The War and the Churches

by Joseph McCabe

THE WAR AND THEISM

In the leading Catholic periodical of this country there has been some nervous discussion of the attitude of the Pope. A new man, a strong and enlightened man, happens to have mounted the chair of Peter in the midst of the war. For more than a century his predecessors have bemoaned the increasing wickedness of the world: Pius VII, tossed like a helpless cork on the waves of the Revolution; Leo XII and Pius VIII, the associates of the Holy Alliance; Gregory XVI, eating sweetmeats or mumbling his breviary while young Italy sweated blood; Pius IX, grasping eagerly his tatters of sovereignty; Leo XIII, the unsuccessful diplomatist; Pius X, the medieval monk. They saw their Church shrink decade by decade, and they witnessed the prosperity of all that they denounced. Benedict XV came to save the Church, and a great moral opportunity awaited him. But, while claiming to be the moral arbitrator of the world, he avoids his plain duty, and is content to repeat the worn phrases about the iniquity of the modern spirit. His apologists say that the war is politics, and that Popes must not interfere in politics.

I have earlier explained in what sense this war presents a political aspect to Benedict XV, and given the reason for his reluctance. It is typical of the whole failure of Christianity. A little over nineteen centuries ago, it is said in the churches, a star shone over the cradle of the Saviour, and choirs of angels announced his coming as a promise of "peace on earth and good-will among men." I am not in this little work examining the whole question of the influence of Christianity. But it is well to recall that, according to its own records, its first and greatest promise to the world was peace; and to that old Roman Empire, and to Europe at any stage in its later history, no greater blessing could have been brought. Has Christianity succeeded?

But the religious interest of the war is by no means exhausted when we have concluded that it marks, in one of the most important departments of human action, the complete failure of historical Christianity. My purpose is to discuss this relation to the Churches, and it would not be completed unless I considered the war in relation to their fundamental doctrine, the moral government of the universe by a Supreme Being. In a few months, we hope, the war will be over: the Allies will have triumphed. We know, from experience and from history, what will follow in the Churches. From end to end of Britain, from Dover to Penzance and from Southampton to Aberdeen, there will rise a jubilant cry that God has blessed our arms and awarded us the victory. Now that we are in the midst of the horrors and burdens of the war God is little mentioned. One would imagine that the great majority of the clergy conceived him as standing aside, for some inscrutable reason, and letting wicked men deploy their perverse forces. When the triumph comes, gilding the past sacrifices or driving them from memory, God will be on every lip. The whole nation will be implored to come and kneel before the altars. Royalty and nobility and military, judges and stockbrokers and working men—above all, a surging, thrilling, ecstatic mass of women—will gather round the clergy, and will avow that they see the finger of God in this glorious consummation. The relation of the war to God will then become the supreme consideration for the Christian mind. It may be more instructive to consider it now, before the last flood of emotion pours over our judgments.

I have already discussed some of the clerical allusions to the share of God in the war. They are so frankly repellent that one cannot be surprised that the majority of the clergy prefer to be silent on that point. They prefer to await the victory and build on its more genial and indulgent emotions. The war is either a blessing or a curse. One would think that there was not much room for choice, but we saw that some are bold enough to hint that the spiritual good may outweigh the bodily pain. They remind us of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi writing smugly of the moral grandeur of war, the need to brace the slackness of human nature periodically by war, the chivalry and devotion it calls out, and so on.

Still worse is the theory of those who regard war frankly as a curse, yet put it to the direct authorship of the Almighty. This theory is natural enough in the minds of men and women who believe in hell. In earlier ages men could not distinguish between the law of retaliation and the need to deter criminals by using violence against them when they transgressed. In many primitive systems of justice the law of retaliation is expressly consecrated. It is even introduced, inconsistently and as a survival of barbaric times, in the Babylonian and the Judaic codes, side by side with saner views. It is, of course, merely a systematisation of brute passion. In the beginning, if a man knocked your tooth out, you knocked one of his teeth out. With the growth of law and justice, the barbarous nature of the impulse was recognised, and the community, by its representatives, inflicted a "punishment" on the offender instead of allowing the offended to retaliate. With the modern improvement of moral sentiments we have realised that this is an imperfect advance on the barbaric idea. The community has no more right to "punish" than the offended individual had. We now impose hardship on an offender only for the purpose of intimidating him from repeating the offence, or of deterring others from offending. The idea is still somewhat crude, and a third stage will in time be reached; but it is satisfactory that we now—not since the advent of Christianity, but since the rise of modern humanism—all admit that the only permissible procedure is deterrence, and not punishment as such.

