That which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.
It is so with all things, from a fungus to a giant of the forest, from a stone to a cl.u.s.ter of stars whose light takes 4000 years to reach us.
It is only a question of time when our own sun shall set in impotence and rise again no more. All things are pa.s.sing away, everything is unstable, change is at the heart of all. How solemn, how true the words, whose melancholy haunts the more the memory dwells on them: "this world pa.s.seth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will endureth for ever"! As we said, the one changeless thing, beyond the doom of sun-stars and swarms of worlds, is the will of man n.o.bly submissive to the Great Obedience of the Supreme Law--the Law of Justice and of Truth. That alone can never die.
Let us turn now to the ethical and religious aspect of that which we have seen to be in itself so natural, so inevitable.
In the first place, we conceive that it in no wise interrupts the progress of the individual life. Certainly the conditions under which existence maintains itself in that other state must be far other than those which obtain here, for there man is dest.i.tute of his bodily environment. The conditions of such a life are wholly unpicturable, wholly unimaginable, but not _inconceivable_. These are high matters, like the truths of sublimest philosophy, wherein it is impious to intrude with so inferior a faculty as imagination, and demand that an image or representation of a bodiless existence be presented to it.
What picture does man make for himself of the force of gravitation, nay of the force which drives the crocuses out of the soil in spring? It is enough to _know_ that the force is there; it is enough to know that a man"s body is not his _self_. Surely every one who reflects must be conscious that his body is _his_, just like his clothes; and therefore not _he_, any more than the raiment wherewith he is covered. Foolish, then, is it to ask for pictures like children; let us be satisfied to know with the reason, which we alone of all earth-born creatures possess, that the body is not _we_ but _ours_, and that we are not mere ephemerals, but are "going on and still to be".
Now these words of Tennyson exactly express our ethical teaching, that man is "ever going on and still to be," and that death, so far from putting a stop to the eternal progress, is but a stage, an incident in the journey, possibly--for we know so little of these matters--a very insignificant one. The theory commonly inculcated, certainly commonly held, is that the fact of death ushers in a perfect transformation scene, more wonderful than anything thought of or devised by man, nor should we be accounted irreverent did we describe the language of the book of Revelation as pantomimic in the exuberance of its splendour.
All sorrow is supposed to cease as if by magic, the sun shines perpetually, it is eternal noon; the home of the blessed is a wondrous city, built four-square, whose streets are of pure gold, whose rivers are of crystal, and whose foundations are laid in precious stones.
Sweetest songs of earth resound in the heavenly courts; yea, even musical instruments are there, and life would appear to be one prolonged religious service. Into this celestial blessedness departed souls enter new-born, and take their allotted places once and for ever; they never apparently move from them; they grow no better; there is no room for further development, nor possibility of deterioration, but a fixed and immovable moral status is, to all appearances, arbitrarily imposed upon them for evermore. The impression one gathers is, therefore, of a large and glorified amphitheatre, tiers rising above tiers into infinity, seats along them, each of which is tenanted by an individual elect spirit whose merits are precisely proportioned to its place.
Now that existence prolonged, I will not say into eternity, but into a week is the very reverse of inspiring. Of course, we are aware that Dean Farrar has as effectually explained away the Orientalisms of the Christian heaven as the Paganisms of the orthodox h.e.l.l; we are ready to believe that the Apocalypse--which is held now not to be a Christian book at all, but a Jewish composition, edited and amended by a Christian hand--sets forth only figures and types of the great supernal blessedness. This we know, but our difficulty is not with the form but with the content, that is, with that which these hyperboles symbolise.
It is fairly inconceivable to us that a matter which, according to the Churches, merely concerns the body, soon to be resolved into its component gases, should exercise so miraculous a transformation on the soul, or the real man. _He_ did not die; his body did, and yet they would have us believe that that mere physical occurrence, that catastrophe of flesh and blood, means the subsequent and eternal stagnation of all psychical life; that men either go forthwith into scenes with which ninety out of a hundred would be wholly unfamiliar, or are thrust headlong into a subterraneous locality called Sheol, or the grave in Hebrew, the English equivalent of which is h.e.l.l, the only difference being that, whereas the good can grow no better, the wicked can and do grow worse.
