The War and the Churches | Page 4

1 II.
CHRISTIANITY AND WAR 25 III. THE APOLOGIES OF THE
CLERGY 48 IV. THE WAR AND THEISM 70 V. THE HUMAN
ALTERNATIVE 95

THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES
CHAPTER I
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCHES
The first question which the unprejudiced inquirer will seek to answer
is: How far were the Churches able to prevent, yet remiss in using their
influence to prevent, the present war? There is, unhappily, in these
matters no such thing as an entirely unprejudiced inquirer. Our
preconceived ideas act like magnets on the material of evidence which
is submitted to us, instinctively selecting what bears in their favour and
declining to receive what they cannot utilise. Nowhere is this more
conspicuous than in the field of religious inquiry, nor is it confined to

either believers or unbelievers. There has been too much mutual abuse,
and too little attention to the fact that the mind no less than the mouth
has its palate, its impulsive selections and rejections. One can meet the
difficulty only by a patient and full examination of the pleas of both
parties to a controversy.
And the first plea which it is material to examine is that, since it is
claimed that all the nations engaged in the war are Christian nations,
one may accuse them collectively of moral failure. From the earliest
days of the Christian religion it was the boast of those who accepted it
that it abolished all distinctions of caste and race. In the little
community which gathered round the cross there was neither bond nor
free, neither Greek nor Roman. This cosmopolitanism was, in fact, a
natural feature of religious movements at the time, and was due not so
much to their intrinsic development as to the political circumstances of
the world in which they spread. All round the eastern and northern
shores of the Mediterranean a great variety of races mingled in every
port and every commercial town, and it was the policy of the powerful
Empire which extended its sway over them all to overrule their national
antagonisms. When, in the earlier period, Jew and Greek and Egyptian
had maintained their separate nationalities, hostility to other races had
been a very natural social quality, an inevitable part of the spirit of
self-preservation in a race. When the great Empires had conquered the
smaller nationalities or the decaying older Empires, this mutual
hostility was moderated, and, as the vast movements of population
which marked the end of the old and the beginning of the new era filled
the Mediterranean cities with extraordinarily mixed crowds, mutual
friendship became the more fitting and more useful social virtue. A
good deal of the old narrow patriotism had been due to the fact that
each nation had its own god. In the new Roman world this theological
exclusivism broke down, and the priests of a particular god, scattered
like their followers among the cities of the eastern world, began to seek
a cosmopolitan rather than a nationalist following. In the temple of
each of the leading gods of the time--Jahveh, Serapis, Mithra, and so
on--people of all races and classes were received on a footing of
equality. The doctrine of the brotherhood of man spread all over that
cosmopolitan world.

When the old world, to the south and east of the Mediterranean, was
blotted out of history, and Europe in turn became a group of conflicting
nationalities, racial hatred was revived and in its political and social
aspects the doctrine of the brotherhood of man was virtually forgotten.
But the Christian Church had embodied that doctrine in its sacred
writing, and was bound to maintain it. In its ambition of a universal
dominion it was the direct successor of the Roman Empire. All the
races of Europe were to meet as brothers under the one God of the new
world and under the direction of his representatives on earth. It was this
change in the features of the world which gave a certain air of
insincerity to the Christian gospel. In the older days there had been
political unity with a great diversity of religions; now there was
religious unity spread over a great diversity of antagonistic political
bodies. Men were brothers from the religious point of view and, only
too frequently, deadly enemies from the political point of view. The
discord was made worse by the feudal system which was adopted. Even
within the same race there was no brotherhood. In effect the clergy as a
body did not insist that the noble was a brother of the serf, and did not
exact fraternal treatment of the serf. Thus the phrase, "the brotherhood
of man," which had been a most prominent and active principle of early
Christianity, became little more than a useless theological thesis.
The solution of the