Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

V

Jesus, too, they tell us, though greatest of all non-resistants, was also "inconsistent." Was he, then, inconsistent with himself? Or was his pacifism the active pacifism of those who give their lives for just and lasting peace, the peace that is real and not mere devastation, not destruction and tyranny miscalled Kultur; not might triumphant over right and unashamed; but a peace that endures because justice and right have been enthroned?

Jesus closed his public teaching with the doctrine that all religion, all duty to God and man, is summed up in the two commandments: Unreserved, unqualified, unfaltering devotion to the One God of Righteousness and Truth; unselfish devotion to the common weal of man. One who in obedience to this law of love took up the succession of Moses, David and the prophets, raising the standard of God's real sovereignty on earth, and paying to it the last full measure of his own devotion, has not deserved the accusation of inconsistency. Jesus was sublimely consistent. That interpretation of his words which refuses the witness of his heroic deeds to their true meaning is guilty of the inconsistency.

It is true, as Tolstoy finely says, that Jesus' noble depiction in the Sermon on the Mount of the forbearance of God as the standard of the higher righteousness means that we should "never do anything contrary to the law of love." But by what right does the great Russian pacifist (or any other who claims for his theory the authority of Jesus) omit from that law of love its "first and great commandment"? How can we ignore the demand of supreme and unqualified devotion to the God of Righteousness, whose kingdom of righteous peace Jesus gave his life to establish, and limit our obedience to acquiescence in the demands of men, be they righteous or the reverse? The second commandment of the Law of Love is dependent on the first, and in separation from it will assuredly be misconstrued. Equal love of neighbor can be no requirement of religion, save as it depends on the prior obligation of supreme devotion to a common Father, whose forbearing, forgiving love extends equally to all. Imitation of that Father's goodness and forbearance, overcoming the evil of the world with good, is the one teaching, the comprehensive, unifying principle, of the Sermon on the Mount. But the God whose goodness this great discourse sets up as the standard of the righteousness of all "sons and daughters of the Highest" is not a non-resistant God. It is the just and merciful God depicted in those Scriptures wherein Jesus read his beneficent will and purpose for the world.

It is not enough for the Christian merely "to do nothing contrary to the law of love"; he must actively toil and suffer in its service, fighting to the death. His personal enemy he may and must forgive. Enemies have thus been won to the kingdom. The enemy of the weak and defenceless brother he must resist. The enemy of God's kingdom he must fight to the death. It is true that this foe of God is no human or visible foe. Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; it is against the principalities and powers of darkness in the heavenly places. But we do not beat the air. This power of darkness finds incarnation in human form at least as readily as the Power of light. He fights with real and concrete weapons, and this reality is the ultimate test. For the foe who thus incarnates the evil power the Christian has no hatred as brother-man; only as agent of the evil power. The hatred ceases when the man renounces the evil allegiance. Hence the paradox of love that may necessitate a blow. Self-deception is here all too easy, but absolutely selfless devotion may be trusted even here not to substitute its own cause for God's.

The very paragraph from which the non-resistants draw their doctrine has this conclusion:

Wherefore seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these (outward blessings) shall be added unto you.

It is because Jesus sought first the kingdom, which means righteousness, peace and good will among men, sovereignty of right over might, overthrow of the powers of darkness which claim as their own the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, that he could teach as the best means to its attainment forbearance and loving-kindness to the limit. For a limit there is—the divine limit of the welfare of all. Loyalty to this ideal led Jesus to crown his sublime teaching with action sublimer still. When the scenes of his earlier ministry were closed, he left the quiet paths of teacher and healer in Galilee to tread the martyr's road, and to set up in his own cross an ensign to rally the scattered and bleeding flock of God. Because he sought "first the kingdom of God" Jesus held back his disciples from the bloody and disastrous path of Zealot fanaticism, and bade Peter return his futile sword to its sheath. For the same reason and no other he depicted to his disciples the Good Shepherd laying down his life in defence of the flock, and poured scorn upon the hireling who "when he seeth the wolf coming, leaveth the sheep and fleeth." It is for the same reason and no other that he also warned them of days to come when it should be the duty of the disciple unprovided with a sword to "sell his garment and buy one," days when only he that endured unto the end, fighting to the death against the powers of darkness, should be saved.

Jesus teaches unlimited non-resistance where only personal and selfish interests are at stake; but resistance unto blood for the sake of the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. In this he is inconsistent with non-resistant pacifism that can see no difference between this doctrine and that of Buddha or Lao-tse. Jesus even reverses that Bolshevist pacifism that to save its own skin throws to the Turkish-Teuton wolves the bleeding remnant of the earliest historic flock of Christ. He approves rather shepherds that give their lives fighting in defence of their helpless charge. He is inconsistent with the theories and philosophies of non-resistance; but he is consistent, sublimely consistent, with his own gospel of the sovereignty of God.

The rule of truly Christian pacifism is not hard to understand when we approach it from the standpoint of those who after the precept and example of Jesus seek first the Kingdom of God. Men of this type are ready like "all the saints who nobly fought of old" to lose their lives in this high cause, that they may save them unto life eternal. For individuals and for nations the rule is the same: "In thine own cause strike never, not even in self-defence; in God's cause strike when he bids thee strike and cease not, come victory or death." There is, no doubt, an easy self-delusion, prone to identify its own cause with God's. But against this blasphemous egotism human history henceforth will ever set up the abhorrent warning of a certain imperial attitudinizer whom we do not need to name. There is a time for forbearance, patience, longsuffering, up to the limit of the forbearance of that God who seeks only the good of all, and who seeks it in wisdom and justice as well as in forbearance. The time is up to that limit, and not beyond it. If the enemy can be won, win him. Turn the other cheek, surrender tunic along with cloak. But forbearance is not meant to play into the hands of the evil power. There is also a time when it only gluts the ravenous maw of inhuman, soulless tyranny, a time when incarnate evil sits in the very temple of God, setting itself forth as God, a time when the law of violence is openly avowed and exalted above the law of mercy and right, a time of the beast and the false prophet, threatening to turn civilization back again to the age of Lamech and Tubal-cain. That is a time to remember also the commandment, "Let him that hath no sword sell his cloak and buy one," and the promise: "He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me on my throne, as I also overcame, and sat down with my Father on his throne."

[1] Rom. 12:20, citing Prov. 25:21-22.
[2] See below as to the fourth evangelist's explanation of Jesus' claim to be the Davidic Shepherd of Israel only in the sense of uniting the scattered flock of God.
[3] The citations are all from the unquestioned writings of the First Isaiah, Isa. 2:2-4; 3:1-5; 9:2-7 and 28:1-6. The rendering is made independently from the Hebrew.
[4] Mal. 3:1-4; 4:1-6.
[5] Paul is elaborating Isa. 57:19.
[6] Mk. 6:34; 14:27 and parallels.
[7] Ezek. 34.
[8] "New Wars for Old," pp. 252-258.
[9] Ibid. p. 223.
[10] Ibid. p. 258.
[11] "New Wars for Old," p. 241.

V
[THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR]
HENRY HALLAM TWEEDY

When the greatest crime in all history was perpetrated and the world-war began, it was natural and necessary that the ministry of all lands should buckle on the Christian armor and take its place in the fighting ranks. Thousands volunteered as chaplains and Y. M. C. A. workers. Thousands more—two thousand at one time in Canada alone—equally eager to don the khaki and endure their share of the hardships, waited impatiently until a door could be opened for them to go. In the training camps and in the trenches, in hut and in hospital, these men found new parishes and pulpits, ministering in a multitude of ways, and finding opportunities for Christ-like service in the soldier's every need. They did more than preach sermons, hold Bible classes, and act as spiritual comforters and advisers. To them, as to Donald Hankey's "beloved captain," no task was too petty or too menial, no lowly service beneath them, if it lightened the burdens or added to the comfort and efficiency of the fighters. At all times and everywhere, in all ways and by all means, they strove to represent the Master, who cared for bodies as well as for souls, for the resting times and food and tired feet as well as for the thoughts and motives and ambitions of his disciples. They were the ambassadors of the Prince of Peace and the army's public friends.

All this was only what might have been expected. The arresting fact was to find these prophets of peace, with comparatively few exceptions, proclaiming the righteousness of our participation in the war. In 1915 when the Continent, of Chicago, sent out a questionnaire among the Presbyterian ministers of the country, an overwhelming majority declared themselves in favor of preparedness. A vote in Brooklyn, embracing ministers in something like twenty denominations, showed one hundred and fifty-one in favor of preparedness, while six qualified their approval and only fourteen were opposed. These are indications of the trend of thought among the ministers of America; and though they may not give direct and unimpeachable evidence of how these men would have viewed the entrance of the United States into the European débâcle, it would seem to be a legitimate inference that their attitude would be the same. When a nation, patient and forbearing until her enemies scoffed and her friends grieved, found herself compelled to defend her unquestioned rights against lawless and brutal pirates, minds which approved of preparedness for war would naturally, almost inevitably, approve of war. Nor was it our rights only. We entered the struggle not through pride or greed or hatred, but as the champion of international law, righteousness, liberty, democracy, and a world peace that shall be abiding and just for all.

To the few pacifists among the clergy all this seems quite unnecessary. Why should not America walk in the footsteps of Jesus, set her face steadfastly toward her Jerusalem, and for the world's salvation suffer Germany and Austria and Turkey to drive the spikes through her hands? Why not permit the Central Powers to seize and possess our country, even though they dealt with those of us, who could not and would not submit to the ethics of Nietzsche and the diplomacy of Bernhardi and the rule of von Hindenburg, as they treated the fathers and mothers and little children of Armenia and Belgium and Poland? "Resist not evil!" The cure of Christ's time is the cure of our time! The age of Judas and of Pilate, of the scribes and brutal Roman soldiers, has never passed.

This is not the place to attempt to settle the dispute between the champions of peace at any price and those of a war which, rightly or wrongly, they regard as righteous and unavoidable. It certainly will never be decided by calling all pacifists cowards and slackers, and all defenders of the course pursued by President Wilson, the son of a clergyman, exponents of Prussian militarism. The plain fact is that there is no path open to us which presents no moral difficulties. It is not a choice between absolute right and absolute wrong, but between the preponderance of right and the preponderance of wrong. As some one has phrased it, "War is a moral enterprise, if it redeems a state from a condition worse than war"; and that—so it seemed to thousands of ethical and religious teachers—was the situation in America. To have watched the violation of Belgium, the massacre of Armenia, the destruction of England, France and Italy, the absorption of Russia, and ultimately the forging of the chains of our own servitude, without striking a blow to protect the world against the unspeakable barbarism of a megalomaniac would have been ethical madness. Granting the culprit's sanity, it would have been a kind of religious paranoia not to bring the international butcher and brigand to terms. The man who stands by, while a thug robs his neighbor's house and murders the wife and children, practically coöperates with the criminal. If he is a saint, he is a saintly Raffles. Though he never strike a blow, he bears the mark of Cain. Leaders like the Rev. Charles A. Eaton, D.D., of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City, have ventured to characterize our participation in the struggle as "our Christian duty." Many even of our Quakers vigorously champion it. Mr. John L. Carver, the head of the Friends' School in New York and Brooklyn, writes: "First and last, let us have no compromise or suggestion of compromise as to the justice of the American cause—no admixture of false pacifism in relation to one of the few absolutely just and unavoidable wars that the world has ever seen, unmarred by fanaticism, mistaken hatred, or lust of gain. Let us permit no confusion of ideas between old time wars of aggression or revenge, and this present war of unselfish sacrifice to save humanity from the reign of the beast." With this it is safe to say the great majority of Christians, lay and clerical, heartily agree. War is always bad; but there are situations when to decline to give battle, permitting the foe to work his immoral will, is not only still more terrible in its cost but more awful in its moral degradation. To kill is always an evil; but it is less of an evil, both for society and for the evil doer, than to permit a band of deluded assassins to run amuck in the ranks of civilization and to practice their marksmanship on the gentlest of women and the noblest of men. Almost to a man the leaders of thought in the allied countries, with unwilling minds and breaking hearts, have reached this decision. Rightly or wrongly, it is the answer which has come to their agonized petition, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?"

But there is a still more striking fact. Not only are our ministers like Sir George Adam Smith in khaki and Dr. Henry Van Dyke in the uniform of the navy, toiling as spiritual specialists for our soldiers and sailors. Not only are teachers like Principal Forsyth and ex-President Taft proclaiming our moral duty and legal right to participate in the greatest and most terrible of wars. After careful deliberation an ever-increasing number of ministers, especially among those of draft age, both in the pastorate and in the seminary, have given up their distinctive work, donned the uniform of the soldier, and sailed for the trenches of France. To some minds this seems incredible folly, a species of ministerial madness. War is so tigerish in its ruthlessness, so demoniacal in its treatment of ethical principles, so un-Christian in matter and in method, that it appears impossible to characterize any participation as righteous. It is, no doubt, the minister's duty to play the role of Good Samaritan when, with nations as his victims, the modern Hun repeats the parable. But can he still bear the title of minister if he joins the police force and attempts, even at the cost of killing the robbers, to clean up the Jericho road?

The answer of these men has been an enthusiastic affirmative. To them their clerical exemption was something more than what Dean Shailer Mathews called it, "an insult or a challenge." No doubt there were good reasons why certain trained specialists, and themselves among them, should be set to work with tools other than bayonets. The physician, the engineer, the munitions expert, the ship-builder and the chaplain will all have their part in the triumph. Mr. Hoover, Mr. Schwab and the Archbishop of York will do more in their present positions than they could behind a machine gun or in an aeroplane. They, and millions of men and women in lowly stations, can fight at home for peace and for freedom; and when the burden is heaviest and the strain almost unendurable, call cheerily, as Harry Lauder did to the Scotch Highlander: "No, man, I'm no tired! If you can die fighting for me, I can die working for you!"

But this patent plea did not satisfy some militant ministers. Their religion as well as their patriotism carried them beyond Dean Mathews' interpretation of the phrase. Grant that their exemption is an insult if it "implies that ministers are not as ready to serve their country as any other citizens, that they are slackers, or that they are so effeminate that they would not make good soldiers; that if they go about their work with no increase of labor or of sacrifice, making an excuse out of their holy calling, they accept their exemption as an insult to their calling." Grant that, if this is not true, it comes to them as a great challenge to do and to dare as much in their spiritual work as the soldier does in his, toiling to the limit of costly sacrifice, possibly to overwork and to death. They are quite ready to burn out, and that quickly, when the age demands the heat and light of their lives. But there was still in their hearts a service unexpressed, an intense desire ungratified. One hears the call in the following letter from a minister, who is now a lieutenant with a Canadian regiment in France:

"I expect to go to the front in Europe in the near future," he wrote to the editor of the Outlook. "For six years I was a Presbyterian minister, although a Canadian, in the Presbyterian Church of the United States. When the cause of liberty and the ideals of democracy were at stake, I could not withstand the 'call'—not so much of my country as of civilization—any longer. I resigned my charge and came to Nova Scotia, my boyhood home. It seems strange, but true nevertheless, that today I am a happy man. I hate war and know something about it—I served through the South African War and saw its results—but there are things worse than war. I am going, as I find many of my comrades going, not because we hate the German people, but because we believe that Prussian militarism would be an intolerable system for the world to live under."

"Is this a psychological and moral paradox?" comments the editor. "We think not. Every man who really grasps the meaning of the words righteousness, justice and peace, and their true relations, will understand the state of mind of this Canadian clergyman." It is the decision of one who loves and honors the calling of the ministry, and yet feels that in this crisis there is a place where he, whatever may be true of his fellows, is more greatly needed. It is the confession of faith on the part of a Christian who knows war and hates it, and yet is happy to make it because he loves peace, and believes, rightly or wrongly, that if the world is to possess it in our time, it must be won with the sword. It is the deed of a brother of all men who declines to be limited by his cloth, who cannot preach to the soldier without drinking the soldier's cup and being baptized with his baptism of mud and of blood. It is the spirit of a true Christian preacher, who cannot urge Christian laymen to "go over the top" unless at least some Christian ministers go with them. It is the jubilant response to the call of the heroic, the comradeship which knows no secular and no sacred, and which covets the most intimate fellowship in the life and sufferings of brave men.

The same attitude is being increasingly taken by the peace-loving Friends. "The young Quaker of the present day," writes one of them, "is so true to his inheritance—that of being allowed to act as his conscience dictates—that there are already many in the service, and that, too, with the fervent coöperation of their Quaker parents.... When one of these young Friends—now a trusted officer in the American infantry, who enlisted before war was declared by our Government—was challenged by a Quaker friend, he promptly replied: 'I am showing my regard for my Quaker ancestry and training in the fact that I cannot and will not allow war to stalk upon the earth unchecked. Only by meeting the Devil face to face can we hope to crush him.'"

Sir George Adam Smith in an American address stated that in Scotland 90 per cent of the ministers' sons of military age entered the army before conscription. Would it be strange if some fathers decided to go with them? He also said that of the sixty thousand Catholic priests engaged in war work in France, twenty-five thousand are fighting in the ranks. Some Chinese missionaries are serving behind the lines as officers of detachments of Chinese artisans and laborers. Other missionaries, however, and sons of missionaries are reported to have gone directly into military service. Our country's Roll of Honor contains the names of men like Captain Jewett Williams, an Episcopal rector and the son-in-law of Dr. David J. Barrows, Chancellor of the University of Georgia, who declined a chaplaincy, trained at Fort Oglethorpe, and was killed in action. Of recent graduates and members of the Yale School of Religion, forty-four are now in khaki. Of these nineteen are chaplains and Y. M. C. A. workers, while eighteen are in the regular army, one each in the British and Canadian armies, two in the Ambulance Corps, one in aviation and one in the navy. Already the School Roll of Honor bears one name, that of a young Englishman of rare promise, who died in the hospital from wounds received on the battlefields of France.

