Historians and critics who view the question from a biologic angle profess to see in war a contribution to our evolutionary progress: it kills many of the most virile, but it kills also the weaklings, actual and potential. The virile who remain push the weaklings to the wall, particularly in the procreative contest. It puts a premium on prowess and valor, and makes the race franker and braver, more resolute and more efficient; it uproots decadency; it sacrifices the grain to get rid of the tare; it plucks the flower that the thistle may be eradicated. The philosopher accepts it as a part of God's programme: some he allows to succumb to bullets, others to germs. The latter is the wise man, for he accepts things as they are, and at the same time tries to shape their course in a way that will give him and those he loves, which is all mankind, the greatest safety.
We get accustomed to and become tolerant of everything save pain. Even in such upheaval as the World War it was beyond belief how little the mechanism of daily life was disjointed. Fifteen millions of men and more were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and yet the ordinary events of daily life were very little disturbed. People seemed to have time for work, for play, for relaxation, for contemplation. I was always reminded of this by reading the papers and observing people in theatres, concert-halls, stadia, churches, restaurants, and public places generally. I realize full well that one cannot sit still and nurse either his griefs or his hopes; that man is so constituted that he must display activity in some form. But I never fully realized that man is chronically happy. And yet it must be so, for how otherwise could he come out from prisons rotund and well-nourished, or from dark filthy tenements with a smile on his face? How else could we be so pleasure-seeking and pleasure-displaying as we were in those agonal days of the war?
The war put many things out of joint, but it did not divorce man from felicity save in individual instances or for short periods of time. The thing that the war dislocated most was further tolerance of the paradoxes of the Christian religion, the irreconcilability between preached and practised Christianity. Every one admits that the fundamental principles of Christianity are perfect and beautiful—that is, they are as perfect and as beautiful as the finite mind can grasp. But nothing can be more imperfect and uglier than the way in which the professional pietist practises it. There isn't a tenet, as formulated by its Founder, or such perfect disciples as St. Francis of Assisi, to which the professing or professional Christian conforms even approximately; and because his fellow man, prostituting it in some similar way to conform with his personal bias, does not agree with him, he proceeds to point the finger of scorn at him and to hail him as infidel and unbeliever.
I have no intention of prophesying whether the church will weather the storm in which it is now floundering or not. I think very likely it will. One reason for so thinking is that it has weathered all previous storms; one of them five hundred years ago was of severity that will never be forgotten. Since then education and enlightenment have lifted man from the supine obedience and resignation of the domestic animal, and he has demanded, and in a measure obtained, his worldly rights. This encourages me to believe that he may soon demand his spiritual rights: liberation from the tyranny imposed upon his mind by the Junkers of the church, freedom to look upon God as the fountainhead of wisdom, mercy, and love who mediates succor to the poor, the mourning, and the meek more willingly than to the rich, the joyous, and the arrogant; liberty to live according to the mandates of Christ and to die in confidence that his pledges will be redeemed. Another reason is that man must have a religion. Individual man can live without it, but collective man cannot, and there is not the slightest sign of the second coming of Christ. Religion was never so openly repudiated as during the Great War, and it never wielded as little influence on the determinations of man's conduct as it does to-day. Those who convince themselves otherwise make themselves immune to the teachings of experience.
The paucity of men who have the capacity for constructive statesmanship is pitiable, but how trifling is such a capacity compared with that required to formulate the tenets of a livable new religion! The practices of the church to-day are not those of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was steeped in every conceivable kind of depravity, licentiousness, simony, wealth, power, arrogance, avarice, and flattery; when it betrayed its mission to protect the weak; when it fornicated with the princes of the world; when it crucified Jesus in the name of egoism. But in what way has it espoused the sacred cause of the lowly, the best-beloved of Him who died that eternal happiness might be vouchsafed us? If Christ's vicar could remain silent without being called to account as was the case a few years ago when we were offering our fathers on the sacrificial altar for the liberation from slavery of God's ebony image, it is not likely that he will be called on to explain a similar silence during the Great War. I do not profess to say, not even to know, the attitude of the hierarchy which governed the Roman Catholic church toward the war. If it was Germanophile or Austrophile, it was more wicked than the harlot of Babylon. I should say the same had it been Anglophile or Francophile. The man who can believe that the temporal head of the church is the infallible spiritual guide of her adherents cannot believe that it should take sides against any of her own people. "The house divided against itself must fall." What I should like from the church is a definition of her attitude toward war. She teaches her children what their conduct should be about indulging their genesic extent, about the property and person of their fellow men, about intemperance of language and of appetite. Why not about war? What troubles me with the church is not so much the determination to keep her children in ignorance, nor that she has her back to the door which opens upon a vista of the world's progress and advance, hoping that she may keep it closed in the face of the divine forces of evolutionary progress which are seeking to push it open. That might be tolerated, but not her arrogation of self-sufficiency, her assumption of self-satisfaction, her boasted immutability, her sanctimonious semblance of resignation, her mumblings of archaic sayings in a language that neither its votaries nor one-half its priests understand, her profession to protect the weak and aid the poor while at the same time she bends the knee to the rich and traffics with emperors.
