious reahty which long lay in the watchword — "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The question for us — and perhaps it carries with it most other questions — is whether this war is to cut off one layer more of slavery from the base of society that it may be settled more solidly on the brotherly recognition of rights and duties. AU the more, if we cannot fight our country's battle, we ought to fight to make our society more worth giving one's life for. We, especially of the elder generation, who have supplied the fuel for this conflagration which we now must leave to the younger generation to put out, if we are to have any right to receive that sacrifice at all, must consecrate i] SOCIAL 69 our lives as utterly to the regeneration of the whole order of our society as our young men are doing to its preservation, for at no cost of lives can we have any security of peace on cheaper terms than a human and equitable relation to our fellow-men in the society in which God has placed us. The world cannot be run on the worship of Mammon modified, as years advance, by the cult of Aesculapius. Surely this war ought to teach us that the running of the world is an austere and earnest business not to be done merely on health and money payment, or on any easier terms than duty and conscience of right, on duty and right undivorced and undivorceable, yet this war can be turned into a commercial transaction, a business of wiping out the Germans in trade and capturing markets. Some will even grow rich by the war, and their power be the greater that the rest of us grow poorer, so that this sacrifice of Hfe will seem hardly more to them than the Ufe of the slave who is buried under the threshold for the protection of his house is for the savage. They are the incarnation of laying up treasure upon earth and the chief war-making element in every nation because they will not beHeve that no earthly treasure can be made absolutely safe so that thieves could never break through and steal. The word "sacred" they seem to think was invented for the protection of property, and the demand that the whole nation should sacrifice every other 70 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. interest to the business of making locks for it follows as a direct consequence. Social gain will, therefore, not come from the war of itself. The politics of the moneyed mind will not be overthrown, the workman will not be more secure before capital, we shall none of us be less the tools of conscious and unconscious oppression. If we are wholly unable to accomplish a positive social victory, we shall only be more deHvered into the hands of our tyrants. And if we cannot deliver ourselves, how shall we deliver our allies ? Whereas, if we can deliver ourselves, it may not be beyond us even to emancipate our enemies. This battle may go the harder with us that the ranks of the enterprising and chivalrous youth, from whom have always sprung any leaders we have ever had against the rule of gold that has neither bowels nor mercies, are being mowed down, and how may they be minished and brought low before this war is over! Then with our natural leaders dead, our spirits broken by suffering, and the contrast between our poverty and our tyrants' wealth enormously increased, how will it fare with us as a people ? How shall we deal with a situation in which we had already too much reason to fear that as wealth accumulated, men decayed? Too much we thought of possessions as blessings in themselves to whatsoever use they might be put, as conferring worth on the owner though they only served his greed and vanity, as worth the lives and i] SOCIAL 71 happiness of men merely to lay hands upon, as worth the Uves of others who did not even share the spoil. Yet, in spite of all these causes of dread, if this war teach us that our real weakness in this social conflict has lain in the spirit we were of, the victory may still be ours. We were unable to help to resist the oppressor, because we also worshipped his gods. For years the fear of poverty has lain over some men's hves like a chiUing shadow under which nothing could grow freely. It passed their imagina- tion to conceive themselves living at all without a ceiled roof over their heads, a warm dry garment next their skin and three square meals a day infallibly appointed. Marriage was impossible ex- cept on terms of servants and upholstery, and children might not be born unless their whole way in life had money provision made for it. In sheer terror of poverty they dared not enter upon the glorious hazard of living; and especially they never dared to leave the sheltered shores where, by routine business, salaries were secure, to venture out upon the high seas, guided only by the ambition to leave the world wiser and better than they found it. Even gifts had no call unless they were first gifts to make money. When their children came to be placed in the world, the dominant consideration was a secure income. A government office with an increasing salary and a pension at the end was the subHmest 72 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. height of the ideal. Not the discovery of a new law of science or a spiritual impulse to a generation or the vision of a new world in poetry would have had more attraction without equal security of income ; and it was the very business of experienced age to guard the enthusiasm of youth against such will-o'-the-wisp ambitions. Thus "fearing their fear and being in dread thereof," we could not set up eflFectively, against those who regarded wealth as life's supreme security and highest worth, a moral judgment of worth as service and surrender. For that reason men who Uved close to us and drew their moral ideas from our society, and not infrequently from our religious societies, were able to devote themselves with exclusive ardour to unsocial, oppressive and selfish gain, without any sense of evil doing — frequently with a sense of being most moral, most rehgious, most Christian persons. And if to-morrow we had the same eflEect from this war as Isaiah saw from the wars of his time — ^poverty all over the land and the daughters of Zion walking with tinkling feet and bejewelled neck, and individuals lavishing gold, and money enough for arms to protect it and none for wages and bread — should we be able to speak, as he spoke, with the indignation of one who had never coveted their heritage or been envious of their selfish reward ? But if the issue thus depend not on social reforms here and there but on a regeneration of our faith, i] SOCIAL 73 this war can teach all who will learn. The very men their parents were almost afraid to welcome into the world lest they should not fare delicately every day and be clothed in fine linen and sump- tuous apparel and die in old age under a silken coverlet, find Hfe not intolerable though clothed mostly with mud, inhabiting a wet ditch, feeding on what turns up and with death every moment at the back of the mind. Finally, the fatal bullet is sped and Hfe ebbs and nothing remains of value upon earth but human affection or of hope of heaven but simple sincerity and a man goes hence naked as he came. Then the eye which contem- plates it, ought to be single. Perhaps, till we thus get down to rock-bottom. Mammon always has a good part of our worship, and our eye cannot be single in this matter of social justice, or any other, till it is fixed on our duty not our gain. Not till then can we pass beyond the trappings of Ufe to consider Hfe itself and be delivered from the fear of poverty, which has made us Hve in subjection to riches, and lose all sense of the austere gladness of courageous Hving. If this war, with its waste of possessions and of Hves — possessions we shall learn we can replace and Hves which the long years will teach us we cannot — means a new estimate of the worth of life by service and not by sitting at meat ; if it wiU show us that to spend and be spent is the only source of interest and joy in Hfe and the only just title to respect, 74 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. all kinds of social victories will be within our reach. Talents will mean responsibility and possessions stewardship, and then we shall none of us be purchasable by capital, but we shall live our own Hves in faith and courage and rejoice also in the lives of others. Having suflEered together in our common humanity, having been all of us reduced together to the poor hazard of our hves, having stood shoulder to shoulder for plain duty and simple loyalty, we shall be less able to endure that any man of whom we have demanded so high a sacrifice should be ever again denied a free man's right. Once we have seen the vision of rights established wholly and exclusively upon duties, it can never fade from our eyes till we have established righteous- ness in the earth. And only then can we have a country with the true and enduring securities and able from that vantage ground to stretch forth its hand in brotherhood to all other peoples. When we are able to say to men in our own society, because we no longer worship their god : You may not enslave your brother on the irrelevant ground that you are already better ofiE than he or fling young life into a war you measure only by possession, we shall have won a victory from this war worthy even of the holocaust of lives, for we shall have made our country worth giving one's life for and shall have won for it a true security of peace. Nothing less is required than a change of worship which expresses i] SOCIAL 75 itself in esteeming men above means and in having a single eye to duty undistracted by gain. Thus only can we overcome the idolatry which enslaves us at home and embroils us abroad. In the end that means nothing less than the individual and catholic judgment of man as man, of man as the brother of Christ and the child of God: and on nothing less can social renovation be adequately based. CHAPTER II MILITARY With the purpose of establishing rights on duties in our own society, we cannot under any conditions hate any society, but there may be conditions in which we should fight it. And, when we begin, we must do our utmost to come out on the right side. No victory and no guarantees exacted by it can ever by themselves give us a secure and abiding peace, but the arbitrament of arms might be left in such a position as to make aU other arbitrament impossible. An acute attack might be turned into a chronic disease in which civiHsation itself might perish. A drawn battle, therefore, which would leave Europe a vast armed camp in which the nations glared at each other with savage suspicion and dread, is not a condition to be accepted, if any devotion on our part can deliver us. Even if we could manage to patch up some form of peace, it would be a mere armed truce, in which we should watch each other like beasts of prey, while mihtary burdens crushed out our highest interests and the military temper grew ever more hostile to the spirit of freedom. CH. ii] MILITARY 77 Yet with the spectacle of Bismarck's colossal success threatening to fall into ruins before our eyes after some forty years — a little time in the history of a great nation — ^we ought not to fail to realise that military success, however necessary, is never sufficient, and, by itself, not even a security. If such judicial bhndness should fall upon us that we should merely say, " I am great and my hand has gotten me the victory," our people will have suffered and bled for nothing and vanity, for