These men are following in the footsteps of ministers of other generations. Yale's records show that there is scarcely a campaign of note, or an important battle in American history, in which her sons among the clergy did not share the hardships and dangers of the soldier's lot. Besides the more than one hundred and thirty who served as chaplains, in the thick of the fight as well as in camp and hospital, are those who fought shoulder to shoulder with their parishioners. When the news of the approach of the enemy reached Thomas Brockway (1768) during service, he dismissed his congregation, shouldered his long gun, and marched away. Of John Cleaveland (1745) it is said that he preached all the men of his parish into the army and then went himself. They helped to take Louisburg in the campaign against Cape Breton Island. They marched in the Crown Point Expedition, fought at Ticonderoga, and shared with Wolfe the hardships of the campaign against Quebec. The record of the Revolutionary days is a stirring one. Edmund Foster (1778) joined the Minute Men on the sounding of the alarm in Lexington. Ebenezer Mosely (1763) enlisted in Israel Putnam's regiment, and with Joseph Badger (1785), who served with General Arnold in Canada, fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. They were in the ranks at Germantown and at Monmouth. Samuel Eells (1765) was elected the captain of a company formed among his parishioners to aid General Washington, who was then retreating through New Jersey. Elisha Scott Williams (1775) crossed the Delaware in the boat with Washington, and is so depicted in Trumbull's painting. He also fought at the battles of White Plains, Trenton and Princeton, and shared with William Stone (1785) and Benjamin Wooster (1790) the hardships and sufferings at Valley Forge. Levi Lankton (1777) was present at Burgoyne's surrender.

In the Civil War this record is repeated. The ministers of Yale fought at Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor. They rode with Sheridan's cavalry in the Army of the Potomac; they marched with General Sherman to the sea. Several, like Erastus Blakeslee (1863), well known for his services to the work of the Sunday school, rose to the rank of general. Moses Smith (1852) entered in 1865 with the first troops into Richmond, while Samuel W. Eaton (1842), after fighting in some of the hardest battles, was present at Appomattox Court House on the surrender of General Lee.

In all this there is no thought of glorifying war, or of haloing the head of the minister who lays down his Bible to take up his bayonet. Quite the contrary. These fighting chaplains condemned war and hated it. They never proclaimed that organized slaughter was a sane method of settling international disputes or ethical questions. They would have marched to their own Calvaries gladly if this would have saved them from the horror of the task of the soldier and at the same time helped to bring in the Kingdom of God. But to their minds there was a time when a Christian ought to put up his sword, and another when his duty was to buy one. Devilishness is not usually overcome by allowing the Devil to have his way. If the powers of evil attempt by force to overthrow righteousness, righteousness may well by force oppose and thwart them; not that it may escape martyrdom, or vent its anger, but with the clear purpose of rescuing the evil doer from his devastating delusion, and of saving the most precious treasures of civilization from the axe of a vandalism, which can and ought to be restrained. The thought finds a crude but characteristic expression in Kipling's poem of Mulholland, the coarse sailor, who, in fulfilment of the vow made during a storm on the cattle-ship, goes back to preach religion to the brutal and unsympathetic crew:

I didn't want to do it, for I knew what I should get, An' I wanted to preach religion, handsome an' out of the wet; But the Word of the Lord were lain on me, and I done what I was set.
I have been smit and bruised, as warned would be the case, An' turned my cheek to the smiter, exactly as Scripture says; But following that, I knocked him down an' led him up to grace.
An' we have preaching on Sundays whenever the sea is calm, An' I use no knife nor pistol, an' I never take no harm; For the Lord abideth back of me to guide my fighting arm.

It is devoutly to be wished that it was never necessary for the preacher to use knife or pistol; but at present apparently there is no other means by which the smiter may be knocked down.

This teaching is what might be called, in Dr. Van Dyke's phrase, "Fighting for Peace." It is the kind of militant pacifism which Paul hints at. "If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with all men." Sometimes it is not possible. It is neither wise nor saintly to attempt to negotiate with a tiger. It would be something worse than folly to allow the I. W. W. to dictate the economic policy of our country, or to suffer philosophical and practical anarchism to work its will with the law and order of the world. War as mere war deserves all the vitriolic epithets which have been heaped upon it. It is the scourge of scourges, the father of piracy and of murder, the mother of havoc, desolation and woe. It stands clearly revealed as "a monstrous crime, man's crowning imbecility and folly." But when through war the attempt is made to tear down law, overthrow justice and shackle the world's liberty, shall not war be met by war in order to preserve these priceless possessions, and perchance end all wars by rendering its mad champions powerless? No minister can be called Christian who does not hate war. But most of them hate still more the sinking of the Lusitania, the rape of Belgium, the massacre of the peaceful people of Armenia. They cannot with clear conscience sit still and watch the fulfilment of the plot of "the Potsdam gang" without striking a blow. Peace proposals from the successful marauders sound to them too much like Dr. Van Dyke's imaginary conversation between an outraged householder and his triumphant pacifistic burglar. It is not a question of Christ or Cæsar. There is something of the Sermon on the Mount in pacifist and militarist alike. But in the choice our ministers in the army have registered their vote for what seems to be by far the lesser of two evils. They with their fellows have chosen to tread the new Via Sacra, as the road is now called which made the salvation of Verdun possible; and today they stand facing the forces of autocracy, greed and military oppression, uttering that great battle cry which broke from the heart of France, "They shall not pass!"

Whatever the verdict of history upon this decision of brave men in the ministry, certain effects of the war upon them and upon their work are sure. These again are both good and evil. On the debit side of the ledger will be the loss of many in whose future service lay much of the hope and strength of the church. A large proportion of the best men, who were looking forward to the ministry, are in the training camps and trenches. Some may now be diverted to other callings; some will never come back. Their vacant places in the ranks will be saddening and for a time crippling. Great tasks which might have been done must needs be left undone. New Elishas will wear the prophet's mantle; but the memory of many a vanished face will waken the old cry upon their lips: "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!" If the church does not begrudge them, it will mourn them among its multitude of sons who

laid the world away; poured out the red, Sweet wine of youth: gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene That men call age; and those who would have been Their sons they gave—their immortality.

A second regrettable result in the minds of some will be the discrediting of the ministry. There have been too many un-Christian utterances from the pulpits of all lands, though we are naturally especially sensitive to those "made in Germany"; too many petty, superstitious prayers addressed to tribal deities as little like the God of Jesus as Moloch and Mars; too reckless dealing with "high literary explosives" on the part of preachers possessing neither the wisdom of Solomon nor the restraint of Paul; too flamboyantly patriotic utterances from orators who apparently forgot their obligations as citizens of heaven and makers of a new world. So far as the writer knows, there have been no blasphemies from the pulpits of the Allies equal to the saying of Pastor W. Lehmann: "The German soul is God's soul; it shall and will rule over mankind"; or that still more brutal and unblushing pronouncement of Pastor D. Baumgarten: "Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve from the bottom of his heart the sinking of the 'Lusitania,' whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to unnumbered innocent victims, and give himself up to the honest delight at the victorious exploit of German defensive power—him we judge to be no true German." But if none have descended to these depths of theological blindness and ethical madness, there has been a certain kinship with the spirit of the imprecatory psalms, used as convenient and refreshing outlets for pent-up tempers, together with more or less pagan treatment of ethical and religious questions, camouflaged with felicitous phrases, which lulled the listener with the assurance that the preacher was quoting from the Litany. All this has not redounded to the respect of the thoughtful for the pulpit, or for the leadership of men supposed to be specialists in the rules of right and teachers of the counsels of a fatherly God.

Furthermore, while the mass of Christian unity and coöperation has been unprecedented, there have been here and there expressions of denominational rivalries. It is not an inspiring spectacle when a few—and fortunately only a few—bigoted denominationalists are seen storming certain camps, not because the religious welfare of the soldiers is not being amply cared for, but because the accredited purveyor of their ecclesiastical shibboleth is not teaching his patois and peddling his wares. Neither our best laymen nor our wisest religious leaders have either patience or sympathy with modern denominational Pharisees. They recognize temperamental, psychological and national differences among fellow Christians, and are content that Quaker and High Churchman, shouting Methodist and dignified Scotch Presbyterian, Salvation Army lassie and devout Romanist should choose their own liturgy and polity, and go to heaven each in his own way. But to their minds, in everyday life usually and in camp life always, sectarian squabbling and doctrinal hair-splitting are merely rocks of stumbling and stones of offense; and whenever they witness, especially in war time, such wrangling in the porch of the sanctuary, they discount the utterances and even the calling of the minister, and, instead of entering the edifice and joining in the service, pass by on the other side.

Still more damning will be the accusation, made even by loyal sons of the church's own household, that not only has the ministry failed to prevent war, but that it neglected to mass its forces and measure its might in the great task. To reply to the charge in its undiscriminating, blunderbuss form is easy. Many ministers gave up their lives to the cause, notably in the various forms of the peace movement. Others proclaimed and urged a cure, which the laity declined to put into operation and the governments ignored. The prevention of war should have been the work of the educator, the lawyer, the scientist, the promoters of commerce and the prophets of international socialism as well as of the minister. If he is blameworthy, so are they. Men who love to sit in the seat of the scornful and jeer at Christianity should enlarge the scope of their humor. If, as G. K. Chesterton puts it, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried," it is equally true that the ministry has not been trusted and found incompetent; it has been the herald of an unwelcome message and ignored. No one class in the community could work the miracle of a world-peace; it could be wrought only through the faith and works of all. To attribute to the ministers the failure to achieve it is in part fair; some of them are guilty. As Dean Hodges said of the much-discussed article, "Peter Sat by the Fire Warming Himself," the charges are richly deserved by those by whom they are deserved. In part, however, it is manifestly unfair; multitudes honestly tried. In part it is one of the greatest compliments ever paid them; for it suggests their power, acknowledges their leadership, and honors their task as the constructive statesmen of the world. No one ever before hinted that the clergy ought to have stopped the wars of Charlemagne or of Napoleon. During the Civil War neither the conflict nor the cause was laid at the minister's door. But in our day many clamor for priests after the order of Joshua as well as of Moses, men at the head of great bodies of Christian soldiers, who shall participate vigorously in domestic politics and international relations, until they actually bring in the reign of righteousness and of love and truth among men. As ministers we accept the compliment while we confess our sins and shortcomings. The burthen of having done the things we ought not to have done and of having left undone the things which we ought to have done is one that we carry shamefacedly but not exclusively. It is shared by all mankind.

But if the war kills some and discredits others, the credit page in the ledger looms large. The experiences and tasks of the present can hardly fail to make the manliest among us still more virile and vigorous. They will purge the leaders in every profession of all softness and sentimentalism, and lift them above a great danger in peace times, that of living a

ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart.

No sane and unprejudiced mind, possessing first-hand knowledge of the ministry, accepts as a representative of the profession the clergyman of the stage comedy and the popular novel. He may be a "sport," in the biological sense; but it would be equally easy to find as ludicrous and despicable examples in law, medicine or business. So far as the average, normal type is concerned, this popular clerical clown is a wretched caricature, possessing humor because endowed with the exaggeration and distortion of a political cartoon. But removing all such weaklings from the discussion, and granting that there are no more lax fellows, lolling through life, in the ministry than in any other profession, there is, as Donald Hankey points out, a certain directness and sternness in camp and military life which is singularly invigorating and even Christ-like. It stiffens a man's back to shoulder heavy burdens, trains the eye to face steadily and without flinching disagreeable and terrifying duties. It tenses muscles with great and glorious resolves. It girds up the loins for a race the issues of which are life and death, throttles any idea of sneaking sinuously through the world avoiding large and costly obligations, and at the end of the day's labor demands visible and tangible results. If any minister was in danger of becoming what Horace Greeley called "a pretty man," or what Holmes described as "a wailing poitrinaire," his experience as chaplain and as soldier will effectually cure him. We should have more prophets after the order of Amos as well as of Hosea when the men who have been under fire come home.

Such men will increasingly merit and possess the respect of laymen and of soldiers. Their lives have been knit together in the fellowship of suffering. Their bodies are inured to the same hardships, their faces lined with the same grim marks of dangers laughed at and of conquered pain. In the democracy of the trenches the sons of the Pilgrims and the immigrant sons of the slums have come to know and to understand one another. The pagan, illiterate dock-hand has fought shoulder to shoulder with the teacher of religion, trained in the first universities of our own and other lands. When such laymen attend plays like "The Hypocrites" or read novels like "The Pastor's Wife," they will never be persuaded that the clerical cartoons represent reality. Each will recall days in the dugouts and nights in the hospitals, when they came to know a different type of minister, a "beloved captain," who marched through the mire with song and laughter, and crept with them through the darkness and shadow of death in No Man's Land. An almost irresistible attraction will draw them to the churches of such ministers. To their leadership they will be inclined to render obedience; to their messages they will listen with respect. No scoffing jests at the minister will be allowed to go by them unchallenged. For the first time in their lives they have been brought into touch with the preachers of religion, and their hearts have burned within them while they talked with these disciples of Jesus by the way.

Furthermore, they will seek them out in the intercourse of ordinary fellowship. For the ministers have shown themselves friendly, approachable—no wan ascetics, no unhuman monks or superstitious other-worldlings, but jolly good fellows in camp life, sane and wholesome counsellors in times of perplexity, comforters in the hours of sorrow, efficient and tireless fellow workers; in brief, the best type of men among men. With such a minister there will be no social uneasiness, no camouflaged conversation during a pastoral visit or upon his entrance into the club. When he opens the front door, the father will not be so apt to call, "Mother, the dominie has come to see you!" It will be no longer the pastor who wishes to meet and to know the male parishioner; the male parishioner will be equally eager to meet and to know the pastor. One soldier phrased the difference in this way: "Well, sir, I like our services out here, and the church is all right; but our parson at home, sir—! You couldn't go to church or have anything to do with him!" All this will come to the minister as a reward for having realized the picture as painted by an English chaplain. "I like to think of the parish priest as fulfilling the Shakespearean stage direction—'Scene: a public place. Enter First Citizen';—for his ministry should mostly be spent neither in church nor in the homes of the faithful, but in public places; and he should be the First Citizen of his parish, sufficiently well known to all to be absolutely at home with each.... And so the word 'parson' will revert to its old proud meaning of 'persona,' and the priest will take in his parish a position analogous to that of the best chaplains in the army." That is the gift which true ministers have always coveted. Many have already won it, turning from the fascination of their studies "to waste time wisely in the market-place, gossiping like Socrates with all comers." After the war many more will possess it, having gladly paid the price.

To the spiritual practitioner, moreover, will have come increased skill in that most difficult of all arts, personal work. He will have had daily hospital training in ministering to the souls of men. He will speak their language, even their lingo, rather than what is to multitudes the unintelligible patois of the seminary Canaan. He will know not only his own theories but their difficulties and experiences in regard to a belief in immortality and the practice of prayer. Like Jesus at the well, he will have learned the method and value of gaining a point of contact in teaching. Formerly it was easy to discourse from the pulpit concerning the being and nature of God and to champion theories of the atonement. The prophet of the regiment will have learned what is far more difficult and more necessary—to persuade a man to follow the teaching and to practice the friendship of Jesus. That is his task, and he will have become efficient in its accomplishment—so to bring modern prodigals to themselves that they loathe the far country, and arise, and go home to their Father's house.

Another gain will be that of a deeper appreciation of denominational coöperation and an enlarged scope for the practice of it. Sectarian rivalries and ecclesiastical trivialities vanish in the trenches. Man-made walls between Christian brethren are crumbling. Petty partisanship becomes first ridiculous and then wicked in the light of the universal church's ambition. "We need a standard so universal," writes H. G. Wells, "that the plate-layer may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the Chinaman, 'What are we two doing for it?' And to fill the place of that 'It' no other idea is great enough or commanding enough, but only the world Kingdom of God." The same buildings are now serving congregations of Jews, Protestants and Romanists. Instant calls come when rabbis, priests, rectors, and representatives of every hue in the rainbow of Protestantism minister to men of other creeds and of no creed. Partisan politics in the field of pure religion are seen to be essentially irreligious; and chaplains of every ilk and kirk are working together like "Bill" and "Alf," two cockney soldiers, one of whom had lost a right arm and the other a left. They always sat side by side at the C. C. S. concerts "so as we can have a clap," as "Alf" put it. "Bill puts 'is 'and out, an' I smacks it with mine." Such men cannot come home and take part in the heresy trials and ecclesiastical hecklings of men whom at heart they recognize as Christian brethren. It is perfectly safe to prophesy that there will be more of church unity, and possibly more of uniformity, so far as this is desirable, when these apostles of hundreds of churches come home from the war.

With this enlarged coöperation will come also an enlarged ambition. The pastor who has been plodding along the familiar ways of an uninspiring parish will never be content to suffer his people to travel in the old ruts or to countenance out-worn and inefficient methods. That way, he now knows, lies ministerial melancholia and the present situation, something far worse than Lear's madness. His task, and that of his people, is nothing less than to transform their portion of the world into heaven. Singing and praying about it are good and necessary; but in the words of the old negro spiritual, it is perfectly patent that "Eberybody talks 'bout heaben ain't a-gwine dah," and the work of the church is to see to it that they go. Some of the strongest and most venturesome among the clergy, unwilling to turn back to the safe life after the thrill of the trenches, will seek adventure in pioneer work in our own land and abroad. Home missions will come as a challenge to men inured to danger and hardship. Foreign missions will have a new and poignant meaning for all the world. We knew before that the bubonic plague in Calcutta was a menace to San Francisco; we know now that the cult of militarism in a single group in Germany can crucify mankind. No chaplain will ever settle down into a parish as if it were a "pent-up Utica." No cultivation of individual piety will atone for the failure to Christianize society, leaven industry with the principles of Jesus, and convert from its Machiavellian heathendom and Bismarckian brutality the diplomacy of the old-time state. Nothing less than the ambition to take the world and its kingdoms for Christ can ever satisfy his soldiers; not, like the Central Powers, in order that they may be enslaved and exploited, but that they may know the fullness of joy and of freedom, and possess the true riches of that divine life which is life indeed.

Almost of necessity the experience at the front will simplify and vitalize the minister's message. For many all discussion of the future of unbaptized infants, and premillenialism, and the verbal inspiration of the Pentateuch had long ago lost interest. In the minds of others, matters regarded by some earnest Christians as of vital importance, like the Virgin Birth and the physical resurrection of Jesus, had ceased to function. To them Jesus would still be the unique Son of God, the divine Saviour of the world, whatever the method of his human generation; and he would still be alive, their unseen friend and present helper, whether or not his body had remained in the tomb. Belief or disbelief in such articles of faith would never transform a demon into a saint or a saint into a demon. Even to those accepting them, they had no visible effect upon character or upon the course of ordinary daily life. No soldiers ever asked about such scholastic problems as they faced going over the top on the morrow. In the hospital they never mentioned them, as they lay lonely and fearful on their beds of pain. But they did ask, or long to ask, had shyness not prevented them, about the treasures for which the heart hungers and to which religion alone holds the key.

