Perhaps the great majority of the clergy deserve the indictment of rationalists. Mr. McCabe can prove his case by citing the exceptions. After all, the accusation is neither new nor original. Voltaire set the tune. “Miserable physicians of souls,” he exclaimed, “you declaim for five quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no word on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces.”
Voltaire's powers of satire were roused by the spectacle of the different factions of Christians praying to the same God to bless their arms. The element of comicality in this aspect of war is greatly outweighed by that of pathos. Those who earnestly pray to God to lead them to victory must at any rate be firmly convinced that their cause is one of which God can approve. No believer would dare to invoke the blessing of God upon a cause which his conscience tells him is a mean and sordid enterprise. Voltaire's quarrel was really with the faith in war as a means of determining the intentions of the Divine Will. Success in war has been held, and is held, by Christians to be a sign of the favour of the Almighty. Bacon expounded this view to the satisfaction of coming generations when he referred to wars as “the highest trials of
right” when princes and States “shall put themselves on the justice of God for the deciding of their controversies, by such success as it shall please Him to give on either side.” The Germans have nauseated the world by their incessant proclamations that they are the favoured and chosen of God. The good old German God has vied with Jehovah of the Israelites in stimulating and sustaining the will to war.
Those atheists to whom all war is an abomination and entirely irreconcilable with the highest human attributes have found complete unanimity in their repudiation of the idea of a presiding God of Battles in the dissenting objections to war expressed by Quakers, Christadelphians, Plymouth Brethren, and other sects of Christianity. There can be no doubt that the faith in war, and in the Divine guidance of war, is receding. The new conception of God, for which humanity is struggling, will be one entirely different from the jealous and cruel Master of Bloodshed to whom man has paid homage in the dark ages of the past. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realization of its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose which unites
Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics, and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has been born which will prove stronger than all the passion for war which has overwhelmed us in the past. President Wilson seeks a peace identical with the freedom of life in which every people will be left free to determine its own polity and its own way of development, “unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.” Statesmen see the ultimate hope for a free humanity in a change of heart. Mr. Asquith outlines the slow and gradual process by which a real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will, will be substituted for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances, and a precarious equipoise. Mr. Lloyd George insists that there must be “no next time.” Viscount Grey warns us that if the world cannot organize against war, if war must go on,
“then nations can protect themselves henceforth only by using whatever destructive agencies they can invent, till the resources and inventions of science end by destroying the humanity they were meant to serve.” Leagues of nations are proposed, organization for peace on a scale commensurate with the past organization for war is recognized as the principal task of international co-operation.
This new revolt against war is inseparable from the religious revival of the time. The word “revival” conjures up memories of less strenuous times, when men were concerned with smaller problems, and uninspired by the bitter experience of the present—Spurgeon thundering in his Tabernacle, Salvation Army meetings, small gatherings in wayside villages, at which howling sinners were converted and revivalists counted their game by the dozen. The present revival is something for which the past provides no analogy. It is not concerned so much with individual salvation as with the salvation of the race and the world. The petty sins and shortcomings which brought men to the confessional and to the stool of repentance lose importance when compared with the awful omissions which we now recognize as the cause of the calamities
which have befallen us. It is not only the existence of war that is rousing the conscience. War is seen to be but a symptom, a horrible outbreak of malignant forces, which we have nurtured and harboured in times of peace. These forces permeate the very structure of society. A new and fierce light beats on our slums, our industrialism, on the old divisions of class and quality, on the standards of comfort and success. Poverty, sickness, and child mortality—the whole hideous war of Mammon through which millions of our fellow-creatures are condemned to the perpetual service of Want—can no longer conveniently be left outside the operations of our religious consciousness.
One thing is certain: we can no longer be satisfied with a religion which pays lip-service to God, and offers propitiating incense to His wrath, whilst it ignores the misery and the suffering of those who have no reason to offer thanksgiving. Religious profession and religious action will have to be unified. The sense of social responsibility is slowly but surely taking the place of the anxiety to assure one's own salvation. Some churches are empty, dead; they have no message for the people, no vision wherewith to inspire the young.