Bishop Butler wondered whether a whole nation could go mad. Well, a whole civilization can go mad if we set the forces of madness moving. We know that now to our cost. And to save civilization from any such disaster we must have a foothold outside and beyond it. We cannot afford to leave it alone, or to be indifferent to its drift. We must lay strong hands upon it and compel it to take its spiritual temper by our standards, and from out of our reserves. We must impose upon it its true purpose; we must fashion it by the pattern seen in the mount. And for this we must have been up in the mount ourselves. Far away above all the social platitudes about growth and progress, we must have seen for ourselves the vision by which all growth is to be determined, and from which all progress receives its dominant value. Only through the Spirit brooding over the waters can the world take form and substance, so that God can pronounce it very good. Back behind civilization lies civilization’s secret. Back behind man is the divine righteousness into the likeness of which he may be fashioned by the increase of the years. In God, by God, through God, man becomes sufficient to control the work of his hands, and to guide his own advance. The national conduct that is governed by this life’s expediencies and interests is doomed. The civilization that takes power as its inspiration hands itself over to the devil. This earth is never understood as self-sufficient. The salt that keeps her pure is not her own. It is brought to her only through the fire of sacrifice. God, after all, means so much. We must begin with Him or we are lost. We want God. We seek Jesus Christ. For nothing else really counts. We had always heard of this with the hearing of the ear. We had often said it in a formula, and subscribed to it by our signatures. But, in the present moral welter, with all former platitudes gone by the board, we must at all costs say it for ourselves, out of a living heart, in the force of a vital conviction, as men who see the Invisible, and name the unutterable Name.
1. The Christian Church has all the time had in its keeping the truth which can vitalize and give health to the social order. The Christian social ideal is the very antithesis of those rivalries and self-seeking aims which are now bearing their harvest of death. We believe in God the Father. And because God, revealed in Christ, is Father, we know that His purpose is to create a human family, in which men will live with one another as brothers, and no man will “seek his own, but each his neighbour’s good.” We have been taught to think of men united in a body, which has many members and yet is one, so that if one member suffers all the members suffer with it. Rooted deep in our fundamental religious beliefs are those conceptions of human fellowship, of co-operation and mutual helpfulness, of the subordination of the interests of an individual or of a class to the good of the whole community, which are the foundation of social health and the bonds that keep society from disruption. When we trace our present troubles to their roots, we find that what is wrong is that individuals, classes and nations have been more concerned about asserting their rights than about fulfilling their duties. But Christianity plainly teaches that men should attach greater importance to their duties than to their rights; that they should be less concerned with what they can get out of life than with what they can put into it.
2. The abolition of war is an ideal. It is part of that ideal which we call the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is never fully come but is for ever coming. One part of it has come, or nearly so, already—the abolition of slavery. It is our business to work now for the abolition of war. Far off as it may be, it is an ideal which is to be realized.
And we have some encouragement in seeking to realize it. In spite of the disregard of international law in the European War, the nations of the earth do not look upon war as once they did. Wars of conquest, wars arising out of the ambition of princes, wars of religion, have almost or altogether disappeared. And commerce has been a great peacemaker, working through men’s interests, which are apt to be more profound than their principles: for the whole commercial world is in a league against war, though the passions of men also on a sudden impulse not infrequently get the better of their interests. Neither could it be at all true to say that moral considerations are wholly left out of sight in the politics of Europe. It is an old vaunt that no one “can preach immorality without being pelted”; and in a similar vein of reflection it may be observed that a nation cannot publicly defy justice in its dealings with another nation, but sooner or later there will be a retribution, and the world will rise up against it.
Great as have been the atrocities perpetrated in this war, which have caused the civilized world to shudder, greater atrocities were committed in ancient wars and without a shudder or a protest. Dr. Hope Moulton has recalled one example.
“The first century B.C. was one of the most evil centuries in all the history of the world. It was a century of civil war, and its cruelty was utterly unbelievable. I will mention one fact which gets at one’s imagination more vividly than anything else I know. There was one class of slaves in the Roman world who were perhaps more pitiable than any. These were the gladiators, of whom that famous line was written, “Butchered to make a Roman holiday.” They were brave, strong men, trained to the use of arms, and the only reason for their existence was that on great ceremonial days the bloodthirsty populace expected their officials to give them exhibitions of real fighting. Then the gladiators were thrown into the arena, and there they had to fight, not because they hated one another, or had the slightest grievance against one another, but simply because they were slaves, and as slaves they had to fight. As long as the arena ran red with blood, the thirst of the populace was appeased for the time.
At last there came a time when these gladiators revolted. They had a strong right arm. They could fight. Why should they not fight for themselves instead of simply among the savage mob? The only difficulty was to get together. But finally they found a leader, a man of military genius, Spartacus. Presently Italy was in a flame, and the gladiator host was spreading terror everywhere. The Romans were at their very wits’ end. At last they succeeded in defeating these desperate men, and they took six thousand of them captive. What did they do with them? The road from Rome to Capua was one hundred and fifty miles long. Along that road, at intervals of fifty yards or so, they set up crosses, and they crucified these six thousand men along that road. All who travelled from Rome to Capua had to pass down that ghastly avenue. I do not think one could imagine a more typical example of the fury and blood-lust and panic of those days.” [Note: J. H. Moulton, From Egyptian Rubbish-Heaps, 116.]