"Dear Sir," wrote a wounded soldier to the chaplain of his battalion; "I often used to wish that you would talk seriously and privately to me about religion, though I never dared to ask you, and I must admit that I seemed to be very antagonistic when you did start." "I wish you'd tell me what you think about it, padre," said another. "Is there anything really afterwards?... I'd like you to tell me as man to man what you really think about it. Do we go on living afterwards in any sort of way or—!" He struck a match to light a cigarette. A gust of wind, which carried a gust of snow round our legs, blew the match out again. I daresay it was that which suggested his next words: "Or do we just go out? I know the creed," he went on. "... But that's not what I want. I want to know what you really believe yourself, as a man, you know."

Is there a God, and can we actually lead men to experience him and to grow like him? Is there any power in Jesus to save a brute and a drunkard, a selfish worldling and a contented prig, not from a hell of fire after death from which he is snatched by some theological transaction, but from his degradation and meanness in the present, until he is fit to be a husband and a father, a patriot and a friend? Are the fruits of the Christian spirit "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, goodness, meekness, faithfulness, and self-control," the qualities of character which alone can make heaven anywhere, and without which a potential Paradise would be transformed into an actual hell? Are the wages of sin death, or does the good man simply lose a deal of fun and prove himself to be a foolish prig and superstitious other-worlding? Does death end all, or are there many mansions in the Father's house? Such are the great questions; and to them Christianity has very definite answers, capable of being tried out in experience. In the past much of so-called religion has seemed to thoughtful minds remote from the facts of life, unreal, a bit queer if not abnormal. If the flames of war are purging it from such unrealities and abnormalities, the facts which lie at the heart of the world's faith are being saved, yet so as by fire. The Christianity of the camp is no pious sentimentalism, no sweet dream or unvirile worship of a "gentle Jesus." It is a living, indubitable experience, full of strength and of joy. Men are fighting to the death a thought and a purpose in the German armies which Prince Lichnowsky, their own ambassador to the British Court, characterized as "perfidy and the sin against the Holy Ghost"; and in that fight they hunger and thirst for the power of a religion of the Spirit, which—however the battle of bodies and of brute force may be decided—in God's good time is bound to win the day.

The last effect of the war upon the work and message of the minister will be to furnish it with a new dynamic. As he returns from the battle with sin in the trenches, he will find in the same battle at home William James' "moral equivalent for war." The call to arms has revealed the fact, seen in the success of the Student Volunteer Movement, that the church has not sufficiently appealed to men's latent heroism. The ordinary individual has revealed an enthusiastic readiness for high adventure and an almost limitless capacity for self-sacrifice, qualities upon which the work and preaching of the average parish made practically negligible demands. There was a contrast as noticeable as it was lamentable between the pompous phrases of certain militant hymns, sung chiefly by the choir, and the lack of ethical passion and aggressive righteousness on the part of the pews. There was too little doing of brave deeds and too much flabby irresolution and orthodox laziness. Christianity seemed to act as a narcotic rather than a stimulant. Any preacher might say to any congregation with perfect safety, "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin."

For the chaplain fresh from the front all this will be changed. Not only will he be the flaming apostle of a new enthusiasm; his church will have been saved from the old lethargy and lukewarmness of Laodicea, the minds of his people purged from the dolce far niente pietism, which dreamed sweet dreams while the wreckers of the world prepared for war. For today religion stands revealed as the greatest of all adventures. Christianity is history's crowning crusade. The greed, the brutality, the imbecile and devilish lawlessness, which have revelled in an orgy of spiritual vandalism, are not peculiar to war. They have long been with us, in city and in country, in the slums and on the avenue, among peoples supposed to be civilized and enjoying the blessings of an era of prosperity and of peace. It was an amazed world, rudely roused from its comfortable slumbers, which found these forces organized for battle; it will be a bloody and dishevelled but determined and aggressive world that, when our men have laid aside their khaki, will strive to hold them in the ranks of an equally fearless and fighting army, which will never retreat from its trenches until these enemies of the world's peace and happiness are driven from the field. Men who hated dirt and discomfort, blood and vermin, have endured and laughed at them for the sake of their cause and their country. When the call comes to carry on the same fight in the homeland, such heroic souls will scarcely decline to sacrifice something of their peace and comfort, or to attack the forces entrenched in saloon and dive and political cave of Adullam, because in the struggle they may be shorn of delights and dollars, know the shame and agony of temporary defeat, and as victors find themselves with mire upon their garments and blood upon their hands. "Never was there a religion more combative than Christianity," wrote Bernhardi. That is false as the apostle of carnage meant it; but it is true to the disciple of Jesus, who has heard Paul's summons to don the full panoply of the Christian armor, and who so loves the Lord as to hate evil with the just but terrible wrath of the Lamb. Here is a new dynamic, an irresistible appeal, which should and must be utilized by the minister. If the Christian Church is an army with the greatest of fights on its hands, there will be a place for the soldier. With the church service of the religious slacker he may be pardoned if he declines to have anything to do.

T. R. Glover in "The Jesus of History" has said that the Christian conquered because he out-lived and out-thought and out-died the pagan. It is beginning to dawn upon the ministry that we must out-fight him, if he is to be conquered in our day. The clergy have seen their opportunity pictured in the words with which John Masefield in "Gallipoli" has told the story of the final attack upon Suvla Bay. "There was the storm," he writes, "there was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which this death and agony ... had led. Then was the hour for the casting off of self, and a setting aside of every pain and longing and sweet affection, a giving up of all that makes a man to the something which makes a race, and a going forth to death resolvedly to help out their brothers high above in the shell bursts and the blazing gorse." The thousands who are responding to that call are the priests of today and the prophets of tomorrow. They can cry to us, with their fellow soldiers, living and dead, in the words of Lawrence Binyon:

O you that still have rain and sun, Kisses of children and of wife, And the good earth to tread upon, And the mere sweetness that is life, Forget not us who gave all these For something dearer, and for you! Think in what cause we crossed the seas! Remember, he who fails the challenge Fails us, too.
Now in the hour that shows the strong— The soul no evil powers affray— Drive straight against embattled Wrong: Faith knows but one, the hardest, way. Endure; the end is worth the throw. Give, give; and dare, and again dare! On, to the Wrong's great overthrow! We are with you, of you; we the pain and Victory share.

VI
[THE EFFECT OF THE WAR UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION]
LUTHER ALLAN WEIGLE

The term "religious education" stands for two ideas that are ultimately one: for the inclusion of religion in our educational program, and for the use of educational methods in the propagation of religion from generation to generation.

Over seventy years ago, Horace Bushnell pointed out the folly of reliance upon the revival method of dealing with the children of Christian homes, and urged the educational method of Christian nurture. He did more than any other one man to determine the present trend in religious education. Yet his work was prophetic; it took fifty years more of "ostrich nurture," as he called it, to reveal to Christian people generally the full truth of his position.

The past twenty years, however, have witnessed a great movement among the Protestant churches of America toward clearer aims and better methods in religious education. A situation had developed that bid fair to let religion drop out of the education of American children. Changed social, economic and industrial conditions had transferred to the school many of the educational functions once fulfilled by the home, and had wrought a change in the forms of family religion. The public schools had become increasingly secular in aim, in control, and in material taught. The development of science and philosophy in independence of religion had made it possible for college students to get the idea that religion is not a significant part of the life and culture of the time. The Sunday school, indeed, was at work, teaching children of God and his will. But its curriculum was ungraded, its teachers untrained, and its instruction limited to one period of half an hour in each week.

Roughly speaking, the beginning of the present century may be taken as the date when the Christian people of America began to awake to the danger involved in this situation. As early as the late eighties, President W. R. Harper, then Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature at Yale, had organized the American Institute of Sacred Literature, and had begun to publish a graded series of Inductive Studies in the Bible. In 1900, under his leadership, the University of Chicago published the first of its present series of Constructive Studies, which provides text-books for a graded curriculum of religious education. In 1903, the Religious Education Association was organized, its membership drawn from the whole of the United States and Canada, and its purpose declared to be threefold: "To inspire the educational forces of our country with the religious ideal; to inspire the religious forces of our country with the educational ideal; and to keep before the public mind the ideal of religious education, and the sense of its need and value." In 1908, the International Sunday School Association authorized its Lesson Committee to construct and issue a graded series of Sunday school lessons in addition to the uniform series which it had issued year after year since 1872. In 1910 the Sunday School Council of Evangelical Denominations was organized, a mark of the more definite assumption by the several denominations of responsibility for the educational work of their Sunday schools and for the training of teachers. In 1912, the Council of Church Boards of Education came into being, which has devoted its energies thus far mainly to coöperative effort in behalf of Christian colleges and for the religious welfare of college and university students generally.

These are but a few outstanding factors in a movement greater far than any single organization or group of organizations. There has been an awakening of the spirit of education in religion. Sunday schools the country over have been graded, and here and there week-day schools of religion have been begun; problems of curriculum, method and organization have been studied and graded curricula devised; classes and schools for the training of teachers have been organized; and attempts of various sorts have been made to correlate public and religious education. Churches in general have come to see that they have an educational as well as a religious function in the community, and that there is a sense in which they share with the public school a common task. The public school can teach the "three R's," the sciences, arts and vocations; the church must teach religion. Both are needed if the education of our children is to be complete. Many churches are employing paid teachers of religion and directors of religious education. Courses in religious education have been organized and professorships of religious education established in colleges and theological seminaries. "The Educational Ideal in the Christian Ministry" was the subject of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, in the Yale School of Religion, a few years ago. The young men who are entering the Christian ministry in these days are being trained, not simply to preach and to care for a parish, but to teach and to direct the educational work of a church.

The immediate effect of the war has been to retard this movement in some degree. Preoccupation with the war itself and with more immediately pressing needs, has made more difficult the work of the churches in this as in other respects. Churches that had planned new buildings for their schools are postponing their erection till the war is over. Training classes for teachers are harder to keep up. Ministers are going into war service; and those who stay at home are doing double work or more. Churches, like business houses and factories, have found their organizations broken by the departure of members of military age. Many of their best teachers and leaders have gone to war; and it is not easy, in these days of urgency and stress, to discover others to take their places.

It is probable, however, that a deeper effect of the war will be to intensify our sense of the importance of religious education and to clarify the church's educational program, in point both of content and method. This conviction rests upon these fundamental facts: that the world is achieving democracy; that it believes in and relies upon education; that it is experiencing what may prove to be a renewal of religion.

Education, democracy, religion—these three, we have long professed and more or less fully believed, belong together. The full life of each of the three is bound up in that of the other two.

Education without religion is incomplete and abortive; it falls short of that life more abundant which is education's goal. Religion without education lacks intelligence and power, and condemns itself to what Horace Bushnell called conquest from without, as contrasted with growth from within.

Democracy without education cannot long hold together or be saved from mediocrity and caprice. Education without democracy perpetuates caste divisions, or else breeds discontent and class hatred.

Democracy without religion is doomed to fail; and religion without democracy cannot realize the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

These, I say, are familiar convictions. They are natural to Protestantism; they have entered into the very making of America. Yet just these old convictions are gaining a new force and a deeper meaning in and through the experiences of these years of war. The struggle for democracy is not only leading us to a new comprehension of the meaning of democracy itself; it is helping us to understand better both education and religion.

It does not lie within the limits of this paper to canvass the wider and deeper meaning of democracy which is opening before us. The messages and addresses of President Wilson have interpreted that meaning not simply to America but to the world. No one yet knows the full promise of life after the war, when Pan-Germanism shall have been not only balked but destroyed. The democracy for which we fight to make the world safe will be a chastened, changed, completer democracy. It will be a democracy between nations as well as within nations, for the doctrine of the irresponsible, beyond-moral sovereignty of the state must return to the perdition whence it came. It will be a democracy applied more fully to the whole of life, social, economic and industrial as well as political. It will be a democracy of completer citizenship, that gives place to women as to men. It will be a democracy of duties as well as of rights.

The world is acquiring a new conscience. Just as the nineteenth century made slavery abhorrent to the moral sense of men in general, the twentieth century will likely be looked back to as the time when the world's conscience decided that the exploitation of man by man is wrong. The general moral sense of men has not been over-tender on this point hitherto. They have checkmated the exploiter if they could, as they did checkmate Napoleon, but they have not always, or even usually, looked upon him as a wrong doer. It required Germany's attempts at conquest and subjugation to wake the world to the absolute wrong of that monstrous thing—that one man should use another as a mere means to his own pleasure or aggrandizement, or that one people should so determine the destiny of another people.

Here lies the supreme moral issue of the war. Shall the world, which has become a neighborhood, organize itself into a great community of mutual respect, good will and brotherhood, or shall its structure be that of restless orders of exploiters and exploited? It is over-familiar; yet, lest we forget, hear some random verses from various Pan-Germanist scriptures: "Not to live and let live, but to live and direct the lives of others, that is power." "To compel men to a state of right, to put them under the yoke of right by force, is not only the right but the sacred duty of every man who has the knowledge and the power." "The German race is called to bind the earth under its control, to exploit the natural resources and the physical powers of man, to use the passive races in subordinate capacity for the development of its Kultur." "Life is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation at the least, and in its mildest form exploitation."

Contrast with this the words of Jesus: "Ye know that they who are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you: but whosoever would become great among you, shall be your minister; and whosoever would be first among you, shall be servant of all." The present struggle is not merely between democracy and autocracy as rival systems of government. It is a struggle between opposed philosophies of life. Nietzsche was more consistent than the Kaiser who has followed him, for Nietzsche did not claim to be a Christian. He frankly proposed a "transvaluation of values" which would do away with the religion of Jesus as fit only for slaves. That proposed transvaluation of values the Kaiser is trying to bring about, however piously he may lie about it or claim God's partnership in his enterprise.

Prophecies are always hazardous; never more so than now. The outlook for religion has been discussed both by puzzled pacifists and by facile forecasters of the fulfilment of their own wishes. One may perhaps question whether there will be any one trend of the churches in the immediate future. Yet this is clear: that the interests of democracy and the interests of true religion are ultimately one. We may confidently expect the churches of tomorrow to realize this more fully, not simply in the ideals they preach, but in the temper and quality of their own life. One effect of the war upon religious education, undoubtedly, will be to make it more democratic in aim, content and method.

Education in general will become more democratic. The experiences of these years are helping us to understand education and to estimate its values. Our eyes are being opened to the diametrical difference between democratic and undemocratic education. We have come to see that the latter may be as great a menace to the world as the former is a vital resource.

The time was, not long ago, when Germany was deemed the school-master of the world. German efficiency and German obedience to authority were seen to be the products of German teachers and German schools. In methods of teaching and in school organization, as well as in ideals of scholarship, the world sought to follow Germany. If here and there one objected that German education seemed to sacrifice the individual to the system and to beget an obedience too implicit, we felt that it was only because the Germans are such docile, pious, family folk, and we rather chided ourselves for our rougher ways and for that self-will that made us unholily thankful that we had been born in a freer land.

But now the character of German education stands revealed. We are no longer as hopeful as we once were of the possible success of an appeal to the German people over the heads of their military masters. They seem on the whole to like the kind of government they have, and to want to be exploited by Prussia. They are perilously near to what Mr. H. G. Wells has given as his definition of damnation—satisfaction with existing things when existing things are bad. They are experiencing what Mr. Edmond Holmes has called the Nemesis of docility.

And it is their system of education that has brought about this result. If the German people are damned to satisfaction with irresponsible autocracy and fatuous docility, their schools have damned them. For a century, German education has been at work to breed the present world-menace. The German schools have made the German people what they are. They have sought to develop habits of mind rather than free intelligence; they have valued efficiency in a given task above initiative and power to think for oneself. They have set children in vocational grooves and molded them to pattern. They have educated the few to exert authority, and have trained the many to obey. They have nurtured the young upon hatred of other peoples; and, much as the Jews of old awaited the Messiah, they have lived and labored in expectation of "The Day." They have exalted Vaterland into a religion, and have degraded God into a German tutelary deity. The German schools have welded the German people into a compact, efficient, military machine. The desires of the State are their desires; the Kaiser's will is their will.

We have been following false gods, therefore, in so far as we have sought to shape our schools upon German models. "The German teacher teaches," wrote one of our great educators some years ago, in criticism of our American way of giving to children text-book assignments which they are expected to study for themselves; yet the text-book method, fumblingly as we have so often used it, gives better training in initiative and intelligence than the German teacher's dictation methods. Professor Charles H. Judd has recently pointed out the confusion and waste of time brought about by the fact that our eight-year elementary school was modeled upon the German Volksschule, which is a school for the lower classes, and not intended to lead on to higher education. Our purpose, on the contrary, is to maintain for every American child an open ladder through elementary school, secondary school and college to the university; and to that purpose a six-year period of elementary education is much better adapted—a plan which many of our school systems have adopted within the last decade. We need better vocational education in this country and better systems of vocational guidance; but we are becoming clear that these must not be of the German sort, that compel a choice before the teens.

Education in a democracy must be education for democracy; and education for democracy must itself be democratic in content and method. Such education practices and aims at intelligence rather than habit of mind. It trains its pupils to think and choose for themselves. It prizes initiative above conformity, responsibility above mere efficiency, social good will above unthinking obedience.

Such education is more difficult, of course, than education of the undemocratic type. We shall at times be tempted to fall back into the ways of the German schools in some respect or other, because they represent the line of least resistance in education. Specious arguments will be presented in favor of these ways by shortsighted "practical" men. Education of the German type is more efficient, they will say; it is more direct and practical; it brings more immediate results. It is more patriotic, moreover, they will insist; it better serves the ends of authority; it makes people more prosperous and contented, each in his appointed niche. But such arguments, we may well hope, will no longer win the uncritical assent that they have sometimes found. German education may be more efficient in the fulfilment of its end than American education—but what an end it has sought and reached! In the moment of our temptation to undemocratic short cuts in education, we shall henceforth look to the Germany of yesterday and today, and shall be strengthened to resist. Her ways are not our ways. Her schools cannot be ours. Education must mean to America something quite different from what it has meant to Germany.

The contrast between democratic and undemocratic types of education is as great with respect to religion as with respect to the rest of life. Germany has been most careful to maintain religion as a subject of instruction in her schools. But the content of this instruction in religion has been intellectualistic and formal. It has pressed upon German children a body of historical facts, moral precepts and theological dogmas; but it has not begotten the freedom of inward spiritual initiative. State-controlled, it has bent religion to state uses, and has in time begotten a generation who can believe in the "good old German God."

