The War and the Churches | Page 6

may have doubted the actual occurrence of war, we have
known for years, and have quite complacently commented upon, the
danger that half of Europe would sooner or later be involved in the
horrors of the greatest war in history. Now it is notorious that the
Christian Churches have done little or nothing, in proportion to their
mighty resources and influence, to avert this danger. No collective
action has been taken, and relatively few individuals have used their
influence to moderate or obviate the danger. The supreme head of the
most powerfully organised and most cosmopolitan religious body in the
world, an institution which has its thousands of ministers among each
of the antagonistic peoples--I mean the Church of Rome--gave his
attention to minute questions of doctrine and administration, and
bemoaned repeatedly the evil spirit of our age, but issued not one single
syllable of precise and useful direction to the various national
regiments of his clergy in connection with this terrible impending
danger. The heads or Councils of the various Protestant bodies were

equally remiss. Here and there individual clergymen joined
associations, founded by laymen, which endeavoured to maintain peace
and to secure arbitration upon quarrels, and one Sunday in the year was
set aside by the pulpits for the vague gospel of peace. But in almost all
cases these movements were purely secular in origin, and the few
movements of a religious nature have been obviously founded only to
keep the idealism linked with a particular Church, have had no great
influence, and have been too vague in their principles to have had any
effect upon the growing chances of a European war. There is no doubt
that the Churches have remained almost dumb while Europe was
preparing for its Armageddon.
I speak of the clergy, but in our time the responsibility cannot be
confined to these. Even in the Church of England the laity have now a
considerable influence, and in the other Protestant bodies they have
even more power in the control of policy. No doubt the duty of
initiative and of work in such matters lies mainly with the more
leisured and more official interpreters of the Christian spirit, yet it
would be absurd to restrict the criticism to them. The various Christian
bodies, as a whole, have confronted a very grave and imminent danger
with remarkable indifference, although that danger could become an
actual infliction only by seriously immoral conduct on the part of some
nation. They saw, as we all saw, the vast armies preparing for the fray,
the diplomatists betraying an increasing concern about the relations
between their respective nations, the press embittering those relations,
and a pernicious and provocative literature inflaming public opinion.
We all saw these things, and knew that a war of appalling magnitude
would follow the first infringement of peace. Yet I think it will hardly
be controverted that the Churches made no serious effort to avert that
calamity from Europe. They were deeply concerned about unbelief,
about personal purity, about the cleanness of plays and books and
pictures, even about questions of social reform which a rebellious
democracy forced on them; but they took no initiative and performed
no important service in connection with this terrible danger.
That is the indictment which many bring against Christianity, and we
have now to consider the general defence. I will examine later a

number of religious pronouncements about the war, and will discuss
here only a few general pleas which are put forward as a defence
against the general indictment.
It is, in the first place, urged that the moral and humanitarian teaching
which the Christian Churches never ceased to put before the world
condemned in advance every departure from the paths of justice and
charity; that it was not the fault of Christianity if men refused to listen
to or carry into practice that teaching. But at no period in the history of
morals has it sufficed to lay down general principles. Everybody
perceives to-day, not only that slavery was in itself a crime, but that it
was essentially opposed to the Christian morality. Yet, as no Christian
teacher for many centuries ventured to apply the principle by expressly
denouncing slavery, the institution was taken over from Paganism by
Christian Europe and lasted centuries after the fall of the Roman
Empire. The Church itself had vast numbers of slaves, and later of serfs,
on its immense estates. Leo the Great disdainfully enacted that the
priesthood must not be stained by admitting so "vile" a class to its ranks,
and Gregory the Great had myriads of slaves on the Papal
"patrimonies." So it was with the demand for social reform which
characterised the nineteenth century. To-day Christians claim that their
principles sanctioned and gave weight to those early demands of reform,
yet