we shall only have built up another mihtarism which by its arrogance will provoke yet another to destroy it, till mankind returns to the welter of the Middle Ages or seeks a temporary respite from its woes in a torpor which accepts a military despotism like Assyria or Rome. The Greeks cherished the idea that the most intolerable of all evils, even in this evil world, to the gods who rule it was the insolent pride which, issuing from a success the gods had given, in spirit dethroned the gods, so that nothing save speedy disaster could await it in a world the gods ruled. Something of the same idea animates us as we consider the temper of the German military. We cannot think God's world would be tolerable were it reinforced by victory in the greatest conflict in history; and if it fall, while we grieve for the sufferings of the German people, we grieve still more that they should accept this idol. Even if Germany escape now and set up this idol higher 78 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. than ever, those of us who believe that the last word in destiny is not might or power but the spiritual forces, and who still esteem her, in spite of her faults, for her labours for the emancipation of the human mind, would only see cause to dread for her a still graver disaster. Those who in that way take the sword, must perish by the sword, for their own good as well as the good of mankind. This war arose, as no other war has ever quite arisen before, as a campaign against the oppressions of militarism. Diplomacies had their place and de- serve consideration, but a military class who believe themselves invincible and who live continually like dogs on the leash and only wait the moment when panic or a sense of injury or even mere blundering will slacken the hold of the nation upon them, are the true cause of the war. "To maintain peace we must be ready for war" is their one gospel of security and this preparation goes on until it cannot be carried further in peace without bankruptcy. That kind of preparation, after all that can be said has been said about diplomacies, is Germany's con- demnation. It is not that she was prepared for war, but that she was prepared for war in a way to spell bankruptcy in peace. A war in such circum- stances is as suspicious as a fire in a house the owner has over-insured to the verge of ruin. But what, we are asked, is this whole business of using militarism to cast out militarism, if not invoking Satan to cast out Satan? And what is ii] MILITARY 79 that, if not the most prevalent, vain and infectious of man's illusions? Though to call in the miHtary power is not necessarily to call in the miHtary spirit any more than to call in the pohce with the use of violence is to call in the spirit which loves violence and trusts it alone, our first task is to keep before us the distinction, and never forget our danger, bearing well in mind, "That he needs a long spoon who sups with the devil." The evils of militarism are (l) an insolence which should make our freedom not worth de- fending, (2) a blind trust in material force which destroys the securities of peace, (3) a burden of armaments which makes peace itself a state of war. During war the stern realities of dying in mud, not by the prancing warrior but by the devices of sedentary persons, and the absence of drum beating and shouting and flamboyant description may help to preserve us. But the danger will be with us im- mediately the war is over, and be the greater, the greater our success. Already the military cult of Germany is pro- claimed to be slavery in Germany, and, in the same breath, to be an object of imitation for Britain. In the same breath as France and ourselves are praised as peoples "averse from war," whose state of preparation was never beyond the needs of defence and never a burden beyond our carrying in 8o THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. peace, this restraint is treated as a folly. That so far we have come through and can now confidently hope to come through finally as honest persons counts for nothing. The cost may not have been small, but long years of solvency and freedom from military oppression were worth it, and, in any case, right and wrong are not questions of geo- graphy. If that type of militarism was wrong for Germany, it is wrong for us. Nor is it very certain that any other kind of preparation, especially if it were paid for in debt and the loss of the spirit of a free people, would have put us in a better position. Because six months under the pressure of a tremendous need can make an army for immediate use, it is not proved that six months' training would, as some argue, have saved nearly all our bloodshed and at the first stroke have flung the German army back beyond the Rhine. Only definite superiority of training took us out of Mons, and any army of half-trained men who had forgotten their training, we could at that moment have had in the field, would only have involved the whole in disaster. Even with our present policy, therefore, it is absurd to say that there are no arguments against conscription. Our navy would at once suffer. Only persons with a love and instinct for the sea can make it efficient. It must, therefore, remain a voluntary service. But, on the face of it, it seems folly to invoke universal compulsion — manifestly ii] MILITARY 81 because it is thought the stronger and better way — for the other arm of the service upon which our national existence less depends. Free service is a great reliance, but not when dogged by compulsion. Patriotism and love of the sea wiU fill the ranks of our sailors, but not when it is only to escape com- pulsion on land, or after such compulsion has provided aU the warfare of which even the most submissive to discipUne has any need. A nation keeping the sea open for ourselves and our friends, protecting our allies from armies landed on their coasts, going on with our business as usual while threatening an indefinite increase of armed succour, must in these days of long siege warfare present a particularly discouraging aspect to an enemy. On any policy, therefore, we ought to maintain conscription to be a foUy, but we also ought to be prepared to maintain that any policy which brings us nearer to it should be reconsidered. Conscription is Dead Sea fruit which we will not pluck, because it inevitably means militarism, at least if it succeed. The military mean one thing among free citizens and quite another when we are handed over by the law to their tender mercies. And they are sure to be backed by those who do not believe in freedom but desire in all beneath them mere sub- jection. A liberty at the mercy of militarism is not worth defending. Even to shun a year of the fate of Belgium under its tyranny, no self-respecting person would willingly accept the alternative of a 82 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. lifetime of the overbearing protection it affords in Germany. The whole country, moreover, is contaminated as well as oppressed. From the insolence bred in the military an element of "strut" has spread to the whole German community, which, backed by the depressing effect upon initiative and the hypnotising effect upon independence of judgment, becomes a kind of judicial blindness in respect of all their human relations. Thus the people become an easy prey to the aggressive temper of rulers who are primarily the head of the military machine. Nor can in any nation masses of young men from town and country be crowded into barracks without moral harm, as we are finding even now with the stress of war to guard our seriousness; and the corruption spreads to the humblest village. Considering the evil of compulsory military service, we may well ask whether any nation has a right to purchase its security by such means, but for -us, in our position of security, to adopt the system would be a crime, and not alone because the specious names it receives and the promises of restricting it to months not years would prove a delusion, but because it would end all hope of a better ground of peace than dread. We should have done our best to rivet the present military burden upon the necks of all European nations till only an overwhelming calamity could deliver us, and to extend it to Asia to train the hordes that ii] MILITARY 83 would make it futile. To shut thus the one door of escape and add to the panic and burden which makes peace little less oppressive than war would be an international apostasy compared with which breaches of the Hague Convention are trivialities. A better policy, a policy which sought the guarantees of peace by deeper understanding, sense of mutual benefit and the natural good-will of mankind, would at once be rendered hopeless. There the final reason for running all risks to avoid militarism lies. We are fighting to free our necks from a yoke which others would impose, and only persons of a slavish disposition would end by putting on the yoke themselves. Here also we cannot be free till we cease to fear them that kiU the body. We must be able to say that, whatever may happen to us in body or estate, we are not ourselves going to sacrifice our own freedom. This we can say the more confidently that it is not only the sole policy which has in it the promise of peace, but, so far as the people of this country are concerned, the sole safeguard of any pohcy at all. See, we are told, how the Germans have done like sheep what their rulers have told them. By making an idol of the bureaucracy, they must suffer with their idol in whose crime they are all implicated. But, if we accept obligations without knowing what they are, are we better in principle ? So long, however, as we do not need to fight till 6—2 84 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. we are persuaded of the justice and necessity of the task, our management of our own affairs, in spite of an unnecessary and even dangerous amount of secret juggling, remains a reality. The moment, however, that we appear before our rulers, not as a free people but as an army under military com- pulsion, we become the tools of the Foreign Office ; and our rulers are estabHshed in a position of autocracy which is neither good for them nor us. For us then there would no more be any hope of escape from the old bad ways of making war, as a mere game of diplomacy, and we should have no power to protest or any hope in working for a better security in openness and good-will. If by some desperate need we were driven for a time to resort to some measure of compulsion, it ought to be in measure and duration prescribed as a dangerous medicine, and not, as is the custom of certain physicians to prescribe alcohol, as if the greater and more frequent the dose the better, till it comes to be regarded as the only support of the constitution it is undermining. Compulsion is alcohol, possibly a fiUip to help round a hard corner, but dangerous even for that. The question concerns nothing less than the whole conception of the state as the servant or the master of the individual. The Germans complain that we describe their attitude as mihtarism because we do not realise their conception of service to the state; and, apart from the necessities of ii] MILITARY 85 self-defence, they cherish compulsory military ser- vice as the supreme instrument for teaching the individual that he is just the servant of the state. Thus the system permeates the whole civil order, which is precisely why we call it militarism. It subjects men to a