It is not strange that men should point to this, perhaps the greatest war of history, as an evidence that Christianity is a failure. If Christianity professed to be able by a miracle to transform human nature at once, such a war would be fatal to its claim. But no such claim can be made for Christianity. It is a great human movement, a phase of the gradual evolution of man, governed by conscience and reason, out of the brute, governed by appet.i.te and pa.s.sion.
Man as he is seen in the world to day is an unfinished product. He is in the making. The best that can be said of a Christian is that he is further along toward the goal of humanity than the barbarian.
Theological doctrines such as the Trinity, the Atonement, and the like are not the essential doctrines of Christianity. The essential doctrine is that life is a struggle for others as well as for self; that in this struggle every one owes a duty to his neighbor, and the stronger he is and the greater the need of his neighbor the more imperative is his duty; that as the father and the mother care for, educate and govern their child until he grows able to care for, educate and govern himself, so always the strong men and women owe the duty of protection, education, and, in some measure, government to the weaker of the human race until they have outgrown the need for it.
In so far as autocracy is the rule of the few for the benefit of the few it is paganism. In so far as democracy is the rule of the many for the benefit of the many it is Christianity. He who believes this will perhaps believe with me that in a true sense this is a religious war, the war of conscience, honor, the moral sense against the rule of the bayonet and the bullet.
The cynic who thinks this war demonstrates the failure of Christianity should not forget such facts as the heroic struggle of Belgium to maintain her neutrality, the resolve of England at every cost to maintain her pledges to Belgium, the Red Cross following the armies in the field and ministering to the sick, the wounded and the suffering, regardless of their nationality, the general kind treatment to prisoners, accentuated by some very horrible exceptions, and all this contrasted with the enslaving, torturing, the crucifying, the flaying alive of prisoners captured in war by barbaric nations before the dawn of Christianity.
LYMAN ABBOTT.
Cornwall-on-Hudson, Sept. 17, 1914.
VIGIL
By HORTENSE FLEXNER.
I have waited with my mothers down the dim, uncertain ages, I have waited in the cave and hut and tower, From the first dawn"s nameless fear To the death-list posted here I have slain my soul in waiting, hour by hour.
Under pelt of beast, trap-taken, or the leaves by chance winds blow, Under tunic, peasant hemp, or cloth of gold, By the fire, in low flame burning, I have crouched in silence, yearning, And as now, my helpless heart has waited cold.
Ancient is the part I play--like a cloak of heavy mourning, I take it, bending, from a million women"s hands.
They have worn it, they have torn it, Agonizing, they have borne it, And its folds are dark with heart-break of all lands.
Oh, the woman figure standing, with the face toward the horizon, Oh, the hand above the eyes to ease the strain!
Gaunt and barren, stricken, lonely, With the empty memories only, We have stood, the dry-eyed sentries of our pain.
Nothing we can do to stop them, nothing we can say to hold them; Taking sunlight, laughter, youth, they swing away, And the things they leave grow strange, House and street and voices change, But the women and the burdened hours stay.
I have waited with my mothers down the dim, uncertain ages, While my children die, I pray the centuries through, And I wonder in my fear At the death-list posted here If G.o.d has left the women waiting, too!
Nietzsche and German Culture
By Abraham Solomon.
_A Letter to The New York Evening Post._
Sir: Those who trace the German militaristic doctrines to Nietzsche"s influence commit Pastor Mander"s sin when he told Mrs. Alving to bar from her library a book which he had never read. Nietzsche was an inveterate enemy of efficiency, astigmatic with regard to practical life, and he never worked out a philosophy in the accepted sense of the term. He was a lyric poet who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain the poetic mood. In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian hymn to life against the melancholy products of German learning and against those Nihilistic snares which he thought lurked in Christian doctrine. There he worked out the mystic idea of "Eternal Recurrence"
and his song of Zarathustra with the bell strokes of noon.
What he knew of history he used for an a.n.a.lysis of values, and not for State polity. He shrank from the irritations of reality, and he had little patience with the national mania cultivated after Sedan, warning his country that their victory was not one of a superior culture, that Germany had no style but a barbaric mixture of many styles; and he pointed out the essential difference between culture and erudition.
His unfinished work, "The Will to Power," was an attempt to house his lyric pa.s.sions in an architectural frame. The facade of the structure, as posthumously revealed to us, is an indication that he was really engaged in building a Tower of Babel. Power, Affirmation, Yea-Saying he considered the attributes of life, and he found in them recompense for his weakness and his lack of capacity for happiness. He was a master of the exquisite nuances of vision, but since he touched real life at the circ.u.mference, and not at the centre, his philosophical valuations are bizarre, and have only a literary value.