Religious education in America has been and will be more democratic. Horace Bushnell used to say that the aim of all education is the emancipation of the child. We teach and train our children in order that they may in due time be set free from paternal discipline. We fail in the religious education of our children if our teaching does not result in their final emancipation from a religion of mere authority and convention and their growth into a religion of the spirit. We aim, not simply to win their assent to a given body of beliefs or to attach them to the church as a saving institution, but to help them to become men and women who can think and choose for themselves. The Protestant principle of the universal priesthood of believers involves democracy in religion. And just as democracy can look forward only to failure unless it can educate its citizens, Protestantism will fail unless it can educate men and women fit to stand on their own feet before God, able to understand his will and ready to enter intelligently and effectively into the common human enterprises of Christian living.

A second effect of the war, closely related to this, is that religious education will concern itself more directly with life, and will put less emphasis upon dogma, especially upon those refinements of creed which have operated divisively in the life of the Christian Church. Its method will be more vital, and less intellectualistic. Instead of proceeding upon the assumption that true belief comes first and that right life is the expression of prior belief, it will recognize that adequate insight and true belief are more often the result of right life and action. "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching." If this be true of adults, it is even more true of children. Our plans of religious education will first seek to influence the life, and will deal with beliefs as an explanation of life's purposes and motives and an interpretation of its realities and values.

If they will realize this primacy of life, the Christian churches stand in the presence of a great opportunity. The experiences of these years have shown us how much more of Christian living there is in the world than bears the label. Religion is being tested, stripped of sham and embroidery, and reduced to reality. And there are being revealed breadths and depths of real religion that we had not understood. There is a vast amount of inarticulate religion actually moving the lives of men which the churches may lift to the level of intelligent and articulate belief if they will but approach it with understanding and a willingness to be taught as well as to teach.

In Jesus' story of the last judgment, there is surprise all around. Both those on the right hand and those on the left stand fully revealed to themselves for the first time, it seems. "Lord, when saw we thee ..." they cry on both sides. This war has constituted such a judgment day. A great moral issue has stood out, sharp, clean-cut and clear. It has set men on the right hand and on the left. It brooks no moral hyphenates; it permits no half-allegiance, either to country or to God. Beneath all pretense and profession, it lays bare the real man. It reveals the hidden qualities of nations. There have been many surprises. It has shown far more of evil in the world that we had deemed possible; but it has shown, too, far more of goodness and courage and true religion than we had thought was there.

Evil is here—real, powerful, poignant, and more unutterably bad than the farthest stretch of imagination had hitherto conceived that evil could be. Since the world began it was never so full of pain and suffering in body and mind, of needless death and of mothers brave but broken-hearted. And most of this is the result of supreme moral evil, the work of a power deliberately seeking world-domination and exploitation of the rest of mankind, even though it involve the extermination of other peoples, determined to use any methods that bid fair to bring about this result, and organizing deceit and lust and murder as the instruments of Schrecklichkeit.

But goodness is here too—strong, calm, cheerful, brave, self-devoting goodness. These years of war have revealed to us the supreme power of the human spirit to endure pain, to resist evil, and to count all else naught for sake of the right in which it believes and the good upon which its heart is set.

This goodness does not always call itself Christian, be it granted, or even know itself to be such. A chaplain in the English army writes: "There is in the army a very large amount of true religion. It is not, certainly, what people before the war were accustomed to call religion, but perhaps it may be nearer the real thing. It is startling, no doubt, and humiliating to find out how very little hold traditional Christianity has upon men.... So far as I am able to estimate, we are faced now with this situation, a Christian life combined with a pagan creed. For while men's conduct and their outlook are to a large extent unconsciously Christian, their creed (or what they think to be their creed) most emphatically is not.... Nevertheless I feel that out here one is very near to the spirit of Christ. There is a general wholesomeness of outlook, a sense of justice, honor and sincerity, a readiness to take what comes and carry on, a power of endurance genuinely sublime, a light-heartedness and cheeriness (nearly always, I believe, put on for the sake of other people), a generosity and comradeship which are obviously Christ-like."[1]

There is strength and goodness at home, too. We had become accustomed in late years to hear it said that the churches were losing their hold upon the people of America. Whether or not that be true, the war has begun to reveal to America, as it has to our Allies, the depth and power of the real moral and spiritual life beneath the surface. Granted that we are witnessing no widespread evangelistic stirrings, no indications of a great revival. It seems probable, indeed, that the itinerant evangelists who had lately become the fashion among us, have passed the heyday of their power. Neither are the "prophetic" folk who misunderstand their Bibles so persistently and look so confidently for the second coming of the Lord, winning an assent at all commensurate with their effort. But there is a vast amount of quiet, sensible, devoted Christian living in America. There is more of genuine religion among us than we had realized. That religion, for the most part inarticulate, and hardly knowing itself to be Christian, is finding expression in action. The spirit in which America entered the war; the high moral aims which President Wilson, interpreter yet leader of his people, has set before the world; the quiet, matter-of-fact and matter-of-duty way in which the principle of selective service was accepted and carried out as democracy's method of mobilizing its power; the coöperation and the giving; the uncomplaining solemn pride of homes that have already made the supreme sacrifice—these are but the first evidences in America of a moral virility, a real religion, which, we may confidently hope, will strengthen us, with our Allies, not only to carry on to victory, but to resist the victor's temptations.

Will this deep, elemental, common religion of America come to understand itself, and to recognize its fundamentally Christian character? The answer to that question lies with the churches. And there are clear indications that many of them, at least, will not fail to realize and meet their opportunity.

Not that we shall do without dogmas. Religion cannot maintain itself as mere ethics. It is a way of living; but a way of living that justifies itself by a way of believing about God and duty and immortality. The point is, that in the natural order of growth life has a certain priority to belief, action to full understanding. And that certainly is the order of growth involved in the present situation.

As the churches share in the expanding and deepening common life and bring their beliefs to bear upon it, in interpretation of its ultimate motives and hopes, there will be growth on both sides. Men elementally Christian in action will come to know what they believe; and on the other hand the churches themselves will discern more clearly which of their customs and beliefs are relevant to the real issues of life and function in essential ways. Our creeds will become simpler, but more vital. And that will make possible a closer unity of the churches. One may well question both the possibility and the desirability of a complete obliteration of denominational lines. We may always have and need denominational loyalty just as we shall always have and need patriotism. But denominational loyalties can be incorporated into a higher loyalty to the inclusive fellowship of Christ's Church as a whole, just as national loyalties, we now see, can and must be incorporated into a higher loyalty to humanity which will be given expression and body in a world-wide League of Nations.

We may expect religious education after the war, again, to be more fully Christian in its conception of God as well as in its view of life.

Jesus, so far as we know, never used the word "democracy." Yet just such a democratic world-community as we are now beginning in a practical way to understand and strive for, he taught and lived and died for. Christianity's ultimate ideal is no longer a mere ideal. It has become an actual political and social program and possibility.

"The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair but empty phrase," wrote President Wilson to Russia; "it must be given a structure of force and reality. The nations must realize their common life and effect a workable partnership to secure that life against the aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing power." The world's choice is between "Utopia or hell," is Mr. Wells' striking phrase, which he expounds in a remarkable article in The New Republic on "The League of Nations." "Existing states," he says, "have become impossible as absolutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice between the League of free nations and famished men looting in search of non-existent food amidst the burning ruins of our world. In the end I believe the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and imperialism to the latter alternative."

Mr. Wells is right. The proposal to establish a league of nations presents itself in our day as a matter of plain common sense. Yet if there is one lesson written with perfect clearness on the pages of history, it is that common sense alone cannot save the world from the tragedies of error, self-will and sin, and that common sense motived by self-interest will in the end defeat itself. In his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin has called our attention to the remarkable prophecy of the present world war made by Frederick W. Robertson in a sermon preached at Brighton on January 11, 1852, addressed to a generation that glorified commerce as the guarantor of world unity and sought to establish morality upon a basis of enlightened self-interest. The passage cannot be quoted too often, nor too firmly impressed upon the minds of the present generation, for there were those among us who, even up until the invasion of Belgium, kept protesting that there could be no war in a world so bound together by economic and commercial ties, and there are those now who find in such interests the only durable basis for world reconstruction. "Brethren," said Robertson, "that which is built on selfishness cannot stand. The system of personal interest must be shriveled to atoms. Therefore, we who have observed the ways of God in the past are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He shall confound this system as He has confounded those which have gone before, and it may be effected by convulsions more terrible and bloody than the world has yet seen. While men are talking of peace and of the great progress of civilization, there is heard in the distance the noise of arms, gathering rank on rank, east and west, north and south, and there come rolling toward us the crushing thunders of universal war.... There is but one other system to be tried, and that is the cross of Christ—the system that is not to be built upon selfishness nor upon blood, not upon personal interest, but upon love."

If Wells has stated the world's alternative, Robertson has shown the way of final and permanent right decision. To common sense must be added love. The brotherhood of man must be established upon a common acknowledgment of the Fatherhood of God. The world community can ultimately be motived by nothing less than the life within the hearts of men of the God whom they come to know through Jesus Christ.

This means both that the world must become more religious, and that religion must become more fully Christian. We can no longer believe in any God less great or less good than the God whom Jesus Christ reveals. However much it may be tempted to the lower view from time to time, we may reasonably expect that henceforth the world is done with belief in a mere tribal or national God. The supreme and inmost bond of the world community can be nothing other and nothing less than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who regards all men as his children and who steadfastly seeks, with them and through them, the good of all.

Religious education after the war will be more democratic, more immediately concerned with life, more fully Christian. In so interpreting the present situation, we have had in mind especially the more or less formal religious education in the church and the church school. The same tendencies will influence the more informal and indirect religious education of children in the family. We have reason, indeed, to hope for a strengthening of family ties and a renewal of family religion. The sacrifices of these days are rendering relationships very precious that in a more careless, unthinking time we had accepted as a matter of course. And it is entirely possible that victory may wait until in America, as in England and France, there are few families that do not live in closer fellowship with the unseen world because their sons are there. The gradual disintegration of family life which the past half century has witnessed was but incidental to a rapid change in social, economic and industrial conditions. There is reason to expect that the family will so adjust its life to these conditions as to maintain its character as a social group, wherein genuine democracy and true religion may be propagated from generation to generation by that sharing of interests, occupations and affections which is the most potent and vital of all educational methods. That it should so adjust itself and so fulfill its primary educational function, should be a matter of the utmost concern to both Church and State, for it is hard to conceive how either the Christian religion or a democratic society could maintain itself without the aid of the family.

[1] "The Church in the Furnace," pp. 53-54.

VII
[FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR, TODAY AND TOMORROW]
HARLAN P. BEACH

It might seem to the uninformed reader that foreign missions and war have nothing in common; for "what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?" Fuller knowledge of the varied work of missions and of its many helpful contributions to African, Asiatic and Oceanic peoples would remove this misapprehension. Professor Coolidge, of Harvard, suggests some important points of contact between missions and the less developed races, particularly of the enterprise as carried on today in contrast with its earlier objectives.[1] How the races of mission fields that have been thus affected are contributing to the war at home and in the trenches, Dr. Arthur J. Brown has described most vividly in a paragraph upon the cosmopolitan composition of the allied forces at the front.[2] Missionary periodical files abound in references to the war's inroads upon missionary enterprises, and to the important mediating work of missions. A great volume of testimony would show that while missionaries still regard the upbuilding of the mind and the saving of souls as fundamentally desirable, the enterprise affects every phase of the personal and community life of the peoples to which it ministers.

Statistics of the missionary situation at the beginning of the war reveal the extent and scope of present-day foreign missions. In the latest full collection of such statistics,[3] one finds a series of tables devoted to "General and Evangelistic" data, to "Educational" activities of missions, and to "Medical and Philanthropic" enterprises conducted by missionaries. It is impracticable to present the totals of the seventy-two columns, suggestive of the many subordinate activities of missions; a few items will indicate the more important contacts established between the Protestant churches of Christendom and the fifty fields which their missions have touched in many helpful ways. In these mission countries 351 Protestant societies had as their foreign staff 24,039 missionaries, including 13,719 women workers and wives. Stationed at 4,094 towns and villages, they directed the activities of a native staff of 109,099 and of 26,210 churches, the communicant membership of which was 2,408,900, with 1,423,314 others under religious instruction. In their elementary schools were 1,699,775 pupils, while in secondary schools were 218,207, and in the colleges and universities 15,636 students were enrolled. In theological and Bible training institutions 10,588 were preparing for the Christian leadership of the churches. Their industrial schools had an enrolment of 10,125, and their normal students numbered 7,504. Mission hospitals and dispensaries were presided over by 1,589 physicians and trained nurses, aided by a native staff of 2,336. In the year reported, 3,107,755 individuals were treated, in single visits or during prolonged residence in hospitals. Orphanages numbered 245, with 9,736 inmates, and 39 leper homes sheltered 1,880 unfortunate outcasts. Such an exhibit, incomplete as it is, will indicate the manifold tendrils which have bound Christian missionaries to the hearts of the nations; and if Roman Catholic statistics for this date were available,[4] the importance of missions as a steadying and reconstructive force at present and in post-bellum readjustments would be even more manifest.

In discussing the war as affecting missions, only a few outstanding facts can be mentioned. Practically all of the mission world has taken sides in the tremendous conflict, most of these nations declaring for the Allies. Many of them have generously contributed the means and man force to hasten the day of peace. In 1917 nearly half a million from India were enlisted, of whom 285,200 were combatants and the rest were employed behind the lines in multifarious tasks. As a result of the recent conference at Delhi, it is hoped that another half million may be secured this year,[5] thus giving that Empire the numerical precedence among Britain's dominions. From North China alone some 135,000 laborers are serving the British forces in varied ways. "They come, also, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the jungles of Senegal; from Madagascar and Tahiti, and several hundred thousand from French Indo-China and China proper. Black, yellow and white, East and West, educated and ignorant, progressive and backward, are laboring side by side."[6] So important is it that these polyglot assistants and warriors should be cared for in a Christian way that many missionaries have been called away from their distant fields to a manifold ministry to their adopted countrymen behind the trenches. Many of these recruits are Christian volunteers, especially so in the Indian contingent.

The effects of this European Armageddon upon the mission fields themselves has been less harmful than had been expected and more advantageous than was anticipated. German missions have been affected most among the Protestants, and among Roman Catholics France has been the chief sufferer. In the latter country there is no exemption for either Protestant or Catholic ministers of military age. Missions-Direktor Axenfeld of Berlin, in a recent publication,[7] states that German Protestant work in Africa has been practically disrupted, in India crippled by enforced withdrawals, in smaller British colonies similarly weakened by the expulsions, and permitted to go on with restrictions in other parts of Asia and North America. According to later information, about 400 German Protestant missionaries and missionary candidates are in military service, 68 are in hospitals, 120 are prisoners of war in various countries, and about 1,000 missionaries are still working in various fields. Referring to the Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, in the files for 1915 and 1916, one learns that 3,000 Catholic missionaries are estimated to have been called to the colors, and that in 1916 there were 2,336 serving in the army. French Protestant missions, with a much smaller force abroad, have suffered in similar proportion; so that in French and German mission fields the personnel has been greatly reduced, limited, or has been obliterated entirely. British missions have likewise sent to the colors many of their best men from the field and the candidate list, while a number have been transferred from field service to work among their constituency in Mesopotamian and French camps. Relatively few native Christian leaders have enlisted.

The Christian communities in mission lands have suffered in various ways through the war. The removal of supervising missionaries in part—almost wholly in the case of German societies—has left many flocks without their chief shepherds. Great as has been this loss, it has wrought a greater benefit in churches whose native leaders thus have been brought to the front and have proved to their congregations that the church was so far indigenous as to survive the withdrawal of missionaries. To help their pastors, the people have undertaken responsibilities which without this necessity would not have been borne, thus developing unsuspected gifts and engendering hope for the future. During the war, evangelistic campaigns, largely participated in by the native church, have been carried on in a number of countries and with marked success.

Participation in the great conflict by the Christians and non-Christians of mission lands has had mixed results. On the one hand, any delusion as to the civilization and attitudes of so-called Christian countries has been dissipated by the undreamed of savagery and international hatred which they have seen. This has led to opposition to missionaries on the fields, especially in Persia and in Morocco, where a Moslem said to Dr. Kerr: "Why don't you turn your attention to Christians? With all our faults, we have some religion left, but the Christians have none." On the other hand, it has revealed to the peoples so aiding their European rulers their real values to them. This has given to Indians especially a renewed determination to secure from England quid pro quo in the form of greater political liberty and social privileges. While this has been especially emphasized by Moslems and Indians, it has affected the Christians with so great a spirit of nationalism that the recent All-India Christian Council sent a deputation to the Viceroy requesting the Government to recognize the 3,876,203 Christians of the 1911 census as a community deserving political representation in the Imperial Legislative Council. The increasing demand of all Indians for greater freedom led Parliament to send out a Commission to investigate the situation; and while their report at time of writing has not been published in full, the people of that Empire are assured of many alleviations of existing disabilities. The independent Powers of the Far East also will be benefited in many ways through their coöperation in the war. A greatly feared backset to the cause of missions in China, through the exposure to fierce temptations and from the harsh treatment unavoidable in war of its labor contingent in France, has been met in part by sending to those camps many successful missionaries from North China, as well as a delegation of Christian Chinese studying in American institutions. In Mesopotamia, also, similar work undertaken by Indian missionaries will do much to lessen the ill effects of the war.

Another resultant of the unprecedented conflict comes from the ethical and religious reactions occasioned by seas of Christian blood. An old convert in India pathetically asked his pastor if the great fire in the West were still burning, and a South Sea islander stood bewildered and shaken when he learned that the war was primarily between Christian nations. Keen Japanese were at first ready to declare Christianity a failure because of this stupendous crime of Christendom; but their maturer thought and the increasing barbarity in German initiative has convinced them that instead of its proving the bankruptcy of Christianity, to quote Secretary Oldham, "the War has shown the bankruptcy of a society which has refused to accept and apply the principles of Christianity in social, national and international affairs. As has been well said, 'Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and never tried.'"[8] So contrary is it to Christian teachings that for a time the churches in one district in China set apart a day each week for special prayer that this demoniacal evil might be divinely conquered.