Doubtless, I shall be reminded that these teachings do not occur explicitly in the Thirty-nine Articles, any Church Confession, or a Papal Decree. That may very well be so, as regards them all, but there can be no doubt that the main a.s.sertion is accepted as dogmatically true by all Christian Churches--namely, that a wonderful and searching change does occur at the moment of death, whereby "the time of probation," as it is called, comes to an end, and all possibility of further "merit before G.o.d," or, as we should say, of ethical advancement, relentlessly cut off. To quote a letter of Cardinal Newman"s, written in 1872 to the Rev. W. Probyn-Nevins, and published subsequently by him--in the _Nineteenth Century_ of May, 1893--"The great truth is that death ends our probation, and _settles our state for ever_, that there is no pa.s.sing over the great gulf". Amidst much that is uncertain, for instance, as to whether real devils are in h.e.l.l, a real fire, and whether it be bright or dark, whether the appalling torments are ever mitigated, say on certain feasts of the Christian Church, such as Christmas Day and Easter, or whether eventually the pains ultimately die completely away and thus usher in that "happiness in h.e.l.l" in which Mr. Mivart is, or was, so deeply interested five years ago--amidst all these highly debatable points, Newman p.r.o.nounces one thing certain, that "death ends our probation," that "there is no pa.s.sing over the great gulf".
Now, whence did he learn this strange teaching? How is he dogmatically certain of that one thing, while all the rest is in a haze? From stray texts, such as, "Whether the tree falleth to the north or the south, in whatsoever place it shall fall, there shall it lie"; or, from the parable of wise and foolish virgins, some of whom happened to be asleep, and awoke at the critical hour to find that during the long night-watch for the bridegroom their store of oil had become exhausted?
Surely tropes and parables are a highly insecure foundation whereon to build such a momentous teaching. Certainly, it is gravely questionable whether any direct statement in the Hebrew or Christian writings can be adduced to support the common notion that bodily dissolution is a spiritual reagent, and _ipso facto_ seals the destiny of a spiritual essence. Vast numbers of even Anglicans repudiate the notion in the name of theology and religion. We repudiate it in the name of reason, which was put into us for no other purpose, we know well, than to judge not only the statements Churches put forth, but the sacred doc.u.ments on which they build them. We repudiate the notion in the name of that reason which shows us that the Infinite Mind, whose light and life we share, was millions of years preparing this earth for man"s habitation, aeons of time so fashioning the course of things that a body might be prepared in which that mind which we call soul might energise; aeons of time so ordering the course of events that man should emerge one day from the savagedom and animalism of the past to enter upon the path of a progress which we believe to be endless. I say the reason which demonstrates this to us with a cert.i.tude which not the most intolerant bigotry dares to question to-day, tells us also that it is wholly preposterous that all that is left to man wherein to work out his own individual moral progress is the brief span of threescore years and ten, that after these days "few and evil," the chapter is closed, the book sealed for ever, and the status of man inexorably and unalterably determined.
I frankly avow I would as soon believe the Buddhist _Jataka_ as such a wholly irrational account of the ways of G.o.d with man. Just think of the palaeolithic man, who had no glimmering of moral discernment; think of the cave-men whose skulls we possess in scores, that bear eloquent testimony to their deplorable degradation--think of such creatures dying, and their mental and moral status stereotyped for ever. "Death ends our probation!" A precious revelation this! Where and what are these men now? When Newman visited Greece in the thirties what impressed him, or rather oppressed him, as he stood above the glorious bay of Salamis, over which once rode the hundreds and thousands of galleys and triremes which transported the unnumbered hosts of Xerxes to Greece, was the awful thought that all those million men, including the proud monarch who reviewed them from the spot on which he then stood, were "_still alive_". Alive! And where were they, and what were they doing? I cannot conceive anything more appallingly depressing, nay, maddening, than to believe that all that heavenly orchestration is going on while Xerxes is possibly in an Apocalyptic h.e.l.l, and his hosts either bearing him company or wandering aimlessly about in the same stupid, stolid, unmoral, unspiritual condition in which they were the moment they were engulfed in those blue waters.
