The War and the Churches | Page 6

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 their principles had been vainly repeated in Europe for fifteen hundred years, and, when the people themselves at last formulated their demands in the early part of the nineteenth century, it is notorious that the clergy opposed them. The teaching of abstract moral principles is of no avail. Man is essentially a casuist. Leave to him the application of your principles, and he will adapt almost any scheme of conduct to them. The moralist who