Though I lived nearly two years in the city where the church's mediæval gorgeousness is more striking than in any other city of the world, and where its chief stronghold is, it was rarely that its practices or its preachings disturbed my spiritual equanimity, my belief in God, or my fathomless faith. Nearly every day my duties took me through the Piazza of St. Peter and along the Vatican Gardens, and my thought was more often of his mediæval predecessors than of the voluntary "prisoner" who, while occupying the sumptuous palace, eats out his heart because he is not allowed to be a temporal sovereign—in other words, to be the antithesis of Him whose vicar he claims to be.
One morning, after I read the communiqués and had that glow of satisfaction in the accomplishments of my fellow men, that feeling of pride which every ally had during the last weeks of the war, I turned the paper and saw the arresting headline, "Translation of the Bones of St. Petronius," and I read:
"This morning at eight o'clock the Holy Father, accompanied by the pontifical court, repaired to the Sistine Chapel, where were gathered the residents of Bologna who had come to Rome for the occasion. The pope, clad in sacred vestments, celebrated the mass and gave communion to those present. After the mass Cardinal Gusmimi, Archbishop of Bologna, gave a brief discourse, while the pope sat on the throne. The pope then responded, recalling the religious glory of Bologna and the life of the sainted Bishop Petronius. He then covered himself with other sacred vestments appropriate for the occasion and assisted the archbishop of Bologna in taking from the provisory urn the bones of that saintly man who had yielded this life for a place in the heavenly hierarchy many years ago, and placed them in the urn offered by the Bolognese; having done this, he placed the urn on the altar. The ceremony lasted upward of two hours."
In my fancy I saw a lot of able-bodied men thus engaged while those whose spiritual destinies they had elected to shape were being slaughtered on battlefields, struggling with wounds and disease in hospitals, contending with cold, thirst, hunger, and indescribable discomfort. What was the purpose of it, what benefit did it mediate, what enlightenment flowed from it? If Petronius was a good man, if he loved his fellow men, and if he did all that was within his power to do to make them better men, more capacious for a full life here and more worthy of eternal life, why should they not allow him to enjoy his reward in the bosom of the Lord? How can they enhance his happiness, what does mankind gain by taking the semblance of that which once formed a framework for his spirit and transferring it from one vessel to another while mumbling or chanting over it? What deep symbolism attaches itself to this attempt to stay nature in gathering the ashes of Petronius to their ultimate destiny? Would not these men give a better account of their stewardship to their Master were they to devote their time and their strength and their minds to the betterment of the physical and spiritual lot of those poor, desolate, forsaken unfortunates with whom I spent the afternoon—a trainload of men who had been imprisoned in an enemy country and who were returning to Italy to die of the dreadful disease that had been thrust upon them by those insatiate monsters of cruelty, the Austrians?
I have rarely spent two hours more steeped in misery than I did that afternoon at Forte Tiburtino, where I went to visit the enormous hospital constructed around that old fort. It was intended to be used for temporary concentration of the sick and wounded soldiers sent from the front, until their disorders and diseases could be interpreted sufficiently to indicate where they should be sent for most speedy restoration to health. The protracted inactivity on the battlefronts of Italy had allowed the hospital to remain for many months unutilized. When Austria decided to send back to Italy a number of the men captured in the Caporetto disaster, upon whom she had thrust tuberculosis through starvation and every conceivable deprivation, it was decided to use this hospital for their shelter until they should die or be sufficiently nurtured to be sent to parts of the country whose climate is favorable to recovery from that disease. Two or three times a week a trainload of two hundred or more of these pitiful creatures arrived, many of them in a dying state. As a rule, they had been en route for a week, and, though the Swiss Red Cross and the Italian Red Cross both attempted to make some provision that would contribute to their comfort, very little evidence of their efforts was to be seen.