Why, Nero fiddling while Rome was burning is a pleasant memory compared with it!
But we have not reached the end yet. "Deep calleth unto deep," and the extreme deductions from the perverse notion that the act of dying is the signal for the infliction of an everlasting mental and moral sterility, finally convince us of the groundlessness of this f.e.c.kless theology. According to these deductions of which I speak, one grievous offence against Divine or ecclesiastical law--such, for instance, as grave scandal or the omission to attend at ma.s.s--is sufficient to condemn a man to eternal reprobation. If it be supposed that death cuts the offender off before he has the opportunity to make confession of his fault or otherwise express his sorrow, we are soberly asked to believe that the horrors of Tartarus are his eternal doom. Surely the mediaeval authorities who formulated this precious teaching must have been bereft of the most elementary notions of ethical law. One act, or a dozen such acts, do not stamp the delinquent as habitually bad, still less as one irredeemably wicked. Habits are only generated by a constant repet.i.tion of corresponding acts, just as good habits are formed with difficulty, and only after persevering and resolute attention on the part of our wills. So, also, an evil disposition is only the outcome of a deliberate surrender of our moral nature to perverse inclinations.
Now, the h.e.l.l dogma implies that the so-called "lost" are so irredeemably depraved as to be incapable of as much as a good thought; they are described in the graphic language of Aquinas and Suarez as "obstinated in evil," "confirmed immutably in malice"; in fact, absolutely diabolised. And all this for missing attendance at ma.s.s on one of the Church"s festivals! "_Paris vaut bien une messe_," said Henri Quatre. It would be well worth attending a ma.s.s to escape such a destiny! "There must be something rotten in the state of Denmark,"
where such horrors go stalking about unreproved. As though infinite justice could be conceivably a.s.sociated with such a transaction as the branding of a man as an eternal criminal, blasting every moral sentiment he ever possessed, arbitrarily reducing him to a condition infinitely beneath the b.e.s.t.i.a.l--and all because he had broken a Church law in neglecting to attend Divine service. Many of us incline to believe that our own punishments, inflicted in the name of law, often tend rather to degrade the prisoner than to improve him. At any rate, not a man in the land but believes that no punishment should be administered except with a view of amending what is amiss in the culprit"s character. But contrast this moral att.i.tude of ours with the method of procedure deliberately ascribed to Deity, and let us ask ourselves whether the G.o.d of some men is not worse than their devil?
No such scruples, apparently, affect that supreme tribunal, but if bodily death by accident overtake the erring man, then, forthwith, and as if by magic, the spiritual in him is rendered fiendish, and henceforth and for ever he is fit for nothing but that genial society and those edifying occupations which are described in the cheerful manuals known as, _A Glimpse of h.e.l.l_, and _h.e.l.l open to Christians_.
Those who witnessed the recent revival of _Hamlet_--a revival which it would appear is destined to be historic--cannot have failed to notice how the great master of song permits himself to express the perverse conception that death is synonymous with everlasting moral stagnation.
Hamlet steals into his murderous uncle"s apartment, sword in hand, but discovering the criminal upon his knees, forbears to strike then, lest somehow his devotions should save him from his doom. No, he will wait until the miserable creature is off his guard, so that death may overtake him at a moment when no prayer or cry for mercy is possible.
As though a momentary act could undo the mischief of years! As though a man is in himself any different after years, of crime because he utters a sudden cry for mercy! And, as though by killing him at an opportune moment, Hamlet could d.a.m.n his soul for ever! And it will be noted, moreover, that the ghost emphasises the treachery of which he has been the victim, in that he was sent into eternity "unhouseled, unaneled," as though momentary acts can make up for years wasted and misspent. As well might one scatter one"s fortune in luxury and riotous living, and resolve to win it all back in a moment, as misuse these glorious powers of mind and will we bear within us, turn them to evil, steep them in iniquity, and then think to suddenly turn and by a single act bend them successfully to the arduous service of the good.
