no appearance during a
thousand years of profound Christian influence, and did begin to appear
and make progress as that faith waned, can be claimed for Christianity.
I do not forget that the theologian began long ago, in the seclusion of
his cell or study, to condemn offensive warfare. But there have been
hundreds of offensive wars waged by Christian monarchs since that date,
and we do not read of any instance in which the clergy failed to endorse
the thin casuistry by which the offensive was turned into a defensive or
a preventive war, or refused to sanction an entire neglect of the
principle.

Dr. Scott-Lidgett followed on somewhat similar lines. The whole trouble,
he protested, was due to an anti-Christian, illiberal, and inhuman
system. It seems that he was referring to Prussia, and it is regrettable
that he did not feel called to explain why that system prevails in the
year of the Lord 1915, or how it finds an instrument of its ambition in
a militarism that ought to have been denounced and abolished centuries
ago. Mr. Shakespeare, another distinguished Nonconformist, follows the
same facile course--casts all the responsibility on Germany--and equally
fails to explain how Germany came to find the machinery of destruction
at its hand in our age.

In fine, Dean Welldon, one of the most energetic spokesmen of the Church
of England, addressed this Free Church Council, and imparted an element
of originality. He used the inconclusive and dangerous argument of _tu
quoque_. If, he said, you claim that this war exhibits the failure of
Christianity, you must admit that it shows equally the failure of
science and civilisation. Nay, he says, growing bolder, if your
contention is true, Christianity has done no more than supply the
instrument of its own destruction, but science and civilisation have
brought us back to savagery.

It is, of course, difficult to follow a man's rounded thought in the
crabbed phrases of an abbreviating reporter, but it is plain that Dean
Welldon has here been guilty of a confusion which only betrays his
apologetic poverty in face of this great crisis. Science--and it is
especially science that the clergy conceive as the rival they have to
discredit--has no concern whatever with the war. Science, either as an
organised body of teachers or as a branch of culture, has never
discussed war, and never had the faintest duty or opportunity to do so.
Economic science may discuss particular aspects of war,