But it is more than a problem of Christianity. The Moslem world has been fighting against itself. The Jihad, declared by the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the Sultan of Turkey most solemnly in November, 1915, failed to call to arms a body of fifty millions of fanatical Mohammedans, as had been fervently hoped would be the case. "There was no shock, since there was no sympathetic response. Protests were made by the Moslems of Turkey, while the eighty millions under British control proclaimed their unshaken loyalty; and from Persia, Morocco, Egypt, India, Russia, Algeria and other Moslem countries, Turkey was taken severely to task for forming an alliance with two Christian Powers in a conflict with other Christian nations.... Mohammedans are in despair especially since, as a last fatal blow, the Arabs have arisen in open rebellion against Turkey, seizing the sacred places of Islam, and repudiating the right to the office of caliph or of the sultan of Turkey."[9] Similarly an Arabic periodical published in Zanzibar says: "The pillars of the East are tottering, its thrones are being destroyed, its power is being shattered and its supremacy is being obliterated. The Moslem world is divided against itself."[10]

But what have been the effects of this war upon the home base of missions? The financial drafts made by the governments and voluntary organizations of warring nations upon their peoples and the increased cost of everything have affected the treasuries of some of the smaller societies unfavorably. For the most part, however, the mission boards have not only met their expenses but in many cases receipts have been larger than ever before. The contributions thus given have called attention to missions as being both worthy and indispensable elements in the world situation, and hence necessitating their support. Perhaps this is felt most generally among friends of British missions.

Man power causes the societies greater difficulty. Practically the entire German force has been sent from India, or else interned, and to fill their places has made new demands upon other nationalities. The depleted ranks of French societies have not been filled. Great Britain needs all her men for the trenches and has been sorely pressed in trying to supply the foreign fields with the workers absolutely required. Even the United States, since her entry into the war, is experiencing difficulty in keeping missionary candidates from going to the front in Europe instead of re-enforcing the thin Asiatic and African battle lines. Hope for improvement in this recruiting is slight, since the call to arms has laid strongest hold upon college and university men. Thus in 1915, out of 52,000 students in German universities, 41,000 were under arms; in France all students except those physically unfit were called out; in Great Britain and Ireland about 50 per cent of the male students were in the army or navy, in Canada 40 per cent, and in Australia 30 per cent.[11] In the United States volunteering and the draft have emptied the colleges and universities of practically all the choicest men of twenty-one and upward. If this continues long, an interim must ensue before another college generation furnishes a sufficient number of missionary candidates. Yet it may be expected that the present devotion to a cause that ends so commonly in death or lifelong crippling will end forever the old excuse urged against missionary enlistment, that the service is a hard one and often fatal, in certain unhealthful countries. Men will join the colors of the Prince of Peace and of Life even more willingly than they now march under the banners of destruction and death in the hope of establishing once more justice, righteousness and lasting freedom in the earth.

A happy effect of the present stress is found in the growing rapprochement between the missions of a given national group, and to a less extent between those of different nations. This is due to the necessity for coöperation in order to make a reduced force serve for the needs of an increasing work. In a few cases already a desire to economize resources has led to readjustment of fields; in others to a temporary filling of vacant places by missionaries of a different denomination or nationality. The home constituencies are thus being taught the beautiful lesson of the trenches as related to true brotherhood and essential Christianity. Perhaps one of the best discussions of this war as affecting the international and interconfessional relationships of missions is that of Dr. J. Schmidlin, a Roman Catholic professor of theology in the University of Münster, found in The Constructive Quarterly for December, 1915, from which we quote two sentences: "Thus that which has served to separate missionaries who were comrades in belief and confession—national solidarity and love of country—has also united and reconciled children of the same country who were separated in their belief. Surmounting all barriers of dogma and church polity, men have learned to love and cherish one another, yes, even to recognize that in spite of all that separates us there is much also that binds us together."

Turning now from the effect of the war upon missions, a few paragraphs may be devoted to considering post-bellum reconstruction in mission lands. The Germans, even more than the Allies, are diligently studying the many problems and possibilities of changes necessitated by the readjustments that must surely come. The economic waste of the past four years is almost inconceivably great; and to restore this waste puts upon every nation an amount of production vastly greater than any known in the past. Raw material, freedom of the seas that the manufacturing countries may buy from every land and carry back for sale and distribution the manufactured products, a new enlistment of labor in countries where climate and primitive living make work irksome and unnecessary, an uplift in desires and ideals that new markets may be created, increasing intelligence and friendliness so that coöperation may be willing and profitable—these are some of the essentials of progress after the war.

In earlier cognate discussions, men like Captain Mahan have emphasized the importance of eastward and westward movements in the temperate zone, while others of Benjamin Kidd's school have insisted no less strongly upon the importance of the Tropics and the consequent north and south line of industrial life. A score of years ago nearly, Professor Reinsch, in his "World Politics," startled many American readers by his insistence upon the importance of the undeveloped and unoccupied tropical regions of the globe, mainly in South America and Africa. Even more insistently Kidd's "Control of the Tropics" had, two years before, magnified the same zone, but more particularly the densely peopled tracts with their varied possibilities of production and exploitation. In a recent article by J. A. R. Marriott, M.P., entitled "Welt-Politik," General Smuts of Africa is thus quoted: "Formerly we did not fully appreciate the Tropics as in the economy of civilization. It is only quite recently that people have come to realize that without an abundance of raw material which the Tropics alone can supply, the highly developed industries of today would be impossible. Vegetable and mineral oils, cotton, sisal, rubber, jute and similar products in vast quantities are essential for the industrial world."[12]

Another aspect of tropical Africa is brought out in an article by Herr Emil Zimmerman, writing in the Europäische Staats und Wirtschaft Zeitung of June 23, 1917: "If the Great War makes Central Africa German, fifty years hence 500,000 and more Germans can be living there by the side of 50,000,000 blacks. Then there may be an army of 1,000,000 men in German Africa, and the colony will have its own war navy, like Brazil. An England that is strong in Africa dominates the situation in Southern Europe and does not heed us. But from Central Africa we shall dominate the English connections with South Africa, India and Australia, and we shall force English policy to reckon with us."[13] And again Dr. Solf, the German Secretary for Colonies, has lately proposed a simple solution of Africa's industrial future. "In redividing Africa those nations which have proved most humane toward the natives must be favored. Germany has always considered that to colonize meant doing mission work. That is why in the present War the natives of our colonies stick to us. England's colonial history, on the other hand, is nothing but a list of dark crimes."[14] The principle enunciated in the first sentence of this statement is as important and true as the later ones are incorrect, if the present writer's inquiries and observations in British and German East Africa in 1912 are indicative of the facts in the case.

The political problems of the countries here considered are quite as important and perplexing as is their economic status. Three theories of control have been tried: (1) That of plantations or possessions, worked for the possessor's profit with little regard for the governed; (2) the policy of vigorous expansion by the whites themselves, despite the perils of tropical environments; and (3) permitting the natives to work out their own development independently, with or without white oversight. Of these the third is the only one favored by the ethics and political sagacity of enlightened nations today. But this demands the consent and good will of the governed, and how may these essentials be secured?

India is the most important, politically considered, of all tropical lands. And that Empire's relation to England the eminent Indian ruler, Sir Herbert Edwardes, declared in an address delivered at Liverpool in 1860, should be that of a stewardship in Christian hands, a designation echoed in Kidd's general phrase, "a trust of civilization," and John H. Harris's "trusteeship vs. possession." How shall this trust be fulfilled? Certainly one must consider the question of India's poet laureate, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, "Is the instinct of the West right where she builds her national welfare behind the barricade of a universal distrust of humanity?"[15] Such distrust is not removed by the Indian educational scheme alone, or with the addition of civilization. "If we pursue the ignis fatuus of secular education in a pagan land, destitute of other light," quoting Sir Herbert again, "then we English will lose India without those Indians gaining any future."[16] In a similar vein Sir Alfred Lyall testified: "The wildest, as well as the shallowest notion of all, seems to me that universally prevalent belief that education, civilization and increased material prosperity will reconcile the people of India eventually to our rule."[17]

A partial solution of India's political problems is found in the deputation to that Empire in accordance with Mr. Montagu's speech in the House of Commons of August 30, 1917, in the course of which he said: "The policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India is in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the Indian Empire."[18] The favorable outcome of the deputation's visit has been mentioned already.

Religious problems and readjustments will also be part of the aftermath of the war. At least six millions of Jews, who rightly or wrongly are the objects of the Christian missionary propaganda, have been released from disabilities in Europe, and new careers and educational opportunities will lie before that remarkable race. "Jewish influence in the life of the world, already great in proportion to the size of the community, will gain a fresh accession of strength. Religiously the emancipation may be expected to result, as it has done in other countries, in a decay of Jewish orthodoxy, of which the Jews of the Ghetto have been the main support. While the weakening of the forces of conservatism will open new doors of opportunity to the Christian Church, there is on the other hand the grave danger that many Jews may drift into irreligion and cast the weight of their natural ability and energy on the side of materialism."[19] Mr. Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild of November 2, 1917, stated that the British Government viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. In the case of missions to Moslem lands, if the Allies are victorious, the work in Turkey will be greatly simplified. Whether this will be the case in Africa depends upon whether the dominant Powers permit missionary organizations to act with greater freedom than they have been granted in the past in North Africa and in certain British possessions. In any case Islam will present strong claims and serious problems for consideration by missionary organizations.

Is the foreign missionary enterprise willing and competent to aid in the reconstruction soon to come in mission lands? Here are a few typical and representative replies to this important question.

Representing in a semi-official way the missionary societies of the United States and Canada, Dr. Robert E. Speer writes thus: "Foreign Missions are the direct antithesis of the world conditions which men most deplore and the purest expression of the principles which underlie the world order for which men are longing. Foreign Missions represent international friendship and good will. The missionary goes out to help and serve. He bridges the gulf between his own nation and the nation to which he goes. He is not seeking to exploit, or to take advantage, or to make gain. He is seeking only to befriend and aid. And his aim and spirit are internationally unifying. The missionaries succeed in surmounting all the hindrances of nationality and language in binding different peoples together in good will. Furthermore, they are demonstrating the possibility of the existence of a strong nationalistic spirit side by side with human brotherhood and international unity. They are seeking to develop in each nation a national church embodying and inspiring and consecrating to God the genius and destiny of each nation. But they are doing this because these are the elements of a yet larger unity, the unity of mankind. The first is not contradictory to the second; it is essential to it, as the perfection of the State requires the perfection of the family unit, and the family demands and does not exclude the richest individualism. It is out of her perfect ministry to the life of each nation that the Church is to be prepared to minister to the life of all humanity and to achieve its unity."[20]

As editor of The International Review of Missions and secretary of the Edinburgh Continuation Committee, Mr. J. H. Oldham states his views of the world-functions of missions: "Missions are the antithesis of war. They have created between different peoples relations, not of competition, but of coöperation. With all their shortcomings they are an embodiment of the idea that the stronger and more advanced nations exist to uplift the weaker and more backward. They are a vital expression of the principle on which the new society must rest.... The gospel of love must embody itself in act no less manifestly than selfishness and brutality have expressed themselves in the terrible scenes that the world has witnessed. The non-Christian races fear, not without cause, that the object of western peoples is to exploit them. Missions must convince them that the Church exists to help and serve them, and the desire to serve them must be made evident in ways that they can understand. The task of Missions thus grows broader and larger than we at first conceived."[21]

And such statements are not the claims of interested propagandists merely,—officials employed by missionary organizations, and hence liable to overrate the character and importance of missions to the nations. Few men have traversed the world as extensively and observantly as Sir Harry Johnston, and probably no one equals him in his varied administrative and anthropological services to Africa. In his Introduction to the Cambridge University Maitland Prize Essay for 1915, he says: "Although the writer ... is so heterodox a professor of Christianity, practical experience in Africa, Asia and America has brought home to him ever and again during the last thirty-four years the splendid work which has been and is being accomplished by all types of Christian missionary amongst the Black, Brown and Yellow peoples of non-Caucasian race, and amid those Mediterranean or Asiatic Caucasians whose skins may be a little duskier than ours, but whose far-back ancestry was the same, whose minds and bodies are of our type, but whose mentality has been dwarfed and diverted from the amazing development of the European by false faiths,—false in their interpretation of Cosmos, false to the best human ideals in daily life."

On a later page he upholds with the author "the work of Christian missionaries in general and lays down the rule that our relations with the backward peoples of the world should be carried on consonantly with the principles of Christian ethics—pity, patience, fair-mindedness, protection and instruction; with a view not to making them the carefully guarded serfs of the White race, but to enable them some day to be entirely self-dependent, and yet interdependent with us on universal human coöperation in world management."

And once more this British administrator asserts: "The value of the Christian missionary is that he serves no government. He is not the agent of any selfish State, or self-seeking community. He does not even follow very closely the narrow-minded limitations of the Church or the sect that has sent him on his mission. He is the servant of an Ideal, which he identifies with God; and this ideal is in its essence not distinguishable from essential Christianity; which is at one and the same time essential common sense, real liberty, a real seeking after progress and betterment. He preaches chastity and temperance, the obeying of such laws as are made by the community; but consonantly with all constitutional and peaceful efforts, he urges the bringing of man-made laws more and more into conformity with Christian principles."[22]

As representing nations of ancient culture coming under the helpful influences of Christian missions, perhaps no one will command a more attentive hearing than Marquis Okuma, ex-premier of Japan and one of the world's foremost statesmen. From a summary of his address, delivered at the semi-centennial of Protestant missions in that Empire, we excerpt the following: "The coming of missionaries to Japan was the means of linking this country to the Anglo-Saxon spirit to which the heart of Japan has always responded. The success of Christian work in Japan can be measured by the extent to which it has been able to infuse the Anglo-Saxon and the Christian spirit into the nation. It has been a means of putting into these fifty years an advance equivalent to that of a hundred years. Japan has a history of 2,500 years, and 1,500 years ago had advanced in civilization and domestic arts, but never took wide views, nor entered upon wide work. Only by the coming of the West in its missionary representatives, and by the spread of the Gospel, did the nation enter upon world-wide thoughts and world-wide work. This is a great result of the Christian spirit. To be sure Japan had her religions, and Buddhism prospered greatly; but this prosperity was largely through political means. Now this creed [Buddhism] has been practically rejected by the better classes who, being spiritually thirsty, have nothing to drink."[23]

These representative testimonies suggest both the fitness and the willingness of Christian missions to participate in the coming international readjustments necessitated by the war. Such an enterprise supplies what the war-weary world so greatly needs—the élan vital et créatur, to borrow Bergson's fine phrase. And the missionary leaders are alert and at their task. On April 4, 1918, Drs. John R. Mott and Charles R. Watson, representing the missionary boards of the United States and Canada, met with the Standing Committee of Missionary Societies in Great Britain and Ireland, when it was resolved to form an international "Emergency Committee of Coöperating Missions." Already the British committee had been consulted by the Government concerning certain important matters affecting the mission fields and their problems arising from the war. Such questions are becoming increasingly numerous, and their solution demands an intimate knowledge of missions and of the spirit and aspirations of African and Asiatic races. America is likewise needing such a body of experts to supplement government investigations. This country has a slight preponderance in representation on the Emergency Committee; and in the chairman, Dr. John R. Mott, the foremost Protestant leader of the world, and a man of such diplomatic gifts that President Wilson twice vainly called him to the position of minister to China,—though he accepted appointment upon commissions to deal with Mexico and Russia later,—the committee has a missionary statesman who is equal to the important trusts that will be committed to its consideration. To serve as the eyes, ears and hands of this important post-bellum council, the two largest fields, India and China, have each an energetic Continuation Committee of the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, established as the result of Dr. Mott's visits and conferences in 1912-1913. The Foreign Missions Conference of North America, and especially its Board of Reference and Counsel, are in annual and ad interim consultation as questions arise from time to time.

President King quotes these words from Lloyd George's address to a labor delegation: "Don't always be thinking of getting back where we were before the War. Get a really new world. I firmly believe that what is known as the after-the-War settlement will direct the destinies of all classes for generations to come. I believe the settlement after the War will succeed in proportion to its audacity. The readier we are to cut away from the past, the better we are likely to succeed. Think out new ways, new methods, of dealing with old problems."[24]

Another horizon of the same idealistic character opens before the eyes of our own President, the seer to the nations in this epoch-making time. In an address delivered on October 5, 1916, President Wilson proclaims the new day to the United States: "America up to the present time has been, as if by deliberate choice, confined and provincial, and it will be impossible for her to remain confined and provincial. Henceforth she belongs to the world and must act as part of the world, and all the attitudes of America will henceforth be altered." And again three weeks later he adds: "America was established in order to indicate, at any rate in one government, the fundamental rights of man. America must hereafter be ready as a member of the family of nations to exert her whole force, moral and physical, to the assertion of those rights throughout the round world." Here is a sentence from his greetings to France on Bastille Day, 1918: "The War is being fought to save ourselves from intolerable things; but it is also being fought to save mankind." And as a final word from President Wilson, taken from his discussion of the new international morality: "My urgent advice to you would be, not always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity, if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred." While none of these utterances refer specifically to missions, yet surely Dr. W. I. Hull is correct in interpreting President Wilson's relation to races of the mission fields in these words: "Instead of exploiting backward peoples, he would apply the maxim of noblesse oblige, and would summon all nations to mutual aid in their ascent of 'the world's great altar stairs' up to the law and order, peace and justice, which constitute the true sunshine of God."[25]

The "really new world" of Britain's Premier will not be dominated by Machiavelli, the motto of whose sixteenth and seventeenth century monarchs was "L'état c'est moi!" even though Treitschke ranked him second only to Aristotle as a political philosopher.[26] The present cataclysm of woes does not prove Professor Cramb's contention that "Corsica has conquered Galilee"; nor has Nietzsche thrust the "pale Galilean" from his throne. That semi-insane philosopher's Uebermenschen must fall before Sir John Macdonnell's "Super-Nationalism" as set forth in the March, 1918, issue of the Contemporary Review. And the President's world-echoed phrase, "world-democracy," is uttered only with the corrective in mind that was sounded forth a score of years ago by England's Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, "Think imperially." It is only by the establishment of an Imperium in imperio through obedience to what the Duke of Wellington called the Christian's Marching Orders, the Great Commission, that the new reign of the Prince of Peace can become possible. If the blood-soaked "savagery of civilization on the march to save the world from the civilization of savagery" is the dolorous duty of the present hour, there is solace in the thought that Golgotha was but the prelude to the Resurrection and Ascension. The Ascent of Mankind in all its nations and peoples and kindreds and tongues is at hand. To hasten this universal uplift and aid the World Powers as they seek to inaugurate the New Order, no agency is likely to aid more than foreign missions among the peoples reached by that enterprise. And the new Imperial Thinking and Acts are simply those of the seven-fold Commission of the Saviour of the World, "Behold, pray, go, heal, preach, teach, baptize, all nations," the conquering Labarum of an onward-moving Church.

