cal Criticism, and Socialism in that country, or they
take refuge in the confusions of the extreme pacifists and refuse to
assign responsibility at all, or they persuade themselves that a small
minority of men who were not Christians deluded the German people into
consenting to the war. In any case, they insist that Christianity as a
whole is not impeached. Assume that Austria was dragged into the war by
Germany, and you have four Christian nations--five, if one includes
Serbia--behaving with great gallantry and entire propriety, and only one
Christian nation misbehaving.

There is no doubt that this is the common religious attitude, but it
does not satisfy some of the more thoughtful and earnest preachers. This
optimism seems to them rebuked by the very fact that Christendom is in a
state of war to which Paganism can offer no parallel. They think of the
lands beyond the sea to which they have been sending the Christian
message of peace and brotherhood. They fancy they see China and Japan
smiling their faint but distressing smile at the situation in Christian
Europe. They have assured all these distant peoples that their faith has
built up a shining civilisation in Europe, and now there flash and
quiver through the nerves of the world the daily messages of horror, of
fierce hatred, of appalling carnage, of the wanton destruction by
Christians of Christian temples. The Gospel has, somehow, broken down in
Europe, they regretfully admit.

But they never go beyond this vague admission and boldly state the sin
of the Churches. One would imagine that, in spite of its obvious and
lamentable failure, they still thought that their predecessors had been
justified in preaching only the general terms of the Christian gospel
and never applying it to war. One would fancy that they are so
unacquainted with history as to suppose that during the long ages of the
past the Churches were really frowning on violence and warfare, instead
of blessing and employing it. They fear to draw out in its full
proportion the inefficacy (because of its vagueness) of the gospel and
the long perversion of its ministers. Yet we cannot evade this
fundamental fact of the situation, that this particular war is an
outcome of a general military system, and the Churches have a very grave
responsibility for the maintenance of that system until the twentieth
century. We all know how the technical moral theologian of recent times
has glossed the complacency of hi