class to whom it gives a power impossible for human nature not to abuse, creates a mihtary spirit in the rulers and destroys the check of the judgment of the people at large. Thus it would cloud the rising hope of establishing peace on the natural good-will of mankind, unexposed to the jealousies of ofEcial persons. But the still deeper hindrance to the hope of peace lies in the whole conception of the state that is fostered where the system is cherished as a good, the whole denial ' of the principles of individual good upon which a reign of peace could be based, the denial of the subjection of the state to the religious value of man as man. By might against might the evil spirit cannot be exorcised. Only by faith in the moral forces and determination to stand or fall with them, can we hope to succeed. By our attitude on that question, by the material risks we are prepared to run for the spiritual good, the real proof of whether we walk by faith or by sight wiU appear. CHAPTER III POLITICAL Victories won by former struggles often maintain themselves in quiet times largely by force of custom and accepted arrangements. But, after a great war like this, we shall only be able to maintain our position, if we are prepared to defend our gains actively and on principle and with greater complete- ness. We shall not remain where we are, but must gain if we are not to lose. Socially we shall lose if the fight for freedom and justice abroad does not call out a much higher devotion to them at home ; and in respect of the securities of peace we shall lose unless in resisting the might of alien mihtarism we establish better our own security on the moral grounds of righteousness and good-will; but in politics still more certainly we must advance if we are not to lose most of what we have gained. The mere hazard of a more extended military organisation should rouse us to perceive the gravity of the danger. With compulsory military service eflEective control over our foreign aflfairs, even the control of our subsequent disapproval would pass from our hands. And, with that loss, our liberties at home would be in grave peril. CH. Ill] POLITICAL 87 In addition to that special danger, the necessary restriction of civil liberties and the need to accept some measure of military dictatorship, the rein- forcing, through military prestige, of privilege and reaction, and the exhaustion of a long, costly and weary struggle are aU dangers to the present securities for our freedom. Only if new securities are established upon the loyalty and self-sacrifice of all classes of the community, only if a new spirit of freedom spring out of the common sacrifice for the nation, can we retain even our old freedom. Yet, if it is thus more individually and less materially founded, it must necessarily be higher and wider than now. In short we cannot make a large sacrifice in any cause without gain or loss. More than we have yet discerned, the present war springs from two opposing ideas of the state. The ordinary citizen realises the diflPerence most practically in the pohceman. The student in Germany is a privileged person, but to call a pohceman " Polieb " may aflford him a sojourn in the university "career." The student in Britain is not a privileged person, but he may address the representative of the law as " Bobby " and not even provoke a frown. In Germany the majesty of the state is insulted in its humblest repre- sentative; in Britain it cannot be insulted in its greatest. A pohceman directing the citizen on his own way might be the symbol or blazon of the one 88 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. conception of the state and a policeman directing him out of the way of his rulers of the other. Our own idea is seldom recognised and stiU more rarely approved. It provokes references to ancient ideals among those who in their youthful days have heard of them, and calls forth denunciation of our uncontrolled thought and action and affords scope for eloquence on the noble austerity of the days when the state was everything and the indi- vidual nothing. Few dream that our conception is one of man's greatest achievements and that to make it a reality is the surest test of his progress. It demands that the state deny itself, but so far is the state from being undone thereby, that, only then, can its order be established on a higher ground than force, even upon duties and the rights which depend on them. As soon as the state becomes the worthy master of the policeman who is the chart of the erring and stay of the nervous, having as its first object of regard the rights of persons merely as persons, with room for free organisations and large tolerance for individual peculiarities, it derives a new security by ceasing to be an artificial and becoming a natural system, based upon human nature. The independent habits of mind of a wandering people may have helped us towards this ideal, but the two main historical sources of this conception of the state and the individual are two forces which are not in high repute at this moment — religious Ill] POLITICAL 89 conflict and " Kultur." The religious struggle has taught us that tolerance is no weakness to a state. It has also created that voice known as the Non- conformist conscience, which, though it may screech occasionally and be confused and at times confusing, tries not to echo the mere national judgment, but would at least bring the national action to the test of the rights of individuals. Above all it has helped the growth of a nonconforming conscience which is the property of no sect, but which em- bodies the protest of all serious members of the state against mere selfish state action. Behind that lies an estimate of man which is none the less a rehgious estimate that we do not dwell on its religious origin — the sense that before the law everyone is simply a man. In consequence we are never without some protest when the state manifestly behaves selfishly not only at home but also abroad. Germany in this matter began before us. No greater presentation of the individual with his rights established upon his duties was ever made than by Luther ; and in his courageous sense that, when God spoke, popes and Kaisers mattered nothing, we must find the first impulse to our achievement. But Germany herself followed Melanchthon, not Luther, or only Luther when least loyal to his vision and his faith, and instead of developing church and state through this moral individual, on division arising, she found no resort save "to call in the police," 90 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. and ended with a subordination of the church to the state and thereby of the individual to the state in a way without parallel in Western Europe. The result is that Germany has scarcely ever had, at any crisis in her affairs, any shadow of an Amos to Hft up his voice in a country which has become merely "the king's sanctuary." Instead, we have the spectacle of theologians, like Wernle and Bousset, who would amend Christian Ethics to canonise Bismarck, or, like Hermann, who in the midst of a book of austere eloquence on the absolute subjection of the individual to the moral imperative, denies with vehemence that the state, which he describes as a naturliche Grosse, is subject to any ethical demands, and who affirms that the statesman who would apply to the state the same rules as he is bound to apply to himself would justly be regarded as a traitor. The other influence is " Kultur," which means that independence of the individual in face of natural forces and tradition which is acquired by increase of knowledge and emancipation of conscience. Germany again produced the movement's most authentic voice. The "all-pulverising" Kant, with his doctrines of the autonomy of conscience, of a good will as the sole absolute good, of the moral person as an end in himself, never for any purpose to be made a mere means, embodied its intellectual and still more its moral ideal. For such a con- ception of life the state is necessarily subordinate to ni] POLITICAL 91 the moral individual and could not be right except by paying heed to his independent moral judgment. Not only does that principle alone rightly con- stitute the state, it alone can embrace all states in the higher conception of the kingdom of God and afford any natural basis for peace. Germany, however, followed Hegel with his doctrine of the individual as the mere organ of the Absolute and necessarily subject to the state which is the Absolute's final organ. At the time that philosophy was called the Prussian State- Philosophy, and its antique conception of the state as the one object with ultimate rights remains the Prussian ideal to this day. It is idealism — ^let us not mistake about that — lofty, inspiring idealism. Men do not sacrifice, as the Germans have done, for Nietzscheisms. But it is myopic idealism which has lost the individual in the crowd and which worships the state without seeing that it too can only be ennobled by serving. Only ignorance can afford to mock at German culture. The man who has no debt to it to-day has no great intellectual debt to anybody. The contribution of no other nation is quite so great, and that let us ever gratefully acknowledge. But, it does appear that we have one more example, of which history provides many, of one race producing an idea and leaving it to other races to put into practice, even as Buddhism did not work in India or Christianity in Judea. Whether the cause is 92 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. due to the type of the German mind oi the exacting geographical position, it would be rash to decide; but it is a noteworthy fact that thus in reUgion and in philosophy Germany has produced an idea of amazing creative value and then proceeded herself to apply the opposite. In consequence we have a war to-day which, so far at least as France and Britain are concerned, is a conflict of the idea of the state as the first servant of its subjects with the state as their master with absolute rights which it accords to none save itself. The disregard of the rights of other peoples, so contrary to all our conceptions of the German character, is after aU only a logical deduction from the absolute superiority of the state over the rights of its own subjects. This appears in another fact even more amazing. The absolute certainty of success which animated aU Germany lay not merely in the enormous and effective military preparation, but in the belief that the German idea of the state could offer up larger holocausts of the lives of her own subjects than the French or British idea of the state could possibly contemplate. When that calculation was made, only one point was overlooked. It was true that for mere military purposes our state idea could not contemplate such a plan of campaign as Germany deliberately made; and therein Hes the security given by France and Britain for keeping the peace. They may not so use the individual in] POLITICAL 93 as a mere means for national aggrandisement. Yet the ideal, not being the outcome of slack- ness, but the result of a great moral victory, not having debased the nation but only set it on its natural foundations, when challenged in its very existence, at once produced a might of personal sacrifice which showed it was for each individual a spiritual, even a reHgious possession. This conception of the state is still struggling for existence against the aristocratic and military systems of both nations, but it is there, as a