This is stern teaching, but it is the truth; and a mercy would it be, a mercy would it have been for us all in the days of our youth, if instead of the too frequent insistence on the doctrine of the forgiveness of sin, the doctrine of compensation and retribution, as taught by Ralph Waldo Emerson, had been instilled into our hearts. "Ye shall not go forth until ye have paid the last farthing," is the teaching. Dare to break those solemn laws, to pervert these mysterious powers we possess, Amen, Amen, we cannot escape retribution; we cannot go forth until we pay the last farthing.
And this last thought prepares for the statement of our view of the att.i.tude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death.
"Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church.
We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about.
_h.o.m.o liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat_. We do not set about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins about with us, still less do we sleep in them--a gruesome practice which has attracted some fanatical folk. To us, death is a fact, not an effect, an incident as natural as birth, in no wise affecting the real, the spiritual, man. We therefore utterly disavow all sympathy with the groundless a.s.sumption that a magical change comes over the psychical powers of a man at that supreme moment, whereby he can do no more good, but may harden into a more hopeless reprobate. The notion that a judgment of the soul takes place, as in the hall of Osiris, of Egyptian mythology, at the instant of dissolution, whereby the destiny of the individual is sealed for ever, we repudiate in terms. Man is judged, not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate themselves" without the intervention of any external tribunal. And, therefore, the eternal progress of the man in us is maintained uninterruptedly across the gloomy chasm of death, under other circ.u.mstances, no doubt, but still it is the same ceaseless approach towards the Infinite Ideal, the same untiring journey along "the everlasting way". All are in that "way," we may be sure, even those whom we foolishly deem hopelessly reprobate. Something can be made of those failures of men, for
After last returns the first, though a wide compa.s.s round be fetched; What began best can"t end worst, nor what G.o.d once blest prove accurst.
But such men, the Neros, Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in the great human family. _Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram_. "He hath made earth"s peoples to be healed;" they shall redeem _themselves_ one day. The moment of awakening comes sooner or later to all; there is an unextinguished capacity for good under the sores and scars of the most dissolute life, and we may believe that awakening comes when the spirit enters new-born, as it were, into a world where the illusions of the flesh, the deceptions of the sense, obtain no more.
There are no final, irredeemable failures. The Divine in man must emerge one day; its glory pierce through the gloom of his sin and shame, and transfigure him anew after the beautiful and pathetic image of the holy Christ in the legend,[1] whose closing days on earth, they say, were illumined by one supreme wonder--his face calm and blissful, glowing radiant like the glory of a setting sun, his very raiment turned white like the driven snow. A beauteous imagery! But there was no external transfiguration. It was but a type of the radiant purity within; a witness to the "beauty of holiness". It was an emblem of what all may be in some far-off day, when the lowliest amongst us learns to follow the Christs, the blessed company of all elect souls, in the way which begins and ends in the eternal righteousness.
[1] In the same way the Buddha was "transfigured". See Doane"s _Bible Myths_.
X.
THE ETHICAL ASPECT OF WAR.
An idealism such as that which substantially identifies religion with morality, is suitably occupied, as occasion offers, in the discussion of those questions of public interest which have an immediate bearing on the well-being of communities. In this respect it departs markedly from the att.i.tude taken up by those Churches, which afford little or no guidance on such matters, probably because it is felt by priests and prelates that their functions are rather of an ultra-mundane character, and that their most important duty is to prepare humanity for the enjoyment of another life after this unsatisfactory stage has pa.s.sed.
Hence the sharp line of distinction they draw between the Church and the world, the one the kingdom of saints, the other "lying" hopelessly "in wickedness". Hence, again, their distinction of "holy days" and secular days, Sunday being devoted to religious exercises, while the remaining six days are presumably to be occupied in wholly secular enterprise. The distinction affects our very attire. Religious rites being of a totally different character from the duties we accomplish during the week, there is nothing for it but to don "our blacks," to quote the language of a current popular play, and enact subsequently the ceremonial described as the church parade. It is the same feeling which causes the average Englishman to lapse into a sort of funereal solemnity at the very mention of the word religion, or of anything allied to it. The divorce of religion from ordinary life could not be more plainly indicated than by such phenomena as we have noticed.
