tanism, they
forbid to rid themselves of the awful burden laid on them by drunken
brutes--the shattered homes and monuments. But there is a side of war
which they must know, and it demands plain speaking. It relaxes the
control of moral restraints even where it was before operative. The
illegitimate-birth rate of England and France will faintly tell the
story before the year is out. Inquiry in any town where our soldiers are
lodged, or in the rear of the French and English (or any other)
trenches, will tell it more fully. I do not speak of crime and violence,
but of willing sexual intercourse where it was never known before. These
things, and the increased drunkenness and the stirring of old passions,
are regarded by the clergy as amongst the most evil things of life. Do
they seriously suggest that they have been brought in to secure, or are
justified by, the spiritual advantage of the refined and emotional few
whose religion is only deepened by affliction?

In short, I find not a single phrase of valid explanation or apology in
these and other prominent clerical pronouncements I have read. They are
superficial, contradictory, and vapid. Nothing is more common than for
religious writers to protest that the conception of reality which is
opposed to theirs is shallow. What depth, what sincere grip of reality,
does one find in any of these pulpit utterances? Yet I have taken the
pronouncements of official bodies or of distinguished preachers who may
be trusted to put the Christian feeling in its most persuasive form. One
thinks that God sent the war; another attributes it to German rebels
against God. One regards it as a spiritual agency devised for our good;
another says that it is an unmitigated calamity sent for our punishment.
One sees in it the failure of Christianity; others find in it precisely
a confirmation of Christian teaching. Some think it will draw men to
God; others that it will drive men from God. Unity, perhaps, we cannot
expect; but the empty rhetoric and utter sophistry of most of these
utterances reveal the complete lack of defence. On the main indictment
of the Christian Church, its failure to have condemned and removed
militarism long ago, all are silent; or the one preacher who notices it
can only dejectedly confess that it is true.

CHAPTER IV

THE WAR AND THEISM

In the leading Catholic periodical of this country there has been some
nervous discussion of the attitude of the Pope. A new