7. That it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of brotherhood and fellowship;
- That with God all things are possible.
These propositions were very carefully drafted by the Committee referred to above and entirely represent my own beliefs; but there is something more which I would add. The new Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Turkey is no accident; it is the combination of just those three Powers which openly and avowedly believe in oppression—that is, in the imposition by force of the standards accepted by one race upon people of another race. All nations have at one time or another practised oppression; certainly Great Britain is not free from the charge, and the history of Russia has many dark pages in this respect. But we can all claim that when we have been guilty of oppression it has been under the influence of fear, whether of revolution, anarchism, or some other force thought to be disruptive of the State. With our enemies this is not so. We all know about Turkey; it is the essentially Mohammedan power, and Mohammedanism is the religion of oppression; it believes in imposing its faith by means of the sword. The Austrian Empire consists of three divisions in each of which one race is imposing its manner of life upon another. In Austria-proper the Germans oppress the Czechs; in Galicia the Poles have, in some degree at least, oppressed the Ruthenes; in Hungary the Magyars have systematically and avowedly oppressed the Roumanians in the east, and the Croats in the south and west. Germany has shown her political faith by her conduct in Alsace-Lorraine, and still more in Poland. Nothing has yet appeared so illuminating with regard to what is at stake in this war, as Prince Bülow's chapter on Poland in his book, Imperial Germany; he describes what seems to us the most grinding oppression with obvious self-contentment and without a question of its righteousness; and there have been abundant signs that, at least, many people in Germany are willing to impose German Kultur by the sword as Mohammedans impose belief in their prophet.
If this is true, and if the analysis in my lectures of the Christian function of the State and of the principles of the Kingdom of God is sound, then it becomes clear that this war is being fought to determine whether in the next period the Christian or the directly anti-Christian method shall have an increase of influence. The three most democratic of the great Western Powers—Great Britain, France, and Italy—in conjunction with Russia, which is after all profoundly democratic in its local life though imperially it is a military autocracy, are linked together in a natural union on behalf of freedom as they understand it, against an idea embodied and embattled which is in exact opposition to all they live for. It was therefore no surprise to find that all the citizens of the United States with whom I came in contact were quite definitely upon the side of the Allies in sympathy. To advocate war in the name of Christ is to adopt a position which looks self-contradictory and which certainly involves immense responsibility, and yet if our people can maintain the attitude of mind in which they entered on the war and can secure at the end a settlement harmonious with that frame of mind, I believe they will have served the Kingdom of God through fighting, better than it was possible to do at this moment in human history by any other means.
W.T.
Lecture II. in this series is almost identical with the pamphlet Our Need of a Catholic Church—No. 19 of Papers for War Time. In Lectures I. and III. I am under great obligation to Professor A. G. Hogg, though my position is not at all identical with his.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
LECTURE II