vital reality, inspiring the rank and file of both nations, and we ought to feel that in it we have a rehgion to propagate, like the liberty, equality and fraternity of the French Revolution, and that our attitude to the German people, with whom we should more and more directly have to do, should be, as the attitude of the Revolution, "Why our brethren will you not accept our dehverance?" It is a revolution we oflEer and the victory will be measured by the extent to which we can begin it among our enemies and not endanger it among ourselves. The policy which is to follow the war wiU, therefore, approve itself according as it is directed towards the de- velopment of that security for peace. It ought to be a policy which never forgets that the repression of a really free conception of the state in Germany has been due above all other causes to her long, weak frontier and her position with powerful enemies on both sides, and which sees 94 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. m that nothing could give a new lease to the old aggressive state ideal and crush the forces of freedom and re-establish the bureaucracy like a victory which humiliated and dismembered. Our mistake aU along has been to think too much about the German rulers, too much even about the German military, and too little about the thoughts of the decent, peace-loving German, the nearest of kin in spirit as well as blood to us English-speaking peoples of all the races of mankind, the people who ought to be the first to join with us in a federation of peace: and nothing we ever do in peace or war should be of a kind to ecKpse that hope or lead us to imagine that without it we can have a peace which is not itself war. But we cannot succeed except by applying in our relations to other states the idea of the state we seek to cherish at home, the conception of the state which derives its true value from its service of the individual. Then we shall see, beyond the mass we call a nation, the people with whom we have the great common cause of our humanity, with whom we can truly establish relations of peace, with whom, in short, we can set up the kingdom of God, which is righteousness and peace and joy in our common spiritual possessions. CHAPTER IV INTERNATIONAL The only wars which have been sternly de- nounced as contrary to the will of God, almost the only wars against which the doctrine of non- resistance has ever been invoked by the churches, have been civil wars. On the other hand, for no wars has religion more frequently provided the dominant motive. Religion, in that case, has held that there are no rulers a people have a right to call to account more than their own, and that to make existence worth defending is more our duty even than to defend it. The essence of revolution is to remove from the rulers to the people the right to say, L'Etat c'est mot ; and that is never effectively forwarded without the religious sense that in God's judgment privilege is responsibility. The Puritan revolution said this with more devoutness and, therefore, in many ways more effectively than the Deist revolution, but the latter also, after its own fashion, represented a religion. Both at least set up a conception of the state which can only be maintained on the religious judgment of the individual which unites his duties and his rights. 96 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. The freedom and progress which have ensued within the state we have long recognised. What we have not yet discerned are the international possi- bilities of our idea of the state with its religious foundation. This war has already shaken most of the poor international safeguards of peace we have hitherto possessed. The suspicions of statesmen wiU be increased, and the hostility of the peoples. No settlement could be devised which will not leave in some nation the sense that it can recover its position only by a new war, and there may not be even the wish to escape such an issue, when the victor, as well as the vanquished, is exhausted and sore. The settlement may, therefore, be such as to disturb even our present agreements, and the embers of so great a conflagration will be in danger of breaking out again into flames. The mihtary influences in the states will be reinforced and be less patient of the civil powers, while the civil powers themselves wiU have masses of men, already veterans, to use for their ends and be less careful of peaceful solutions. Unless, therefore, we can obtain new safeguards, the old will be far from sufficing. Already they had largely degenerated into custom and accepted arrangement ; and we shall find that they will now need principle and purpose and active loyalty, based upon a clear conviction of what the state ought to be. The most obvious gain that could come out of the war, would be a revolutionised Germany, a iv] INTERNATIONAL 97 Germany with her whole idea of the state passed through the fire, a Germany with the ideal of the state renovated by subordination to the individual with his rights as well as his duties and so based upon the fiat of nature and not the arbitrary decrees of rulers. We should then have a federa- tion of the western nations, not by alliances, which are as much threats as securities, but by a great unifying idea, an idea which would raise poHtics to the level of science and art as a uniting force and even make it an ally of what religion ought to be. With her thoroughness in applying ideas, Germany might even become our true leader and guarantee peace by more successful means than her present prescription of being ready for war has proved. Then and then only, we should have an effective bulwark of civilisation. But we cannot hope to commend the medicine of revolution to our enemy, except we can show our approval of it for ourselves. Evolution always means revolution, and if this trial is not revo- lutionary for our society and for our government, it will only reinforce privilege and reaction, for revolutionary in some way it will be, for evil if not for good. The most obvious necessity is the extension of the revolutionary idea of the state to foreign politics, in which hitherto it has been treated merely as a dangerous intruder. All foreign politics have been conducted on the German idea of the state, o. 7 98 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. with the result of excluding the only conception which has the natural dynamic able to create a wider association of nations for a peace established in righteousness. The immediate duty for the people who now discover how much they are involved, is to obtain a control of their foreign pohcy adequate to their responsibility. Nominally the ministers who manage it are our representatives and, so long as we can refuse to back their policy with our lives, we have a guarantee that they will not too grossly offend our sense of right. But the chief use of their power as our representatives is to keep us in the dark, while we are involved in obligations, of which in many cases our disapproval could have been counted on, and, when the grounds for secrecy are declared, they are never adequate, especially as none were in the dark except those who, being finally responsible, had the right to know. When we do know, our native land and all its interests are so involved that we cannot hold back. But it is not right for a free people thus to be driven by its loyalty. Our policy may still be better than the German, but it is not really more independent or better guaranteed by our own knowledge and insight against the pre- possessions of individuals. The method is defended on the ground that secrecy is necessary and statesmen alone capable of judging. But history does not seem to support either contention. IV] INTERNATIONAL 99 The frequency with which the devices of states- men have issued in the opposite of their intention almost exceeds the reasonable chances of a lottery and seems to indicate a positive bias towards illusion. From the days when Isaiah reminded them that God too is wise, they have tried to play providence in the world, and with disastrous results. Not taking anyone to be wise but themselves, they have not believed in simple truth and straight- forwardness — the only wisdom any short-sighted mortal ever is capable of in any situation in this perplexing and uncertain world. One illuminating instance will suffice, and it is given because it is an example we might repeat. At the council of Vienna, which settled Europe after the Napoleonic war, the dominating influence was the secret diplomacy of Metternich. Already he detected the danger for Austria of the growing power of Prussia. He devised for weakening her a scattered territory and a long and weak frontier, with as unnatural a combination of peoples as possible. The immediate result was to force Prussia, even in her exhausted state, to maintain the military system which had been invented to cope with the oppression of Napoleon, to make the country tolerant, as never before, of the ascendency of the miHtary, and to subject aU the abundant movements of the time towards greater political freedom to the necessities of bare existence. At the same time Prussia, having the longest, weakest, 7—2 100 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. most wide-spreading frontier was forced to use such opportunities as arose of filling in the gaps and so developed the love of annexation which has enabled her to play the leading role in a united Germany in so aggressive a fashion. All merely political guarantees, all manipulation of territory, all imposition of indemnities, all con- ditions about armies, such as the utmost military success could enforce and the utmost political skill devise, may still go as far astray from their object and accomplish its exact opposite. Better than all such guarantees would be a frank open policy with no secrets to guard, no bye-ends to serve, with aU its cards on the table, demanding only justice and seeking, as its first guarantee, mutual understanding and good-will. In short, the first step towards a securer ground for peace is to change for ever the old definition of an ambassador as, "one who lies abroad for the benefit of his country," and to realise that no country, any more than an individual, can gain by wandering in crooked ways. If we have understandings with other nations let us commit ourselves openly to what they involve, and then, even if they are undertakings to support each other in war, every- body will know where they are, and be much more likely to keep the peace. But, with occasion given for every one to say "A conspiracy," we begin "to fear their fear" and in our panic to fly blindly at each other's throats. A great nation like this can iv] INTERNATIONAL loi have nothing to lose by saying openly what we judge to be right and how we mean to maintain it. and our whole trust in the devices of diplomacy and the whole business of secret conclave partakes of the rather disreputable belief that a good cause is not so safe a road to success as an unscrupulous lawyer. The work of the statesman as a guarantee of peace would necessarily be wiser and more effective by this openness, partly, because he would not then be so apt to imagine himself wiser than any man can be, and, partly, because secrecy breeds distrust and frankness confidence. But the real gain would lie beyond the work of politicians. The peoples who never have any real enmities, who shoot one another, not because they see cause to, but because they are