[1] A. C. Coolidge, "The United States as a World Power," p. 329.
[2] F. Lynch, "President Wilson and the Moral Aims of the War," New York, 1918, pp. 50-51.
[3] Beach and St. John, "World Statistics of Christian Missions," 1916, pp. 59-61.
[4] For the year 1913, see P. K. Streit, "Atlas Hierarchieus," summarized in "World Statistics of Christian Missions," pp. 103-104.
[5] London Times, May 16, 1918.
[6] Personal letter from an investigator in France, May 29, 1918.
[7] "Das Kriegserlebnis der deutschen Mission in Lichte der Heiligen Schrift" as quoted in The Missionary Review of the World for June, 1918, pp. 423-424.
[8] J. H. Oldham, "The World and the Gospel," p. 200.
[9] J. L. Barton in Missionary Ammunition, Number One, 1916, p. 19.
[10] Missionary Review of the World, January, 1917, p. 4.
[11] International Review of Missions, April, 1916, p. 183.
[12] Nineteenth Century and After, April, 1918, pp. 675-676.
[13] Reported in the London Times, November 9, 1917.
[14] Nineteenth Century and After, April, 1918, p. 681.
[15] R. Tagore, "Nationalism," p. 101.
[16] Quoted in W. Archer's "India and Its Future," pp. 307-308.
[17] M. Durand, "Life of Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall," p. 89.
[18] International Review of Missions, January, 1918, p. 23.
[19] Ibid., p. 53.
[20] Missionary Ammunition, Number One, 1916, pp. 12-13.
[21] International Review of Missions, October, 1914, pp. 632-633.
[22] A. J. Macdonald, "Trade, Politics and Christianity in Africa and the East," xii, xv, xviii.
[23] Japan Daily Mail, October 9, 1909.
[24] F. Lynch, "President Wilson and the Moral Aims of the War," p. 72.
[25] F. Lynch, "President Wilson and the Moral Aims of the War," p. 64.
[26] H. von Treitschke, "Politik," p. 3.

VIII
[THE WAR AND SOCIAL WORK]
WILLIAM BACON BAILEY

Although the duration of this world-war, and the part which we may be called upon to play in it, makes the destruction in wealth and human life in this country uncertain, and although we cannot tell so far in advance what will be the probable extent of social reconstruction to follow, still the war has progressed far enough, and its effects upon this country are sufficiently apparent, to enable us to forecast more or less indefinitely certain changes which are likely to follow its close.

With regard to the future of social service, three facts are apparent:

First, the people of our country are contributing money as never before to social work. We have for a long time realized that there was a reservoir in this country upon which we had drawn but little, but few realized the extent of this surplus. At times of great distress both here and abroad, our sympathy had been expressed by generous contributions. We had annually contributed large sums for the support of various philanthropies in this country, but as a nation we never realized how much we could give until the test came. One drive is hardly completed before another comes. We are surprised as a nation and as individuals at the amounts we can repeatedly give and still continue to meet our ordinary expenditures. This giving is getting to be almost a habit with us and when the war is over, although we may be helping to carry a huge national debt, I believe that our deserving charities will be supported more adequately than before the war.

Second, we are getting more trained volunteer workers. One of the principal problems of charitable organizations engaged in case work has been to secure a sufficient number of capable volunteers who would keep their interest in the work and be regular in their attendance. The past few months have seen an increase in this volunteer service which a year ago we should never have deemed possible. The Home Service Section of the American Red Cross has enlisted the service as visitors of thousands of our men and women who are anxious to do what they can to preserve the homes from which some member has been called to the colors. In a large number of cities this service has been placed under the supervision of paid workers who had been connected with charity organization societies and who brought with them the experience of years in directing and training volunteer friendly visitors. They recognized the advantage of classroom instruction for these visitors, even if necessity compelled that it be extremely limited. Accordingly training schools for these volunteers have been started in many places in this country and the attendance has been surprisingly large and regular. These volunteers are no longer timidly inquiring whether there is some opportunity for friendly visiting in the homes; they are demanding that some opportunity be given them. After the war this vast army of workers with limited training will demand work of a similar nature and the problem of finding satisfactory volunteers should be solved for many years to come.

Third, the war is raising the standard of care in charitable work. Most of these volunteers are visiting in soldiers' families. The allowance from the Government, the State and the Red Cross makes possible a good standard of living. While our soldiers are at the front they do not need to fear that the standard to which the family had been accustomed will be allowed to fall. At the close of hostilities these volunteers, accustomed to this standard, will demand that the same standard apply to the out-door relief given by charitable societies. The result will be a considerable rise in the standard of care. Professional social workers are not talking so much as they did about "cases." They are talking more about "families." This is the express desire of those who are directing the Home Service Section of the Red Cross. It is felt that in this way a more personal note may be brought into family rehabilitation in the future. It would appear, therefore, that the future should find our charities more adequately financed, better supplied with trained volunteers, and inspired to a higher standard of work.

The habit of saving is likely to become much more firmly established among our people. We may never be so thrifty as the French nation, but we are progressing in that direction. Subscriptions to the Third Liberty Loan were received from seventeen millions of our people. In many of our public schools the purchase of thrift stamps by the scholars has been almost universal. It is probable that a very large proportion of those who are now purchasing liberty bonds never owned a bond of any description before. The habit formed in this way will continue in many cases. A banker a short time ago prophesied that upon the conclusion of this war the savings banks would receive far larger deposits than had ever been the case before. This habit of saving and the ownership of bonds will not fail to have its influence upon the rank and file of our people. At the close of the war we shall have our troubles with those who will advance repudiation or some scheme by which the burden of our national debt may be shifted and the necessity for saving miraculously avoided in some way. But the common sense of our people will assert itself and we shall realize that the only way by which we can replace this capital is by spending less than we earn. The plain word "thrift" seems likely to come into its own again.

Up to the present time social work has appeared to many persons to be a fad. Some have felt that people with too little to do have spent their time in interfering with the affairs of people who had too much to do. The charge has been made that social service was only a temporary phenomenon which would soon disappear. But the war has taught us a lesson. The military authorities were among the first to recognize the need of proper recreation for the troops, and the demand for workers in the cantonments and at the front has been too great to be met. We see now that the need for recreation is a real need. It seems likely that commercialized recreation and amusement is likely to play a smaller part hereafter, and that the community is going to demand a share in this enterprise in the future. Assembly halls, playgrounds, and similar provisions for the public will be required.

We have never had a caste system in this country and aristocracy based upon birth has been unknown. It is probable that nowhere in the world during the past two centuries has it been easier for a man to improve his financial and social standing by his own efforts than in this country. Land ownership has been widely distributed, we have had a large middle class and men have been constantly changing from the group of employees to that of employers. But notwithstanding these factors, there has been a growth of class feeling in this country. Employers have been mistrusted by employees. The growth of large fortunes has given rise to envy and bitterness in many quarters. Many have felt that ignorance was the principal cause for this growing antipathy. Employer and employee no longer met upon a common footing. Many attempts have been made to bridge this chasm. Settlement houses have been erected in order that individuals who would not be likely to meet in the usual course of business or social intercourse might here become acquainted and learn one another's viewpoint. The industrial service movement has been an attempt to link the interests of employer and employee together. But these movements have only scratched the surface. The distinctions based on difference have persisted. It has remained for the war to bring the members of these opposing groups together. Camp and trench life know no class distinction. Rich and poor, educated and illiterate, rub elbows and share common life. It is no uncommon sight to find four men with three different mother tongues sharing a tent together. The effect of this close companionship, this sharing of dangers in common, cannot help but breed a companionship which will do much to bring together men of different birth, breeding and social station.

Another effect of this war has been to lessen sectarian and religious differences. Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish organizations are working side by side in our military camps. The contributions to the work of the Knights of Columbus and of the Y. M. C. A. have come from the community as a whole. Men of different faiths have served as members of the same teams in these drives. The lessons learned in this way are not likely to be forgotten and the great charities to survive this war will probably draw their support from a wider public regardless of sectarian affiliation.

We often heard at the beginning of this conflict that it was a rich man's war; that this country had been drawn into it through the machinations of wealthy men who wished to make more wealth through army contracts. This charge has been pretty thoroughly disproven, and now little is heard of it. The rich have proved their patriotism as conclusively as any class in this country. They have contributed generously to our war charities, have submitted to unprecedented taxation with very little grumbling, have bought Liberty Bonds generously, and have seen their sons volunteer for military service with commendable pride. Many of our most efficient executives have contributed their time to the service of the Government. In fact, one of the most interesting and inspiring features of this war has been the service rendered by our men and women of wealth and social position.

The war is also likely to change the extent and direction of the social movements in this country. In the early days most of the charitable work in this country was directed to the amelioration of the condition of some particular group of unfortunates. A group of their compatriots in this country would form a society for the assistance of Scotch widows. No study was made of the causes of this unfortunate situation. The widows were there and their helpless condition called for aid. There was no attempt to reduce the number of widows by safeguarding the lives of their husbands. In this assistance there was much duplication as the number of these societies increased. Then came the attempt to eliminate this waste by the formation of societies to coördinate these charitable activities in our cities. Although the idea of constructive work entered the minds of these pioneers, the contributors were interested chiefly in the relief of want.

It soon became evident that this want was the result of certain well-defined causes. Sickness, unemployment, intemperance and child labor were recognized as the causes of misery and the extent of these causes was studied by societies which worked for their removal. These activities soon brought the realization that many of these causes were social rather than individual. Sickness is sometimes caused by individual excesses, but it is also caused by unhealthful occupations and life in miserable tenements. We had held property rights as sacred, but when greed brought a train of social evils we directed our attention to regulation. It may be meritorious to help a widow whose husband has been killed at a machine, but it is equally meritorious to safeguard the machine that it may cease to be the cause of widowhood in the future. It is good philanthropy to assist those afflicted with tuberculosis, but it is better to remove the disease-breeding "lung blocks" from our communities.

This brought the realization that these are community problems which must be met by community action. The state legislatures were appealed to with ever increasing success, but Federal action was difficult to obtain. The war has made us impatient with half-measures. The exigency demanded immediate and drastic action. Things have been done to obtain efficiency which we would have considered impossible five years ago. The rights of private property have had to give way before community need. We have begun to deal on a larger scale with ultimate causes and less with the relief of apparent effects. This movement may receive a temporary setback at the close of the war, but as a community we have learned what is possible and this lesson will not be lost.

Certain social reforms are being hastened by the war. We have long felt that certain practices were harmful or wasteful, but in our easy-going manner had kept putting the matter off in the hope that the evil would cure itself. The necessity of waging successful war has compelled the immediate elimination of this waste. Take one or two instances only.

For a long time we have been more or less familiar with the financial, physical and spiritual waste resulting from the consumption of intoxicants in this country. We have been interested in this problem for a half century and various attempts have been made to eliminate the most serious evils connected with excessive drinking without interfering with a moderate use of alcohol. Our half-hearted attempts were not very successful and finally, after we had experienced a coal shortage, and had accepted wheatless and meatless days, the country at last made up its mind that intoxicants must go and the liquor traffic in this country appears to be doomed. It might have come sooner or later in any case, but the war has hastened the day.

For a long time penologists have realized that it was poor economy to shut prisoners into dark and dismal cells, giving them but scant exercise with little or no employment and then to expect them, at the expiration of their terms, to be returned ready to take their proper places in society. We have realized that out-door labor on farms was one of the best things for this class because in this way the prisoners could be built up in health and be made more or less self-supporting while serving their terms. But we had the jails on hand and it was perhaps the easiest plan to lock the prisoners in their cells with the assurance that they could be found when wanted. The demand for farm labor has finally forced our jails and penitentiaries to give up the labor so sorely needed on the farms. It is probable that during the coming summer a million acres of land in this country will be tilled by those undergoing sentence.

We had recognized for years the ravages of venereal disease upon our manhood and womanhood, and a national society and a large number of state societies had been organized to combat the evil. But when the figures began to be published showing the incidence of these diseases among our troops the public awoke to the seriousness of the situation. The Federal Government has taken steps to remove diseased women from the neighborhood of the army cantonments and naval bases. The Government is footing the bills for the treatment of these women in state institutions, where such exist, and is providing suitable facilities for their care in the states where no such opportunity for treatment existed. After the war the lesson we have learned in this way is not likely to be forgotten. Another lesson we have learned from the war has been that a considerable proportion of our young men are physically below par. Poor care of the teeth and body, improper or insufficient food, lack of proper exercise, unhygienic methods of living, and various forms of excesses have produced a generation of young men many of whom are physically unfit for active military service. The importance of this fact has now been driven home, and although much had been said and written upon this subject in recent years, it will have added emphasis in the future.

We have always had a democratic form of government, and have in a way considered this country an asylum for the oppressed of all nations. For several years previous to the outbreak of the war in Europe, we had been receiving into this country immigrants at the rate of about a million a year. We had gradually increased the number of restrictions until most of the undesirable types were excluded. We had made the process of naturalization comparatively easy and had left it to the individual immigrant to decide whether or not he would become a citizen. We had recognized the desirability of Americanizing these immigrants as soon as possible, but had proceeded about the proposition in a more or less half-hearted way. The Y. M. C. A., through its industrial department, and through the industrial service work in connection with the colleges, had done considerable to teach English and civics to the non-English-speaking foreigners. Several other organizations, some of them national in scope, had interested themselves in this problem, but our country seemed slow to appreciate the necessity of making true Americans from these various racial groups at the earliest possible moment. The war has brought home to us the fact that we have alien enemies in our midst and from this time we may expect to make a much more thoroughgoing attempt to Americanize these groups. The National Council of Defense is investigating this question at present and we may with confidence look to a well-considered plan of campaign from this body.

The very fact that we were receiving from the Old World annually a gift of a million foreign-born, most of whom were in the active ages, has led us to think that the supply of labor for this country was assured. We were receiving from Europe all of the natural increase from a population half as large as our own. The ships that brought these hopeful workers to this country took back many who had been maimed in our industries. We had paid too little attention to this problem since the source of this supply of cheap labor seemed inexhaustible. Upon the declaration of hostilities in Europe, the stream of labor to this country suddenly ceased and it is a serious question whether it will ever again reach its former proportion. Most of the European countries are going to be so drained of their young men that a large emigration from them is not to be expected for a long time to come. The demands for raw material and finished products from certain of the European countries has increased tremendously and a shortage of labor in this country has been the result. Concerns have bid against one another to secure sufficient labor and for the first time in years we have a condition in which the demand for labor of all kinds exceeds the supply. With the impossibility of securing this needed labor from abroad, we have realized the necessity of conserving the supply in this country. Every effort must be made to reduce the toll from accident and injury and to decrease the amount of sickness in the country. We may expect an increase in compensation insurance and in health insurance among the states. This summer we are having a campaign to save the lives of a hundred thousand children. This movement for the conservation of life would undoubtedly have come in time but has been hastened by the war. Thousands of our young men will be returned to us from overseas more or less crippled and steps are already being taken to give them expert training to fit them for some useful occupation. It is only a step to provide the same sort of training for those who are maimed in our industries.

No matter what may be the waste in life and property resulting from such a conflict, if the people of this country can preserve in their purity the ideals with which they have entered upon this crusade, social workers may face the future with confidence.

IX
[THE WAR AND CHURCH UNITY]
WILLISTON WALKER

The great war has been conspicuously one of alliances. For its successful accomplishment coöperation and individual subordination have been manifested in military, political and economic fields in heretofore unexampled fulness. Liberties, the result of long struggles, and deeply cherished, have been laid aside, for the time, that larger efficiency may be accomplished. Individual opinions strongly held have been subordinated to a common purpose. The time has witnessed a reappreciation of values in many realms. Much that in days of peace has seemed of importance, has appeared in the fierce light of war of relatively minor significance. A change of perspective has been the consequence. Has this result, so apparent in most realms of activity and of ordinary life, been manifest in the realm of religion? Are the same forces at work there also? An answer to these questions cannot as yet be fully formulated; but it is at least possible to indicate certain influences which are at work.

The entry of the United States into the world-war has been in a degree unexampled in the history of this country a response to the appeal of righteousness. No action in which the nation has ever engaged has been so unselfish. We have taken our part in the struggle without hate, and with full consciousness of the prospective cost in life and treasure, that certain principles of justice may prevail, and that despotism, brutality and falsehood may not dominate the civilized world. We look for no indemnities, no annexations, and no pecuniary rewards. The American people has never more fully exhibited that idealism which, in spite of frequent misapprehension by those unacquainted with the real national spirit, is its fundamental characteristic. The consonance of this attitude with some primary teachings of religion is apparent. Self-sacrifice that the weak may be helped, that wrong may be resisted, and that a truer and juster order may be established among the nations, are aims that are closely akin to those of the Christian faith in its aspect of love to one's neighbor. Nor is it without evidential value to the essentially religious quality of American life that no enterprise has ever so united the people, and that Americans, whether so by long inheritance or immigrants who have more recently caught the national spirit, have never before been so at one in a common endeavor. Nothing less noble, less idealistic, less in a true sense religious could so have fused them into one.

The war, furthermore, has been a revelation of the fundamental purposefulness of the rising generation. The years immediately antecedent to the struggle saw not a little shaking of older heads over what were called the irresponsibility and pleasure-seeking of our young people. The call to arms has shown them as patriotic, as whole-hearted in devotion, as sacrificial as ever their elders were. They need bow in reverence to none who have gone before them. The cheerfulness with which a selective draft has been accepted, and in thousands of cases anticipated, has shown the readiness of youthful response to high appeal. This demonstration of the soundness, the earnestness and the unselfishness of those who are soon to be the leaders of the national life is full of religious encouragement.