It is, of course, one of the main objects of our movement to show the falsity of this distinction between the Church and the world, between religion and morality. We submit that it is not the inst.i.tution of the founder of Christianity, but of his later followers. The Church of Christ meant the a.s.semblage of men _as men, as citizens_. The entry thereto was not by the magical washing away of an imaginary birth-sin, but through the natural and beautiful sacrament of human birth. The world is the Church, and the Church is the world, and the "living stones" out of which "the kingdom of heaven" is built here on earth are precisely the stones out of which the civil commonwealth arises. There is nothing secular, nothing profane, but from first to last the life of every man, from the miraculous moment of his conception to the closing of his eyes in bodily death, and beyond death, through the perfecting of him by an ever-increasing approximation to the standard of all moral perfection, everything is religious, sacred, divine. The Church is nothing but an ethical society, co-extensive with the race, and it is for the realisation of this ideal that the ethical movement is working, to show men that religion is morality, is life.
This preamble, then, may serve as a justification for introducing here such a subject as war. The Christian Churches, with one single exception, that of the Quakers, vouchsafe no guidance whatsoever on the moral aspects of this question. On the contrary, they rather suggest that it is a highly moral proceeding, for their ministers pray to their Deity for the success of their country"s arms, and sing their _Te Deums_ over the mangled corpses of the vanquished. An archbishop in Spain offered to guarantee the harmlessness of every American bullet, and unctuous prayers were reported in the newspapers of last spring as emanating from Transatlantic pulpits. Indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what the supreme court of their heaven must be, the perplexities of patron saints and angels, and ultimately of their Deity himself, in face of the immoral mingling of bloodshed and religion which went on during the recent Spanish-American war. But the Churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, see none of the impiety which is so revolting to moral men and women, who to their lasting advantage have emanc.i.p.ated themselves from ecclesiastical guidance. On the contrary, the public in America which looks for moral inspiration to clergymen, is fed upon this sort of doggerel:--
Strike for the Anglo-Saxon!
Strike for the newer day!
O strike for heart and strike for brain, And sweep the _beast_ away.
And let no feeble pity Your sacred arms restrain; This is G.o.d"s mighty moment To make an end of Spain!
It is our purpose to endeavour to make an end of the immoral inspiration behind this profane piffle by speaking out our mind on the subject of war as viewed from the standpoint of ethics.
By war we understand the appeal to _might_ to decide a question of _right_ between two or more civilised peoples, and of war thus defined I say that it is the great surviving infamy[1] of our unmoral past, the persistence in us of animal instincts, of the ape and tiger which should long since have died out. That man, in the childhood of the world, should have decided questions of justice by an appeal to brute force is only what we should expect. The laws of life, which are laws of development, necessarily presuppose the imperfect before the perfect, the animal as a preparation for the human. As Immanuel Kant puts it in a sentence which flashes the light over the whole panorama of existence, "the _cosmic_ evolution of Nature is continued in the _historic_ development of humanity and completed in the _moral_ perfection of the individual". This is the synthesis of the greatest of the masters of modern philosophy. The non-moral cosmos makes way for a process of moral human development, which is consummated in the perfection of each individual man. Here is the _Alpha_ and _Omega_ of all existence.
Now, warfare, or the invocation of might to settle right, was as natural an accompaniment of earlier conditions as theft or cannibalism.
But is it not obvious that with the disappearance of other unmoral ideals of the past, we have a right to expect, and to demand, that the last and crowning infamy of wholesale and systematised manslaughter, called war, should cease also? The humanity which has got rid of slavery in all civilised countries, which has now through England"s instrumentality succeeded in destroying its last strongholds on the Upper Nile, will also ultimately get rid of war. The manhood of the race, which in this country has long since put down the immorality of duelling as a means of settling private differences, will indubitably a.s.sert itself elsewhere to the final overthrow of warfare as a means of deciding public disputes. The great reform is in the air. It is everywhere except in the pulpits of Christendom and the "yellow press"--the jingo journalism of the world. We all experienced the growing sense of the unsuitability of war to our modern ideals during the earlier months of this year while matters were reaching the acute stage between Spain and the United States. The best Press in this country reflected the common sentiment, that the whole proceeding is savage, barbarous, inhuman, and therefore utterly unworthy of rational men. I believe it is this growing horror of legalised carnage which prevented the late President of the United States" ill-judged message leading to any rupture between our two countries. It was felt that Englishmen and Americans deliberately setting about the destruction of each other"s property and taking one another"s lives would amount to a scandal positively unthinkable--a fratricidal horror to be prevented at all and any costs. I am not sure that the same opinion was so universal on the other side, though undoubtedly it existed amongst the best men of the country.