It is superficial to make Treitschke and Bernhardi his disciples, as some American writers have made Roosevelt his disciple. Treitschke is a heavy-footed historian who raised the axiom of self-preservation into a philosophy of force. Von Bernhardi"s book, though extreme in its expression, is based on the fundamental truth that if Germany desired a just proportion of oversea territories (a proportion denied her by England) she would have to gain it by force of arms. In the development of this idea he makes many generalizations calculated to dazzle the mult.i.tude and to imbue it with the courage to expansion. Treitschke would have rested in obscurity but for the war; Bernhardi does not pretend to talents as a philosopher.
The real origin of Germany"s policy in the last forty years may be derived from the eminently practical and direct mind of Bismarck. From reading of history he learned that chicane and force had been utilized as the roads to power, of which fact he found ample demonstration in the histories of England and Russia. He proved himself a true adept by using chicane and force to achieve German unity, after the theorists had failed.
Those who glibly condemn a lyric philosopher in order to make out a case against Germany reveal the weakness of their position. It is strange that these lantern-eyed critics haven"t cited Heine as an enemy of democracy because he adored Napoleon. Was it because Heine lived for years in Paris on the adulation of advanced feminines?
ABRAHAM SOLOMON.
New York, Oct. 13, 1914.
Belgium"s Bitter Need
By Sir Gilbert Parker.
_Sir Gilbert Parker, M.P., went to Holland at the request of the American Committee for the Relief of Belgium a week ago to inquire into the work of the committee and the needs of the Belgians._
_Sir Gilbert visited frontier towns and the camps of the refugees for the purpose of making a personal investigation into the conditions. That he is deeply impressed by the desperate need of the Belgians may be gathered from the following graphic statement and appeal, dated Dec. 5, 1914, to the American people:_
Since the beginning of the war the hearts of all humane people have been tortured by the sufferings of Belgium. For myself the martyrdom of Belgium had been a nightmare since the fall of Liege. Whoever or whatever country is to blame for this war, Belgium is innocent. Her hands are free from stain. She has kept the faith. She saw it with the eyes of duty and honor. Her Government is carried on in another land.
Her King is in the trenches. Her army is decimated, but the last decimals fight on.
Her people wander in foreign lands, the highest and lowest looking for work and bread; they cannot look for homes. Those left behind huddle near the ruins of their shattered villages or take refuge in towns which cannot feed their own citizens.
Abyss of Want and Woe.
Many cities and towns have been completely destroyed; others, reduced or shattered, struggle in vain to feed their poor and broken populations.
Stones and ashes mark the places where small communities lived their peaceful lives before the invasion. The Belgian people live now in the abyss of want and woe.
All this I knew in England, but knew it from the reports of others. I did not, could not, know what the dest.i.tution, the desolation of Belgium was, what were the imperative needs of this people, until I got to Holland and to the borders of Belgian territory. Inside that territory I could not pa.s.s because I was a Britisher, but there I could see German soldiers, the Landwehr, keeping guard over what they call their new German province. Belgium a German province!
There at Maastricht I saw fugitives crossing the frontier into Holland with all their worldly goods on their shoulders or in their hands, or with nothing at all, seeking hospitality of a little land which itself feels, though it is neutral, the painful stress and cost of the war.
There, on the frontier, I was standing between Dutch soldiers and German soldiers, so near the Germans that I could almost have touched them, so near three German officers that their conversation as they saluted me reached my ears.
I begin to understand what the sufferings and needs of Belgium are. They are such that the horror of it almost paralyzes expression. I met at Maastricht Belgians, representatives of munic.i.p.alities, who said that they had food for only a fortnight longer. And what was the food they had? No meat, no vegetables, but only one-third of a soldier"s rations of bread for each person per day. At Liege, as I write, there is food for only three days.
What is it the people of Belgium ask for? They ask for bread and salt, no more, and it is not forthcoming. They do not ask for meat; they cannot get it. They have no fires for cooking, and they do not beg for petrol. Money is of little use to them, because there is no food to be bought with money.
Belgium under ordinary circ.u.mstances imports five-sixths of the food she eats. The ordinary channels of sale and purchase are closed. They cannot buy and sell if they would. Representatives of Belgian communities told me at Maastricht yesterday that the crops were taken from their fields--the wheat and potatoes--and were sent into Germany.
No Work, but Taxes Continue.