And so to-day the significant thing is not that nineteen hundred years after the advent of a religion of peace and good will among men, gladiator nations still wet the earth with fratricidal blood; the significant thing is the constantly growing protest against it all, for that announces the birth into the modern world of a new international conscience, and that, through an ethical necessity like that which abolished forever the bloody sacrifices of the Colosseum, means the certain and speedy abolition of war as a crass negation of human solidarity and brotherhood, and a venturous denial of a moral order of the world and the sovereignty of conscience.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Henry T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (1891), vol. i, chap. iv. For a trenchant criticism of Buckle’s contention that there has been no progress in morals during historic times, see article entitled “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867.
[2] For a discussion of the economic theory, see Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, 2d ed.
[3] Social Evolution (1894), p. 307.
[4] Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 254.
[5] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Practical Reason; cited by Fisher, History of the Christian Church (1888), p. 623.
[6] “It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct, arrived at by some person or persons.”—T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 361.
[7] Prolegomena to the History of Israel, tr. Black and Menzies (1885), p. 472; summing up the moral teachings of the prophet Amos.
[8] Wake, The Evolution of Morality (1878), vol. ii, p. 4; Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. ii, p. 743; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 237; George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 79.