Equally heartening has been the cheerful and effective answer of the responsible population of America to limitations in food and drink that the needs of the Allies should be met and the national resources conserved. Doubtless other nations in the world-struggle have made larger sacrifices and endured far severer privations; but the impressive quality of what America has done is that it has been so largely self-imposed, a voluntary sacrifice, in which suggestion rather than compulsion has been the task of its leaders. Strikingly impressive, also, has been the outpouring of wealth and effort to relieve human suffering through the Red Cross and kindred agencies, not only for the alleviation of the miseries of our own sons, but of the martyred population of Belgium, of France, of Poland and of Syria. No village has been too small, no community too remote or too rural, to have a share in this altruistic endeavor. Its spirit is in a true sense that of religion. More openly and professedly religious has been the marvelous work of the Young Men's Christian Association and of the Knights of Columbus. No previous war has seen anything comparable in extent of effort or scope of plan. The aim, and to a great extent the accomplishment, has been to cast Christian sympathy and brotherly helpfulness around the soldier and sailor in every camp at home and abroad, in the trenches, the hospitals, the battleships, the transports, and in the cities where his furlough is spent and his ideals so easily forgotten. These agencies have not labored for our own sons alone, but for those of France and Italy also. Even more impressive than the vast sums of money contributed from all over the United States for this cause have been the numbers and the quality of the men and women who have given themselves freely and in Christian consecration to this service. The Young Men's Christian Association and the Knights of Columbus have been in truth the right arm of American Christianity stretched out to shelter, to hearten and to aid. They have been the agents of the churches in their ministry. Without them the contribution of organized American Christianity would have been relatively ineffective. Through them that Christianity has exhibited itself in practical and achieving power as never before.

The outstanding feature of these conspicuous manifestations of American religious life is that they have been absolutely undogmatic. Their type of Christianity has been broadly inclusive of what may be called universally accepted doctrine. Chaplains from most various denominational antecedents have labored together in a spirit of Christian comradeship, bearing only the sign of the cross. The workers, ministerial and lay, recruited by the Young Men's Christian Association have been drawn from all shades of American Evangelicalism and have wrought not only harmoniously one with another, but with the Knights of Columbus and with the representatives of Jewish faith. In common efforts to reach common needs, differences which loomed large at home have been laid aside. The requirements and experiences of our soldiers and sailors have been elemental, and these agencies have sought to meet them with a simple, earnest, uncontroversial Gospel,—the common denominator, if it may so be called, of our American Christianity. They have presented God, sin, salvation, faith in Christ, purity of life, brotherly helpfulness; and to this presentation the young manhood of our armies and navies has been quick to respond. These young men have cared little as to the particular denominational label which these messengers may have worn at home. Spoken with manliness, sincerity and sympathy, the message has won their hearts.

These experiences have inevitably raised the question more insistently, which had already before the war been sounded increasingly loudly in our home churches, whether the divided state of American Christianity is to continue. It has long been deplored. Can it not be in a measure abated? A disposition to believe that it can is increasingly evident. The enlarging support given to the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ since the beginning of the war is significant of a growing conviction that at least a larger federal coöperation is not merely desirable but feasible. The much-divided Lutheran body has taken steps which promise its union in one fold. The last General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the United States has empowered a committee to issue a call for a Council to meet before the close of the present year by which practical action may be initiated looking towards the organic union of all American Evangelical Christianity. The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States still urges its ambitious and remote plan of a World Conference on Faith and Order, aiming at a general reunion of Christendom; though in this case the war seems to have delayed rather than furthered the project. In the local field, the scarcity of fuel during the recent winter led to hundreds of instances of temporary combinations of congregations representative of different denominations throughout the northern portion of the United States. Not only has no evil been the consequence, but better acquaintance and larger Christian sympathy have resulted. In some places, as in New Brunswick, N. J., these temporary unions have led to efforts to make these combinations permanent. It is evident that the possibility of a larger unity is being discussed as never before, and in a spirit which more than at any previous time tends to emphasize the great truths in which Christians are agreed and to minimize their differences.

Will anything permanently effective come out of this widely diffused desire? Shall we be satisfied with the remarkable exhibitions of Christian coöperation in our army and navy, shall we entertain a pious wish that something similar may be achieved at home, and will the end of the war find us, nevertheless, in our present divided state? The answer will depend on the sacrificial willingness of our American Christianity. Is it ready to pay the cost? That is a far-reaching question any answer to which is at present impossible, for the difficulties in the path of a larger union are enormous. Such a greater unity can be achieved only as several barriers of great strength are overthrown.

One such barrier is the inertia of local organizations. Few American communities are not confessedly overchurched, as far as the Protestant population is concerned. The spectacle of eight or ten relatively feeble churches ministering to needs which two or three larger bodies could much more effectively meet is one exhibited in hundreds of communities. Yet effective consolidation is opposed by serious obstacles. Long custom, ancient disputes, denominational loyalties, keep these relatively feeble bodies asunder. These prejudices are hard to overcome. "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain," is a feeling not peculiar to Samaria. Much of this local loyalty is not without its commendable qualities. It is bound up with traditions of parental piety, of devotion to a particular house of worship and to a congregation of believers in which one has grown up in the Christian life. These feelings are very real. Yet it is only as the advantages of a larger local unity become evident that our churches can rise to a greater consolidation and more effectively meet the local situation. Only the larger good can drive out the lesser goods.

A further barrier, and one of no inconsiderable magnitude, which renders local union difficult is that our local churches are parts of large organic wholes for the advancement of the Kingdom of God at home and abroad. By their gifts, their sons and daughters and their prayers, the missionary societies are supported, by which the outreaching work of the Kingdom of Christ is carried forward. These societies are now denominational. If two local churches are to become one, where will their joint contributions go? One has aided one group of missionary societies hitherto, the other another. Shall the new union divide its gifts? If it does, will they be as extensive or the interest as great as formerly? These are practical questions for the missionary societies. The only final solution of such a situation would seem to be an extensive consolidation of the missionary societies themselves, so that they might become more representative of American Christianity, at least of American Evangelical Christianity, as a whole, rather than simply the organs of particular denominations.

A third barrier of difficulty barring the pathway of local consolidation is that of ministerial and ecclesiastical responsibility. Each of the various denominations now has its definite method of entrance on its ministry, and of responsibility for the character and standing of those in its pastorates. Each holds itself bound to aid its feebler churches in their pecuniary necessities. If a new congregation results from the union of two or more existing bodies representative of different denominations, where is the test of ministerial fitness, and the guarantee of continued ministerial standing to be found, and who is to aid such a church if financially feeble? These are the problems which are often raised by the so-called "community church." Of course these difficulties are often met by the united organization attaching itself to the denomination originally represented by one of its component parts; but this solution, though effective, makes so large demands on Christian self-denial as often to be impracticable in the present still comparatively feebly developed desire for unity.

A still further barrier to unity, both on the local field and on the larger national scale, is the fact, often overlooked, that the separations of American Christianity are really due quite as much to differences of taste as to divergencies of doctrines or of polity. There is an Episcopal, a Presbyterian or a Methodist way of doing things that really differentiates these great families of believers quite as fully as their more generally acknowledged divergencies. They view the Christian life, they look upon worship, they express their deeper feelings, in unlike ways. The variety is not so much a diversity of belief as a contrast of temperaments. Being so, it is not susceptible to argument, or to adjustment by conventions or creedal agreements. It is to be met, if met at all, by the increasing spirit of democracy, which the war has done so much to foster. In proportion as the fundamental Christian democracy of America becomes a real consciousness these temperamental unlikenesses will tend to be subordinated to a larger unity of spirit. They will continue. Men are not all made in the same mould. But, it may be believed that they may be overcome by a growing recognition of unity in variety.

Moreover, in spite of an increasing longing that the multitudinous subdivisions of American Christianity be merged in a larger whole, much tenacious holding of peculiar denominational tenets will have to be overcome. The simplicity of the great truths which Christians hold in common will need to be more fully realized. Most American Evangelical denominations are now willing freely to admit that the essential verities of Christianity are held by their associated communions, and that a true Christian life is possible in each of them. The evident working of the spirit of God makes a denial impossible. But while each denomination is thus willing to recognize a real, if grudgingly admitted, sisterhood as the share of the others, each regards its peculiarities of belief or practice as of extreme importance, if not to the being, at least to the well-being of the church, so that effective inter-communion seems impossible. An interesting illustration of this spirit has recently been shown in a discussion involving a communion which professes, one cannot doubt with sincerity, a desire for a reunion of Christendom. A proposition was made to it by a number of representatives of other communions, urging that the unity of American Christianity be illustrated by joint ordinations of chaplains for service with the army and navy. That proposal, which involved no question of ministerial status in the home churches, was declined by its highest authorities. It is not conceivable that those who thus refused it believed that chaplains went forth to their arduous task in the name of Christ from other communions without the blessing of God; but such differences of apprehension as may still coexist with obedience to the one Master are evidently yet deemed too great to permit mutual Christian authorization for service. Doubtless many similar instances could be found, but as long as they characterize American Christianity at all they reveal the persistence of a spirit which exalts denominational peculiarities above the full recognition of common Christian discipleship.

These barriers have been thus frankly stated because they are very real, and while the impulse toward Christian unity now flows in increasing strength from the experiences of the great war, the movement in that direction must acquire far greater momentum before its work can be accomplished. Christian unity was never so fully before the thought of the American churches as now. Never were so many sincerely desirous of it. Never was its need so obvious as in these days when the church faces the tremendous problem of the reconstruction on a Christian basis of a shattered social order. It is a task which demands all the forces of an undivided Christianity. Yet desirable as the goal of unity is, it will never be reached save through the strenuous coöperant effort of all who long for it. That effort must be greater than any heretofore made. It must be patient and persistent and in full faith that the Master's prayer for his disciples demands their utmost endeavor.

Three steps are certainly needful for effective progress towards a larger unity:

There must be a clearer recognition of the things in the Christian faith which are of vital significance. The really great truths must be seen in their proper perspective. The simplicity of the Gospel must be increasingly recognized. We have too often elevated relatively subordinate convictions to an equality with the fundamentals of the faith. In this clearer perception of proportions the experiences of the religious work of the war is greatly aiding. We are seeing that in the Christian life we need not so many things as much.

No less necessary is it that a spirit ready to sacrifice the important, but relatively subordinate, be developed. No denomination is called upon to sacrifice alone. If unity is to be achieved, each must feel a willingness to subordinate that which though precious by custom or antiquity or cherished possession is yet divisive.

Even more imperative is it that American religious bodies know each other better. Existing side by side, laboring in the same communities, it is amazing how little real comprehension of each other's spiritual life now exists. In mutual acquaintance by common association, wherever such intercourse can be brought about, lies the corrective of much present misunderstanding that separates us. All that aids a common acquaintance is an aid to ultimate unity.

The consideration just mentioned makes it probable that the most promising present step is in the direction of federal coöperation. Religious bodies that are far from willing to sink their present differences may yet work in harmony, and by working together increase that mutual understanding and thereby confidence in each other's Christian spirit which is so essential a preliminary to unity. That is what makes the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ and similar movements eminently worthy of support. They are not ends in themselves. They are means of utmost significance to a larger end.

The war is showing a vision of our need and of the goal of our effort. That the road to a larger and more effective unity of the religious forces of America is full of difficulties is no reason why a Christian man should hesitate to tread it. It is as true now as when the Master said it, that "with God all things are possible."

X
[THE RELIGIOUS BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION][1]
E. HERSHEY SNEATH

When we reflect upon the situation of the race today, with the leading nations in the throes of a war of unparalleled dimensions and destructiveness, we are appalled at the impotency of those forces that heretofore have tended toward world-organization. Time was when international treaties and laws seemed to have at least a semblance of inhibiting sanctity, but in recent years they are regarded in certain quarters as mere "scraps of paper," and the supposed "rights" of nations are treated with scorn and contempt. The black flag of piracy, hitherto regarded as the symbol of international outlawry, floats on the high seas, and the assassination of neutrals and noncombatants is regarded by some as a national virtue. For centuries humane considerations obtained with reference to prisoners of war and to partially conquered nations. Now, certain nations have substituted for such humanitarianism, outrage, brutality and enforced slavery. In short, international pact and law seem to have broken down. Their restraints have yielded to the unbridled force of national greed and lust for power.

Again, in the past, the moral imperatives, independent of political treaties and laws, have exercised a wholesome constraining and restraining influence on the relations of different peoples, and have made for fraternal world-organization. Man is constitutionally a moral being, and is, to a certain extent, governed by sentiments of justice and benevolence. These moral elements of our nature have led us to have regard for man as man, rather than for men as members of particular nations and races. Hence, in our interaction there has been a tendency to recognize and respect what we have been wont to call human rights as growing out of the essential constitution of personality. The same tendency has characterized our attitude toward men organized under political government. But alas! these fundamental moral claims are now flagrantly violated. The morally right has, with some nations, degenerated into the right of might.

Again, in the past, art has made for the unification of the race. The æsthetic consciousness is on the side of harmony. It hates chaos and loves order. It functions in the social and political spheres and tends toward unity rather than anarchy—toward peace rather than war. "Art binds together and unites the members of the nation; nay, all the members of a sphere of civilization; all those who have the same faith and the same ideals. Opinions and interests differ and produce discord; art presents in sensuous symbols the ideals which are cherished by all, and so arouses the feeling that all are, in the last analysis, of the same mind, that all recognize and adore the same ultimate and highest things."[2] When we deal with the ideal we are dealing with the universal. Thus art transcends both individualism and nationalism. It contributes toward international good will. But how ineffective it has proven along these lines during the last few tragic years. One of the first great outrages of the war was the wanton bombardment of the beautiful Rheims cathedral. The world protested against this iconoclasm, but it continued. Vandalism and robbing nations of their art treasures are features of Kultur; so the breach between nations widens despite the supposed unifying power of art. The nation of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Wagner grips with mailed fist the throat of the nation of Michelangelo, Titian, Da Vinci, Correggio and Raphael, and tries to strangle the nation of David, Delacroix and Millet. The nation of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller schools its children in a gospel of hate toward the nation of Shakespeare and Milton and a long line of glorious poets from Chaucer to Browning. The refining and organizing influences of art have given way to the brutal instincts of malevolence and greed, and a lofty idealism that bound the nations together in a golden chain of beauty finds the precious chain rudely broken. Art, like the other binding forces, has apparently failed in its work of unification.

Another force that has been operative in world-organization is religion, and especially the Christian religion. With its proclamation of the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man; with the law of love as its law of social interaction; with its "Go ye into all the world and preach my gospel"—a gospel of universal membership in a kingdom of supreme values—in which every member is on a moral equality with his neighbor—the Christian religion has been promotive of a spirit of good will among men, and of harmony among the nations. But what is the case today? A nominally Christian nation joins bloody hands with a traditionally murderous nation of Mohammedan faith in wholesale assassination of one of the most ancient Christian peoples, and attempts to incite the Moslem world to warfare against nations of Christian faith, merely to enhance her own selfish interests. Furthermore, in the present crisis we find Christian nation arrayed against Christian nation: Protestant against Protestant; Catholic against Catholic; Protestant and Catholic united against Protestant and Catholic. Peoples in whose ears for centuries have rung the glad tidings of "peace on earth, good will toward men" are today gripping one another in mortal combat. The star of the East that, according to the story, guided the Wise Men to the manger of the Prince of Peace seems to have lost its radiance and directing power. Never since the star is said to have shone were men apparently farther from beating their swords into plow-shares and their spears into pruning hooks. The unifying power of him whose life illustrated even better than his parable of the Good Samaritan the highest law of human relationship is not in evidence today. Where is the power of that cross, the vision of which carried with it still another vision of a world attracted to, and unified by, the power of self-sacrificing love—"And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me"? Is the power of sacrificial love drawing the hearts of men and of nations together in the fellowship of Jesus Christ? Are not the dominant forces operating today centrifugal rather than centripetal? It is not the skeptic, or cynic, or pessimist, who asks these questions. They are the questions of thousands of earnest men and women who face the supreme crisis of human history. They bring home to us the fact that religion, even in its highest form, like international law, like morality, like art, however promotive of human brotherhood it has been, has failed in this most crucial test to prevent the dreadful work of the destructive forces of mankind. This is a fact that the sincere believer in religion must face whether he wants to or not.

In view of the failure of all of these more or less harmonizing and synthesizing forces to prevent such a gigantic war, what are we to say about world-organization after the conflict? Nations must live and sustain relations to one another. They must establish some modus vivendi, and it must be founded on justice. The necessity of righteousness and good will in international relations has been made more apparent than ever by this most tragic conflict. And the question arises: What organized forces are to establish such righteousness and good will among the nations? We must depend upon the very same forces that have been operative in the past; that is, upon international law, morality, art and religion, but they must be made more effective. How this may be done in the case of religion it is the aim of this paper to try to explain.

In the first place, if religion is to become powerfully effective in this direction, it must take a really ethical view of God. He must be regarded as essentially moral in his constitution; as ruling in absolute righteousness, and a being whose ultimate aim with reference to men and the world is the realization of a new heaven and a new earth wherein righteousness is to dwell. Much as believers in religion have said on this subject, the conceptions of many as expressed in belief and conduct have contradicted their words. When the nation of Martin Luther, including not merely the docile masses, but the spiritually enslaved clergy and servile university professors,[3] among whom may be numbered such religious leaders as Harnack, can accept and pray for the success of the war program of a ruler who regards himself to be the vicegerent of the Almighty, coöperating with him in a scientifically organized movement for the triumph of the most diabolical forces the human race has ever witnessed—approving the vices of hell as though they were the virtues of heaven—this nominally Christian nation is either guilty of awful blasphemy or it has lost its vision of an ethical God. Such a conception of the Deity proves divisive rather than unifying. It recognizes merely a partisan tribal Deity who coöperates with a people to realize its own ends, however unworthy and debasing those ends may be. Its influence is promotive of national selfishness, and makes against a brotherhood of nations. Professor Leuba speaks of the utilitarian ends for which men believe in God—making him hardly more than a meat purveyor;[4] but the German conception of God is much crasser than this.[5] "Gott mit uns" is a God that is asked and believed to coöperate in the most damnable atrocities the human mind ever conceived in order to further low national aims.