America has at present two difficulties to contend with. First, she is a _young_ nation, and young people are fond of trying experiments.
And, next, they are burdened, perhaps I should say cursed, with the most violent, anti-cosmopolitan Press anywhere existent. A set of fire-eaters appear to control the New York section, of it, and in the judgment of many sober-minded Americans, with some of whom I have myself spoken, the late war was wholly due to their ceaseless, incessant clamour, and that, given a few months" patience, the Cuban people might have by plebiscite been able to settle their own destiny.
The starving peasants concentrated in the towns were the alleged object of the hurry. Long months pa.s.sed before any succour reached them. If they were veritably starving, surely every man of them must have died long before an American army of liberation could have been effectually landed for their relief. The sympathies of this country were not with Spain, for it is by her misrule, her acknowledged misgovernment of her colonists, that all the mischief has been brought about. One regrets to have to say it, but Spain has been strangled in the coils of her own superst.i.tion, and progress for her ceased to be when she elected to live by the light of ideals and principles which are henceforth impossible. It is the frantic endeavour of France and Italy to escape Spain"s doom which explains their incessant strife between Church and State. The enlightened Frenchman or Italian has a horror of sacerdotalism as the beginning of the end, always and everywhere, and as the only religion in those countries is sacerdotal, they are, alas, in their national capacity, bereft of any religious guidance or inspiration. We are, therefore, unable to see anything in Spain"s present position, but the working of the inevitable law of Compensation, which is sovereign over States as over individuals, though there are many of us who believe that the avowed humanitarian objects of the American Government might have been attained by peaceful methods, had not the country been goaded into a fever of restlessness and impatience by that deplorable phenomenon of democratic inst.i.tutions known as the "yellow press".
At all events, the feeling universal in this country in the early spring of this year, showed how far and fast we are travelling along the road which will lead us to the final abandonment of warfare as unworthy of rational men. Doubtless we are in advance of other nations in this respect. But that is only what history leads us to expect. We were the first to free slaves, abandon duelling, reform prisons and criminal law, and erect humanitarianism into a veritable religion. And have we not taught representative inst.i.tutions to the world? We are evidently destined, I believe, to lead the way towards the final surrender of war. We keep no standing army. We shall never again enter on a war of conquest or aggression. Our naval armaments and such military power as we possess are notoriously created and maintained for defensive purposes only. Brigandage and pillage we have most certainly been guilty of in past times, but such a policy could not now survive the day it was mooted. We are in the last trenches, preparatory to finally abandoning the field.
But here it will be urged that there are circ.u.mstances which render war absolutely inevitable, such for instance as an unjust aggression upon the territory we own, or even live upon; an attack on the national honour, or a reckless disregard of rights sanctioned by treaty or international usage. Were arbitration in such cases even admissible, we may conceive the would-be aggressor unwilling to have recourse to it, or possibly to abide by its award. What is a government to do then?
Now, arguments and pleas such as these are valid enough against a proposal of universal disarmament to be compulsorily carried out in six months or a year"s time, but they in no wise, I submit, const.i.tute an inseparable bar to the realisation of "that sweet dream," as Immanuel Kant called it, of a "perpetual peace". The ideal is none the less real because it cannot be at once put into practice; and had we to wait another whole century, it would still be the duty of our movement to stand by Kant and boldly set up the grand conception of an universal peace as the goal for which all that is best among men is inevitably making. Still, I trust that in our enthusiasm for ethic and for the ideal of its master, we have not lost our heads and betaken ourselves to Utopian impracticabilities. No ethical man could think of fixing a limit within which a national disarmament must take place, and the swords of the world beaten into ploughshares, any more than he could name the date at which the millennium is to be introduced. But this implies no insuperable, or rather, no serious, obstacle to our belief that the ideal of universal arbitration, through the medium of a congress of all nations, must in the future, near or distant, be realised, because it is an ideal which is alone worthy of rational men.