ordered, would then be in a position to treat directly with each other and give scope to their natural sympathies and common sense of justice. In that direction primarily, and not in any guarantees exacted by statesmen at the point of the sword, the hope of a settled peace among the nations, which shall not be bristUng with armaments, ought to be sought. And it can only be sought after we have told our diplomatists quite definitely that we have no manner of use for underground workings. An equal and an equitable judgment are very far from being identical, and we are very far from admitting that the poHticians on both sides are 102 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. equally to blame for the war. But, even if they are as far apart in guilt as right and wrong can make them, they have been equally unsuccessful. The result is a war, as our own Foreign Secretary pointed out, from which no country engaged could by any chance gain enough to compensate its loss. A civilisation linked by ties of intercourse, friend- ship, knowledge and mutual benefit, in a way the world has never seen before, has been divided against itself; with the people most akin to us in race, religion and temper we are at bitter enmity; men with no right knowledge of any cause of hostility between them are destroying each other by millions; even the rulers give so confused an account of their reasons as to leave room for the impression that the strongest reason has been blind panic. Seeing that a responsible task is not dis- charged merely by not doing wrong, even after we have acquitted our politicians of the guilt of making the war, we are still required to ask, whether they understood the whole situation, resisted in the best way the forces that made for war, and called to their aid all the forces that made for peace. Above all we have to ask whether, besides this political way, there is nothing better. So much is at stake for us all that we ought to leave no stone unturned in our search for every possible security for good-will and friendly relations, so that, if fight we must, it should only be after we have all clearly decided the issues, measured the calamity we invoke in all its iv] INTERNATIONAL 103 extent, and exhausted every other way of deter- mining the right. For that purpose the whole weight and wisdom of the nation is required. Alternatives to war at present seem cloud phantasies to persons who pride themselves on their common-sense. Where now, they ask, are your Hague Conventions, Peace Congresses, Courts of Arbitration ? The state alone has armies and armies alone can enforce, and force alone can be the High Court of Appeal. Suppose that true, the fact would remain that the quantity of lead by which we can give weight to our judgment in no way adds to its worth, and that some saner way of approving it is desperately wanted. How the want is to be suppHed we may not see, but we ought not to profess to measure the resources of the universe. And surely such a vacuum nature must abhor. Wherefore, we have stiU the right to see visions and dream dreams of one ever enlarging brotherhood of nations to be an ever stronger guarantee of peace, because when we dream them in the right way they come true. The common-sense which rejects them has, as its real name, routine. Through it, we love ourselves and all our ways indiscriminately, because, like Cupid, routine is blind. To parcel out this life with its measureless possibilities into neat little practi- calities all shut in with clipped hedges of accepted opinion, is the least practical and most obtuse of all ways of cultivating our inheritance. When our 104 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. young people especially do not see visions our state is perilous, even though there be not a cloud on our horizon. But in a day like this of blood and fire and vapour and smoke, even our old men should dream dreams, because when our customary life is all unsettled, our boasted civilisation the sport of fate, and all our seemingly solid world heaving beneath our feet, if we cannot see a new world to seek, we cannot continue to live in the old. And just at such times new worlds are born, because the routine which made us live so blindly in the old is scattered to the winds. Then we can forward almost any ideal we can conceive and use almost any power in which we have faith. Only the prophet who sees the lion lying down with the lamb and the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ is quite adequate to the situation. The duller people say, Let us wait for times of quiet and leisure, and that means. Let us wait to cast our image till the metal has ceased to be hot and turbulent and can be handled safely and circumspectly. Here lies the primary inadequacy of politicians for a time like this. They are seldom prophets. Their damnation, as a friend says, is their disbelief in Utopias, for the spiritual forces will only work in the hands of those who believe in them. Lack of faith in life's possi- bilities is the only deadly illusion about the world. The disillusioned are merely suffering from the illusion of their own narrow minds, as when an IV] INTERNATIONAL 105 image is turned upside down by passing the rays from the object through a pinhole. The form of this wider organisation may be in the womb of the future and altogether different from our imaginings. But the life of every great birth of time is so felt and nourished without being known. We may even live for it as a mother Hves for her unborn child who remains for her a life and a hope and no more. If we know the direction of our endeavour, we do not need to know the form of its reaUsation. Who, for example, ever laboured to realise a modern university with a foresight of the reality ? When each handful of teachers in a college taught all learning, who conceived the colleges en- larged enormously in scope, yet parts only of a far vaster organisation of knowledge ? No one conceived it, but everyone who saw a little beyond the life of his college and stretched out his hand to fellow- workers and welcomed co-operation and did not limit knowledge to what he knew, in short, every- one who had a hospitable soul, helped to rear the university. Even so the state came into existence. The form of it, though, now that it is reahsed, it may seem to many as final and unalterable as the Rule of Three, was never predicted till it arrived, but everyone who saw a better way of treating his neighbour than the mere subjection of the con- quered, helped to found it and so to make the work of war the security of peace. io6 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. In the same way everyone who seeks behind war the grounds of reconcihation, who opposes the disposal of peoples by poHtical decree apart from choice and natural affinity, who champions personal right against official wrong, who insists that the republic of politics should not lag so far behind the republic of letters, or better stiU of humanity, is helping to forward that larger organisation of peace, the form of which we cannot discern, but the direction of whose working we clearly know. Were there nothing more than hope, therefore, we should live for it. But already there is more than hope ; there is some embodiment of it. Something beyond the state has come into existence. A prin- ciple of wider application is at work among us. Have even Hague Conventions been so hope- lessly futile? Some still regard its decrees, and those who disregard them know better what they are doing, and the world knows. Every offence does something to forfeit the good-wiU of a world which may be neutral, but the bias of whose neu- trahty may determine the difference in our other- wise evenly balanced struggle. And conventions may not be the final way. Already in our present alliance something greater is adumbrating itself, for what are we doing in this war, if not attempting to pohce Europe by a wider organisation than the nation? The Allies, as far as they are serving a common cause, are attempting to say to the nations, Ye shall not accumulate arms IV] INTERNATIONAL 107 and seek empire at the expense of your neighbours and override smaller nationalities and generally be- come a menace in the earth. And what is our right to ask for the sympathy of the civilised world and why has it been so liberally given, if not that this procedure marks another stage of human progress ? And alliances also may not be the final way. They are themselves too much of a threat to be the right means of keeping the peace. They lead men to say, " Syria is confederate with Ephraim," and to reply "'A conspiracy' concerning all whereof this people shall say 'A conspiracy,'" and then we all "fear their fear and are in dread thereof." Had this combination had no engineering of statecraft, no offensive and defensive alliances, no secret under- standings about armies ; had it sprung simply from the good intent of the nations involved and only had moral conditions ; in short had it been a natural growth and not merely an artificial manu- facture, its prime mover might with better reason have remained entitled to go down to posterity as the Peace-maker. But a state alliance based on military calculations and involving conditions un- certain yet hostile and menacing so far as they were known, was too near a mere extension of the German idea of the state to be an effective way of replacing it. Military camp against military camp was involved and the inevitable trial of strength was the natural issue. Of some avail for the immediate distress and a prophecy of a better io8 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. way in the future that alliance may still be, but the better way itself it has not proved. The prejudice which blinds us to the real issue lies in the conception of the state. When we imagine a wider organisation of humanity, we imagine simply a larger state of the Germanic type ; and when we ask how it can command peace, we think of greater combinations of military force. The logical issue is the Kaiser's : An all-triumphant Germany is the guarantee of European peace. And the all-triumphant Allies might be as poor a substitute for war. What we require is manifestly an organisation different at once in principle and in working. A foreshadowing of it appears more plainly in the British Empire than in the Alliance, and pre- cisely because no word could more inappropriately describe its real bond than " empire." Empire is reminiscent of subjugation by arms and union by legal force. The reality has its glory in the very absence of these vastly over-valued ties. Its mere loyalty is a bond as much excelling in effective- ness as in graciousness. The legal ties themselves have become more symbols than realities, if indeed symbols are not the most sacred and deep realities. Who could have predicted such a loose but operative league of peace in which the whole national idea disappears in an amazing agglomeration of races, tongues, religions? The state idea in it is also entirely transformed and its method of force never iv] INTERNATIONAL 109 invoked. It lives and works by something of the heart mainly, efficacious without either soldier or policeman, something which is rather a church than a state. Yet precisely this life in the spirit rather than the body makes it capable of extension not only to many other states, but to many other empires. In that form it has guaranteed our unity and harmony and succoured us in the time of our need, as no might of