Christ nowhere breathes a word. The violence of
faction or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from his
utterances. Camille Desmoulins, in a moment of rash and unreasoning
rhetoric, styled Him "le bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the
_Internationale_, Michel Bakounine traced the beginnings of Nihilism to
Galilee; just as in recent times the Anarchist, the Socialist have in
His sanction sought the justification of their crimes or their
fantasies. But in His whole teaching there is nothing that affects the
politics of State and State. Ethics and metaphysics were outlined in
His utterances, but not politics. His solitary reference to war as
such contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity might even twist it
into a maxim of prudence, a tacit assent to war. And the peace upon
which Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is not the amity
of States, but a profounder, a more intimate thing. It is the peace on
which the Hebrew and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises
within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense of reconciliation,
of harmony with the Divine, a peace which may, which does, exist on the
battlefield as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset as deep
and tranquil as in the heart of him who rides alone in the desert
beneath the midnight stars. Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his
extension to the more complex and intricate unity of the State of the
same laws which regulate the simpler unity of the individuals who
compose the State. And of such a war as this in which Britain is now
engaged, a war in its origin and course determined by that ideal which
in these lectures I have sketched, a war whose end is the larger
freedom, the higher justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but
the full, the living development of those conditions of man's being
without which peace is but an empty name, a war whose end is to deepen
the life not only of the conquering, but of the conquered State--who
shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, that such a war is
contrary to the teachings of Galilee?

Finally, as the complement of this condemnation of war as the enemy of
religion, men are exhorted, by the refusal of military service or other
means, to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision towards the
establishment of the empire of perpetual peace. The advent of this new
era, it is announced, is at hand.

Sec. 6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE

Now the