And, moreover, the essential rationality of the ideal gives us a right to demand that it should be recognised by all public men, by our legislators who represent us, the Press which aims at reflecting the life and thought of the age, the professors and masters who have the care of our youth, and above all by fathers and mothers to whom tender children are confided, and those men who a.s.sume the responsibility of speaking to their generation in the sacred name of religion.
I say the ideal gives us the right to demand its recognition by men in such positions of responsibility, and implies a corresponding obligation on their part, no less than on our own, to labour seriously for its speedy realisation. We are, every one of us, agreed that war is essentially a cruel, barbarous, horribly vindictive and degrading method of serving the interests of the sublimest thing known to man, namely, justice. Wanton warfare, merely for the sake of fighting or killing, or openly avowed oppression, can scarcely be acknowledged now even by the most cynical of statesmen. The public conscience is become too sensitive for that, so that some question of justice, or the semblance of it, must be invoked in order to justify its unspeakable barbarities. But what an outrage, the deliberate destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent men--men who in their simplicity or ignorance are positively unable to even dimly comprehend why they are being lashed into a blind fury and goaded to the madness of steeping their hands in each other"s blood--what barbarity, what savagery to invoke as the minister, as the vindicator of justice! Let us keep our eyes steadily fixed on this central, essential wickedness of the whole business, that it dares to offer its polluted services in the interests of justice and thereby to profane the holiest thing we know.
Remembering this, therefore, let us ask ourselves what help we get in our endeavours to effect its overthrow from the recognised ministers of religion. Why, it is notorious that what has long been clear to philosophers like Immanuel Kant, and philanthropists among humble laymen, has not yet dawned upon the imagination or touched the consciences of bishops or priests. Popes, themselves, have created military orders, "knights and commanders of Christ and the Cross,"
whose profession it was to destroy life in the name of the most merciful, pitiful man known to us Western people. Popes have led military expeditions, conducted campaigns and crossed swords with the most daring, though the impetuous fisherman, founder of their line, was bidden by Christ to put up his sword into its scabbard, "for all they that take up the sword shall perish by it". Can any man point to one single condemnation of war as immoral, irrational, opposed to the law of their Deity or of Christ, in all the collection of councils, bulls and canonical legislation? And can any man quote to us the charge of an archbishop or bishop in the Anglican Communion or the Greek Communion wherein he has raised his voice against the barbaric survival of war and condemned it in the name of his Saviour Jesus, who spoke of the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the pure in heart, the hungerers and thirsters after righteousness, or, as we say, the ethical enthusiasts, as his followers?
Why, religion, in the hands of bishops and priests, has allowed a trail of blood to be drawn across the path of the ages. I say nothing of religious persecution and the millions who have gone to torture and to doom for erroneous beliefs. I confine myself entirely, to field warfare. During a period of 674 years, from 1141-1815, it is an historical fact that this country and France were at war for no less than 266 years, or considerably more than one-third, and we must remember that up to the Reformation both countries were under the direct guidance, one might almost say the exclusive inspiration, of the Catholic Christianity of the day. But where does history record the act of any religious leaders of those times denouncing war as contrary to the gospel of Christ and of reason alike? We are able to quote numbers of despised heretics who had grasped the truth and emphatically condemned the brutal inst.i.tution. Thus Erasmus: "They who defend war must defend the dispositions which lead to war, and these dispositions are absolutely forbidden by the gospel". Wickliffe, "the morning star of the Reformation in England," thought it "utterly unlawful,"
according to Priestley; and as Southey writes in his _History of Brazil_: "There is but one community of Christians in the world, and that unhappily of all communities one of the smallest, enlightened enough to understand the prohibition of war by the Divine Master in its plain literal and undeniable sense and conscientious enough to obey it, subduing the very instinct of nature to obedience".