Prussian autocracy could have done, having in a few years overcome differences of race and speech and buried the bitter memories of a war begotten of evil influences and turned the very generation which fought against us into our friends and helpers. Contrast with this bond, so weak, if strength be only in rigidity of rule, the Teutonic system which has still to suspect and control by force a generation born under its own flag, of its own speech and kindred. Those things are an allegory, speaking of mightier forces in the world than the might of the heavy hand ; and it is from these forces we should expect deliverance. But the greatest promise of the coming of that higher order lies in the principle of the state itself which we have better illustrated in practice than formulated in theory. The moment we say a work- man in his right is more sacred than a cabinet minister in his dignity, the moment we regard the state as securely settled only on that principle, we have at once exalted the state and subordinated it to something greater, even to humanity. CHAPTER V ECCLESIASTICAL If the hope of a wider organisation of humanity, to guarantee peace in righteousness, freedom and good understanding, be not in a state seeking world empire but in a federation of states which can naturally come together because they have subdued the lust of conquest and use force only to organise rights and duties, do we not rather fore- shadow a church than a state ? We seem at least to be in the line of Rothe's solution of the relation of church and state. Some day, he argued, the church wUl attain its goal in creating a Christian state prepared to do the church's work. To disappear into this state will then be the highest realisation of the church's mission. And, if we could attain a state which, though it fashioned for itself legal forms and even compulsions, yet brought them into operation only by help of the unseen forces of equal rights and common ideals which rest upon the Christian estimate of man as an immortal soul, what further wo\ald be left for the church to accomplish ? CH. v] ECCLESIASTICAL iii But the state, even as perfectly moralised force, would still be neither wide enough, nor deep enough, nor high enough to embody the kingdom of God, and nothing less is the church's task. (i) It is not wide enough. However extended, the state must stiU have frontiers, and these will continue to be in some aspects hostile frontiers, and over them it must necessarily be alien. Unless, therefore, it has within it, neither as its servant nor as its master, but as its inspiration, a body living by a rule which can acknowledge no frontiers because it is bound only by the ultimate human ties of individual insight into truth and the personal service of love, its highest devotion to the cause of peace must always be at the mercy of circum- stances. This church may be small in numbers, but it must, in an active sense of brotherhood to all classes of men and by esteem for the blessings which know no frontiers except humanity, have an efficacious belief that God has made of one blood all nations, and be missionary not only in having missions, but in having a rule to which national boundaries are irrelevant and for which a man may be asked to forsake his nation even as his father and mother, a society in which they are our mother and sister and brother who do the wiU of our Father. If such a society is by accident a national church, that position wiU be irrelevant to a catho- licity which depends not on official or creed, but on truth and love; and that relation to the 112 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. state will also be apt to appear rather a restriction than a succour, rather a cause of confusion of systems which work best to their mutual advantge when not confused. A church must be less satisfied to be merely national in any form, the more fully it recognises not only that its mission is to mankind, but that it can only carry it out by principles that know no ground of appeal save God's image in man merely as man. At this moment our own empire needs nothing so much for its task as this inspiration. Our supreme menace lies in the pride of race, the spirit of dominance and that exploitation of what we regard as inferior peoples which has so often corrupted the victor. We are thereby in danger of trying to establish our position in the world as a standing denial in the face of heaven that privilege ought only to be another name for responsibihty. As the just Powers never have tolerated that denial and never wiU, only as we serve shall we endure. And the spirit that will sustain that service needs a church, a church which is not a state but some- thing founded more widely on the nature of man than any state ever can be. (2) The state is not a deep enough idea. The church can only be this larger inspiration when it is not a state but a fellowship. However much a state may determine its laws by righteousness and rest the enforcement of them on the general moral sense, it remains force; whereas the church v] ECCLESIASTICAL 113 should rest its unity entirely on faith, which means unity by individual insight into truth, and on love, which is the only final bond of nature, and should not even attempt to rest it on force, however perfectly moralised. In that case for the church to be content to be swallowed up in the state is to abandon its own basis, and even to fail to accompHsh its work for the state. The church in Germany to-day for example, seems to be whoUy swallowed up in the state and to be incapable of raising any independent moral issue. It has become a state church as perhaps no other church in Christendom, and if the state has taken over its functions, it cannot be said that humanity at large approves the result. Rothe's view has reappeared as a kind of fallen angel in a sovereign who talks of God's Germany as the Mediaeval Papacy talked of God's Church, and who assumes God's help in the extension of it as if it were the fellowship of the saints. Nor is that an illogical consequence if the principle of the church is so much the principle of the state that a perfect state could replace it. Our divisions in this country have kept us in mind of the possibility of the deeper and more spiritual bond, so that a state church in the German sense is not a possibiHty for us, but we have a long way yet to go before any church, free or established, reahses a fellowship which is not a legal organisation, but which is truly catholic because it is prepared to o. 8 114 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. stand or fall upon an appeal to each man as man, to each man because he is the brother of Christ and capable of seeing in Christ the truth and realising in His cross the service of love. That is the church every nation always needs to maintain in it true righteousness. (3) The state is not a high enough idea. The state must regard itself primarily as the guardian of civilisation and measure itself by its success in guarding the immediate interests of the present life. These need not be merely material or selfish interests and more and more the state ought to seek at least to afford scope for man's higher concerns — social, intellectual and ethical. But, so long as these are only temporal interests, they wiU afford occasions of strife, and there will always be the possibility of a defeat in which these interests will suffer, and it wiU not be certain that they can be secured even by victory. The state will, there- fore, always be in need of a society which can by setting all man's temporal activities in the midst of eternity turn defeat to victory, safeguard victory from being corrupted by pride, turn disasters to civilisation into blessings and secure thereby the imperishable riches which make none poor by another's wealth. Rothe's theory, in the last resort, assumes the progress of civilisation and the realisation of the kingdom of God to be identical, whereas religion and civilisation have been at once antagonistic and v] ECCLESIASTICAL 115 dependent, with their mutual succour largely derived from their antagonism. On the one hand religion and civilisation have the closest relations. All early codes of law, from Hammurabi's onwards are religious — perhaps any code of laws worth anything remains religious ; the inspiration for every great struggle for freedom — perhaps of any national struggle requiring sacrifice — has been religious : while every religious movement is related to its own stage of progress in civilisation and has seldom been independent of a suitable political basis. On the other the antagonism is equally marked. The higher the religion the more likely it is to be despised and persecuted, and religious gain is never welcomed like a new accession of wealth or even a new output of literature, science or art; while the great religious personalities, and not least Jesus, have generally regarded the civilisa- tion of their time with deep pessimism and have often been rightly persuaded that they were com- missioned to announce its overthrow by the finger of God. The task for the religious man is how to be in the world yet not of it ; how to live as a stranger and a pilgrim and yet with the assurance that all things, the world as well as Cephas, things secular as well as sacred are his ; how to have as it has been expressed, a joyous use of the present with a self- denying outlook upon the future. And that diffi- culty extends itself to the church, which has to be a visible institution, yet ought never to be happy 8—2 ii6 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. as a corporation, which has to use all life and serve all life, and yet be supremely a witness to a vision of the eternal which makes the temporal a sub- ordinate interest. That aim can only be followed by maintaining the true relation of the world to God, of the present life to the life eternal. The mere renewal of the sense of God above and eternal life beyond will not sufHce, for we shall not be shown how the world and life are to be conducted — and with the conduct of life, every institution on earth, and the church not least, is concerned. Were one to judge from the occasional prophecies, only the renewal of conce;rn about God above and eternal hfe beyond is expected to be the immediate effect of the war. Having looked desolation and death in the face, men will return to the old view that Life is the season God has given To rise from hell and fly to heaven. Then it seems to be expected that the church, one's own particular church at least, will become a great, impressive, powerful organisation, able without more ado, by its unquestioned splendour, to impress men's minds and dominate their actions. Expressed bluntly it means that the churches will be re- established in their old power to constrain belief and, at least so far as the people's relations to the church are concerned, to control action. Men, it seems to be expected, will come out of this experience with a concern about their souls to v] ECCLESIASTICAL 117 which all intellectual perplexities will be irrelevant and with a habit of military peremptoriness intoler- ant of question. Being resentful of revolutionary teaching and quite closed against it, and accustomed to the sharp word of command and to an austere mode of behaviour, they will need a church settled on unquestioned traditional belief and with a rule as efficient for order as military drill. With that beginning it may then seem possible to hope for the realisation of