It may seem ungracious to be ever repeating that these improvements did not take place during the period of Christian influence, but in the recent period of its decay. There is, however, in this case a most important and urgent reason for emphasising the fact. I say that we all admit the more humane conception of punishment, but this must be qualified. In human affairs we do: Carlyle was, perhaps, the last moralist to cling to the old conception. But in the religious world the old idea has been flagrantly retained. The doctrine of eternal punishment is clearly based on the barbaric old idea that a prince whose dignity has been insulted may justly inflict the most barbarous punishment on the offender. Theologians have, since the days of Thomas Aquinas, wasted whole reams of parchment in defending the dogma of hell, because they knew nothing whatever of comparative jurisprudence and the evolution of moral ideas. To us the development of the doctrine is clear. In the Christian doctrine of hell we have a flagrant survival of the early barbaric theory of punishment. Modern divines—while continuing to describe the non-religious view of life as "superficial" and the Christian as "profound"—have actually yielded to the modern sentiment, and in a very large measure rejected one of the fundamental dogmas of the Christian tradition. In order to conceal the procedure as far as possible, some of them are now contending brazenly that Christ never taught the doctrine of eternal punishment, and are deluding their uncultivated congregations with sophistical manipulations of Greek words.

This does not mean that Christians have lower moral sentiments than non-Christians, but that the rigidity of their traditions, which they regard as sacred and unalterable, imposes restrictions on them. Hence the fact that, while Protestants have so very largely rejected the doctrine of hell, Roman Catholics, with their more rigid conservatism and claim of infallibility, still cling to it, and offer the amazing spectacle of a body claiming to possess the highest ideals in the world, yet actually cherishing an entirely barbaric theory. There is probably not a Catholic lawyer in the world who does not reject the old idea of punishment as barbaric, yet he placidly believes that God retains it. That is why we find a Catholic archbishop like Carr putting forth so revolting an idea of the war, while Protestant preachers as a rule shrink from mentioning God in connection with it. These things make it impossible for one to understand how non-Christians can say, as they do sometimes, that if they were to accept a creed, it would be the Roman creed.

Any theory of the war which proceeds on the lines of the hell-theory is simply barbaric, and is beneath serious discussion. We know to-day that both ethics and religion are in a state of constant evolution. We look back over a stream of several thousand years of historically traceable development; we follow that stream faintly through earlier tens of thousands of years in the ideas of primitive peoples; and we see the evolution going on plainly in the creeds and ethical codes of our own time. But the practice of registering certain stages of this evolution in sacred books or codes, which are then imposed on man for centuries or millennia as something unalterable, has been and is a very serious hindrance to development, both in ethics and religion. It is all the worse because these codes and sacred books always contain certain elements which belong to even earlier and less enlightened stages, and whole regiments of philosophers or theologians are employed for ages in putting glosses on ancient and barbaric ideas at which the world eventually laughs. However, we need not linger here over these ancient ways of regarding life. The man who keeps his God at a moral level which we disdain ourselves rarely listens to argument. He protects his "faith" by believing that it is a mortal sin (involving sentence of hell) to read any book that would examine it critically. It is a most ingenious arrangement by which the doctrine of a vindictive God protects itself against moral progress.

Now any suggestion that God sent this war upon Europe—whether as a judgment on the clergy, or a judgment on unbelievers, or a judgment on the arrogance of the Germans, etc.—is part of this old barbarism, and may be disregarded. It conceives that God is vindictive, and at the same time assures us that Christianity sternly condemns vindictiveness. It allows God to deal mighty blows at those who affront him, and tells men to bear affront with patience and turn the other cheek to the smiter. It is simply part of that mixture and confusion of old and new ideas which a codified religion always exhibits. We pass it by, and turn to more serious considerations. I pass by also eccentric ideas of Deity like those of Sir Oliver Lodge or Mr. G. B. Shaw—two oracles who have been singularly silent on the religious aspect of the war. Let us examine the main religious problem as broadly and as honestly as we can.