Even De Quincey with all his pessimism admits that the attitude to war of the nations of the world has been profoundly modified by Christianity. “The nations,” he says, “or at least the great leading nations, are beginning to set their faces against it. War, it is felt, comes under the denunciation of Christianity, by the havoc which it causes amongst those who bear God’s image; of Political Economy, by its destruction of property and human labour; of rational logic, by the, frequent absurdity of its pretexts. The wrong which is put forth as the ostensible ground of the particular war is oftentimes not of a nature to be redressed by war, or is even forgotten in the course of the war; and, secondly, the war prevents another course which might have redressed the wrong —namely, temperate negotiation, or neutral arbitration. These things were always true, and indeed, heretofore, more flagrantly true: but the difference in favour of our own times is that they are now felt to be true. Formerly, the truths were seen, but not felt: they were inoperative truths, lifeless, and unvalued. Now, on the other hand, in England, America, France, societies are rising for making war upon war.”
Sometimes a great reform seems to come suddenly. It was so with the abolition of slavery. It may be so with the abolition of war. Olive Schreiner believes that the extension of the franchise to women will be the death-blow to war. “On that day, when the woman takes her place beside the man in the government and arrangement of external affairs of her race, will also be that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human differences. No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce women into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild the wilful taking of life with any other name than that of murder, whether it be the slaughter of the million or of one by one.”
How will this be? “Not,” she says, “because with the sexual function of maternity necessarily goes in the human creature a deeper moral insight, or a loftier type of social instinct than that which accompanies the paternal. Men have in all ages led as nobly as women in many paths of heroic virtue, and toward the higher social sympathies; in certain ages, being freer and more widely cultured, they have led further and better. Nor will women shrink from war because they lack courage. Earth’s women of every generation have faced suffering and death with an equanimity that no soldier on a battlefield has ever surpassed and few have equalled; and where war has been to preserve life, or land, or freedom, unparasitized and labouring women have in all ages known how to bear an active part, and die.”
It is because she knows the value of human life. “The twenty thousand men prematurely slain on a field of battle, mean, to the women of their race, twenty thousand human creatures to be borne within them for months, given birth to in anguish, fed from their breasts and reared with toil, if the numbers of the tribe and the strength of the nation are to be maintained. The man and the woman alike, who with Isaiah on the hills of Palestine, or the Indian Buddha under his bo-tree, have seen the essential unity of all sentient life; and who therefore see in war but a symptom of that crude disco-ordination of life on earth, not yet at one with itself, which affects humanity in these early stages of its growth; and who are compelled to regard as the ultimate goal of the race, though yet perhaps far distant across the ridges of innumerable coming ages, that harmony between all forms of conscious life, metaphorically prefigured by the ancient Hebrew, when he cried, ‘The wolf shall dwell with the lamb; and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them’—to that individual, whether man or woman, who has reached this standpoint, there is no need for enlightenment from the instincts of the childbearers of society as such; their condemnation of war, rising not so much from the fact that it is a wasteful destruction of human flesh as that it is an indication of the non-existence of that co-ordination,the harmony which is summed up in the cry, ‘My little children, love one another.’ But for the vast bulk of humanity, probably for generations to come, the instinctive antagonism of the human childbearer to reckless destruction of that which she has at so much cost produced, will be necessary to educate the race to any clear conception of the bestiality and insanity of war.” [Note: Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour, 175, 176.]
Write this thought on your hearts, sear it on your brains, let it be etched into your souls, all ye sons of men and daughters of women; for it is easily within the range of practical events, it is within the scope of human power today, now. Police the land and the seas against war for the future; let all peoples combine in the formation of that international police force, and sweep off the face of God’s good world every fortress, every factory for the manufacture of weapons and inventions of slaughter, every arsenal and dockyard where warships are built, and if one stiff-necked nation will not obey the universal law, then give that nation root and branch to the sword of the world’s police, that mankind may not live again through the hell of today. Let a people that will persist in plunging humanity in a welter of blood be wiped out as if they had never been, for such a nation is accursed; mankind will not tolerate one murderer in its midst—why tolerate a whole tribe? The mad, bad old days must not be reborn; translate this saying into every tongue; let it be framed and hung on every wall, for it is worthy of humanity’s acceptation: The time is ripe for a league of the nations for the preservation of the world’s peace. [Note: A. G. Hales, Where Angels Fear to Tread, 67.]
These things shall be: a loftier race
Than e’er the world hath known shall rise,
With flame of freedom in their souls
And light of knowledge in their eyes.
They shall be gentle, brave, and strong
To spill no drop of blood, but dare
All that may plant man’s lordship firm
On earth, and fire, and sea, and air.
Nation with nation, land with land,
Unarmed shall live as comrades free;
In every heart and brain shall throb
The pulse of one fraternity. [Note: J. A. Symonds.]
