This early history is, however, as yet vague and unstudied, nor do we need to enter into any ungenerous struggle about priority. It is enough that the idealist scheme was well known in England long before the middle of the nineteenth century. Did the Christian Churches adopt and enforce it? Here, at least, no minute research is needed. The Christian bodies failed lamentably and totally (apart from the heterodox Friends) even to recognise the moral and humane greatness of the idea when it was definitely presented to them. It is only in the last few years that a Peace Sunday has—at the suggestion of lay associations—been adopted in the churches and chapels of England. It is only in quite recent times that bishops and ministers have stood on peace-platforms and advocated the reform. And even to-day, when peace associations founded by laymen have been endeavouring for decades to educate the country, no branch of the Christian Church has officially and collectively decreed that Christian principles enjoin the reform; no Pope or Archbishop or Church Council has supported it with a stern and official injunction that Christian and moral principle demands that all the members of the particular Church shall subscribe to and work for the reform. Even at this eleventh hour, when the issue of peace or war confronts the whole of mankind, one notices hesitation, reserve, ambiguity. During the fateful years between 1900 and 1914, when the nations were, in the eyes of all, preparing the most appalling armaments ever known in history, when men were speaking freely all over Europe of "the next war" and the terrific dimensions which modern science and modern alliances would give to it, the various branches of the Christian Church adhered to their ancient and futile practice of preaching general principles (as far as national conduct is concerned), and had little practical influence on the development.
I am not unaware of the small movements among the clergy for cultivating international clerical friendship, or of the extent to which individual clergymen have co-operated in the various arbitration movements. That is only a feeble discharge of a small part of their duty. Had Leo XIII or Pius X issued a plain and explicit Encyclical on the subject, and directed his vast international organisation of clergy to labour wholeheartedly for its realisation, who can estimate what the result would have been? Had the clergy of Germany issued a stern and collective denunciation of the Pan-German and Imperialist literature which was instilling poison into every village of the country, can we suppose that it would have been without avail? Had the Archbishops and Bishops of England, and the leaders of the Free Churches, definitely instructed their people that the pacifist ideal was not merely in accord with Christian principles, but was one of the most urgent and beneficent reforms of our time, would the English people have passed as inobservantly as it did through the five years of preparation for a great war?
It is no part of my plan to analyse this deplorable failure of the Churches as moral agencies. The explanation would be complex, and is now superfluous. The clergy were, like the majority of their fellows, obsessed by the military system and unable to realise the possibility of a change. In part they were deluded by the catch-words of superficial literature. They had an idea that we were asking England to lower its armament while the rest of the world increased its armament. They muttered that "the time was not ripe," not realising that it was their business to make it ripe. They had been accustomed for ages to preaching a purely individualist morality, and they felt ill at ease in the larger social applications of moral principle which our age regards as more important. They feared to offend military supporters, and did not realise that one may entirely honour the soldier as long as the military system lasts, yet resent the system. They felt that this new movement was suspiciously hailed by Socialists, and that to denounce armies had an air of politics about it. They were peculiarly wedded to tradition, on account of the very nature they claimed for their traditions, and they instinctively felt that to denounce war would be to attempt to improve, not merely on their predecessors, but on the Old and the New Testaments. They solaced themselves with the thought that unnecessary violence was condemned in their general teaching, and that, if it eventually transpired that war was unnecessary, they could point out once more the all-embracing character of the Christian ethic. In fine, they were for the greater part, like the greater part of their fellows, mentally indolent and indisposed to think out or fight for a new idea.
Whatever the explanation, the fact remains. By the tenth century Christianity was fully organised, and all the peoples of Europe were Christian; by the thirteenth century the power of the Church was enormous and the nations of Europe were settled and civilised. But neither then nor at any later period did Christianity perceive the crime and stupidity of the prevailing system. The perception is even now only faint and partial. It is this long toleration of the military system, the thousand-year silence on what is now acclaimed as one of the greatest applications of Christian principle, that one finds it difficult or impossible to forgive. The zeal of some of the modern clergy is open to a certain not unnatural suspicion: in view of their shrinking authority and the growing indifference of the world to dogma and ritual, they have been forced to take up these new and larger ideas of our time.
Even if one lays aside that suspicion, and in many cases it is quite unjust, the clergy must realise that the indictment of Christianity is grave, and is almost unatonable. Those thousand years of conflict, during which they sanctioned every variety of war and initiated many wars in their own interest, have given the military system such root in the hearts of men that it will require a supreme and prolonged effort to destroy it. The proverbial visitor from Mars would not be so much amazed at any feature of our life as at this retention amid a great civilisation of the barbaric method of settling international differences. He would ask in astonishment how an intelligent and generally humane race, a race which raises homes for stray cats and aged horses, could cling to a system which, on infallible experience, plunges one or more countries in the deepest suffering every few years. He would learn that there has not been a war in Europe for a hundred years the initial cause of which would not have been better appreciated and adjudicated on by a body of impartial lawyers; and that, if the quarrels had thus been submitted to arbitration, we should have saved (including the annual military expenditure and the cost of the present war) some three million lives and more than £15,000,000,000—since the end of the Napoleonic wars. In answer to the amazement of this imaginary critic, we could reply only that Europe has grown to regard the military system as so permanent and unquestioned an institution of our civilisation that it simply cannot imagine the abolition of that system.
For this incapacity, this widespread inertia, this blundering idea that there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they are to-day abandoning, the public mind would have awakened long ago. There is no intrinsic difficulty in substituting arbitration for war. There are technical difficulties which the great lawyers and statesmen of the peace-movement have given ample promise of surmounting, but the overwhelming obstacle is merely this—the peoples of Europe do not insist on the reform. Of all the large problems which confront the modern mind this is incomparably the simplest. We are hopelessly divided as to the nature of the remedy for most of our social ills. Here the remedy is acknowledged: the plan has been elaborated almost in entirety: the international tribunal already exists, and awaits only its executive, which the nations of Europe could supply to-morrow. It is the will, the demand, that is wanting. For that lack we charge the utter failure of the Churches during the ages of their power to enunciate a plain moral lesson, and their positive encouragement of an evil system. That is the real indictment. It affects the Christian Church in every nation.
CHAPTER III
THE APOLOGIES OF THE CLERGY
Any person who cares to read the reports of the utterances of our clergy in the current religious periodicals will recognise that they are painfully conscious of the reproach which this war implies. One constantly finds them repeating that in this year of tragedy "Christianity has failed" and "the gospel has broken in our hands." It had been their boast that Christianity had civilised Europe, and none of them has the audacity or indecency to claim, as some writers have done, that such a war is in harmony with the principles and ideals of civilisation. They have preached brotherhood and peace, and the greater part of Christendom is engaged in a strife of the most terrible nature. It is not a struggle of Christian and infidel; it is a struggle of Christian and Christian, and one or several of the Christian nations involved are guilty of a crime greater in magnitude than all the murders in Europe during a decade. Above all patriotism, above all immediate anxiety, above all argumentation about responsibility, this grim fact stands out and reproaches them: after fifteen hundred years of Christian preaching Europe is locked in the bloodiest struggle of all time.