Now, there is an important psychology here that we must reckon with. Professor Stratton, in his work on "The Psychology of the Religious Life," calls attention to the fact that religion breeds conflict, it gives birth to opposites or antitheses, and he devotes nearly the entire volume to a consideration of these conflicts. In one of his most interesting chapters[6] he points out the fact that religion is productive of both breadth and narrowness of sympathy, of both social and anti-social feelings, of both egoism and altruism. He illustrates this in pointing out the exclusiveness of some religions, such as that of the Jews, and of the catholicity of others, such as Buddhism and Christianity. He points out, also, the jealousy and intolerance of the monotheistic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism, as compared with polytheistic religions, like Buddhism. The former, like Elijah, are very jealous for their Lord, and such jealousy breeds narrowness and intolerance. It breeds exclusiveness, strife and often persecution. Now most of the conflict between narrowness and breadth of sympathy to which religion gives rise is due to wrong conceptions of the ethical nature of God. This manifests itself in many ways. God is conceived as a God of one people, rather than of others; or of one people particularly and peculiarly, and of other peoples merely generally; or a God choosing and rewarding the elect and damning the non-elect; or a God favoring only one mode of salvation peculiar to a certain people or sect, and hostile to all others; or a God of one revelation rather than of another. In short, God is a God of favoritism instead of the impartial God and father of all mankind. Such a God is not a God of justice, much less of love. Such a conception is productive of division, rather than of unity in the race. It begets strife, rather than harmony. Witness the religious wars that history records. Witness, for example, the history of the conflict between Mohammedanism and Christianity; between Protestantism and Catholicism. As a rule, religion is so involved in the life of a people that it becomes an integral part of their nationalism. Historians call attention to the fact that the monotheism of the Jews was largely the outgrowth of reflection upon their own history as a people. They saw in this history a Divinity that had shaped their ends, however roughhewn they may have been. They regarded themselves a "peculiar" people, specially chosen of God. For more than a century a similar belief prevailed in America. Our wonderful history led people to believe that we are a favored nation. God's providential government reveals a partiality for America when compared with other nations. With such conceptions of a partial God, it is but a short step to making use of God for national ends, and, as illustrated in the case of the German nation today, only another step to conceiving God's willingness to coöperate in realizing ends which, in the judgment of the world, as expressed in international law, as well as in its own unwritten verdict, are regarded as unrighteous. Until the God of the race supersedes in actual belief and practice the God of nationalism; until the God and father of all mankind displaces in our belief the God of sect or of one religion rather than of another; until the God of absolute and universal righteousness takes the place in our minds and hearts of the God of partiality and favoritism, which is the God of injustice; men and nations will not be bound together in one great and glorious fraternity. The root idea of religion is the idea of God, and as is our idea of God, so will our religious life be. If it is the idea of an unrighteous Deity, our individual, national and international life will be unrighteous. A fundamental necessity in the determination of the religious basis of world-organization is an ethical conception of God.

In the second place, in our religious efforts at world-organization we must entertain and put in practice a far more ethical conception of man than we have in the past. The inalienable rights of personality must be recognized and their sanctity remain inviolable. That valuation which Christianity places on man as man must be seriously reckoned with in our reconstructive efforts after the war. Or, as Kant states it, every man must be regarded as an end in himself. He must not be used merely as a means to an end. The significance of this is, that there is an essential moral equality among men. On it all political relations, whether national or international, must be based. This means, first, that within each nation a true form of government, under whatsoever name it may be known, must be democratic. "It must derive its authority and power from the consent of the governed." Autocracy is opposed to moral and political equality. It treats its subjects as tools or instruments. It builds governments of force that ignore the moral and political claims of their own people, reducing them to a docility in which they are little more than "dumb driven cattle." Thus subjugated, they are schooled from childhood in a creed of jealousy and hatred of other nations. They can be hurled in masses "into the jaws of Death" in an unrighteous war of conquest. Autocracy is upheld by militarism, and militarism means strife. On the other hand, militarism is upheld by autocracy. It first robs the people of its own nation of their rights and then proceeds to plunder other nations. It is essentially anti-social in character, and it is so because it is anti-moral. It overlooks the moral equality of men. The religion of the future must set its face like flint against this immoral view of man. It must emphasize the autonomy of the human spirit—the essential value of a soul that can determine its own conduct in the light of ideals of worth. Once it does this, democracy will assert itself in government, and autocracy, responsible for so many of the wars that have afflicted the race, will be abolished.

In the next place, this essential moral equality of men, when recognized, means that their mutual relations will become more ethically articulate, and the law of social interaction will be at least the law of justice, and in a measure the law of love,—"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,"—which being interpreted means, that just as one is under obligations to labor for the realization of the highest good in one's own person, so he is under obligations to work for the realization of the highest good in the person of others. And this highest law of human relationship must be recognized, not merely as obligatory upon individuals in their relations to other individuals, but also upon nations in their mutual relations. Morality is transcendental in its character. It overleaps the bounds of individualism. It knows not men merely, nor nations merely, nor groups of nations merely;—it knows the race. It knows man, rather than men. It is difficult for us to realize this. Just as it was hard for primitive tribes to realize any obligations to other tribes, so today, notwithstanding centuries of so-called civilization, somehow or other an international morality fails to have the binding force either of personal, community, or national morality. The righteousness that exalts a people seems largely to be a righteousness within its own borders. Egoism in a nation is just as blameworthy as egoism in an individual. In the vast group of nations, no nation liveth unto itself alone, if it is to live according to the moral law of benevolence, or according to the Christian law of love. The religion of the future must, in its practical belief, emphasize this fact far more than it has in the past. Nations are simply larger human units, and the moral law in its obligations applies just as truly to their interrelations as it does to those of individuals. Its demands are no more Utopian in the former case than in the latter. It can at least serve as an ideal or guide to conduct. As in the case of individuals, so in the case of nations, each has its rights, and in their mutual relations the moral law or the law of love requires the recognition of the rights or just claims of each. As President Wilson said in his memorable message to Congress on April 2, 1917: "We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among individuals of civilized states." And again: "It is clear that nations must in the future be governed by the same high code of honor that we demand of individuals." Of course the cynical political philosopher and "practical" stateman will regard this as "unpractical idealism." But the ethics of the Nazarene will prove far more effective in promoting a satisfactory modus vivendi among the nations than the revived Machiavellianism of modern Germany, or the ethics of a Nietzsche, a Treitschke, and a Bernhardi. We see the inevitable outcome of the latter in the most ghastly war of all history. There never will be peace on such a brutally egoistic basis as that laid down in the political philosophy of these writers so prized by many Germans. The doctrines of the superman with their contempt for the weak, and of war as a "biological necessity," so dear to Junkerdom, are confessedly the affirmation that "might makes right." If peace be attainable and preservable on such a basis, and the lion and the lamb are to lie down together, it will only be as the lamb lies inside of the lion. Some lamb-like pacifists and "conscientious objectors" to war may be content with such a place of residence; but physically and morally red-blooded and self-respecting men and nations not only prefer, but feel it a moral obligation to maintain the individual and national self against an unscrupulous and barbarous aggressor and destroyer. They feel so, too, in obedience to the Christian command, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"—a command that not only includes self as the object of moral regard, but that makes it the norm according to which we are to determine our duty to others. Men and nations do feel morally responsible for their own preservation and development, and will, as a rule, defend the essential conditions of these against unjustifiable attack. Hence, as long as nations exist, war will remain a possibility. The only way to avert it is through mutual respect for fundamental rights. Both the law of benevolence and the Christian law of love demand this. Indeed, they demand more! They call for a manifestation or fuller expression of good will and fraternal regard both in feeling and in conduct.

Now, in the work of establishing a real brotherhood among individuals and among nations, religion has the advantage over mere morality, for it can avail itself of the power of the religious sanctions in trying to realize the kingdom of righteousness. But, on the other hand, a subtle danger lurks in religion which it may be well to point out here, and which must be guarded against in our future efforts at community, national and world-organization, for it tends to subordinate the ethical element in religion, and often degenerates into an anti-social program. According to the sanest views of the psychology of religion, the whole mind as intellect, sensibility and will functions in the religious consciousness. Because of this, there is a possibility of developing a wrong sense of values in the religious life. There has been a notable tendency in human history to stress the intellectual element in religion. This has resulted in a large body of doctrine which frequently assumes extraordinary significance. The main thing, then, is to give intellectual assent to dogma and creed. Orthodoxy of belief rather than orthodoxy of life becomes the primary thing. The ethical element in religion is subordinated to intellectual belief. And how divisive and anti-social, rather than unifying, dogma has been, and how deadening to real moral endeavor! This constitutes a long and very tragic chapter in the history of Christianity, as well as of other religions.

Again, there has been another marked tendency in the history of religion and that is the substitution of the religion of feeling for the religion of will. Pietism and sentimentalism have supplanted in a large measure the ethical. Such religion is dominantly non-social, if not, indeed, anti-social in its character. It does not make for brotherhood. The pietistic monk shuts himself in a monastery and tries to work out his soul's salvation with fear and trembling, rather than to work it out by aiding his neighbor or society to work out theirs. Buddhism and Christianity have been most unfortunate victims of this substitution of solitude for solidarity. Dean Brown once said to the writer that there is a great deal of pietism that is utterly wanting in ethical quality, and that is true. It is a kind of selfish subjectivism devoid of any real moral character. It is self-centered and non-social. It represents the minimum of true religion. Where in such pietism do we find the universality of obligation involved in the ethical law of benevolence or in the Christian law of love? Such religion does not bear the marks of a really socialized gospel. It has developed a wrong sense of values.

Again, there is in practically all religions a large element of symbolism—the religious life expressing itself in worship—in rites and ceremony. And this carries with it a dangerous tendency in evaluation. It often substitutes ritual and ceremonial for what is the real essence of religion—namely, righteousness. The great Hebrew prophets contended strongly against this misinterpretation of religion. With them it represented an erroneous estimate of the essentials of religion. Indeed, it threatened its very life—the heart of which in their conception is righteousness in God and man. Isaiah represents Jehovah as being weary of sacrifice, incense and other forms of worship—regarding them as an abomination, and calling upon the people to live a life of righteousness: "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed."[7] Hosea exclaims: "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice."[8] Micah, inveighing against burnt offerings, says: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good, and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"[9] And Jesus, all through the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables, in the most positive manner represents righteous living as the very core of religion.

All of these elements—the intellectual, the pietistic, the æsthetic or symbolical—have a rightful place in the religious life, but they are all subordinate, and exceedingly subordinate, to the one great dominating element, the moral. And it is because of a failure to adequately recognize and practise this element that so many supposedly Christian nations are today in deadly conflict. All of them persist in their theological beliefs; all of them persist in pietistic communion; all of them persist in rite and ceremony; but some of them at least fail even to approximate the exemplification of the fundamental ethical requirements of their faith. Their theology, their pietism, their worship,—their religion,—have not been moralized; and unless we are willing to make, both in belief and practice, the religious basis of world-organization truly ethical, we will fail as lamentably in the future as we have in the past.

Finally, how is such a religious program to be carried forward? The answer is, by systematic religious education. Such an educational procedure involves beginning at the beginning, and that is, with the child. Here, again, we meet with a melancholy failure in the development of a true sense of values. Despite the progress that modern religious educational effort has made, there is still a widespread lack of genuine appreciation of the importance of childhood for moral and religious instruction. The premium is still placed on the adult. We have but to examine the average church program to be convinced of this. In a large number of churches we have three Sunday services—two of which are devoted to adults and one to children. In the average church the week-day services are largely services for adults. Our sermons, our hymns, our prayers, many of our week-day meetings cover chiefly the interests of grown-ups: and the lamentable condition of home religious education painfully fails to make up this deficiency in what Dr. Horace Bushnell called Christian nurture. Indeed, under a false conception of conversion, and a false apprehension of the spiritual birthright of children in most Protestant quarters, the child, as the late Professor George P. Fisher once remarked to the writer, is regarded as an alien to the Commonwealth of Israel. Instead of being born into the church and treated as a member of the household of faith, he must serve his probation as a heathen, and await the dawn of adolescence when he will have developed sufficient maturity of mind to interpret and give intellectual assent to a creed. The absurdity and tragedy of it all are manifest when we take into consideration the ethical character of religion, and the fact that childhood is preëminently the period for establishing the individual in habits of virtue. There may be some exaggeration in Dr. G. Stanley Hall's affirmation, that the moral and spiritual destiny of the average person is determined in the first ten years of his life; but, to anyone who has studied the psychology of moral and spiritual development, it is evident that Hall is dealing with far more than a half-truth. The receptivity and plasticity of the child make it possible for those to whom his most vital interests are committed to really save him or damn him. And, as we establish children in right thinking and right living, so we establish the community, the state, the nation, and ultimately the nations in their reciprocal relations. In more ways than one is Wordsworth's statement true, "The child is father to the man." It is preëminently true in the moral and religious sphere. The Kingdom of God and his righteousness will never make the progress on earth that they should make until the scales really fall from our eyes, and we gain a true vision of our duty to the child in establishing him in personal and community righteousness, and thus pave the way for the application of the law of righteousness in the state and among the nations of the earth.

In still another way, to one who is convinced of the supremacy of moral and spiritual worths and of the ethical aim of all true religion, is the lamentable failure to develop a true sense of values manifest. Professor Pratt calls attention in his "Psychology of Religious Belief" to what he regards to be a fact, that in the average American community, "we find our friends and neighbors, of all degrees of education and intellectual ability, almost to a man accepting God as one of the best recognized realities of their world and as simply not to be questioned."[10] That statement is in the main true. In other words, we are a religious people. And yet, notwithstanding this fact, so far as thoroughgoing, systematic religious education is concerned, when compared with the time and efforts devoted to education along other lines, and its quality, it suffers painfully. In nearly all of the states, five days a week, of at least four or five hours each, are given to what we call secular education, as against one day per week, of one hour each, to religious instruction and worship. In secular education we have, on the whole, a trained body of teachers. In religious education we are dependent largely on amateurs. In most places religion is not allowed a voice in our schools, so far as systematic training is concerned, and in comparatively few communities has a systematic course of moral training even been introduced. What does all this mean? Does it not mean that we err tremendously in our sense of values? If there is any doubt concerning this, reflect for a moment on the possibility of organizing a community on a basis of the vices instead of the virtues. Try to found a community on sensuality, falsehood, dishonesty, injustice, hate and murder, and see how far you will succeed. Society could not exist on such a basis. Were the German people to put into practice among themselves the vices and crimes they have committed against other peoples, their existence as a nation would be exceedingly short-lived. The vices are anti-social in their character. The virtues are social: they make for unity, for organization. And what is true of communities is true of states and nations—not only in their internal relations but in their relations to other nations. The virtues make for national and international organization. Now, religion deals with these sovereign values, and yet, comparatively speaking, we—a religious people—relegate them to the background in our educational schemes. We will never succeed in world-organization until we genuinely appreciate the unifying power of the virtues, the harmonizing and binding force of righteousness, and systematically train a generation from childhood in a knowledge and an appreciation of their supreme worth, and try to mould their wills in conformity to their requirements.

But, as Herbert Spencer wisely remarks, we have not an ideal environment in which to work out our ideals. And that is eminently true in this case; therefore, wisdom dictates that we try to do our work with reference to the conditions of the actual environment in which we are placed. If, for apparently good reasons, it be not expedient under present conditions to introduce systematic religious education into the public schools, it is possible for us to make provision in some other way for religion to have its rightful place in the general training of our children. This would require a religious school organization, with a curriculum that interprets religion as ethical in its aim. It would require a scientifically graded moral scheme with its corresponding religious sanctions; also the creation of a literature to meet these demands. It would require, at least, three sessions a week. It should be separate from the Sunday school, where, with present conditions, sectarianism still enters into education, and yet it should be supplementary to it. It would call for a specially trained teaching force; and for skilled professional supervision. All this ought to be done; it can be done; and it must be done. We must do it in the interests of the individual, of the family, of the community, of the state, of the nation, and of the brotherhood of nations. It is a thoroughly practicable scheme. The literature exists already; colleges, schools of religion, and theological seminaries can easily become training schools for the preparation of religious teachers. The only difficulty in the way, which is, indeed, a serious one, but by no means insuperable, is the time-schedule of the children. In my own judgment, if a real effort were made by the churches of any community, a plan could be formulated in relation to the public schools whereby the children would become available for such religious instruction. If the community is a religious one, it has a right to, and must insist upon, having the children a fair share of the time for such purposes. If the moral and spiritual values are the supreme values of society, then it is in the interests of society itself that these values should receive proper recognition in formal education for citizenship. The real trouble is, that the churches are not really in earnest concerning this important matter. It has taken an awful social cataclysm to make us realize that nations, like families and communities, can hang together on no other basis than the cardinal virtues, and that something more than a mere formal recognition of these virtues is required for world-organization. Men and nations must be disciplined in them, and the way to do this is to begin in childhood. If the schooling of a nation in a gospel of national egoism and hate be largely responsible for the present war, with the brutal indifference of the German people to moral considerations in provoking it and to humane methods of waging it, why is it not possible to school the nations in those things that make for good will and world-organization? To doubt it is to doubt the might of right.

In conclusion, my plea is, that, in our efforts at world re-organization, so far as religion is concerned, we adequately reckon with its ethical character. Let us take, first, an ethical view of God—that he is a righteous being, that he deals justly with all men and all nations, that he cannot be used by any individual or nation for unrighteous ends, that he is the father of us all, and that he coöperates with men in their efforts to bring in the reign of righteousness upon earth. And, secondly, let us take a more ethical view of man; recognizing the worth and inalienable rights of personality; that no man may be used merely as a means, but must be regarded as an end in himself; and thus, whatever may be the outward form of government, it must in essence be democratic, rather than autocratic; that the law of interaction among nations must be the same as the law among individuals—the law of benevolence or the law of love. Let us develop a true sense of values in religion that will place emphasis on the voluntaristic or ethical element rather than on either the intellectual, pietistic and symbolical or æsthetic. Finally, let us try to realize this program by thorough, systematic religious education in which we shall emphasize the interests of the child rather than the interests of the adult; by giving an ethical interpretation to the curriculum; by organizing a trained body of teachers; and by insisting that a fair amount of the child's time and effort shall be devoted to education in the supreme values of society. If we act on this program, if we make this really the religious basis of world re-organization, we will make long strides toward the dawn of a better day, when nations shall seek war no more; and the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our righteous God and his Christ, whose gospel and life teach the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.

[1] Address delivered at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the National Religious Education Association, New York, March 5, 1918. Republished with modifications by courtesy of Religious Education.
[2] Paulsen, "A System of Ethics," trans., p. 559.
[3] On the servility of German university professors consult David Jayne Hill, Harper's Magazine, July, 1918, pp. 30-33.
[4] Monist, XI, p. 571.
[5] See, for example, the views of Pastors W. Lehmann ("About the German God"); H. Francke ("War Sermons"); J. Rump ("War Devotions and Memorial Services for the Fallen"); K. König ("Six War Sermons"); also Tolzien and others in "Patriotic Evangelical War Lectures."
[6] Pt. I, ch. II.
[7] Isaiah 2:10.
[8] Hosea 6:6.
[9] Micah 6:8.
[10] Page 231.

Transcriber's Note:

Hyphenated words have been standardized. On page 67, "stablished" changed to "established"; on page 167, "sancity" changed to "sanctity".