the vision of one great visible church which has these last few years hovered before the minds of some ecclesiastical persons. How better could we safeguard this gain than by one great corporation, capable of being described, as her servants delight to describe Rome, as a visible state " like the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice," at first perhaps only a Protestant achievement, but ultimately to embrace aU Christendom ? How much the hope is in a state created primarily by organisation appears from the way it has been set about. Without any preliminary task, not only of so high a concern as oneness in truth and charity, but of an approach to decent friendhness and helpfulness, it is to be hammered together by ecclesiastical compromise. The con- fusion of tongues suggested the unhopeful analogy of the Tower of Babel, but this war seems to promise a moment when we shall all speak the same tongue long enough to accomplish the task. Only to a corporation, however, could that be any ii8 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. gain, for it might still do something by its organisa- tion, once it was created, whereas a fellowship naturally ends when we cease to see eye to eye and stand shoulder to shoulder. The forecast, however, may not be wholly beside the mark. Long, destructive, murderous wars which shake men's souls with fear have driven them to such views and created in them the desire for one great, authoritative institution to guarantee their hopes. In weariness of spirit, men are led to think of a God far away above the welter of human existence and to long for a life whoUy beyond the vicissitudes of time, a God and a life they cannot relate at all to their present experience. As they have nothing in themselves whereby to find these objects of their desire, they turn to the church to provide them from the outside. But as a fellowship can only be built on what men are themselves enabled to provide, the church is led to set up as a state established on other-worldliness. On that basis this-worldliness speedily comes into the life of the church as it ever does into the life of the private Christian. This world's business has to be carried on : so, when the fervency which has been kindled by fear dies down, the church either comes to live on the decencies of custom or to stand for a section of life marked off as religious — usually kept well apart from the rest. What austerity and self- discipline remain are applied to conquering the earth, not by meekness but by markets. If that is v] ECCLESIASTICAL 119 to be all our victory, therefore, we shall in a few years be exactly where we were, except that we might be quarrelling under one name instead of several. Even outward peace we should be in no better position to forward either in the church or the world, at home or abroad. What did one such church, when it did exist, do for the peace of Western Europe? It used spiritual claims to achieve worldly greatness. So it became a state with temporal interests like other states which could be attacked and defended by force of arms. Consequently it as often fomented strife as stilled it, and was itself sometimes the aggressor. The more churches are states, the more neces- sarily they foster the jealousies by which they live and remain distinct. And indeed no kind of tribal feehng is more bHnd and virulent. "There is no sentiment," says Merriman, "so artificial as national hatred. In olden days it owed its existence to churchmen. And now an irresponsible press foments that dormant antagonism." When we ask, remembering that no duty is ever done by mere absence of offence, why no church has created any worthy opposition to the irresponsible press, or done anything whatsoever effective to overcome the artificial feeling of national animosity, where are we to seek the reason? In the churches being too Httle states or too much? Is the defect lack of visible authority 120 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. or lack of humility, lack of power to assert herself or lack of power to affirm the rule of God? Were our attempts at international fellowship failures because of what we could not do from lack of power or because of what we ourselves were from lack of sincerity and charity ? In our divisions, at least, the cause could hardly have lain. There was no lack of visible unity on our part and the German church is perhaps the least divided outwardly in Europe. If the churches had been fellowships of persons who sought unity whoUy by common insight into truth and esteemed no service except the service of love, could there have been any church so small as to accomplish nothing ? But starting as states, we started with frontiers difficult to pass. Visible corporations, their greatness measured by finance, buildings, numbers, and their guidance dependent upon official persons who provide external securities for faith and practice, are too like states to be effective means of reaching beyond themselves out to our common humanity in which we find ourselves one and our interests not antagonistic. On both sides were churches which were confessedly national institutions. Perhaps they have been the chief schools of that narrow nationalism which on both sides made mutual understanding impossible. But churches whose gospel had managed to transfer the difficulty about itself from the rich to the poor, which not only welcomed the business man as they v] ECCLESIASTICAL 121 ought, but his merely business habits as they ought not, which tried to live by the multitudinous activities of an institution and not by concern about the faith which works by love as the one thing needful, were also of the nature of states, regarding which it is absurd to say that alliance with the state would be alien in principle or worthless in practice. They also live by animosities which con- stantly stop far short even of the national frontier, and cherish also a specially unprofitable kind of tribal consciousness. For a true religious peace at home the victory would not be any greater, had we merely greater outward unity and success in our present aims, by our present methods, and on our present notions of the religious society. No true success can come till they are radically overturned by the recognition that the church is a fellowship into which no one can enter except by seeing the truth and answering the demands of love, which can, therefore, have no appeal at all except to a mind open to the truth or be served at all except by recognition of the claim of love. Meantime we see where our assumption that the church is a state leads us. We would have adhesion on any terms. We have even had the immoral doctrine : Believe aU, else you will believe nothing, as if men's creeds were all, and the Uving God of truth nothing. Questions of ritual and ceremony — questions Jesus never mentioned, are put on a level with meekness, purity, forgiveness of 8-5 122 THE MORAL ISSUES [ca. enemies, love to God and man — duties every word He said and every deed He did illuminated and enforced. Setting up the cross in the sanctuary was as solemn a business as setting it up in the heart. Being founded on the apostles and prophets by pedigree was more discussed than being founded on them by their faith and works. Such things could only concern adhesion to a worldly institution and could have no relation to a church which was a representative solely of the kingdom which is righteousness and peace and joy in spiritual things. Nor was it better to aim constantly at success, to organise everything except one's own soul, to appeal by every device except simple sincerity, to impress in every way except by the spirit of peace, to translate sacrifice into giving money for bad architecture and worse upholstery or for pauperising spiritually and sometimes materially the poor. It would, therefore, appear that our need is not greater success for our churches on their present basis but, as the first great victory, a complete overhauKng of the basis itself. What we want are churches not set on material but on spiritual success, rivals only in preaching good news to the poor, with the authentic signs of power in giving sight to the blind and raising the dead ; concerned about vital religious issues and not about successions and ceremonies ; recognising that unity is to be sought in a hospitable heart tolerant of differences and alive to kinship of spirit and not in identity of name v] ECCLESIASTICAL 123 or form of government ; encouraging their teachers to seek truth in the spirit of peace and not fritter away their lives in carefulness about matters irrelevant to godKness; trusting in the persuasive- ness of simple sincerity and not in the impressiveness either of ornament or oratory. Could not such churches remove any mountain ? They might even have averted this war both by helping to strengthen the bonds of our common humanity and by teaching mankind a better rivalry than the clash of material forces. Or, if injustice had for a time prevailed, they would have made sure of a spiritual gain worthy of the trial. Through it aU, at the very least, we should have been able to feel that we were on the way towards overcoming war by placing Hfe on a juster competition than the rivalry of brains and money and by the provisioti of a better warfare to absorb war's heroisms and endurance of hardness and superiority to the fear of death. Instead, the churches have themselves entered on the same rivalry and have in that race come perilously near to offering the gospel as mere comfort for the already comfortable. An ecclesiastical victory from this war, some- thing to transform all our churches and make them genuine organs of God's kingdom wherein privilege is entirely responsibility — the last being first and the first last, would be a security for all other victories. For the working man it would mean at once a new might in striving for social justice and a new 124 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. independence of the issue, for it would mean con- tending in God's world for the brother of Christ in whom is the dignity of an immortal soul and whose most common earthly task is concerned with that high issue. He ought to discover that in any church he has a surer instrument to his hand than in the state, for in the last issue the state's method is force, and by that method the poorer always stand to lose. But, if he would put the same energy into insisting that the church shall devote herself to her own task of creating a fellowship of those who see eye to eye and who recognise the service of love, there would be no limit to his hope. And the rich stand in equal need, for the soul destroying hypocrisy of regarding position as merit corrupts and debases life, turning all a man's possessions into his own destruction through luxury, pride and sometimes brutal selfishness. A society embodying that true righteousness would incarnate so high an order and be so great a security for peace and victory in the world, that no one would dream that it should abdicate to the most perfect state or put its work into commission for the state's supremest necessity, or better help in any crisis than by more earnestly doing its own work. Among other tasks it ought to enable all classes to bridge the gulf that separates them and afford a means for all us ordinary people who earn our bread to stretch forth our hands towards all our v] ECCLESIASTICAL 125 fellow-workers in the kindness and mutual helpful- ness which we always