That religion can lose nothing by the destruction of her monuments is the solace of Christian souls. Her churches lie in crumbling ruins. Ypres, Pervyse, Soissons, Revigny, Souain, Maurupt, Étavigny. Everywhere stand the shattered walls of what was once a church, with here and there an altar burned or hacked, and a mutilated crucifix. But the faith that built these churches is as unassailable as the souls of the men who died for them. There are things beyond the reach of “high explosives,” and it is not for them we grieve.
It is a common saying that the New Testament affords no vindication of war, which is natural enough, not being penned as a manual for nations. But Catholic theology, having been called on very early to pronounce judgment upon this recurrent incident of life, has defined with absolute exactitude what, in the eyes of the Church, justifies, and what necessitates war. From a mass of minute detail,—laws laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas and other doctors of the Church,—I venture to quote two salient points, the first dealing with the nature of a right, the second with the nature of a title.
“Every perfect right, that is, every right involving in others an obligation in justice of deference thereto, if it is to be an efficacious, and not an illusory power, carries with it as a last appeal the subsidiary right of coercion. A perfect right, then, implies the right of physical force to defend itself against infringement, to recover the subject-matter of right unjustly withheld, or to exact its equivalent, and to inflict damage in the exercise of this coercion, wherever coercion cannot be exercised without such damage.”
“The primary title of a state to go to war is, first, the fact that the state’s rights are menaced by foreign aggression not otherwise to be prevented than by war; second, the fact of actual violation of right not otherwise reparable; third, the need of punishing the threatening or invading power, for the security of the future. From the nature of the proved right, those three facts are necessarily just titles, and the state whose rights are in jeopardy is itself the judge thereof.”
I am aware that theology is not popular, save with theologians; but after reading Treitschke and Bernhardi on the one hand, and the addresses delivered at “peace demonstrations” on the other, it is inexpressibly refreshing to follow straight thought instead of crooked thought, or words that hold no thought at all. I am also aware that Catholic wars have not always been waged along the lines laid down by Catholic theology; but this is beside the point. The Mosaic law was not the less binding upon the Jews because they were always breaking it. Nor are we prepared to say that they would have been as sound morally without a law so constantly infringed. It is well to know that, even in the spirit, there is such a thing as justice and admitted right.
To prate about the wickedness of war without drawing a clear line of demarcation between aggressive and defensive warfare, between violating a treaty and upholding it, is to lose our mental balance, to substitute sentiment for truth. The very wrongness of the one implies logically the rightness of the other. And whatever is morally right is in accord with Christianity. To speak loosely of war as unchristian is to ignore not only the Christian right, but the Christian duty, which rests with every nation and with every man to protect that of which nation and man are lawful protectors. Even aggressive warfare is not necessarily a denial of the Christianity it affronts. Crooked thinking comes naturally to men, and the power of self-deception is without bounds. God is not deceived; but the instinctive desire of the creature to hoodwink the Creator, to induce Him—for a consideration—to compound a felony, is revealed in every page of history, and under every aspect of civilization. The necessity which man has always felt of being on speaking terms with his own conscience, built churches and abbeys in the days of faith, and endows educational institutions in this day of enlightenment; but it very imperfectly controlled, or controls, the actions of men or of nations. If our confidence in the future were not based upon ignorance of the past, we should better understand, and more courageously face, the harsh realities of life.
Two lessons taught by the war are easily learned. There is no safety in talk, and there is no assurance that the world’s heritage of beauty, its triumphs of art and of architecture, will descend to our children and our grandchildren. We never reckoned on this loss of our common inheritance. We never thought that the gracious gifts made by the far past to the dim future could be so speedily destroyed, and that a single day would suffice to impoverish all coming generations. What can the pedantry, the “culture,” of the twentieth century give to compensate us for the loss of Rheims Cathedral? The deficit is too heavy to be counted. Not France alone, but the civilized world, has been robbed beyond measure and beyond retrievement. Life is less good to all of us, and will be less good to those who come after us, because this great sacrilege has been committed. As for culture,—the careful destruction of the University of Louvain proves once and forever that scholarship is no more sacred than art or than religion, when the tide of invasion breaks upon a doomed and helpless land.
This affords food for thought. Italy, for example, is the treasure-house of the world. She is the guardian of the beauty she created, and to her shrine goes all mankind in pilgrimage. How long would her cathedrals, her palaces, her galleries, survive assault? What would be left of Venice after a week’s bombardment? What of Florence, or of Rome? There is no such thing as safety in war. There is no such thing as safety in neutrality. Italy has more to lose than all the other nations of Europe, and is there one of us who would not be a partner in her loss?
And the United States? “God’s own land”? Are we forever secure? True we have little to fear in the destruction of our public monuments, which are rather like the public monuments of Prussia, the ornate edifices and ramping statues of Hamburg and Berlin. It might be a pious duty to let them go. But we have homes which are as precious to us as were once the devastated homes of Belgium to happy men and women; and we confide their safety to treaties, to scraps of paper, like the one which made Belgium inviolate. If we are in search of life’s ironies, let us note that a Roman Catholic Peace Conference was to have been convened in Liège, the very month that Germany struck her blow. A fortnight’s delay, and delegates might have been making speeches on the concord of nations, while the streets of Aerschot ran blood, and Wespelaer was looted and burned.
Yet so deep-rooted is sentiment in our souls, so averse are we to facing facts, that to-day a “peace meeting” will pack a convention hall in any town of any state in the Union. We are as pleased to hear that “the brotherhood of man is the only basis for enduring peace among the nations” as if this shadowy brotherhood had taken form and substance. We listen with undiminished trustfulness to Mr. Bryan’s oft-repeated plans for ending the war by remonstrating soberly with the warriors. We see hope in conferences, in speeches, in telegrams to Washington, in appeals “from the mothers of the nation.” How many months have passed since Mr. La Follette evoked our enthusiastic response to these well-timed, well-balanced words? “The accumulated and increasing horrors of the European wars are creating a great tidal wave of public opinion that sweeps aside all specious reasoning, and admits of but one simple, common-sense, humane conclusion,—a demand for peace and disarmament among civilized nations.”