In the world as it now is—shot through with sin—progress can be bought only by conflict. And to a materialist the one big-scale form of conflict is war. But war has not proved to be a teacher of idealism. It has indeed brought much good to light, and apparently for the time being checked some kinds of evil.
But in any honest balancing of accounts the evil would surely vastly preponderate. Even setting aside the spiritual and physical misery entailed both on combatants and on non-combatants, and ignoring the huge economic waste, one may doubt if, even where it does seem to have done good, that good is more than partial and transient. For the good that it draws out of one part of a man it draws much evil out of another. For the inspiration it may bring and has brought to some, it has meant a parching of soul to many. And it will be found that, where the effects do seem to be good, one of them is invariably a horror of that which is supposed to have produced them. The men who have come out of the ordeal spiritually ennobled are the first to repudiate the logic of Bernhardi. “If you want to find real pacifists,” said a wounded officer, “go to the army in the trenches.” One knows how many are buoyed up in the performance of a hateful duty by the trust that this is “the war against war.” And, of course, from the standpoint of merely physical effects, it has long since been obvious that war is not the best, but the very worst eugenics.
What then emerges? What is the half truth conveyed in the phrase, “the biological necessity of war “? What is the whole truth of which a fragment is revealed to us by the way in which war has left some men better and nobler? Surely just the truth that, for fallen man, true life must be conflict, but spiritual conflict, the “good fight” of creative faith. For though walking in the flesh, it is not along the lines of the flesh that we make war: “for the weapons of our warfare are not material, but powerful through God for the pulling down of strongholds, casting down [merely human] calculations, and every erection that rears itself against the knowledge of God.”