manifest when we meet face to face, and reaUse a true Catholicism which thinks no more in armies but which thinks in the experi- ences of individual souls. But that is only possible as churches cease to be states dependent primarily on organisations and organisers, compacted by arrangements and needing to be held together by compromises, states necessarily antagonistic in interest to other states, and become fellowships dependent primarily on seeing eye to eye in truth and standing shoulder to shoulder in love, churches at least concerned about that first and about all else in complete subordination thereto. On no other conditions can they manifest the fellowship which is wide as humanity, deep as truth, high as heaven : and nothing less is equal to our need. CHAPTER VI RELIGIOUS For all our victories it would appear that the essence of success lies in immediately translating privilege into responsibility. The value of the churches for these victories lies in the fact that they ought to stand for that and nothing else. They are not states governed by rank and office and by the subjection of one to another, but they are fellowships, alone effective as the first is last and the last first. Such an order is possible only where there is a common vision of God's purpose in the world and, through that, the valuation of all men as children of God which the Scriptures call love. That again is the spirit of Christ and the power of His cross of service in the world. The extent to which the churches embody that fellow- ship is the only ecclesiastical question of any importance. But that manifestly is of supreme consequence for every victory we ought to try to accomplish in the world, because it will deliver us from the delusion that privilege is merit which is the supreme insincerity with ourselves and the supreme hindrance in any battle we undertake for righteousness. But that means that the final victory cannot even be ecclesiastical. In the last issue it is CH. vi] RELIGIOUS 127 religious. The source of all other attainments is the right worship. What is our highest reverence ? What, in the last ditch of our moral nature, do we believe in? That is the question. This war can hardly fail to restore us to serious- _ ness. Without that nothing can be done in life that is worth doing, and in religion least of all. Facing experience seriously, we may learn how weak man is without God and how poor a possession life is without the life eternal. For a time that may chasten us and repair many defects in ourselves and in our churches which have mainly sprung from a frivolous attitude towards life. But it will not of itself effect a change that will suffice or that will endure. The other question, and the greater question is, whether it will give us sincerity. Will it determine us not to rest on any belief which is less than utter reality or accept any duty as adequate which is not wholly from the heart ? By nothing less can we be delivered from the fuss and fret in organising other people which belongs to the human things that perish and is of weakness while it lasts, and return to the peace of God by which men order their souls aright and find God the meaning of the whole world and eternal Hfe the significance of all our mortal days. That is the victory which overcomes the world, and nothing less will. But that is possible only to the sincerity which can be content with nothing except reality; and 128 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. while seriousness may come from the war of itself sincerity will come from nothing less than an entire change in ourselves, and a change in us means specially a change in our worship. Seriousness by itself may be devoted as much to selfishness as to service, as much to idolatry as to true reverence. What, for example, has commanded among us such high seriousness as making money, except perhaps among a few, the externals of religion! Only the seriousness which will be utterly done with unreality, which will have truth and righteous- ness at all cost, which will rest no blessedness on self-delusion, can be of abiding avail. Otherwise we involve ourselves in a soul-destroying hypocrisy and worship an idol of our own making and deny God who is the only final reality. Thus the matter concerns nothing less than what our whole attitude towards life shows that we worship. The placing of security in gain and selfish good wiU not be changed from idolatry into the right worship merely by being extended into eternity. Reverence not merely of another quantity but of a totally different quality is needed. The god of this world will not be over- thrown by being set up over the next as well. When we have utter sincerity in face of life and death, time and eternity, we must recognise that no man can be blessed in the things that he possesses, or call anything he has his own, or be blessed at all save in a faith in righteousness vi] RELIGIOUS 129 which possesses him and in holding all at the disposal of God in the service of His children. Let this war leave us with the old idolatries and we shall in the end, when the shadow has lifted from our spirits, have gained nothing ; but, if the terrible disasters to the things seen teach us true reverence for the unseen forces of truth and right- eousness, we shall find the price not too great, for we shall have entered on a higher warfare in which we stake everything on God's will being done on earth as in heaven. In that warfare there is no discharge and no age limits. Especially for us who would no more be accepted for our country's battle, yet who have the true responsibiHty for a war younger men are called to fight, this campaign of the soul is imperative. We have been the greatest sinners and, what is sadder, it looks as if we might continue to be. Idolatry, in any case, is more the sin of old age than of youth, and in the last resort, it is the sin by which the world is made a place of carnal strife. Nothing is more appalling at this moment, nothing is more ominous for the future, than the spectacle of middle-aged persons who, while the young are pouring out their lives like water, are discussing markets and using the occasion to get gain. If the war means for us mere masses of men and transactions of armaments and finance, this war will do nothing to touch this idolatry. But will it not be otherwise, if we reaHse the constraints which take 130 THE MORAL ISSUES [ch. vi men out of peaceful callings into the strife, the weary physical training of sedentary persons, the thoughts with which men given to thinking face death, the loneliness of the wounded suffering alone, the empty places and the empty hearts, the lingering agony of dying hope involved in the terrible word "missing," and think of all it means for man's greatness as well as for his weakness, and all it means of humanity and not merely of explosives cast into the scales of destiny. If all that is to count only for a material and not for a moral and spiritual victory, no one of us ought to consent to accept the sacrifice. "And David was then in an hold and the garrison of the Philistines was then in Bethlehem. And David longed, and said. Oh that one would give me water to drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate! And the three mighty men brake though the host of the Philistines, and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem j that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David: nevertheless he would not drink thereof, but poured it out unto the Lord. And he said. Is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their Uvesf" Is not the one question. How shall we pour out unto the Lord this offering of the blood of the men who go in jeopardy of their lives? Cambridge; printed by johh clav, m.a. at the university press BOOKS OF SPECIAL INTEREST IN CONNECTION WITH THE WAR The Origins of the War. Lectures delivered in the Michaehnas Term, 1914. By J. Holland Rose, Litt.D., Reader in Modem History in the University of Cambridge. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 2s 6d net; paper covers, is net. "The subject is treated under separate heads, the threads of European policy being clearly and easUy unravelled. Dr Rose teUs the story of the Anglo-German relations from 1875 to 1888. He then gives an admirable account of the Kaiser's personal share and of Germany's world policy. Thenceforward his story is more particularly concerned with questions of yesterday and to-day — the Bagdad railway and Morocco, the Eastern Question, the crisis and rupture of August 1914. First to last, this pamphlet ranks as history of high quality and temper." — Saturday Review " Of all the booklet and pamphlet hterature which the war has thus far produced, we hazard the opinion that the best is Dr J. Holland Rose's "The Origins of the War." It covers the whole ground .... We have read nothing so lucid and proportionate in its narrative and explanations." — Birmingham Post Belgium in War. A Record of personal experiences. By J. H. Whitbhouse, M.P. With 8 illustrations and an Intro- duction by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Demy 8vo. Paper covers, is net; doth, zs net. "A pamphlet of interesting and striking observations of the state of Antwerp and Belgium generally under the German invasion. It has a few remarkable illustrations, and a short commendatory introduction from the pen of Mr Lloyd George." — Scotsman The Expansion of Russia, 1815-1900. By F. H. Skeine, F.R.Hist.S., of H.M.'s Indian Civil Service (retired). Third edition, revised. Crown 8vo. With 3 maps. 6s net. The Ottoman Empire, 1801-1913. By W. Miller, M.A., Hon. LL.D. ia the National University of Greece. Crown Svo. With 4 maps. 7s 6d net. A History of Modern Europe from the Middle of the Sixteenth Century. By J. E. Morris, D.Litt. Crown Svo. With 7 maps and 7 pedigree tables. 3s 6d net. I [p. T. O. THEOLOGICAL WORKS Forgiveness and Suffering. A Study of Christian Belief. By Douglas White, M.D. Crown 8vo. 3s net. Evolution and the Need of Atonement. By Stewart A. M'DowALL, M.A. Crown 8vo. Second edition, revised and enlarged. 4s 6d net. The Interregnum. Twelve Essays on Religious Doubt. By R. A. P. Hill, B.A., M.D. Crown 8vo. 4s 6d net. The Origin and Propagation of Sin. Being the Hulsean Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge in 1901-2. By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. Second edition. Crown Svo. 3s 6d net. The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin. By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. Demy Svo. gs net. The Concept of Sin. By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. Crown Svo. 4s 6d net. The Bible of To-day. By the Rev. Alban Blakiston, M.A. Large crown Svo. 3s net. "The Son of Man," or Contributions to the study of the thoughts of Jesus. By Edwin A. Abbott, F.B.A. Demy Svo. i6s 6d net. The Fourfold Gospel. By Edwin A. Abbott. Demy Svo. Section I. Introduction. 2s 6d net. Section II. The Beginning. 12s 6d net. Section III. The Proclamation of the New Kingdom. I2S 6d net. The Gospels as Historical Documents. By Vincent Henry Stanton, D.D. Demy Svo. Part I. The early use of the Gospels. 7s 6d net. Part II. The Synoptic Gospels. los net. To be completed in four parts. The Parables of the Gospels in the Light of Modern Criticism. Hulsean Prize Essay, 1912. By L. E. Browne, M.A. Crown Svo. 2s 6d net. The Social Teaching of St Paul. By W. Edward Chadwick, D.D., B.Sc. Crown Svo. 3s 6d. Cambridge University Press C. F. Clay, Manager: Fetter Lane, London 2